My associate in France — Cannes— sent this picture this morning:
They’ve deployed 7,000 soldiers to their streets following a stabbing attack. Infantry units are kind of “disproportionate” to a knife attack, unless you are following the technical use of the term (see comments here).
Disarm a population and it takes a police state to "protect" them.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the comments in the linked-to article at the end of the OP, which center on "proportionality:"
ReplyDeleteThe government of Israel has already laid out its definition of proportionality in its purpose and goal in responding to the terrorist Hamas butchery: the extermination ("elimination" is just a euphemism) of the terrorist gang that is Hamas.
As someone else, not as well known, has written on the matter of proportionality:
A correct idea of proportionality accounts for potential responses to the defender's response: a truly proportional response...must aggregate across actions and responses and be strong enough to destroy the attacker's ability to pursue its war.
And
Here is proportionality in a just war. The right of a polity to its existence, its peace, and its prosperity throughout its future makes the destruction of the attacker proportional to the attack itself and the threat to existence that attack represents.
Israel's goal is entirely proportional.
How many Israeli lives--women, children, babies, geezers--have been lost--wasted--over the years to terrorist assaults because the Israeli government wasn't proportional the first time? Or the second time? Or the...? How many Israeli lives have been wasted over the years because Do-Gooders of the West pressured Israel to not act proportionally, but only to do some damage in response; yell, "Now we're even;" and then call off the rest of the response?
Regarding France's response, 7,000 infantrymen across the nation doesn't seem all that large; although it could be seen as so large as to be unnecessary. But necessity is a different, if related, measure from proportionality. My own view here, as an American, is that France ought make it easier for French citizens to arm themselves. But I'm from a different culture, so WDIK?
Eric Hines
I don't use 'proportional / proportionate / disproportionate' any way except in the legal sense for a simple reason. Over the last 20 years, I have spent a LOT of time w/ left wing academics and they generally use these terms to accuse the US and Israel of war crimes. They often don't understand the legal sense, and so they're using proportions of violence: A did X, so their enemy B can only do X in return.
ReplyDeleteThere are also those who intentionally equivocate. I've seen an Ivy League law student organization put up a display that stated correctly that use of disproportionate force is a war crime, but then only give examples using the common definition of "A did X, but B did much more than X" to "inform" people that Israel, in using disproportionate force, had committed war crimes. I could be wrong, but I suspect these Ivy League law students knew what the term means in its legal sense and were just being dishonest.
I think pretty much everyone here knows the difference. It's obvious that Grim, in saying the French response was disproportionate, was not accusing the French of a war crime or anything like it. But that's how many on the left use that word, and that's the only way they understand it in discussions of violence.
Consequently, whenever it comes up in other places where someone might not know, I make a point of educating people on what proportionality means in war and law, and I only use the term in that sense anywhere I comment.
On the French response, Hamas seems to have pulled one over on Mossad. Maybe the French are worried someone's going to pull one over on them and are flooding the zone just in case.
ReplyDeleteApparently, Andrew McCarthy thinks similarly.
ReplyDelete