Segacs’s World I Know

Death penalty debate re-ignited in Illinois, where Governor George Ryan commuted the sentences of 150 death row inmates to life in prison:

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Saying the death penalty system was broken, the governor of Illinois granted clemency to more than 150 death row inmates on Saturday, a move unprecedented since capital punishment was reinstated and likely to inflame a national death penalty debate.

[ . . . ]

“How many more cases of wrongful convictions have to occur before we can all agree that this system in Illinois is broken?” Ryan told a cheering audience at Northwestern University Law School that included several wrongfully convicted former death row inmates.

The blanket commutation follows an examination of the state’s capital punishment system ordered nearly three years ago after investigations found that 13 prisoners on death row were innocent.

As an opponent of the death penalty under most circumstances, I’d have to say that overall, this is a good move.

But since I seem to have sparked a lot of reader anger with my posts on gun control, I guess I’d better defend this position before I get jumped on, too.

My opposition to the death penalty is based on 4 key reasons:

1) It doesn’t deter violent crime.

General deterrence only works if a sanction is applied rapidly and consistently, neither of which is the case with the death penalty. If life imprisonment isn’t a harsh enough penalty to deter people from committing violent crimes, than death isn’t likely to change that. Furthermore, only calculated, premeditated crimes can be theoretically deterred by the threat of any kind of sanctions, since the psychos and the unstable people rarely do a cost-benefit analysis before committing their crimes.

Research has consistently supported this position, that the death penalty doesn’t deter crime. Surveys of police indicated that they do not see it as important in fighting crime. In Canada, a 1985 Solicitor General’s report found that there had been no change in the murder rate since the abolition of the death penalty, although surveys showed that 2/3 of the population wrongly thought that it had increased.

2) The possibility of error is irreversible.

If you wrongly convict an innocent person, you can’t give him his life back but at least you can release him from prison. If he’s dead you can’t do that. Advances in technology, such as the ability to do DNA testing, have vindicated a number of falsely-convicted prisoners over the years (the David Milgaard case comes to mind), and chances are, further advances will continue to do the same. To date, 65 people have been released from death sentences because it was later discovered they were innocent.

3) Money.

The economic argument for the death penalty doesn’t hold water; it costs more to execute a death row prisoner than to keep him in prison for life. The ratio between life imprisonment and the death penalty is $2 million to $5 million, respectively.

4) Revenge is not justice.

While it may satisfy our primal thirst for revenge to execute a prisoner, it doesn’t advance society in any way, and sends the message that life isn’t as precious as we say it is. Ultimately, it doesn’t come down to who they – meaning the prisoners, who have generally committed heinous acts such as cold-blooded murder – are. It comes down to who we want to be as a society, and what we stand for. Do we want to be a barbaric society, or a humane one?

I’d like to address the “mosquito argument” for the death penalty: namely, that swatting a mosquito may not stop other mosquitoes from biting you, but it will at least ensure that that particular mosquito won’t bite you again. People making this point argue that general deterrence may not work, but specific deterrence is a valid enough argument to support the death penalty, to ensure that the prisoner never escapes or gets paroled and goes out and kills someone else. To them I say that people aren’t mosquitoes, and that many innocent life forms can get caught up in a mosquito net.

Finally, I’d like to quote the Talmud (yes, me, the non-religious skeptic!) in saying that it is preferable to let 10 guilty people go free than to convict one innocent person.

Wow, I have a sneaking suspicion I’m about to really get it from the right . . . bring it on!

Yasser Arafat has long claimed to condemn attacks against Israeli civilians, and that he can’t control the groups launching the attacks. Israel has long claimed the opposite: that Arafat plans, funds, and approves of terrorism, and that he can switch it on and off like a light switch.

Here’s more evidence that Israel is right about Arafat:

RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) – The Palestinian leadership has called for an end to attacks against Israeli civilians in the two weeks before Israeli elections, but an Israeli official Saturday rejected the gesture as inadequate.

[ . . . ]

The Palestinian Authority statement, released late Friday, was a rare reference to Israel’s Jan. 28 elections. It called on Palestinians “to show their restraint and not to allow themselves to be dragged along by the Israeli elections and (Israeli) provocation.” It added, “The attacks on civilians cause great harm to our cause, in public opinion, for Israeli peace supporters, and at the international level.”

