This article by Jillian Becker and C.Gee appeared first at Front Page Magazine yesterday, March 9, 2011.

If the Palestinians unilaterally declare a State of Palestine this year as they say they will, everything changes. This is not the first time they have announced such an intention: twelve years ago they proposed the same thing but took it no further. This time it seems they mean to do what they say, and if they do, all resolutions, agreements, proposals made in the past for the ending of the Arab-Israeli conflict by negotiation become instantly irrelevant. Resolution 242, Oslo, the Road Map … all will be dead.

The UN Security Council Resolution 242, pursuant to which the parties were to negotiate a settlement, envisaged the establishment of borders within which Israelis should be able to live in peace. Forty-four years have passed, and Israel’s borders are still not fixed and Israelis still do not live in peace.

The Oslo Accords called for a five-year transitional period in which Israel would withdraw forces from occupied territories and accept the creation of a Palestinian Authority in exchange for security undertakings by the Palestinians. This arrangement was supposed to lead to a permanent peace settlement. The agreement was signed September 17, 1993. More than seventeen years later a peace settlement is no nearer.

The Road Map for Peace – “a performance-based roadmap to a permanent two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict” – was put forward by “the Quartet” of the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and the United States, on September 17, 2002. More than eight years have passed and the conflict continues.

There have also been the failed Camp David and Taba Summits – July 2000 and January 2001 – which were likewise concerned with Israel’s borders. And the Arab Peace Initiative, 2002 and 2007, had the same aims and met with the same failure.

Now the establishment of a State of Palestine, recognized by many if not all other countries, means there will be no more of all that. No more discussion of the “right of return” of Arab refugees. No more “land for peace”. And no more negotiations under international auspices over where borders should be drawn.

The Palestinians want to declare a state without defining their borders. Temporarily, they say, they will claim all the territory of erstwhile Mandate Palestine outside the armistice lines of 1949, drawn when Israel survived the invasion of Arab armies and won its War of Independence. (These lines are commonly referred to as “the 1967 borders”, meaning those Israel had until it fought off invasion in the Six Day War of June 1967, and expanded its territory by conquest.)

Why only temporarily? With those frontiers, wouldn’t the Palestinians have all the territory the world considers they have a right to?

Oh, yes. And that’s what they fear. If they accept those borders as permanent, they will have accepted Israel’s permanent borders too. They will have accepted the existence of the State of Israel, so there would be no pretext for refusing peace. And that is what they have resisted doing all these years since the Arabs rejected Resolution 181 of November 1947 which offered a Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel and went to war instead.

In order to have peace, Israel went on proposing the creation of a Palestinian state as an inducement to the Arabs to agree on secure borders. Over and over again, the Palestinians balked. In all the years that they have been negotiating under Resolution 242, the very last thing the Palestinians wanted was an agreement on borders.

The boundaries they will declare for their state are temporary not because they are willing to concede territory in negotiation, but for the very opposite reason: because they want all the territory. They want their state to consist of Judea, Samaria, East Jerusalem, Gaza, and Israel – the whole of the country that is now Israel. Israel will be dissolved in the State of Palestine. It will be abolished. That is what the Arabs have always wanted and continue to want – the abolition of the State of Israel.

It is glaringly obvious that what Israel needs to do is define and declare its own borders now. But surprisingly is seems that the Israeli government is not thinking of making that vital move. If the news out of Israel is to be believed, they don’t seem to be considering the implications of the unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state, and so cannot grasp the fact that with it everything changes.

They are allowing the Palestinian Authority to dangle them on a string. But why would Israel allow itself to be kept dangling while the Palestinians decide where their state will be and, therefore, where Israel will be – especially since Israel knows perfectly well that the ultimate intention of the Arab side is to wipe it off the map? Why are Prime Minister Netanyahu and his government waiting, as though in shocked disbelief or denial, for the PA to act? Do they not believe that the State of Palestine will be declared? Do they think it will not happen because the US will veto it in the Security Council? True, the Obama administration would have a hard time from Congress and American public opinion if it did not oppose the unilateral declaration, but its veto cannot be relied on. Only under heavy pressure from both parties in Congress was it reluctantly used against the recent Security Council resolution condemning Jewish settlements as illegal.

