IronLionZion wrote:unknown_man wrote:Why does the US let this stand? Shouldn't the UN at least try to stop it?
They do try to stop it. However, the United States has veto power over any resolutions passed againt Isreal. In other words, the UN cannot do anything with respect to Israel unless America agrees. The United States makes liberal use of thier veto power. In fact, the United States has used its veto power to strike down resolutions against Israel more than all other members of the UN have used thier veto power for all other resolutions combined.
Makes you wonder who's really running the US!
Wilso wrote:IronLionZion wrote:unknown_man wrote:Why does the US let this stand? Shouldn't the UN at least try to stop it?
They do try to stop it. However, the United States has veto power over any resolutions passed againt Isreal. In other words, the UN cannot do anything with respect to Israel unless America agrees. The United States makes liberal use of thier veto power. In fact, the United States has used its veto power to strike down resolutions against Israel more than all other members of the UN have used thier veto power for all other resolutions combined.
Makes you wonder who's really running the US!
It's the Illmuinati...ever since 1912.
Smiley, You are correct in your assessment of human behavior. Even US soldiers have been known to unduly torture its prisoners. The justification for ill treatment during war is a common disease shared by all cultures.
heywood...thanks for the Onion piece, always a breath of fresh air, those guys.
Iron...I didn't want to get into the discussion of Israel as client state of the US, and the history of US vetoes and support (Israel being in violation of UN resolutions precisely as was Sadaam, for example). Folks either face that moral and legal inconsistency with courage or they don't.
We humans have the capacity for causing great suffering and cruelty (the shot to the testicles), yes. We are no different, in any genetic sense, than the crowds who crowded the bleachers and cheered as some thief was ripped into bloody pieces by four horses (one can imagine the screaming, the hooves on cobblestones, and the sound of bones and muscle ripping apart).
What has changed, what has improved and made us safer, is our ideas regarding freedom and equality, regarding rights and liberty and autonomy, and the institutions we have put in place to protect us from ourselves.
We understand too, that the sort of inhumanity revealed in this story has precursors. We know that the pogroms in Russia or the holocaust in Europe were preceded by the cultivation of very specific notions regarding, in that case, jewish people. Formost, was the notion that 'those' people were really not human at all, they were less. Or even parasitic. So it is ok to do damage to them, even necessary, to protect that which is 'good'.
This sort of rhetoric is not difficult to spot. The US president, for one, uses it all the time. As does Usama.
We can at least be aware of such precursor mind-states and speech acts, and yell bloody hell when we come upon them.