As in the past, the statement did not define “civilians.” Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and others have often condemned suicide bomb attacks inside Israel, but they rarely speak out against attacks against Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Palestinians consider them trespassers on land they claim for a state.

No control over the attacks, huh Arafat? So what makes you think you can call a two-week ceasefire?

What’s clear is that the extremist groups are just doing Arafat’s dirty work for him. Arafat has never been and will never be a legitimate partner for peace.

Trevalyan has a message to people who don’t believe Israel is in a war for the survival for its people:

Let’s contrast how you, and your enemy, deal with the problem. You feel ever so sad when you hear one of your soldier killed a civilian. They throw goddamn parties when one of their bombers strikes. Mass death for them is VICTORY. Your news always tries to soothe your emotions: even the Jerusalem Post, who you know could get a lot nastier, a lot quicker when they take pictures, because your imagination can see the destruction is even worse than what the TV shows. They show accidental deaths of children, footage as gory as it gets- they want to hate you, and God knows no one’s got a gun to their head to watch the hatred.

[ . . . ]

Your enemy names STREETS after child killers, celebrate them as “the general of the martyrs” whatever the FUCKISTAN that verbal diarrhea means. Their child- killers are glorified, their politicians fall over themselves to claim credit for slaughtering toddlers after murdering their screaming mother.

[ . . . ]

I don’t particularly want you to hate them, son. I want you to know what IS. What people deal with every day. Because Israel at least makes the attempt to spare lives. Arafat and his clones have to TAKE them, otherwise they become less popular: this is obvious to anyone with brains, and not all the UN commissions in the world can get by that, my friend!

Looks like I’m not the only one who’s pissed off.

I’ve long maintained that Israel is a “testing ground” for terrorism, just as Spain was Hitler’s testing ground for weapons during the Spanish Civil War. Don’t fight terrorism in Israel and it will spread.

September 11th was proof. So was Bali, Kenya, Yemen, and more examples too numerous to list. Now Hamas is urging Iraq to use suicide bombers against American and British troops.

The militant group Hamas, which has carried out scores of suicide bombings in Israel, urged Iraq on Friday to copy its tactics and send thousands of attackers with explosives strapped to their bodies into a battle against American and British troops in Iraq.

“We call on the Arabs and Muslims to burn the land under the feet of the American invaders, especially our brothers in Saudi Arabia because this war is not against Iraq, it’s against the Islamic nation,” Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi told a rally in this impoverished shanty encampment.

I hate it when my predictions appear to come true, even when they’re obvious ones to call.

Something happened to me the other day while debating with a Palestinian supporter on the Link’s website who justifies suicide bombings: I got angry.

I usually try to stay rational, and make my arguments coolly without letting them get clouded with emotion. But when I stopped to think about it, why shouldn’t I be angry? No, let me go one step further: I should be angry and if I weren’t, I should be ashamed of myself as a human being!

I’m angry that people are justifying and supporting terrorist attacks against innocent Israelis. I’m angry when they make statements like this:

What is wrong with suicide bombings if that is the only way of retaliation against the Israeli Forces? They could be stopped though…how?…if the palestinians were also supplied with Black Hawks and bombs and tanks by the US! Then it would be fair game to play and hey we wouldn’t need to worry about suicide bombings. That will be the end of them.

I’m absolutely livid when these same people turn around and play the morality card, blaming Hillel for postering and vilifying Israel for committing such horrible “crimes” as closing borders or imposing curfews.

I’m through being “rational” and “reasonable”. This is all about emotion. I’m absolutely, unapologetically furious.

Jaggi Singh now claims that his arrest in Israel wasn’t a publicity stunt.

“This was not a publicity stunt,” he said yesterday. “I did not come here to get arrested – I came here to write stories. In late 1999 to 2000 I spent three months in India doing exactly the same thing. But nobody heard of it because they didn’t decide to deport me.”

Yeah, right.

Singh is drawn to publicity like a moth to a flame. Now he’s levelling accusations that he was beaten while in lockup in Israel awaiting deportation.

Liar.

Think about it: the Israelis clearly have no motive whatsoever to beat him up or harm him in any way. But Singh has plenty of motive to portray Israeli police as “brutal”. Actually, I think the word “brutal” is pretty much synonymous with any police anywhere – and with any Israeli anywhere – in Singh’s mind, so he must have seen the opportunity to make up charges against Israeli police as too good to pass up.

