The Scriptorium

Israel’s Supreme Court seems to have the same affliction that affects our Supreme Court in the U.S. – an extreme aversion to common sense, morality, and intelligent thought. In the U.S. our courts are working with the ACLU to release more Abu Graib photos, which will lead to American deaths overseas and in Islamic countries (remember the Koran flushing story. In the absence of infidel targets, Muslims will kill each other). In Israel, a military tactic meant to save Palestinian lives has been deemed unconstitutional. The IDF has, in the past, used willing Palestinian civilians to warn home owners before they do a sweep for terrorists, thereby saving lives in many cases. The sole purpose for this tactic is to spare innocent lives while rounding up terrorists. I’m starting to understand why our courts are becoming more and more anti-American/anti-Israel. They have more in common with the Islamists when it comes to morality and ideology. Death is a political tool, and human life means nothing to them.

Israel’s supreme court says the army may no longer use Palestinian non-combatants as “human shields” because doing so violates international law.

In the last few years, the Israeli army has rounded up Palestinians (“willing” Palestinians, the army says; coerced, say critics), using them to knock on neighbors’ doors in cases where the army is about to launch sweeps for wanted terrorists.

The Israeli military considers its use of Palestinian civilians as an early warning system. It says using locals as front-men has saved many Palestinian and Israeli lives, but the court says the practice is illegal.

Civilian or terrorist?

The “human shield” or “early warning” procedure was developed over the last few years to help the army differentiate between innocent Palestinian civilians and terrorists during arrest raids, a military source told Cybercast News Service.

Because terrorists gravitate to crowded neighborhoods for protection, it is hard for soldiers to differentiate between them and innocent civilians.

Sarit Michaeli, a spokeswoman for the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem — one of the petitioners to the High Court — said her organization was very pleased by the decision.

According to Michaeli it is important to differentiate between the goal — saving lives — and the methods being used, which were illegal.

“The point isn’t whether it saves lives or risks lives. It is expressly forbidden by the Geneva Convention,” she said in a telephone interview.

In other words, I don’t care if people die as long as it benefits me politically and agrees with my warped ideological views.

CNS News Article

The EU, the U.N., and some of the worst human rights violators in the “international community” think they’re going to take control of the internet away from the United States. Bwahahahaha…ahahahaha….ahahahahahahaha. Right, the U.S., who created the internet, paid for the internet, and gave it to the rest of the world for free is going to hand over control of its root servers and ICANN to countries like China so they can sensor anything they don’t like while the U.N. replaces it’s lost oil for food money with an internet tax.

I can understand how the free flow of ideas and information is threatening to their socialist and communist governments, but they’re fools if they think they can just steal it because they don’t like it. These two paragraphs are a perfect example of how delusional the media across the pond can be.

A number of countries represented in Geneva, including Brazil, China, Cuba, Iran and several African states, insisted the US give up control, but it refused. The meeting “was going nowhere”, Hendon says, and so the EU took a bold step and proposed two stark changes: a new forum that would decide public policy, and a “cooperation model” comprising governments that would be in overall charge.

Much to the distress of the US, the idea proved popular. Its representative hit back, stating that it “can’t in any way allow any changes” that went against the “historic role” of the US in controlling the top level of the internet.

But the refusal to budge only strengthened opposition, and now the world’s governments are expected to agree a deal to award themselves ultimate control. It will be officially raised at a UN summit of world leaders next month and, faced with international consensus, there is little the US government can do but acquiesce.

Who are these people? If we don’t acquiesce, what are they going to do, isolate us by breaking away and forming their own internet with their servers? Most of the internet anyone cares about is on U.S. servers anyway. Sure they can annoy us, but they need us more than we need them. Most humorous is the fact that they think we can’t say no if the U.N. makes a demand. . . . . we must acquiesce. Send us a strongly worded letter and the answer will still be NO. You can have my internet when you pry it from my cold dead hands.

Read the whole thing. It’s good for a laugh.

London Guardian Article

The fact that the Catholic church would deny the reliability and truthfulness of the Bible doesn’t surprise me. In debates with Catholics, I’ve often pointed out the many inconsistencies between the Bible and Catholic tradition only to have the Catholic tell me that the Bible, while important, is only a collection of fables. The Papacy and tradition can not stand as the ultimate authority for the faithful if the Bible is taught as the true, inerrant Word of God. Still, other Catholics will argue that the Catholic Church has the utmost respect for the Bible. It will be hard to make that argument now that official church doctrine teaches the Bible is not always true.

THE hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has published a teaching document instructing the faithful that some parts of the Bible are not actually true.

The Catholic bishops of England, Wales and Scotland are warning their five million worshippers, as well as any others drawn to the study of scripture, that they should not expect “total accuracy” from the Bible.

“We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision,” they say in The Gift of Scripture.

The document is timely, coming as it does amid the rise of the religious Right, in particular in the US.

Some Christians want a literal interpretation of the story of creation, as told in Genesis, taught alongside Darwin’s theory of evolution in schools, believing “intelligent design” to be an equally plausible theory of how the world began.

But the first 11 chapters of Genesis, in which two different and at times conflicting stories of creation are told, are among those that this country’s Catholic bishops insist cannot be “historical”. At most, they say, they may contain “historical traces”.

The document shows how far the Catholic Church has come since the 17th century, when Galileo was condemned as a heretic for flouting a near-universal belief in the divine inspiration of the Bible by advocating the Copernican view of the solar system. Only a century ago, Pope Pius X condemned Modernist Catholic scholars who adapted historical-critical methods of analysing ancient literature to the Bible. . . . .

The Genesis account hardley contradicts itself, but it’s a common argument, usually made by atheists. An explanation can be found here.

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London Times