RTP

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There was a time there when we were hearing a great deal about the Responsibility to Protect. But RTP appears to be on holiday as far as Gaza is concerned.

Oh Samantha, where are you? Shown below receiving an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Brown University. “Humane” is good, don’t you think?

I had occasion to attend a Brown University graduation recently. Samantha Power did not speak on that occasion, but the President badly mangled the two or three phrases of Latin she was called upon to utter. That, and the general air of smugness and self-congratulation, were the only strong impressions the festivities made on me.

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6 thoughts on “RTP

  1. I thought it was R2P among the connoisseurs of Kafka Era Studies:

    When the terrorism is not especially helpful to U.S. interests but is carried out by an ally or client that U.S. officials want to placate or protect, the killing of large numbers of civilians is treated as of little interest and no evident moral concern-it is “benign”…

  2. i’ve got friends of jesus posting on facespace about all the persecution & displacement of ancient christian communities going on in iraq, syria, et al. “in 2003, the situation for iraqi xians took a turn for the worse,” says some concerned xian concerned for xians from xian concern. part of me wants to scream, “it was only ELEVEN years ago! during YOUR adult lifetime!” of course these people don’t realize that iraq was destroyed in toto or see islamic fundamentalism rising in the wake of US/NATO bombing campaigns. ask about the US relation with S. Arabia and listen to crickets chirp. there is some imaginary boundary between iraq & syria on one side of which ISIS is good, but on the other side, not so much.
    and that “xian concern”? not so much for the gazans, who, last time I checked, are slightly more xian than the israelis.
    what am i whinging about again? i guess the sectarian/tribal nature of people’s concern over justice & injustice, the way they/we tend to look at events as happening in a vacuum which enables us to label certain parties as “good” or “evil” without regard to any sense of history.

    • When you start cantonizing and ‘destabilizing’ and partitioning — which seems to have been Israel’s grand strategy for quite some time now– people will suffer. Quite a lot. Some of them may even be Christians.

      Not a new story.

      I think of Milton’s wonderful sonnet, which mutatis mutandis seems pretty relevant, though most of the victims, nowadays, are not Christians, and the Piemontese, calm now and not bloody at all, have found successors of a different persuasion, as the men of blood always will.

      Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered Saints, whose bones
      Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
      Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
      When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones,
      Forget not: in thy book record their groans
      Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
      Slain by the bloody Piemontese, that rolled
      Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
      The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
      To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
      O’er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
      The triple Tyrant; that from these may grow
      A hundredfold, who, having learnt Thy way,
      Early may fly the Babylonian woe.

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