Posted on 06/11/2002 7:46:36 AM PDT by Aleksandar Vojvoda
FORWARD.COM JUNE 7, 2002 | current issue | back issues | subscribe
Top Lawyer Urges Death For Families Of Bombers
Lewin: 'A Policy Born of Necessity' By AMI EDEN FORWARD STAFF A prominent Washington attorney and Jewish communal leader is calling for the execution of family members of suicide bombers.
Nathan Lewin, an oft-mentioned candidate for a federal judgeship and legal advisor to several Orthodox organizations, told the Forward that such a policy would provide a much-needed deterrent against suicide attacks. Under the proposal, which Lewin unveiled in the current issue of the opinion journal Sh'ma, family members would be spared if they immediately condemned the bombing and refused financial compensation for the loss of their relative. (Lewin's article appears on the web at http://www.shma.com/may02/nathan.htm.)
While a 20-month spate of suicide bombings has been met in the Jewish community with calls for increasingly Draconian preventive measures, Lewin appears to be the first Jewish communal leader to approve publicly of the concept of executing innocent civilians in the hopes of curbing terrorism.
"If executing some suicide-bomber families saves the lives of even an equal number of potential civilian victims, the exchange is, I believe, ethically permissible," wrote Lewin, who served as president of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists and is a vice president of the Orthodox Union. "It is a policy born of necessity — the need to find a true deterrent when capital punishment is demonstrably ineffective."
Lewin argued that the biblical injunction to destroy the ancient tribe of Amalek serves as a precedent in Judaism for taking measures that are "ordinarily unacceptable" in the face of a mortal threat. His proposal, however, was rejected by an Israeli diplomat in New York, and discounted, in terms ranging from mild to condemnatory, by a range of commentators, terrorism experts and Jewish communal leaders from across the American political spectrum.
"The State of Israel is determined to respond to every Palestinian provocation," said Ido Aharoni, consul for media and public affairs at Israel's New York consulate. "Israel's military approach is to pursue the perpetrators and those who seek to carry out acts of terrorism against innocent Israelis. Within that framework, Israel is trying to minimize, if possible to eliminate, the number of innocent lives lost."
Several leading Jewish figures, including Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, argued that the plan represented a legitimate if flawed attempt to strike a balance between preventing terrorism and preserving democratic norms. But the proposal was strongly condemned by the head of the Reform movement, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, and the executive vice chairwoman of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, Hannah Rosenthal.
"The opinion is utterly reprehensible and totally contrary to the most fundamental principles of the Jewish religious tradition and everything the State of Israel has been about since its founding," said Yoffie, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. "I've said it, and everyone realizes, that in a war all of our standards on civil liberties may not apply. But to say that you need to make common-sense compromises is a long way from saying we are going to kill innocent people to bring about deterrence."
Yoffie rejected Lewin's reference to Amalek as a possible justification for killing innocents. He argued that for nearly 2,000 years talmudic sages and other rabbinic commentators have argued that the lessons of Amalek could not be applied to contemporary times. In an article that appeared in the Sh'ma journal alongside Lewin's essay, Brandeis University Jewish studies professor Arthur Green wrote, "I only wonder how long it will take [Lewin], by the force of this proof-text, to go all the way and suggest that the Palestinian nation as a whole has earned the fate of Amalek."
Green, former president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, wrote that his first desire upon reading Lewin's essay was to "tear my garments, as a sign of mourning on hearing the desecration of God's name."
The criticisms of Lewin were taken one step further by Jeremy Burton, a member of Sh'ma's advisory board and executive director of AMOS: The National Jewish Partnership for Social Justice. Burton argued, in his own name, that the attorney should now be blackballed from organized Jewish life, just as the late Rabbi Meir Kahane was ostracized for calling for the mass deportation of Arabs from Israel.
Rosenthal, whose organization serves the national network of local Jewish community relations councils and a range of national organizations, said that Jewish groups need to condemn any talk in their community of justifying the killing of civilians. "I can't begin to tell you how many meetings I've been in with colleagues across the country where the words of spokespersons for various Muslim and Arab causes are being parsed," Rosenthal said. "We look at words and decide which side of the line you are on."
Dershowitz and Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, rejected the notion that Lewin should be elbowed out of communal life. They argued that his proposal represented a legitimate attempt to forge a policy for stopping terrorism. Foxman declined to take a stand on the actual proposal, citing his policy of deferring to Jerusalem on Israeli security issues.
Though they declined to endorse the controversial proposal, top officials at the O.U. and Agudath Israel of America, for whom Lewin has done legal work, expressed sympathy for Lewin's efforts to curb what they described as an unprecedented wave of suicide attacks in Israel. "[Lewin] is not a Kahanist; he is not a nut," said Richard Stone, chair of the O.U.'s Institute of Public Affairs. Stone noted that Lewin, a member of the institute's executive committee, was not advocating the mass deportation of Arabs, rather a limited method of fighting terrorists.
