Hamas-Israel War Ethics Train Wreck

Unethical Protest of the Week…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

….along with an ethically inert “X” approval of it.

But then, assholes tend to admire assholes. Theater types are such weenies. That jerk who decided to betray his duty to the performance, the work of art, the paying audience and the other performers who cared about doing their jobs should have been tackled and dragged off stage, either by back stage staff or the actor next to him. This clip caused flashbacks to the unconscionable stunt by the “Hamilton” cast in 2017, using the stage to corner Mike Pence and lecture him on some woke agenda item or another; I neither recall nor care which. (Pence, of course, himself being a weenie, didn’t have the guts to tell the performers “Bite me!” and walk out.)

I confess: that disgraceful incident is why I haven’t seen “Hamilton” yet as my own little protest against ignorant actors pretending that what they think about pubic policy is any more intrinsically valuable than the opinions of the average drunk in a bar.

The flag display flunks the tests in the Ethics Alarms 12 Step Protest Ethics Checklist. See…

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“Bias Makes You Stupid” Crossed With “Self-Anointed Virtue”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

A simple Ethics Dunce verdict doesn’t do justice to Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. There is so many things wrong with his New York Times column “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It” I may not have the time and patience to list them all. Here’s a gift link so you can analyze them yourself.

The major flaw in the piece is flagged by the headline: it’s a long appeal to authority, the writer’s own, but also other “experts.” “It’s true because we say it’s true.” He holds Israel guilty of genocide because he relies on his own analysis and he’s “been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century.” He’s also been marinating in the academic community’s intersectionalism bias and growing anti-Semitism for all those years. He needs to get out more.

It’s not just him, however. “A growing number of experts in genocide studies and international law have concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza can only be defined as genocide,” Bartov writes. Yeah, this is how the US started freaking out about climate change, how 50 national intelligence experts proved that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation, and how the United States crippled its economy and the intellectual and social development of its children because experts kept lying about the Wuhan virus.

Sorry, I am no longer persuaded by “experts”; they have collectively proven incapable of objective analysis too many times. (Don’t get me started on legal ethics experts.) “So has Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, and Amnesty International,” the author says, adding to his cherry-picked list of authorities who agree with him. “South Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice,” Omar adds. Now there are three objective analysts!

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Nah, There’s No Anti-Israel, Anti-Jewish Mainstream Media Bias…

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Britain’s media regulator (Great Britain doesn’t have a First Amendment, remember, so the government can punish dishonest, biased journalism. This is not a good thing…) said today it is investigating a BBC documentary about the dire fate of children in Gaza. The BBC removed the program, “Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone,” from its streaming service earlier this year after it was revealed that the 13-year-old narrator, “Abdullah,” is the son of Ayman Alyazouri, Hamas’s deputy minister of agriculture.

Oh. Sounds fair and objective to me! The media reports says this information “emerged.” Translation: the BBC was caught. News programs purporting to be factual must not materially mislead the audience in Great Britain, or so they claim. Imagine if the U.S. had such a regulation and enforced it. There would be no broadcast news.

The independent production company that made the program didn’t share the background information regarding the father of the young narrator’s Hamas ties, claims the BBC. Hoyo Films, which produced the documentary, claims it didn’t “intentionally” mislead the BBC. The BBC meanwhile, was wonderfully trusting and incurious—you know, like good journalists are supposed to be. After all, it’s not like anyone is out to vilify Israel as it tries to survive while protecting its citizens from being raped, murdered and kidnapped by terrorists.

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“Never Mind!” The Axis Media Spreads Hamas Anti-Israel Propaganda, and There Are No Consequences

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The Washington Post last night retracted its story misrepresenting an incident in Gaza. The Post, like most of the news media, falsely claimed that Israel killed 30 Gazan civilians who were just trying to get some food (you know, the “Aww, poor Palestinians, still being persecuted by those evil Jews!” narrative).

The Post’s statement was posted on X rather than on its website, and announced that the paper had “deleted the post below because it and early versions of the article didn’t meet Post fairness standards.” That’s another lie, as it is pure deceit. The story had to be deleted because it was false and should not have been published in the first place. Yes, false news stories are unfair, but that’s a secondary problem.

Palestinian Arab sources had spread the claim that an Israeli strike near a humanitarian aid distribution center resulted in at least 30 deaths and numerous injuries. The international media outlets didn’t consider the source, and leaped to the conclusion that Israel was committing war crimes.

Later that same day, the IDF released the findings of its initial investigation into the incident. These findings indicated that the IDF did not fire at civilians while they were near or within the humanitarian aid distribution site, and that the reports being circulated as fact by media outlets were false. Yet even after the story had been discredited, CNN and MSNBC (among others) continued to stick with the original. anti-Israel spin. I saw this in real time: a Fox News guest told viewers that the report had been debunked, and at exactly the same time, the two Axis networks were repeating the original account.

