Reversing Reality in the Yates Case

Crime, Criminal Injustice, The Courts

In the legal system, a shambles really, truth is often dismissed if petty procedural rules have been violated. If a defense lawyer can prove that an arresting officer skipped a word while mirandazing a murderer, the entire case ‘DNA evidence and all’ may be retried or worse: reality might even be reversed. The murderer, caught mid-act, could be found innocent. The exclusionary rule is another legal trick by which this can be achieved.

The modern day Medea, Andreas Pia Yates, methodically drowned her children aged six months to seven years. I won’t go into the tiresome details, but thanks to a legal technicality, she’s gone from guilty of murder to innocent by reason of insanity.

Even if the stellar jury that first convicted her overlooked her alleged psychosis, as I’ve written, “An individual’s essential nature does not change because he suffers behavioral or mood problems. Most ‘mentally-ill’ people choose never to commit murder. Why? Because mental peculiarities don’t rob people of their moral nature. Texas law concurs by implying that even under extreme mental duress, a person is not bereft of the capacity to reflect on his actions and thoughts and make choices. In every situation, no matter the constraints, one can exercise some free will, even if it’s only to decide how to respond to a hopeless predicament.

The insanity plea is bad enough as it is:

“ It capitulates to the mistaken ‘and corrosive’ notion that, when crimes are too horrible to comprehend, medical concepts must replace moral concepts. The insanity plea further performs a very odd exercise: It says that to find her not guilty by reason of insanity, the jurors would have had to accept that it was not Yates, but her ‘disease’ or some alter ego, that tortured those children to death. According to the new, reality-reversing verdict, Yates is no longer a victimizer, but an innocent victim of her ‘disease.’

This nonsensical bifurcation flouts the Law of Identity: A person can’t have done the deed, yet simultaneously be innocent of it! The great 19th-century American philosopher Lysander Spooner put it this way: ‘Guilt is an intrinsic quality of actions, and can neither be created, destroyed or changed by legislation.’

* In addition to the hyperlinks in the text, you can read more about so-called mental disease in “Broken Brains?”

So, the 'Presstitutes' Can Tell Right from Wrong

Just War, Media

Brent Bozell pointed out this week that media coverage of the Israeli-Hezbollah war has been quite fair, with few acknowledged exceptions.

I happen to agree with him this once.

It has become as clear as crystal that those who slept with their sources in the ramp up to war in Iraq actually know quite a bit about unbiased reporting. They understand the need to report both sides but to avoid moral equivalence between them; they get the necessity to warn viewers when they’ve been taken on a guided tour by Hezbollah. And they’re good at showing the misery on both sides, while not ignoring that because the one side is inflicting so much more suffering on innocents, the legitimacy of its cause is at stake.

The same people who hyped the Iraq war, its prosecutors, and their propaganda, and concealed the destruction to that country’s infrastructure, have remained so far relatively detached. They’ve simply stepped aside so the viewer can survey the damage for himself.

And get this: one-time jingoists who suffered Alzheimer’s when it came to Just-War ethics and the international law (the naturally compatible type, not the UN version) vis-Ã -vis Iraq are suddenly debating concepts such as proportionality.

To be fair, a great deal of credit goes to the Israelis. Washington controlled and shaped every snippet of emerging information in the count down to war, and thereafter. It did so through an elaborate set of limits and conditions imposed on reporters in exchange for access via the embed program.

Embeds were supervised by the military in the same way Saddam once assigned minders to accompany Western journalists. Even so, American TV networks went beyond the call of duty in green-lighting the home team.

That journalists are doing an adequate job covering the war in south Lebanon has a lot to do with the fact that they’ve a far freer hand; Israel hasn’t an “In Bed with the Military program. Their soldiers — unlike ours — are not allowed to propagandize. In fact, they can’t even talk to the press about any aspect of the operations, much less pose for staged photo ops.

So much for the “formidable Israeli propaganda machine.” If they had one, they’d have set up an embed filter.

Ultimately, it’s good to see reporters doing their job — it’s good to know that when they try, they are not entirely incapable of telling right from wrong.

So, the ‘Presstitutes’ Can Tell Right from Wrong

Just War, Media

Brent Bozell pointed out this week that media coverage of the Israeli-Hezbollah war has been quite fair, with few acknowledged exceptions.

I happen to agree with him this once.

It has become as clear as crystal that those who slept with their sources in the ramp up to war in Iraq actually know quite a bit about unbiased reporting. They understand the need to report both sides but to avoid moral equivalence between them; they get the necessity to warn viewers when they’ve been taken on a guided tour by Hezbollah. And they’re good at showing the misery on both sides, while not ignoring that because the one side is inflicting so much more suffering on innocents, the legitimacy of its cause is at stake.

The same people who hyped the Iraq war, its prosecutors, and their propaganda, and concealed the destruction to that country’s infrastructure, have remained so far relatively detached. They’ve simply stepped aside so the viewer can survey the damage for himself.

And get this: one-time jingoists who suffered Alzheimer’s when it came to Just-War ethics and the international law (the naturally compatible type, not the UN version) vis-Ã -vis Iraq are suddenly debating concepts such as proportionality.

To be fair, a great deal of credit goes to the Israelis. Washington controlled and shaped every snippet of emerging information in the count down to war, and thereafter. It did so through an elaborate set of limits and conditions imposed on reporters in exchange for access via the embed program.

Embeds were supervised by the military in the same way Saddam once assigned minders to accompany Western journalists. Even so, American TV networks went beyond the call of duty in green-lighting the home team.

That journalists are doing an adequate job covering the war in south Lebanon has a lot to do with the fact that they’ve a far freer hand; Israel hasn’t an “In Bed with the Military program. Their soldiers — unlike ours — are not allowed to propagandize. In fact, they can’t even talk to the press about any aspect of the operations, much less pose for staged photo ops.

So much for the “formidable Israeli propaganda machine.” If they had one, they’d have set up an embed filter.

Ultimately, it’s good to see reporters doing their job — it’s good to know that when they try, they are not entirely incapable of telling right from wrong.

Hitler's Mufti Merely Modernized Muslim Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism

Via Nora Brinker — our fine friend in Germany, and proprietor of the blog Roncesvalles — comes this documentary, detailing the (allegedly shallow) roots of the Arab world’s affinity to Hitler and National Socialism. Watch the short film about Hitler’s Mufti.

However thorough, this depiction still treats anti-Semitism across the Islamic patrimony as a foreign transplant. Not so. The Quran (especially the later edicts which, by law, usurp the earlier ones) is anti-Jewish. It is the manual for war on Israel and for the eternal hate of Jews.

“Samuel of Acre (1270-1350), one of the most outstanding Kabbalists of his time, writes Andrew Bostom, fled to Italy and Christian Spain, after “ Acre was taken from the Crusaders by the Mamluks in 1291, during a very brutal jihad conquest. Samuel, who was “ [c]onversant with Islamic theology and often used Arabic in his exegesis, observed the following, from his safer haven:

“ In the eyes of the Muslims, the children of Israel are as open to abuse as an unprotected field. Even in their law and statutes they rule that the testimony of a Muslim is always to be believed against that of a Jew. For this reason our rabbis of blessed memory have said, ‘Rather beneath the yoke of Edom [Christendom] than that of Ishmael.

Hitler’s Mufti, then, didn’t invent Muslim anti-Semitism, he merely modernized it.