Ignoring for the moment whether a state as such can have any rights at all (it can't), we can ask: does a state have the right to "defend" itself against the people it subjugates?
A Right to Defense?
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TGIF: Smells like Genocide
If it looks like genocide, sounds like genocide, and smells like genocide, chances are it's genocide. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) will rule provisionally on whether that is what Israel is committing against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip. The Republic of South Africa filed the complaint, which is ironic because Israel was a staunch ally of South Africa's former apartheid regime. The official complaint is welcome, but thanks to social media, each of us already has ample evidence from a large variety of sources showing Israel's assault on the Gazans. Just watch the...
Discussing Gaza on Kibbe on Liberty
Matt Kibbe and I discussed the Gaza emergency on his podcast. Watch here.
Conversation on Israeli Genocide
I discussed Israel's genocidal attack on the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip with Saifedean Ammous. Listen here.
TGIF: The Right to Move
If people individually own themselves and have a right to be free of aggressive force, then they have a right to change their location in ways consistent with other people's rights. Whether you call this moving around relocating, emigrating, or immigrating, doesn't much matter. The default position is that each individual may rightfully move to somewhere else permanently or temporarily. Inside the United States, nobody questions this. People freely move from state to state, etc., sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. They need no one's permission. Why should things be different when...
TGIF: Beware Elitists in Populist Clothing
We're led to believe that today's political struggles are largely a contest between populists and elitists. But something besides libertarians is missing from that simple tale: the elitists in populist clothing, or elitist populists. We have no better example than a conversation the other day between the leading "right" populist Tucker Carlson and the leading "left" populist Glenn Greenwald. (The quotation marks are to indicate that these tribal labels are seriously problematic.) To their credit, Carlson and Greenwald consistently defend a noninterventionist foreign policy and free speech....
TGIF: Ahad Ha’Am’s Prophetic Warning about Political Zionism
Ukrainian-born Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg (1856-1927), whose pen name was Ahad Ha'Am (Hebrew for one of the people), was a proponent of Spiritual, or Cultural, Zionism, which made him a rival to Theodor Herzl and Political Zionism, the movement dedicated to creating a nation-state in Palestine for all Jewish people worldwide. Ahad Ha'Am remains relevant to understanding the roots of the conflict in Palestine and Israel that has cost so many innocent lives. Hans Kohn, a Bohemian-born American writer, shed light on Ahad Ha'Am's thinking about the "Arab problem" for Herzl's movement in "Zion and...
Anti-Zionism Is NOT Anti-Semitism
Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro says what needs to be said -- and he said it two years ago, before the clowns in the House of Representatives (Thomas Massey and a few others excepted) decreed otherwise. I have nothing to add.
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