Whatever the case may be, Singh was seeking this arrest from the day he stepped off that plane in Tel Aviv. Press releases abounded – most probably written in advance – to chronicle Singh’s detention at the airport, the Israeli court’s subsequent decision to allow him into Israel conditionally, Singh’s blatant violation of those conditions and his “come and get me” attitude, and finally, his inevitable arrest.

Singh has demonstrated that he has no problem bending or completely manufacturing the truth. This goes directly to his credibility and says that we should take whatever he says with not only a grain of salt, but a whole shaker full.

In the time since I started this blog, I haven’t exactly shied away from controversy in my postings. But with all the issues being debated – Mideast politics, Concordia politics, the US and potential war on Iraq, terrorism – I seem to be getting the most critical e-mails about my post below on Jim Turnbull and the Canadian gun lobby.

Now, the gun registry’s got problems and it might not be the most popular viewpoint out there to oppose those opposing it, but come on, this is far from the most controversial topic that’s come up here! So I wondered why it’s getting so much attention. Then it came to me: because I’m pro-Israel, people assume I must be right-wing in my politics and that I’m therefore a supporter of what our neighbours to the south call the “right to bear arms”.

Simply put, I attracted a right-wing readership with my main topic of discussion, and then alienated them by doing a 180 on an issue that I happen to disagree with them about. Don’t get me wrong, I agree to disagree – some of the smartest bloggers I know want to toss the gun registry out the window (check out the links on the lefthand side of this page) and it’s not like I don’t understand where they’re coming from. But I have to ask sometimes: what does wanting more restrictions on gun ownership and licensing have to do with supporting Israel?

Anyone notice anything strange about those combinations? They don’t logically follow. And I categorically reject the idea that we need to pick a side and go along with all the pet issues that have come to represent one side or another.

In my FAQ, I specifically state that I don’t identify with either the Left or the Right. My views are simply my views, and I think that the real hypocritical thing is to change them simply because the political stage has shifted in one direction or another. If I said I was a Liberal, and tomorrow all Liberals decided that their new pet issue was opposing all people with orange socks, and I disagreed with that, then it would be silly to go along with it simply because of a label, wouldn’t it?

I take issue with the Left for its overspending of our tax dollars, its hatred of anything with a profit motive, and its absolutely disastrous foreign policy – especially when it comes to the Mideast, but in general as well.

I take issue with the Right for butting into our private lives in issues of abortion, gay rights, and religion, and its insistence that the right to own a gun is more important than the right for the next guy not to get shot, and its refusal to associate rights and freedoms with responsibilities.

Most of all, I take issue with people who assume that it’s a spectrum of “either-or” and that everyone has to pick one side or the other.

So I’m just going to keep on saying what I think, without worrying about whether it’s fashionable on the Left or on the Right, and trust that people out there reading can recognize the difference between labels and views. I also happen to hold an inkling – maybe naively idealistic – that if we can just get past these labels, and pick and choose the good from both sides, maybe we can get somewhere closer to where we want to be as a society.

A pro-Palestinian activist from – where else? – France has started a new brand of cola, called Mecca Cola, aimed at the European market (via Jon).

The new brand, which bears a striking resemblance to Coca-Cola, is specifically intended to make a political statement.

Its producers promise that 10 percent of profits will go to Palestinian causes.

“No more drinking stupid,” its label reads in French. “Drink with commitment.”

I wonder, what qualifies as a Palestinian “cause”? Donate money to help them make bombs to blow up innocent Israeli children?

Update: An anonymous reader came up with a great advertising slogan for Mecca-Cola: “Now with 15% more Jihad!”

Reports say that Canada is now considering joining a US-led attack on Iraq even without UN authorization. In a statement by Defence Minister John McCallum, he said that Canada’s cooperation with such an attack would be reluctant, but he hasn’t ruled it out.

“Many, many countries are in a position where they are offering contingency co-operation,” McCallum said after meeting U.S. counterpart Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon. “Some may say, ‘We’re doing it only with a UN mandate.’ We’re saying we much prefer that, but we may do it otherwise.”

Could this be the beginning of Canadian foreign policy that reflects reality instead of idiocy? I’m cautiously optimistic.