Slashdot Mirror
Police Officers Seek Right Not To Be Recorded
linzeal writes "When the police act as though cameras were the equivalent of guns pointed at them, there is a sense in which they are correct. Cameras have become the most effective weapon that ordinary people have to protect against and to expose police abuse. And the police want it to stop. Judges, juries, and legislatures support the police overwhelmingly on this issue, with only a few cases where those accused of 'shooting' the cops being vindicated through the courts."
Right, whatever. Israel has been a massive bunch of assholes to the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza, granted. Again: why is Egypt opening up the borders a notable event? It should be open all the time to their starving Arab brothers, no? What about the Jewish communities of the rest of the Middle East? They're doing great, right? None of them got dispossessed? Oh wait, they pretty much kicked them all out.
Everyone in the Middle East is, or has been, an asshole to everyone else there. Jew, Christian, Muslim; Hebrew, Arab, Persian, Kurd: there's enough history of assholery there to fight forever.
I really don't give a fuck what the UN says, because it's an organization that says that people are represented by governments that have the authority to speak for them on equal terms with all other governments. You think Fiji is the equivalent of Turkey, let alone the US? No. It's not. International relations consist of what you can get away with.
Incidentally, my personal view is that all of this is fallout from the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and it won't be fixed for another century at least.
Legal authority and moral authority are two very different things.
Desmond Tutu doesn't have any legal authority.
The head of the UNRWA himself said he's not representing a political organization when he spoke.
Similarly, the United Nations, as a whole, doesn't have any legal authority over Israel or international affairs in general other than what is authorized by the Security Council. To say any action at all is "Illegal under international law" is to show you have no idea what you're talking about. There is no such thing as international law, merely a piecemeal set of treaties and agreements that Israel has sole discretion in enforcing and obeying within Israel's sovereign borders.