This is the moment for the Israelis finally to decide for themselves on their own frontiers, having earned that right with victory in three defensive wars. They should declare them to be permanent. Nothing within them would be negotiable. Israel would offer all those within its borders residency or citizenship, but it would not be required to let in any citizens of a foreign state. There could be no question of a “right of return” for Palestinians. This is the time, now, before the Palestinians declare their state – and even if they do not – for Israel to draw the line: this far and no further. This is where we are; whom we let in is our business; how we protect ourselves is in our hands, not our enemies’.

There could be no more talk then of “occupation” and so none of a “right of resistance”. The territories brought within Israeli sovereignty would be part of Israel. Any insurrection from people within the state would be dealt with according to Israeli law.

If there are Jewish settlements left out of the declared borders of Israel, the residents can decide whether they want to stay where they are and live in Palestine (a risky choice, and one that the Palestinians may not allow them), or move to Israel. Equally, Arab citizens of Israel should be free to stay or move.

Once Israel has defined and declared its borders, and asserted control over them, its security will be in its own hands and no longer held hostage in negotiations. Any future dispute over borders with neighboring states will need to be settled the way border disputes between states are always settled: by diplomacy or war. The issue will no longer be concerned with population majorities, no longer clouded by perceptions that superior force used against irregular militants is illegal. It will be state against state. If Israel is attacked, its defense will be legitimate and seen to be legitimate.

Meanwhile the Palestinians can get on with the business of building institutions for their state without being able to claim that the presence of Jews in settlements interferes with its viability. The institutions of statehood put in place by the Palestinians will determine the viability of the Palestinian state, not the presence of Jewish settlements. The talk of wobbly frontiers round disconnected cantons, the cry of “Bantustan” and “ghetto”, the complaint over “viability”, raised as a pretext not to accept borders, will have to come to a stop.

It may be that the Palestinians will find good governance and economic success sufficient to dull the desire to undo the Naqba (their “disaster” of 1948, when Israel came into existence). Until then, let the Palestinians have their state, and, if they choose, continued war with Israel; but they will have to bring the war to Israel’s borders. It will no longer be plausible to call it a war of “liberation” – and that might mean that it will pall as a pet cause for international humanitarians. In any case, the likelihood of a Palestinian state making war alone on Israel is not high. That Iran might join it is another story.

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare – all must go. If we were politicians we would propose a soothing program of phasing them out. But we have the luxury of being theoreticians only, airy-fairy philosophical types, who have reached our ivory tower after decades tramping the muddy and perilous highways and byways of the wicked world. So we can simply and bluntly say: it is not the proper business of government to feed, house, heal or educate the people, and the federal government must stop trying to do so or the nation will sink under the burden of debt this administration has laid on it.

The proper business of government is to defend the nation, protect every individual and his property by enforcing the law. It should not encroach on the freedom of the people. It is a thing that all too easily runs wild and ravenous. It must be kept within tight limits. At best it should be no worse than an annoying necessity. Always remember that anything government does, it does badly. So let it do only what it must; what only government can, nothing more.

In support of our view today we cite Walter Williams, who writes at Townhall:

Whether Americans realize it or not, the last decade’s path of congressional spending is unsustainable. Spending must be reined in, but what spending should be cut? The Republican majority in the House of Representatives fear being booted out of office and are understandably timid. Their rule for whom to cut appears to be: Look around to see who are the politically weak handout recipients.

The problem is that those cuts won’t put much of a dent in overall spending. …

More than 200 House members and 50 senators have co-sponsored a balanced budget amendment to our Constitution. A balanced budget amendment is no protection against the growth of government and the loss of our liberties. Estimated federal tax revenue for 2011 is $2.2 trillion and federal spending is $3.8 trillion leaving us with a $1.6 trillion deficit. The budget could be balanced simply by taking more of our earnings, making us greater congressional serfs. True protection requires an amendment limiting congressional spending. …

We need a rule that combines our Constitution with simple morality and plain common sense. I think it immoral for Congress to forcibly take one American’s earnings and give them to another American to whom they do not belong. If a person did the same thing privately, he’d be convicted of theft and jailed. We might ask ourselves whether acts that are clearly immoral and despicable when done privately are any less so when done by Congress. Close to two-thirds of the federal budget, so-called entitlements, represent what thieves do: redistribute income.

