New Media

“If you don’t marry me I will put a bomb on your body and send you to the police station.”

They do marriage proposals a bit differently in some parts of the world.

H/T to Adrian MacNair

“But if you try to stop us, we will descend upon you like rage-infected zombies. We will beat, kidnap and murder as many of your people as we can.”

That pretty much sums up the message from the passengers of the Gaza-bound flotilla to the Israelis who sent commandos to prevent an end-run around the blockade.

So much for peaceful acts of civil disobedience. See the peaceniks of the world beat, club and shoot at the Israeli navy personnel with everything they can get their hands on:

For the record, the flotilla had far easier options if their sole purpose was to get humanitarian aid in to Gaza. This has been the consistent line of the Israeli government for weeks:

The Israeli government supports delivery of humanitarian supplies to the civilian population in the Gaza Strip and invites you to enter the Ashdod port. Delivery of supplies in accordance with the authorities’ regulations will be through the formal land crossings and under your observation, after which you can return to your home ports on the vessels on which you have arrived.”

Israel is already getting hit with a ton of bad press over the casualties on the boat, despite the lethal force being employed against the commandos.

But let’s remember that it if an iron pipe is coming at your head, it doesn’t matter if it’s being swung by a “peace protester” or a member of the Iranian Republican Guard. The only logical response is to fight for your life. If the other guy ends up dead… well, them’s the breaks.

UPDATE: New video evidence that the commandos were acting in self-defense against murderous thugs on this boat.

America’s newest super hero fights for truth, justice and his zippy cup.

Hat tip to John Chow.

The Red Cross has provided first-aid kits and training to the Taliban in Afghanistan; yes, those same Taliban who blow Canadians up with IEDs at random intervals.

This may come as a shock to reasonable people who think wounded Taliban ought not to be prevented from letting infection and gangrene take their natural course. Still, it is consistent with the Red Cross mandate.

That mandate is to “protect human life and health, to ensure respect for the human being, and to prevent and alleviate human suffering, without any discrimination based on nationality, race, sex, religious beliefs, class or political opinions.”

Is it not time to update this mandate for the realities we face today? Let’s say we assume (and this is a very debatable premise) that the Taliban represent a legitimate fighting force as opposed to a rag-tag collection of terrorists, bandits and assorted psychotics.

Taliban members are all essentially motivated by an ideology with stated objectives that are completely antithetical to human freedom, happiness and even the right to life (for anyone except a fellow jihadi psycho or their beaten-down family members).

Their leaders, if such an organization can be said to have ones that represent the complete organization (another iffy assumption) have certainly never been a signatory to the Geneva Convention.

Yet according to the IRC’s mandate, they would appear not to have a choice in the matter — they seem obligated to keep helping thugs who have no respect for civil rights or human life.

Simple solution: change the Red Cross charter. Organizational constitutions are not written in stone. They can be amended, usually by a majority or unanimous vote of the executive body. It’s long overdue for the Red Cross to change its mandate to one that does not reward nihilistic aggressors.

It’s safe to assume that the vast majority of people, who are not closely involved with the offshore oil drilling industry, sort of thought that these multi-billion dollar companies had the expertise and resources to plug a leak if something went wrong with their pipeline.

Boy, were we ever wrong.

Nice business model: “We’re going to get this product out of the ground and sell it for many billions of dollars every day. But if there is a catastrophic failure, well… we’ll improvise a solution if that happens. We’re not in the business of crossing our bridges until we come to them, you know? Why set aside significant resources for safety features that will cost huge dollars when our legal liability will be limited to a small fraction of the damage?”