The IDF again called on the media to be cautious with information published by the Hamas terrorist organization. Gee, ya think? But they aren’t careful and don’t want to be careful. They want to back the Democratic Party’s position that Israel is the villain for reacting to an unprovoked terrorist attack exactly as the United Sates would (and has): by crushing the attacker and ensuring that the actions could never be repeated.

Saying “Oopsie! Never mind!” does not undo the damage caused by the original false reporting. That the Post and other media outlets would accept without confirmation a Hamas narrative shows where their confirmation bias lies, and why they are no longer trustworthy.

Ethics Quote of the Month: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

‘”Free Palestine’ is just today’s version of ‘Heil Hitler’”

—-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week, referring to the murder of two young Israelis by a man who screamed “Free Palestine” in Washington, D.C.

The context of that quote, from Netenyahu’s remarks last week: Continue reading →

“Cornell Just Doesn’t Get That Freedom of Speech Thingy” and Other Observations On a Campus Fiasco

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Read this whole jaw-dropping NYT article (Gift link!) and see if you can find evidence of anyone ethical in the entire story. It’s kind of like “Where’s Waldo?”

1.The headline is “Cornell Cancels Kehlani Performance Over Alleged Antisemitic Statements.” The caption under the photo (above) adds, “Kehlani, a popular R&B singer, is being replaced as the headline act at Cornell University’s annual concert.”

Observation: If she’s a popular performer for her singing ability and presentation, her “alleged Anti-Semitic statements should be irrelevant. This pure cancel culture stuff. Still. How can Cornell teach anybody if its administrators learn nothing?

2. “In a 2024 music video for the song “Next 2 U,” Kehlani danced in a jacket adorned with kaffiyehs as dancers waved Palestinian flags in the background. During the video’s introduction, the phrase “Long Live the Intifada” appeared against a dark background.”

Observation: So what? The event organizers can tell her not to perform that number.

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The Ethics of Deporting Mahmoud Khalil For Pro-Terrorist Advocacy, II.

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Shortly after posting a discussion of conservative legal scholar Illya Somin’s article at Reason declaring the Trump administration’s effort to deport Mahmoud Khalil “unjust and unconstitutional,” I became aware of the article at City Journal in which conservative legal scholar Ilya Shapiro defends the policy as legal and constitutional. It is clear from the essay that he also believes the policy is appropriate and ethical.

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The Ethics of Deporting Mahmoud Khalil For Pro-Terrorist Advocacy, I.

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

ICE arrested Palestinian activist and former Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil with the intent of deporting him in accordance with the announced Trump policy of deporting non-citizens who engage in pro-“terrorist” speech related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Predictably, the Axis is all-in supporting Khalil, who sure appears to be a bad human hill to die on. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez condemned ICE’s detainment of Mahmoud Khalil, calling it a “tyrannical” move, “Violating rule of law, actually,” she wrote. That AOC defends him alone makes me inclined to want to get rid of the guy, but that would be irrational. Judge Jesse Furman of the Southern District of New York issued an order today halting Khalil’s processing and scheduled a hearing on the case for later this week. Ah yes, the Southern District of New York!

In a confusing essay at The Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin writes that deporting non-citizens for the content of their speech is a First Amendment violation and “a slippery slope,” then, in the fifth paragraph, acknowledges that 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(3), bars “Any alien who … endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization.” I’d say endorsing and supporting Hamas qualifies under that law, wouldn’t you? So Somin says, “Such laws, too, should be ruled unconstitutional.” But until and unless it is, the Trump administration has the law on its side.

The question remains, is such a restriction on the free speech of non-citizens ethical? Somin:

“The First Amendment’s protection for freedom of speech, like most constitutional rights, is not limited to US citizens. The text of the First Amendment is worded as a general limitation on government power, not a form of special protection for a particular group of people, such as US citizens or permanent residents. The Supreme Court held as much in a 1945 case, where they ruled that “Freedom of speech and of press is accorded aliens residing in this country.”

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A Jumbo For Democrat Bitter-Enders and the Trump-Deranged

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

This made me laugh out loud, and I have to do a quick post. I heard successive guests and hosts on MSNBC desperately try to give puppet President Joe Biden credit for today’s cease fire and negotiated release of the Hamas hostages, including the Americans. They denied that Donald Trump had anything to do with it. Trump, you may recall, promised that “all Hell would break loose” if the hostages were not released by the time he became President. Inaugeration Day is January 20. The cease-fire deal goes into effect on January 19.

That’s just a coincidence, you see. Sure it is. “Elephant? What elephant?”

Would it really be so difficult for even the worst Trump-phobics to give him credit for what to any non-deranged observer is so clearly the result of his thinly-veiled threat and the belief abroad that, unlike some “red line”- drawing Presidents of the recent past, it is risky to call this one’s bluff?

Apparently it is too difficult. They would rather lie when the lie is obvious and indefensible than show the integrity to admit that the man they hate so much did something that worked. How unprofessional. How petty. How self-indicting. How stupid.

But funny!