Posted on 02/22/2006 5:25:22 AM PST by SJackson
Next week a vastly important book will be published: "Preemption, A Knife That Cuts Both Ways" by Alan Dershowitz. Yes, that Alan Dershowitz: the very liberal civil libertarian, anti-capital punishment Harvard Law School professor. And but for my lack of his legal scholarship, there is nary a sentence in the book that I — a very conservative editor of the Washington Times, and former press secretary to Newt Gingrich — couldn't have written.
The premise of his book is that in this age of terror, there is a potential need for such devices as profiling, preventive detention, anticipatory mass inoculation, prior restraint of dangerous speech, targeted extrajudicial executions of terrorists and preemptive military action including full-scale preventive war.
In his own words, from his Introduction: "The shift from responding to past events to preventing future harms is part of one of the most significant but unnoticed trends in the world today. It challenges our traditional reliance on a model of human behavior that presupposes a rational person capable of being deterred by the threat of punishment. The classic theory of deterrence postulates a calculating evildoer who can evaluate the cost-benefits of proposed actions and will act — and forbear from acting — on the basis of these calculations. It also presupposes society's ability (and willingness) to withstand the blows we seek to deter and to use the visible punishment of those blows as threats capable of deterring future harms. These assumptions are now being widely questioned as the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of suicide terrorists becomes more realistic and as our ability to deter such harms by classic rational cost-benefit threats and promises becomes less realistic."
(Excerpt) Read more at jewishworldreview.com ...
Thanks for making my point. The vast majority of representatives are not raving liberals. They might be liberal on many issues, but the Sheila Jackson Lee's of the House and Senate are far outnumbered by moderates. Contrary to the new popular definition, the term "moderate" more closely resembles conservatives than it resembles "liberal". That is why the Democrats are trying to hijack the word in order to try an establish themselves as more mainstream.
Along the same lines, I do not use "conservative" to define just people that are strictly far-right on all issues. If you were to ask all Americans of voting age how they were to feel on issues that effect themselves in their daily routines, I am under the opinion that the vast majority would answer somewhere to the right of center. They might feel that "people have the right to do one thing or another but they, themselves would make the conservative (or right of center) choice.
Again, just my opinion based on my own observation.
No, that's where the wind BREAKS most strongly.
I haven’t read the book, probably won’t, but that’s entirely possible. As I noted earlier, there’s nothing necessarily extra-constitutional about profiling, preventive detention, anticipatory mass inoculation, prior restraint of dangerous speech, targeted extrajudicial executions of terrorists and preemptive military action including full-scale preventive war. They’ve all been done in various forms before. Very messy areas we'll likely be getting into in the not too distant future.
His book The Case for Israel is a powerful attack on the anti-Israel lies Muslims and their leftist co- conspirators propagate.
People like him and Hitchens are independant thinkers who don't just toe the party line like the other useful idiots.
OTOH he was a strong and vocal supporter of Kerry. Would not suprise me to see him back off on that.
I do agree that the terms "liberal" and "conservative" have in some sense lost their usefullness. If you want to say that the moderates are conservatives then I cannot argue with that shift of reference.
Even here there are great disagreements as to what conservative means. And calling an opponent a "liberal" generally means the substantive argument is over.
A "liberal" was originally one who believed freedom should be a goal to fight for and even die for. Today's conservative was the liberal of 1800.
Untrue. I've heard him as a featured speaker at a CAMERA function long before 9-11.
The funny Dershowitz anecdote I heard was him in Harvard Square at the T stop, At Out of Town News, and talking into his cell phone is very loud voice oblivious to all around him. About 10-12 years ago.
I know the Alan Dershowitz-Billy Bulger encounter. The anti Semitism from Bulger was chilling. The whole encounter was chilling. Was about the 50 State building if I recall correctly and a half million dollar fee that Bulger was going to get from the builders for services rendered.
Nothing on the internet about it http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&c2coff=1&rls=GGLG%2CGGLG%3A2005-49%2CGGLG%3Aen&q=%22Alan+Dershowitz%22+%22Billy+Bulger%22
For Dershowitz, his faith is important, and I think it directs him more certainly than his leftist proclivities. That's not really important with respect to his arguments, but it explains his occasional non-leftist swerves.
For instance, in 1981 when Israel bombed Iraq's nuclear site at Osirak, if they had waited much longer the site would have been "radioactively hot" and massive innocent civilian casualties would have been incurred from radioactive releases. It is simply not enough anymore to say a country violates the norm by acting in its ultimate, but not imminent, self-defense. We need new standards for a new age.The new realities of unacceptable risk require new — and lower — standards of certainty before defensive action is permitted.
As we develop a jurisprudence of prevention, we increase the chance of justice and rationality being a bigger part of such crisis decisions that our presidents will be facing for the foreseeable future.
Dershowitz's sound, practical scholarship is commendable. But what I find heartening is the political fact that a prominent scholar of the left has finally entered into a constructive conversation about how to manage our inevitably dangerous WMD/terrorist infested future.
If such as Dershowitz and I can find common ground, there should be space there for a multitude. And from that common ground can grow a common plan for a common victory.
I'm in total agreement with Tony Blankley here, and I applaud Professor Dershowitz way of thinking when it comes to deal with the terrorists.
bttt
Can he pull the President along?
That was the beginning of the end for Barnicle?
I wish you were correct. I am afraid, however, you think to highly of my fellow co-religionists. So many have succumbed to leftist mantra that they are beyond sanity in their views. And not only here: a huge portion of Israeli Jews are the same. "If we could just love one another," they say. Reminds me of that liberal nut in California who was convinced that if he were nice to grizzlies, they would reciprocate. A couple of years ago he was mauled to death. Some Israeli Jews think that they too can talk to Muslim grizzlies.
Western civilization has forgotten its values and lost its identity. Without those you simply don't know what to fight for and who the enemy is. And Jews are no exception.
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