Some people might say, “Williams, the programs that you’d cut are vital to the welfare of our nation!” When someone says that, I always ask what did we do before. For example, our nation went from 1787 to 1979 and during that interval produced some of the world’s most highly educated people without a Department of Education. Since the department’s creation, American primary and secondary education has become a joke among industrialized nations.

Who made this happen and when? He points an accusatory finger:

There is a distinct group of Americans who bear a large burden for today’s runaway government. You ask, “Who are they?” It’s the so-called “greatest generation.” When those Americans were born, federal spending as a percentage of GDP was about 3 percent, as it was from 1787 to 1920 except during war. No one denies the sacrifices made and the true greatness of a generation of Americans who suffered through our worse depression, conquered the meanest tyrants during World War II and later managed to produce a level of wealth and prosperity heretofore unknown to mankind.

But this generation of Americans also laid the political foundation for the greatest betrayal of our nation’s core founding principle: limited federal government exercising only constitutionally enumerated powers. It was on their watch that the foundation was laid for today’s massive federal spending that tops 25 percent of GDP.

A good part of that generation is still alive. Before they depart, they might do their share to help us have a federal government exercising only constitutionally enumerated powers.

They might. But not all grow wise as they grow old.

We are opposed to all forms and uses of collectivism, including collective bargaining. We are against trade unions as such, and most emphatically against unions of public employees.

Matthew Vadum is of the same opinion, as he explains in this article at Front Page:

Bloated, rapacious, violent public employee unions indifferent to the suffering and social decay to which they contribute have been eating Wisconsin and other states alive for decades.

They’re not giving up their elite status without a massive fight and they don’t care if they take the whole nation down with them into the abyss. …

The backlash against … the unions’ legalized thuggery continues to build. Wisconsinites want their elected officials to balance the books, but the spendthrift unions won’t allow that to happen. Outraged that they may finally be held to account for their many abuses, participants in the labor movement are … using the seductive language of rights to defend the fat cat government worker unions.

Of course, rights have nothing to do with this …

[But] this rhetoric, which masks the fact that these rights are actually privileges, has served the grasping racketeers of organized labor well over the years, even though it is predicated on a fraud.

That fraud is known as group “rights.” It is the idea that when a group of people get together they somehow magically gain rights that supersede the rights they hold as individuals. It is a lethal, misanthropic fallacy that negates the very spirit of 1776.

Contrary to the fairy tales told by leftist professors, the idea of group rights was antithetical to the Enlightenment-era thinking of the Framers. They understood that a collective right is not a right at all … They would never have wanted to extinguish the right of individual workers to walk away from union-negotiated contracts. The Constitution mandated the most exquisite protection of individual rights and treated the right to enter into a contract, in particular, as sacrosanct. …

But this all-American reverence for individual rights gave way to pressure over time. As organized labor became increasingly violent and troublesome, eventually, lawmakers grew weary of the unrest fomented by radical agitators. Worn-down, shell-shocked politicians purchased so-called labor peace by selling out the U.S. Constitution. How exactly did they betray it? They ignored the fact that America’s great national charter protects the right of individuals to freely associate with others. At the same time, it does not protect any purported group rights. …

Legislatures across the country have also gone out of their way to exempt labor unions from antitrust laws, which is one of the reasons they run wild today. It was a mistake, and it was compounded exponentially when policymakers decided to let government employees form unions, since public employee unions can never serve the public interest. … Government workers … merely negotiate for more tax money. When government unions strike, they strike against taxpayers.

Public employee unions, which are always willing to collude with politicians against the common good, inexorably lead the jurisdictions they infest to fiscal ruin and discontent. Look across America. Look at strike-crazed Europe where socialism has never secured labor peace. …

A community organizer and labor agitator is in the White House sending DNC-approved goon squads to Wisconsin to reinforce the dirty hippies and labor activists threatening Republican lawmakers with violence. …

The labor movement is in complete and utter denial, unable to see the freight train of fiscal reality barreling down the tracks toward it, and there’s something really beautiful about that. …

The great Thomas Sowell writes at Townhall on the same subject, and makes the same case:

The most fundamental fact about labor unions is that they do not create any wealth. They are one of a growing number of institutions which specialize in siphoning off wealth created by others, whether those others are businesses or the taxpayers.

