The repercussions of our country's basically insane 'preemptive strike' doctrine continue to be felt around the world. Last week, the Israeli government assassinated Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Palestinian Hamas. Neither Israel or the US are calling it assassination, of course, but that's what it was--an Israeli helicopter cut him (and nine others nearby) down as he was leaving a mosque. Hamas is a violent group and Yassin's hands must be considered dirty, but I for one am deeply troubled by this escalation--this is simply going above the law, above international standards of justice. This is rule by terror, hardly a productive response to terrorism. Even the worst criminals of the Holocaust were tried in international courts, but now Israel is taking shortcuts with bullets and rockets, foolishly thinking it's made safer in the process.

It's bad enough on its face, but the details make it worse. First of all, if Israel wanted to prosecute and try Yassin, it would not have been a difficult task--he was, to quote The Nation, "a half-blind quadriplegic in his late 60s...in his wheelchair when he died." Where is the nobility of such a thing? This was a cowardly act of brute force, taken out on a weak person to terrorize others, and as such is no better than the tactics of Hamas itself. Secondly, Yassin was among the more moderate forces in Hamas; in his absence, among the first voices heard was new Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi, who said that "[President] Bush is the enemy of God, the enemy of Islam, an enemy of Muslims." Yet another example of how the Bush government, through its unconditional support of the bizarrely erratic Ariel Sharon, is making the world safer for us. Hey, he's a uniter, not a divider.

What irks me about things like this, and the rose-colored defense they get in our conservative media, is that the right-wing hypocrites are always bashing advocates of peace for thinking the world is simpler than it is, snootily reminding us that the world is in fact a complex place. Yet what could be more wrongly simple-minded than this ridiculous concept of good vs. evil, us vs. them that our president is foisting on the world, and the idea that, as in some action movie, you just go blow up the bad guys and everything is better? Who's living in that oversimplified dreamland now?

And in another shining example of our "liberation" of Iraq, we've shut down the Baghdad newspaper Al Hawsa, resulting in thousands of angry protesters chanting anti-US slogans and burning the US flag. Yes, I'd say our mission of bringing freedom to Iraq is going swimmingly.

Labels: Politics