Rabbi William Altshul, headmaster of the Melvin J. Berman Hebrew Academy, a Modern Orthodox Jewish day school in Washington, D.C., told the Forward that he did not regret the decision to honor Lewin this week at the school's annual dinner. "I haven't read the article," Altshul said. "But Nat has always been known for his outspoken opinions, and I respect him for it."
Even as several observers rejected the notion of blackballing Lewin, they offered substantive critiques of his argument. Dershowitz, author of "Why Terrorism Works" (Yale University Press, 2002), and terrorism researcher Steven Emerson, who both favor the limited use of torture to extract information about an impending terrorist attack, said that they balked at the execution of innocent civilians. Still, Emerson added, "all bets are off" if terrorists were to target thousands of people with non-conventional weapons.
Dershowitz argued that the same level of deterrence could be achieved by leveling the villages of suicide bombers after the residents had been given a chance to evacuate (an idea Lewin disparagingly likened to "using aspirin to treat brain cancer").
Rabbi Steven Pruzansky of Orthodox Congregation Bnai Yeshurun in Teaneck, N.J., a trained lawyer known for hawkish views on Israeli security issues, argued that a policy of mass deportations, rather than executions, could serve as an effective, but less deadly, deterrent against future attacks.
Several observers defended Lewin by noting that the United States killed tens of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But Yoffie warned against such parallels.
"If we are going to start looking for historical justifications for us to kill innocent people, then we are destroying the moral basis of our argument, which is ultimately our most effective weapon," the Reform leader said. "Don't go down that road because it is wrong, self-defeating and dangerous for Israel."
But emasculating the male relatives of terrorists might well prove an effective deterrent ....
This is one person mouthing off. The Palestinians are very open in stating the elimination of Israel is their goal, and Mein Kampf is a bestseller in Gaza.
How yet resolves the governor of the town?
This is the latest parle we will admit;
Therefore to our best mercy give yourselves;
Or like to men proud of destruction
Defy us to our worst: for, as I am a soldier,
A name that in my thoughts becomes me best,
If I begin the battery once again,
I will not leave the half-achieved Harfleur
Till in her ashes she lie buried.
The gates of mercy shall be all shut up,
And the flesh'd soldier, rough and hard of heart,
In liberty of bloody hand shall range
With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass
Your fresh-fair virgins and your flowering infants.
What is it then to me, if impious war,
Array'd in flames like to the prince of fiends,
Do, with his smirch'd complexion, all fell feats
Enlink'd to waste and desolation?
What is't to me, when you yourselves are cause,
If your pure maidens fall into the hand
Of hot and forcing violation?
What rein can hold licentious wickedness
When down the hill he holds his fierce career?
We may as bootless spend our vain command
Upon the enraged soldiers in their spoil
As send precepts to the leviathan
To come ashore. Therefore, you men of Harfleur,
Take pity of your town and of your people,
Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command;
Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace
O'erblows the filthy and contagious clouds
Of heady murder, spoil and villany.
If not, why, in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;
Your fathers taken by the silver beards,
And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls,
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused
Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry
At Herod's bloody-hunting slaughtermen.
What say you? will you yield, and this avoid,
Or, guilty in defence, be thus destroy'd?
And here are two doses of reality:
| 16:50 Jun-11-02, 1 Tammuz 5762
Prayers Requested for Ninth Grader Wounded in Hevron Attack |
| (IsraelNN.com) One of the three victims of today's bombing attack against a school bus in the Southern Hevron Hills area is in serious condition. Family members are calling on the public to pray for the recovery of D'vir ben Hana, a 9th grader who was wounded in his stomach and lost part of a leg in the attack. |
|
19:05 Jun-11-02, 1 Tammuz 5762
IDF Discover Bombs in Ramallah |
| (IsraelNN.com) Nahal soldiers in Ramallah uncovered ten bombs earlier today. According to military officials, the bombs were found in a home belonging to Force 17 members. The bombs were detonated without incident in a controlled explosion. |
There's only one solutional to this BS which is even close to rational at this point, and that would be for the US to force the arab countries to find a place for the palis which is at least 300 miles from israel. There's no way the israelis could be expected to except the palis as neighbors at this point. Somebody's gotta move or be moved.
There's only one solutional to this BS which is even close to rational at this point, and that would be for the US to force the arab countries to find a place for the palis which is at least 300 miles from israel. There's no way the israelis could be expected to except the palis as neighbors at this point. Somebody's gotta move or be moved.
HAHAHHAHAHAH
Gaza Strip is the most crowded place on this planet and has the highest birthrate. Some genocide. Try to pick your words better or you might be mistaken for a Muslim liar. West Bank has very high birthrates too as the Islamic try to use their Muslim population bomb against the Israelis.
I spell it moose limb!
If a family were to be taking payments because of their relative's involvement in a crime, they would be guilty a crime too.
Absurd. Mothers with children take welfare payments because their husbands are in jail for criminal convictions.
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