On March 6, 2008, a Palestinian resident of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Jebel Mukabber entered an Israeli religious seminary in West Jerusalem and opened fire on students with an automatic weapon, killing 7 (all but one under the age of 17) and injuring many more. On July 2, 2008, a Palestinian resident of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sur...
Opinio Juris is pleased to welcome Daniel Seidemann as a guest blogger this week to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the future of Jerusalem. Daniel is the founder and legal advisor for Ir Amim, a non-profit, non-partisan association dedicated to an equitable, stable and sustainable Jerusalem. Ir Amim (“City of Nations” or “City of Peoples”) was founded in...
On behalf of all of us at Opinio Juris I would like to thank Tom Farer for joining us this week in the first Oxford University Press/ Opinio Juris book symposium to discuss his new book Confronting Global Terrorism and American Neo-Conservatism: The Framework of a Liberal Grand Strategy. We would also like to thank Kristen Boon and Mark Shulman for joining us...
Tom, Thanks for that cordial response. I did not mean to give offense, but wanted to be direct about my perception. I'm also under pressure for something else, so I won't go on for too long. On the Israel-Palestinian conflict and its role in defining neoconservatism and, more broadly, the book's thesis overall. I take your writing very seriously indeed, always...
Ken, since I have commitments most of today, I can answer only briefly and perhaps a little too abruptly, the surprising, even astonishing remarks in your last post, remarks so surprising, given their source, that I am wondering whether someone pretending to be you actually made the post. Let’s begin with the granular. In my post on the Israeli-Palestine conflict I...
Among several fascinating themes in Farer and Kris Boon dialogue has been the detention and trial of accused terrorists. Governments that feel besieged frequently depart from peace-time standards. Their lawyers and diplomats try to justify the departures. And some arguments are better than others. But rarely does the public have the opportunity to weigh in on whether to depart from...
I want to thank Tom for participating in this discussion; I have re-read the book as we have had this discussion, and it has provided great illumination on what the text is about. I have learned a great deal from the discussion and from the book. I apologize for coming late with this entry; it was hard to get to...
In this final substantive post of my Warholian week as guest blogger I offer a necessarily telegraphic summary of my long chapter on the conflict. Being telegraphic it will not even have the virtue of the chapter, i.e. even if it is clearly wrong, it won’t be wrong clearly. For two reasons I devoted an entire chapter to a single neuralgic...
Kristen’s last post concludes by opening the giant can of worms at the heart of international human rights law: “Farer’s analogy [between recent U.S. counterterrorism measures and Latin American practices in the 1980’s] shows weaknesses in the [human rights] compliance system generally…. [B]ecause it remains an issue of domestic competence as to whether human rights are enforced in the face...
Colleagues, The pan of discourse is beginning to sizzle. A delightful sound. So rather than racing on to another main issue I attempt to address in my book, in this post I stop and engage with discussants. Let me start with Ken Anderson in part because his very interesting categorization of ways of thinking about strategy lubricates a segue to Mark...
It's a tiny bit off topic, but it's worth noting that after much bluster about how the ICC was destroying the "peace process" in the Sudan by indicting Bashir, none of the Security Council members put deferring the prosecution under Article 16 of the Rome Statute on the Council's agenda for September. Over at UN Dispatch, our colleague John Boonstra...
Tom Farer's 'Latin Americanization' thesis deserves comment; i.e. that recent anti-terrorism / Guantanamo measures by the Bush administration are comparable to tactics that certain authoritarian Latin American regimes undertook, in that (i) states of emergency were proclaimed in conjunction with incursions on human rights, and that (ii) neither judicial nor congressional oversight effectively limited the executive's power. The analogy between the current US administration's behavior towards terrorism...
