Principles at stake

There's an excellent article by Jonathan Freedland in today's Guardian, setting out his worries about some of Ken Livingstone's recent statements. Read it all - but one prominent feature is his highlighting of how Israeli civilians, in a certain way of thinking, get excluded from the protections embodied in the law of nations and a long tradition of just war thinking:

[T]his becomes the demonisation of a people. Only one nation on the planet has no civilians; only one nation must recognise that its children can legitimately be torn apart by nail bombs on buses. Not the Russians for what they have done in Chechnya, nor the Arab Sudanese in Darfur, nor the Americans and British in Iraq, but the Israelis. They are uniquely guilty and therefore less than human, denied the protections afforded to all other human beings.

So when Livingstone offers this as some kind of defence - that Qaradawi is against 9/11 and 7/7, but in favour of "martyrdom operations" against Israeli civilians - I am not comforted. I am fearful of the dark place he has entered.

Freedland also makes the elementary point that there ought to be some limits in the seeking out of political allies:

The solution is... to form alliances where one can, but to keep a healthy distance where progressive principles are at stake... Livingstone and friends need to break their equation of radical Islamism with Islam...

Relatedly, see this editorial from Arab News (h/t RB):

How can anyone justify the killing of innocents? No religion condones it. Yet that is what the militants do. What is that justification to target Egyptian workers at a downtown cafe? Why did they merit death?

Most of those killed yesterday were Egyptians. It is impossible to fathom the terrorists' warped thinking, but they clearly think that ordinary Egyptians, like ordinary Londoners, are disposable.

Theirs is not just a war against the Egyptian economy and government, it is a war against the entire Egyptian people, as it is against all the people of Britain, of Spain, of Lebanon, of Iraq, of Indonesia, of the US - of everywhere. The terrorist is at war with the entire world.