There are limits to how long unions can siphon off money from businesses, without facing serious economic repercussions. …

Higher wage rates led coal companies to replace many miners with machines.

The net result was a huge decline in employment in the coal mining industry, leaving many mining towns virtually ghost towns by the 1960s. …

Similar things happened in the unionized steel industry and in the unionized automobile industry. At one time, U.S. Steel was the largest steel producer in the world and General Motors the largest automobile manufacturer. No more. Their unions were riding high in their heyday, but they too discovered that there is no free lunch, as their members lost jobs by the hundreds of thousands.

Workers have … over the years, increasingly voted against being represented by unions in secret ballot elections.

One set of workers, however, remained largely immune to such repercussions. These are government workers represented by public sector unions.

While oil could replace coal, while U.S. Steel dropped from number one in the world to number ten, and Toyota could replace General Motors as the world’s leading producer of cars, government is a monopoly. Nobody is likely to replace the federal or state bureaucracies, no matter how much money the unions drain from the taxpayers.

That is why government unions continue to thrive while private sector unions decline. Taxpayers provide their free lunch.

So successfully has the intellectual life of the Western world been commandeered by the Left, that it’s almost impossible to satirize it. Since we know this to be the case, we should not be surprised by a comment on our post below, Against schools, that takes for granted that the six absurd subjects we made up are in fact being taught – though they “take up far less time” than the conventional ones, the commenter informs us. We are, however, a little surprised, if also amused.

It is seriously deplorable that education in America should be so deeply corrupted.

The Left is chiefly to blame, but not exclusively. Religion is another rot in the beams.

Here’s a scandalous story, providing a rather extreme example of attempted indoctrination in the classroom, from Open Salon, written by a blogger who calls himself “The Unapologetic Geek”, and posted on January 18, 2011:

Almost three years and one million dollars in public funds ago, the Mount Vernon Board of Education in Ohio began considering the case of John Freshwater, a middle school science teacher. The accusations had piled up over the previous decade that Freshwater had been proselytizing his religious beliefs in class, that he physically hurt his students, and that he wasn’t adequately teaching the science curriculum. The Board of Education had a difficult determination to make: was Freshwater a bad, abusive, overzealous teacher, or was he the victim of overreaction, gossip, and heresay? It shouldn’t have taken nearly three years and one million dollars to answer this question, because once you look at the case, it becomes pretty clear that John Freshwater was more than just a bad public school science teacher; he – along with the mind-numbingly terrible and wasteful bureaucratic rigamarole the public school system had to go through to get him to stop “teaching” – is a good reason to consider homeschooling your kids. …

John Freshwater … used his eighth-grade science classroom to discuss what the Bible has to say on homosexuality, to discuss whether Catholics can be considered real Christians, and to preach that evolution has been fully discredited. He allegedly assigned pro-creationist literature as required reading … while refusing to spend a minute explaining the facts behind modern evolutionary theory. …

For at least eleven years, other teachers had been complaining about Freshwater. One high school science teacher has been very vocal about how difficult it was to re-teach basic scientific principles to freshmen who had been through Freshwater’s class. This is a serious failing for the public school system, because our science education is already lacking without having to deal with zealots like Freshwater giving young minds the wrong impression of what science is actually about. …

According to multiple reports, Freshwater used an electrostatic generator (a Tesla coil, essentially) to burn a cross into the arms of some of his students. … Even in a legitimate science class … using scientific tools to burn the skin of your students is not an acceptable thing for a teacher to do. In a perfect world, such an act should lead to automatic termination as surely as bruising your students would. After all, let’s call it what it really is: assault. …

The investigation that resulted came up with plenty of physical evidence, and that lead to Doe v. Mount Vernon Board of Education et al., a civil court case that went on for two and a half long years. In the end, Freshwater was heavily sanctioned for his behavior (both out of court and in court) and wound up having to pay several hundred thousand dollars in plaintiffs attorney fees. The Mount Vernon Board of Education had to pay a large settlement as well. It took two additional months for the Board to finally terminate Freshwater, which it did last week. All told, the entire legal battle cost the public school system an estimated total of $902,765.

