Condemning Israel positively encourages the future use of human shields by fascists.
It is a tenet of behavioural psychology that reinforcing a
behaviour with rewards tends to condition an organism to repeat that behaviour.
That applies to humans as well as to lab rats. If a rat gets given a food
pellet whenever it nudges a particular lever, it will nudge that lever with
increasing frequency in future. If a child is given a generous payment whenever he mows the
lawn, he will make efforts to mow the lawn more frequently in future. Conversely, punishing
a behaviour with a negative stimulus tends to lead to that behaviour becoming less
frequent. Giving a lab rat an electric shock (btw I hate laboratory maltreatment
of animals) when it nudges a certain lever will lead to it avoiding that lever in future.
Grounding a child for swearing at his parents will generally discourage a child
from swearing at his parents in future.
Skinner’s theory of operant conditioning informs the
approach adopted by many governments towards kidnap and blackmail. If you pay
the ransom, you have provided positive reinforcement for the behaviour of
kidnapping for ransom. A reward has ensued from behaviour “X”, and so behaviour
“X” becomes more likely to be repeated. So although freeing the kidnap victim
may be inspired by compassion and the greatest of humanitarian motives, it will
increase the likelihood that more kidnappings will take place in the future:
not only by the kidnappers themselves, but also by those who have observed
kidnapping to be a successful undertaking. Not paying a ransom that then leads
to the murder of an innocent individual is an evil. But paying the ransom to
liberate that individual might encourage several kidnappings to take place in
the future that otherwise would not have happened. The more people who are
kidnapped, the greater the likelihood that victims are going to be murdered,
either because the ransom was not paid or could not be paid, or because some
kidnappers will kill some hostages regardless of whether or not they are paid
the ransom. The money paid to kidnappers is also often used to finance further criminal
and murderous activities. Paying that ransom might well also directly lead to
the deaths of several individuals who are not victims of kidnapping.
So although paying kidnappers a ransom to release a hostage
might feel like the right thing to do at the time, it simply encourages the
behaviour of kidnapping, and makes it all the more likely that hostages will be
taken in the future, with more and more victims being killed, and more and more
money going into the coffers of terrorists, criminals and murderers. Not paying a ransom in order not to encourage and facilitate the greater suffering of more people in the future may therefore be the lesser of two evils. It is a
fact of human psychology that immediate pain tends to feel more significant
than imagined future pain, and accords to itself a premium of importance it
does not really deserve. The suffering of the additional people who are killed
as a result of kidnapping and terrorism that results from our paying the ransom
to release one individual, feels too abstract in comparison to our
present-moment grief and horror at the kidnapping of one countryman whose face
we see on our TV screens. We have an emotional bias that overrides normal
logical thinking.
The current global condemnation of Israel for targeting fascist,
genocidal Hamas militants and their military hardware because they are
deliberately concealed amongst civilians being used as human shields, also
needs to be analysed through the lens of logic rather than of passion. In the
civilised West, our values are such that our governments would never consider
using our own citizens as human shields in any military conflict. Of course, an
Islamofascist administration such as Hamas would not baulk at killing our
citizens, (they have been firing missiles to deliberately kill Israeli citizens
for years). But the fundamental reason why the West would consider the use of
civilians as human shields to be a war crime is because it has established
certain rules in an attempt to limit and circumscribe the horrors of war.
(Having said that, western anti-Israel “progressives” seem to be strangely
muted about Hamas’s war crime in using human shields, or else they choose to
deny it is happening. Their hatred of Israel has created a shared tunnel
vision, any challenge to which represents a serious breach of the
pseudo-liberal orthodoxy, and therefore behaviour discouraged by punishment,
again according to Skinner’s theory of operant conditioning.)
