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To: Caesar Soze

Would it have been “murder” for Jews to hunt down SS officers?


72 posted on 03/24/2010 10:25:22 AM PDT by Dead Corpse (III, Oathkeeper)
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To: Dead Corpse
Would it have been “murder” for Jews to hunt down SS officers?

That's an interesting question, but hardly analogous to the question at hand. During the Nazi regime, the SS presented a danger to the life of every Jew in Europe. I would consider the killing of an SS in German territory to be an act of self-defense; obviously, the Germans disagreed, and would judge such an act to be murder. There's also the old maxim that it is never murder to kill a tyrant. In a combat zone, the SS would not be covered by the laws of war--they didn't obey the laws, themselves--so the killing of an SS by a nonbelligerent would have been permissible under international law and may or may not have been permissible under municipal law. As in the above case, I'd consider it self-defense or national defense.

After the war, the extrajudicial killing of an SS not in self-defense would be murder. The killer might get off with the jury's sympathy, might not. The killing of an SS by an organ or agent of the State of Israel falls into the gray area of covert action. States can't commit murder, and the officers employed by states to covertly kill their enemies usually have diplomatic immunity. States may practice proportional retribution, and as the state of much of Europe's surviving Jewry, a case could be made that killing SS is an act of legal retribution. (I don't think they did it willy-nilly, either. They tried to bring them back for trial.)

Anyway, it's all a red herring, the Public Health Service has nothing in common with the SS. The SS was the Nazi Party's army. It institutionalized genocide and, in historical terms, was deemed criminal and destroyed almost as soon as it appeared. The PHS is the Federal government's medical agency and has existed, in one form or another, since 1798. Its officers are commissioned in accordance with Article II, Section 3 of the US Constitution, and the organization's existence stems from Article II, Section 8's authorization to provide for a navy. (The Public Health Service used to be the Marine Health Service; its scope broadened when we started figuring out how diseases are transmitted.) There might be something wrong with the Commissioned Corps of the PHS, but the comparison to the SS is unconscionable. The other poster's call for thousands of murders is obscene.

90 posted on 03/24/2010 11:42:55 AM PDT by Caesar Soze
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