In his new book Coercing Virtue, Robert Bork writes that "pride of place in the international judicial deformation of democratic government" goes to the State of Israel. "Imagine," writes Bork, "if you can, a supreme court that has gained the power to choose its own members, wrested control of the attorney general from the executive branch, set aside legislation and executive action when there were disagreements about policy, altered the meaning of enacted law, forbidden government action at certain times, ordered government action at other times, and claimed and exercised the authority to override national defense measures. Imagine as well a supreme court that has created a body of constitutional law despite the absence of an actual constitution. No act of imagination is required: Israel's Supreme Court has done them all."
True to its overweening form, the Supreme Court is currently arrogating to itself the power to decide if the government's decision to build a fence designed to keep out suicide bombers meets the court's standard of "natural justice." While Outpost has pointed out repeatedly that the "wall" is counterproductive, building the fence is a political decision, not one to be made by the courts. It no more belongs in the Israel Supreme Court than it does before the International Court of Justice in the Hague (whose "case" against its construction the Israeli government has rightly decided to boycott).
Ilke Schroder, a Green Party representative in the EU Parliament, has fought to expose the EU's coverup of its funding of terrorism by Arafat's Palestinian Authority. We are pleased to report that, thanks to pressure from Schroder and those she mobilized within the EU, EU Commissioner Chris Patten was finally impelled to order an investigation. In February, the German weekly Die Welt reported the results: the EU's Anti-Fraud office has concluded that tens of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid donated by the EU to the PA was used for terrorism against Israel. Of course, while the coverup has now failed, the funding has not stopped, although at least for the moment it has been halved.
Mary Robinson, architect of the viciously anti-Semitic so-called "human rights" conference in Durban, is the newest addition to Columbia University's anti-Israel roster. She joins the likes of Rashid Khalidi and Joseph Massad (who, in Al Ahram, denounced "the anti-Semitic nature of Israel," accusing it of "atrocities and crimes against humanity.") Meanwhile, Martin Kramer, editor of Middle East Quarterly, has accused Columbia of concealing funding of the Edward Said Chair of Arab Studies, now occupied by Khalidi, and of failing for many years to report -- as it is legally bound to do -- its foreign donors to the N.Y. State Department of Education. (It belatedly reported this year one $250,000 grant from an unidentified Saudi Arabian, the tip of the iceberg.).
Nobel Peace laureate and Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble, at an international conference of terrorism victims in Madrid, declared a truth that has hitherto been unspeakable: "One of the great curses of this world is the human rights industry. They justify terrorist acts and end up being complicit in the murder of innocent victims."
While Trimble was predictably assailed by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (currently two of the worst offenders), he was more fortunate than BBC talk show host Robert Kilroy-Silk. Host of a highly successful BBC talk show for 17 years, Kilroy-Silk was abruptly fired for speaking salutary truths about Islam in a column in the Sunday Express. He wrote: "We owe Arabs nothing. Apart from oil -- which was discovered, is produced and is paid for by the West -- what do [Arab countries] contribute?...They should go down on their knees and thank God for the munificence of the United States. What do they think we feel about them?...That we admire them for the cold-blooded killings in Mombasa, Yemen and elsewhere? That we admire them for being suicide bombers, limb-amputators, women repressors?"
In politically correctly-mad Britain, Kilroy Silk now faces possible prosecution under race relations legislation with a maximum of seven years in prison.
On this page in December 2003, we noted a report in the London Daily Telegraph about the plight of Iraqi Christians in Ramadi, 100 miles from Baghdad.
Outpost - 2 - March 2004