My impression is that many selective progressives hate
Israel with such a vengeance that they would blame Israel for any action it took
in defending its citizens against attacks by a hostile neighbouring
administration and hostile militants against its civilians. The thousands of
missiles fired into Israel at civilians by Hamas, 10% of which evade the Iron
Dome; the attacks via tunnels paid for from international aid, that even take
place during so-called ceasefires; the
strapping of explosives to men, women and children – including people with
learning disabilities – to kill Israeli citizens in suicide bombings. All
of this is glossed over, and somehow “Israel’s fault”, with some commentators,
who should know better, saying that they themselves would probably fire those
rockets or wear those suicide vests if they had been Palestinian. Such
selective progressives make no similar comment about Hamas having caused the
military action in Gaza by refusing to stop firing missiles to kill Israeli
citizens, and of Hamas committing a war crime by deliberately using the people
of Gaza as human shields, and encouraging them to climb onto the rooftops of
buildings instead of evacuating them as advised by the Israeli authorities
before the buildings are shelled. Hamas is a fascist terrorist organisation whose Charter is committed to the genocide of all
Jewish people and to the annihilation of Israel. Yet the exposure of Hamas’s
appalling ideology in the media and particularly on the Left, and proper
criticism of Hamas’s responsibility for causing this current military action in
Gaza and ensuring its continuation, seem
to be too much for the orthodoxy of the selective, pseudo-liberal media and the
Left to accommodate.
In the charged anti-Israel climate that Leftist propagandists
and international pro-Islamist, anti-semitic propagandists have managed to create,
where Israel is damned whatever it does, and whatever is done to it – the greatest
victim has been logic and rational thinking. Condemning a state for defending
itself against missile attacks from a hostile power just because that hostile
power is using human shields, is so similar to paying ransoms to kidnappers.
The current message given to Hamas by the international anti-Israeli community –
and we must remember that Hamas claim any citizen killed in an Israeli attack
is a “martyr” and will have immediate access to paradise – is that Hamas’s
current strategy of using human shields is one that must be allowed to succeed,
and that can be used in the future with impunity against any western power.
This is a very strong weapon to gift to any fascist, genocidal Islamist state.
It is a weapon they now know can be used with great success against any civilised
western power in the Islamist jihad for the establishment of a global
caliphate. Western pseudo-progressives condemning a just military action
because of the deaths of civilians as a result of Islamists deliberately using
them as human shields, simply encourages the exploitation of civilians by Islamists
as human shields. The result of this will be more civilians dying as a result
of human shield exploitation in the future, just as paying blackmail ransoms
encourages more kidnappings in the future.
It is appalling that innocent civilians are being killed by
bombs. People being killed by bombs is always an evil. But it is a greater evil
to allow a genocidal fascist outfit to continue killing another state’s
innocent civilians with impunity, to consolidate its own power over its oppressed
citizens, and to succeed in its cruel fundamentalist religious objectives –
especially when the reason for allowing that genocidal outfit to continue
killing with impunity is to avoid the deaths of the citizens it is exploiting
as human shields. The reason for this is that, when we rule out military action
against an enemy simply because it is using human shields, then we encourage
the use of human shields. Encouraging the use of human shields will either lead
to the deaths of even more civilians in the future, or else it will mean that,
whenever a civilised nation with progressive values suffers a military attack
from a fascist Islamist state, the missiles will only ever be able to come in
one direction. This is appeasement and surrender, not defence.
It is very important to remember that some situations only
allow options that are intrinsically evil, but where one of the options is
clearly less evil than the others. What many on the Left are doing at the
moment, as well as many Islamist sympathisers and appeasers, is to airbrush out of discussion
and out of consciousness the greater evil of encouraging the use of human
shields as a successful strategy in any Islamist military conflict against civilised,
democratic, liberal countries, whose values Islamists hate. This is a strategy
for the defeat of western civilisation, and for the possible eventual
imposition of a global Islamofascist caliphate in the context of a post-nuclear
Iran that currently seems frighteningly possible. Whilst Islamofascist
governments such as Iran are developing nuclear weapons and intercontinental
ballistic missiles to reach western cities, we are declaring to enemy states
our paralysis at the thought of taking any military action that could result in
large numbers of their civilian casualties. Any nuclear power that presents
such weakness to an aggressive, hostile religiofascist state with nuclear
weapons that longs for our subjugation or annihilation, is asking for very
serious trouble: just as a refusal to
countenance the tragic killing of large numbers of civilians in Nazi Germany would
have led to the defeat of the Allies and the triumph of National Socialism.
© Gary Powell, 2014