This is perhaps the most shocking aspect to the case; that it took so long and so much money to fire one bad teacher. A fair hearing or an investigation is one thing, but this has been going on for over a decade. You have a teacher who apparently isn’t teaching the curriculum, is branding his students, and who has refused to obey continued instructions to change his methods, and it still takes you this long to do anything about it. Meanwhile, Freshwater had over ten years to continue his idea of teaching science to impressionable young minds, forcing future teachers (and hopefully parents) to work harder to undo the damage. That is, in a word, unacceptable. …

There’s no telling how many more of these teachers are out there, but Freshwater was certainly not the only one.

… in Afghanistan.

Pope Benedict XVI has discovered that the Jews were not responsible for the killing of Jesus.

From IBD:

In an upcoming book to be published this month, “Jesus of Nazareth,” the pope definitively ends any question of official Catholic church anti-Semitism, exonerating now and forever Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

Well, better late than never. Two thousand years of blaming the Jews for something they didn’t do, and now it’s “Oops, sorry – we got it wrong. No hard feelings. Come on, Jews – shake hands and let bygones be bygones, okay?”

What needs to come next is the realization by this uniquely open-minded Pope that the Jewish teacher the Greeks called “Jesus”, who reputedly lived in the Roman province of Judea between the times of the Emperors Augustus and Tiberius, was not God.

Then the Church can be dissolved and Christianity can be looked back on as an historical curiosity.

Of course it’s a pity about all the Jews and heretics and pagans who were done to death in agonizing ways by Christians in the name of the gospel truth that turns out to be not so true, but that’s all in the past now and we’ve gotta move on.

In an article in the Telegraph, Niles Gardiner reveals that the (undemocratic, left-leaning) European Union is actively interfering in US affairs. It is shelling out taxpayers’  money to groups in America that oppose the death penalty.

Here is a large part of what he writes:

Why on earth are British taxpayers being forced to fund European Union lobbying for policy campaigns in the United States? Furthermore, why is the EU directly interfering in domestic political debates in America, and so far without Congressional oversight? As the research detailed below demonstrates, the EU’s European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR) is spending millions of Euros on US-based campaigns against the death penalty. An extraordinary development. …

This extremely unusual funding for US groups – by a taxpayer-funded foreign entity to advance a political cause – deserves to attract a great deal of public attention, including Congressional scrutiny in Washington and parliamentary scrutiny in London. …

Here is a list of US recipients of EU EIDHR aid in 2009, which amounted to €2,624,395 ($3,643,951). The recipients of EU aid include the rather wealthy American Bar Association, whose annual budget approached $150 million in 2008.

American Bar Association Fund for Justice and Education: EU grant: €708,162 ($983, 277)

Project: The Death Penalty Assessments Project: Toward a Nationwide Moratorium on Executions

Death Penalty Information Center: EU grant: €193,443 ($268,585)

Project: Changing the Course of the Death Penalty Debate. A proposal for public opinion research, message development, and communications of capital punishment in the US.

The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty: EU grant: €305,974 ($424,829)

Project: National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty Intensive Assistance Program

Reprieve LBG: EU grant: €526,816 ($731,591) (some of these funds also went to “European countries”) Project: Engaging Europe in the fight for US abolition

Murder Victim’s Families for Human Rights Non-Profit Corporation: EU grant: €495,000 ($686,608) (some of these funds also went to other countries, including Japan and Taiwan). Project: Voices of Victims Against the Death Penalty

Witness to Innocence Protection: EU grant: €395,000 ($548,538)

Project: American DREAM Campaign [Note that this is a far left project – JB.]

MPs reading this should be asking questions why British taxpayers’ money is being used by the European Union to fund campaigns against the death penalty in the United States, without the consent of the British people. (Not least when 51 per cent of the British public support the reintroduction of capital punishment for murder, with just 37 per cent opposing it, in a recent YouGov poll.)

This is also an extraordinary intervention in a highly charged, intensely political domestic debate in the United States over the death penalty, the use of which has been ruled Constitutional by the US Supreme Court on several occasions, and is backed by 64 percent of Americans according to Gallup, with just 29 percent opposing. Can you imagine the outcry in Brussels if the US government funded policy groups in the EU, and the charges of “American imperialism” that would inevitably follow?

