Silly Little Country

Eliot Spitzer!?

One of the joys of retirement is the ability to spend an awful lot of time doing informal research, and law prof blogs are a major source of joy, as law is SO tricky and entertaining in a way that feeds this ex-logician.
So this post is SO Much fun to read, especially as one of my knee-jerk lefty siblings has informed me that Israel had clearly broken international law by boarding that ship full of Islamist nutballs. As it turns out, of course, people who actually make it their business to KNOW something about international law are far less sure about that! In fact if you play the third video on that linked page (at that link use the parenthetically documented direct links as I wound up having to suffer through Al and Tipper Gore by behaving more naively), you'll see that this is simply not so clear. What is clear is that if you attack any reasonable country's soldiers, they might finally, after some deliberation, start shooting at you.
Eliot Spitzer proves in all the videos to be a fine substitute host. I'd maybe watch MSNBC if he became a regular!
Spitzer rather readily agrees that this was a PR disaster for Israel, but Paul Mirengoff has made me wonder; the key question is what else the Israelis could have done that would have caused less outrage (after all, cartoons caused riots and demonstrations, and deaths, where apparently none of the current demonstrations have caused deaths). When your audience lives to be outraged and whine violently in public, it hardly matters what you do.

Those who play the role of useful idiot by calling on Israel to reward, through concessions, the kind of behavior displayed by the cutthroats on the flotilla do no good for the cause of a negotiated settlement. The conditions for a settlement acceptable to Israel do not exist as long as its enemies believe they can advance their interests through the kind of tactics on display this weekend.

As is pointed out in the Spitzer interviews, the useful idiots, and I come more and more to think of them as idiots rather than as co-conspirators, were on the ships that had no battle with the IDF.
And BTW, the original linked post includes a nice description of the hardships in Gaza. Ha!

posted by Alan Adamson @ 2:24 PM