TFF Associates & Themes Blog

Archive for the ‘Human rights and justice’ Category

By Richard Falk

This post is a modified and expanded text of a contribution to a Jadaliyya roundtable on targeted killing posted on March 5, 2012, and responding to the article by Lisa Hajjar referred to in the opening paragraph.

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There is an emergent Israeli/American controversy on the lawfulness of targeted killing. Although the policy has not yet attained the status of being a national debate, there are signs that it may be about to happen, especially in light of the Attorney General, Eric Holder’s Northwestern Law School speech on March 5, 2012 outlining the Obama’s administration’s controversial approach to targeted killing in some detail. Lisa Hajjar convincingly narrates how the “legalization” of targeted killing has evolved over the course of the last twenty years. [Hajjar, “Lawfare and Targeted Killing Developments in the Israeli and U.S. Contexts,” Jadaliyya, Jan. 15, 2012] She there calls attention to the analogy to the torture debate that, in many ways, defined the political and moral identity of the Bush presidency in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and even caused moral and legal fissures to develop that divided the American people unto this day.

Hajjar shows that it was Israel that first crossed the threshold of legality in response to a wave of suicide bombings that traumatized Israeli society in the 1990s. In other words, targeted killing became a tactic of choice for both the Israel and the United States as part of the preventive logic of counter-terrorism, that is, placing a premium on eliminating threats before harm is inflicted rather than the reactive logic of striking back and retaliating. The upsurge in targeted killing seems responsive to the belief that neither defensive strategies nor deterrence, nor massive retaliation are appropriate or effective against a terrorist adversary, especially if the violence might accompanied by the readiness of a perpetrator to die while carrying out a mission. Read the rest of this entry »

A longer video with fundamentally important issues. About 16 minutes into it, listen to Richard Falk’s extremely relevant pointing out the difference in attention to an Israeli and a Palestinian human rights case.
Listen also to his telling criticism of the UN Secretary-General’s way of handling the politicization of the world organization and the difficulties he has with reaching the UN S-G.
Professor Falk is the envoy of the S-G to the occupied territories and TFF Associate since 1986.

By Richard Falk, writing from Cairo

I am publishing here my press release of today (February 15) expressing urgent concern about the fate of Khader Adnan, a Palestinian activist, who is near death resulting from his continuing hunger strike that expresses his refusal to accept the humiliating conditions of imprisonment without charges and accompanied by an Israeli court approved denial of visitation rights to his wife. Read the rest of this entry »

By Johan Galtung

Galtung here focuses on a human rights case which – like the terrible mass slaughter in Algeria in the 1990s – have attracted little attention in the West. Please circulate the letter to the French prime minister below.

Syria is horrible. Assad should step down immediately, a coalition government should come into being, and a thousand mediators should talk with the many parties, maybe with a federation in view. But Algeria is even worse. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jan Oberg

If we do not care for single individuals, we care for nobody. I have met Aziz twice, 5 hours conversation in 2002 and 2003 during TFF’s fact-finding missions.

He came across as a decent, very knowledgeable man. No matter what he may also have done, killing him will be a barbarian act shaming us all. Read the rest of this entry »