It is bad enough that Brussels consistently interferes with the internal affairs of EU member states, but it is surely a bridge too far when it tries to intervene in the affairs of one of the world’s greatest democracies that isn’t even part of the EU. This is hugely insulting to the US. …

Evidently, unelected bureaucrats sitting in the European Commission feel they have a divine right to lecture the United States and its citizens on how they should decide their own policies. This demonstrates a fundamental lack of respect for US national sovereignty, and a sneering condescension towards the American people. But perhaps this should come as no surprise. A supranational entity like the EU that has no respect for the democratic rights of hundreds of millions of Europeans can barely be expected to respect freedom and democracy outside its own borders.

The interference is wrong, and the cause is wrong.

We are for the death penalty.

To remove the death penalty is to permit murder.

The strange inclination some have to pity a murderer facing execution more than his or her victim is the sheerest sentimentality.

Some argue that mistakes can be made, and if someone is executed and later proved not guilty of the crime, there can be no redress. This implies that there can never be certainty; but there can be and there should be, and the law allows for ample (it could be argued too much) opportunity for arriving at it.

Some say the death penalty is not a deterrent. Sociologists and others of that kidney have toiled to show statistically that states with the death penalty have higher rates of murder than states without it. What the statistics cannot show is how many more murders there would have been in the death-penalty states if they did not have it.

We apply a simpler test of the efficacy of the death sentence as a deterrent: does it deter us? And our answer is yes: we’re absolutely sure that it would deter us if ever we thought of killing (and we can’t say the thought has never crossed our mind).

The only argument against it we think has some merit is that a lifetime in prison may be worse for a murderer to endure than execution. But it doesn’t persuade us. Prison these days – for those who don’t feel the lack of freedom to be the worst thing about it – is not unpleasant. Nowhere near dreadful enough to be fitting punishment for murder.

We would also favor the death penalty for treason, a crime that seems to have been removed from the book.

Justice is the prime responsibility of everyone all the time. It may be hard, even impossible, to achieve perfectly. But it has to be attempted constantly, unremittingly. It is what the law is for. Without law and the hope of  justice there is no civilization.

Be judgmental. Without personal judgment there is no morality.

There is no power greater than brain power, and Israel has it.

From the Jerusalem Post:

Antitank rockets … had been the bane of the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) Armored Corps. Until now, the answers had been increasingly thick steel protective plates for the tanks to literally dull the blow. But improved rockets proved essentially able to penetrate any shield and there are limits to how much armor can be piled on a tank without impeding its movement.

Realizing how deadly portable hollow-pipe devices can be, both Hamas and Hezbollah stocked up on them, amassing colossal arsenals. In the Second Lebanon War in 2006, dozens of Israeli tanks were struck, 19 crewmen were killed and others wounded.

But while Israel’s enemies were arming themselves to the teeth, Israel’s scientists … were busy re-accentuating the country’s qualitative military edge, which had sometimes appeared to be fading.

They have invented a new missile interceptor called Trophy.

The first time it was used in the field, this is what happened:

It happened so quickly and functioned so flawlessly that the IDF tank crews doing routine duties last Tuesday near the security fence in the southern Gaza Strip frontline didn’t even notice anything unusual.

They didn’t immediately realize that they had just witnessed history in the making and that the lives of a fourman crew had been spared when the miniature Trophy system, fixed onto all tanks in the Gaza sector, recognized that a rocket propelled grenade (RPG) had been launched at one of the tanks.

Trophy intercepted the RPG with a neutralizer and blew up the incoming projectile in mid-air, with no harm wrought to either the tank or to the corpsmen in its belly.

(Pronounced cor-men, President Obama.)

The system quickly reloads in a fully automated process. It’s “smart” enough to hold fire if an RPG is about to miss its target. Moreover, the explosion it sets off is so small that friendly-fire casualties are highly unlikely.

The Trophy is perceived as the harbinger of the future in ground warfare, being the first operational active defense system, and capable of granting Israel a new strategic advantage.

Trophy will be available to Israel’s allies.

The Trophy’s premiere matters not only for Israel but globally. This was the first time that antitank fire had been successfully intercepted under real combat zone conditions, as distinct from controlled trials. The implications both to Israel and its allies cannot be overestimated.

