At 16:42 11-4-02 -0500, Marvin Long wrote: > > What do you think will happen if someone would have attacked an Israeli > > visitor to the Parliament for showing Israeli symbols? I can tell you what > > will happen: the public will demand that the responsible government > > officials be sent home because they failed to protect the public. > >But failing to protect Jews themselves isn't failing to protect the >public?
As I have pointed out earlier, we can (and do) give them extra protection, but we cannot give them the extreme levels of protection some people on this list expect from Europe. >Failing to protect Jews' right to peaceful and public >self-identification and self-expression is not failing to protect the >public? That right is protected in our Constitutions. But when that right starts clashing with public safety, something has to give. In this particular case, the right of a minority to wear Jewish/Israeli symbols might clash with the right of everyone to be protected from attacks. Sometimes the good of the many outweigh the good of the few. > > Now, what is more important? The right of an Israeli to openly wear Israeli > > symbols, or the right of everyone (including said Israeli, BTW) to be > > protected from being blown up? > >The former, by Franklin! IOW, all Europeans should accept an increased risk of being killed, only because a small minority wants to show their symbols. Yikes. Somewhere in Israel, a Palestinian man walks into a market place, unfolds the Palestinian flag and starts waving it, while shouting "Freedom for Palestine!". The Israeli crowd in the marketplace goes crazy and lynches the man. Are you going to blame the man for doing something that he could have known might get him killed? Or are you going to criticise the Israeli public for denying the man his right to show a symbol related to his ethnicity and denying him his right to self-expression? >I reiterate a question from an earlier post: >is there really sufficient threat to all of Europe to justify the fear that >associating with anything Jewish will create a significant likelihood of >attack for individuals and for non-Jewish sites? I rather doubt it. If >the government doesn't defend the right of the people, no matter their >ethnicity, to express themselves and identify themselves peacefully and >publicly, then what good is the government in the first place? It is the task of the government to defend everyone's rights. When a situation occurs in which rights start clashing, the rights of the majority (in this case: the *entire* population) become more important than the rights of a small minority. Jeroen _________________________________________________________________________ Wonderful World of Brin-L Website: http://www.Brin-L.com Tom's Photo Gallery: http://tom.vanbaardwijk.com