Rocketry that is easy to carry is a favorite weapon for terrorists and a whole host of irregulars [such as] the roadside-ambushers in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Trophy could radically alter the balance of power on both the Lebanese and Gaza fronts and it could become crucial for US and allied forces battling al-Qaida and associated insurgents.

And there’s more to come:

[Trophy] is not alone. In the works is the Iron Fist, an antimissile defense that is being custom-designed for armored personnel carriers. Its jamming capabilities can swerve an oncoming rocket off course, or it can detonate it with shock waves.

Lots more is being concocted in Israeli labs, workshops and testing grounds. Despite our proven penchant for fault-finding and self-deprecation, this is a fitting occasion for unstinting collective pride. Our defenses and those who man them are, mercifully, a little more secure today in the face of our enemies.

It seems likely then that those massive stockpiles of heavy pipes, those colossal arsenals of RPGs, so painfully assembled in Gaza by smuggling pieces through tunnels, will soon have no more value than any old pile of scrap metal. Unless Hamas puts them to use against fellow Arabs, which is more than likely.

Good and blunt is an article titled Treatment of Libya Illustrates the Fatuousness of the Human Rights Council, by Brett Schaefer at the Heritage Foundation.

Here’s part of it:

On March 18, the United Nations Human Rights Council is scheduled to consider its final report of Libya’s human rights record that was conducted under the body’s Universal Periodic Review. The first part of the human rights review of the “Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya”, conducted on November 9, 2010, was an all too typical dog and pony show. Libya’s submission to the Council asserted that the regime observed and protected a host of basic human rights including freedoms of expression, religion, and association. During the review, governments lined up to commend Libya on its observance of human rights. …

The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) for Libya “scheduled for adoption by the Council … made 66 recommendations for Libya to adopt to improve its human rights practices”. The UPR for the United States made 228 recommendations for the US to “improve its human rights practices.” (See our post, Beyond Outrageous, September 1, 2010.)

So, in the eyes of the Human Rights Council, it seems that the U.S. has much further to go in terms of its observance of human rights than Libya.

Farce has long been a feature of the UPR. … Past UPR sessions have featured countries like China, Cuba, Iran, and North Korea offering false reports to the council, laughably affirming their commitment to fundamental human rights and freedoms. These patently dishonest reports were accepted at face value and approved by the majority of member states in the council. Indeed, these countries received relatively little criticism during their reviews. Meanwhile, the U.S. was grilled relentlessly.

The utter fatuousness of the UPR and the completely unserious and biased nature of the Council’s treatment of human rights were revealed fully by the past few weeks’ events in Libya. Libya’s UPR report up for approval this month duly characterized – without a hint of embarrassment — Qadafhi’s government as (in the summary of Syria’s remarks) a “democratic regime based on promoting the people’s authority” and notable for its commitment to (North Korea) “achievements in the protection of human rights” and for (Algeria) “cooperating with the international community.”

Then suddenly, a few days ago –

The Council approved a resolution that “strongly condemns the recent gross and systematic human rights violations committed in Libya, including indiscriminate armed attacks against civilians, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests, detention and torture of peaceful demonstrators, some of which may also amount to crimes against humanity” and recommended that Libya be suspended from the Council by the UN General Assembly.

Which has now been done. But –

Where are the Council’s condemnations of human rights violations and abuses committed by Algeria, Angola, Azerbaijan, Cameroon, China, Cuba, Egypt, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia or other countries that have been elected to seats on the Council? It should not take slaughter of civilians to get the Council to accurately and objectively condemn the human rights practices of its members.

But it does take at least as much as that.

The brutal truth is that the Council has proven to be a weak body easily manipulated by repressive regimes to provide a patina of international legitimacy on their abuses. The Bush administration was right to shun the Council …

The Obama administration re-joined it.

The council discusses Israel as a matter of routine at every session. It is the only country in the world assigned a permanent investigator. Over the last five years, the Council has issued 35 condemnations of Israel out of a total of 51; the rest of the world put together only offended it 16 times.

If the UNHRC were to be taken as a guide, who wouldn’t rather live in North Korea where your human rights are protected than in Israel where you will be more abominably oppressed than anywhere else on earth?

The Human Rights Council is a contumelious farce, as corrupt and pernicious as the UN itself.

The UN delenda est. The entire UN must be destroyed.