On Fri, 12 Apr 2002, J. van Baardwijk wrote: > >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.
Extreme protection isn't necessarily needed. But the willingness of all citizens to share the risk posed by defending minorities' rights is. > 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. But you've told me that attacks on Jews are quite rare, so the danger to the general public is actually vanishingly small. You defend the rights of all by defending the rights of the few (assuming those rights are equal to begin with). > IOW, all Europeans should accept an increased risk of being killed, only > because a small minority wants to show their symbols. Yikes. Yes, in part because the risk is, as you've agreed, very slight. More importantly, facing this kind of risk is the obligation faced by all citizens of a pluralistic democracy. > 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'm going to criticize the Israeli public, especially if the man in question is an Israeli citizen (if he's not an Israeli citizen, you've drawn a poor analogy). However, you'll recall that in an earlier post I said that some exceptions might be warranted in warlike times, and Israel is definitely experiencing warlike times. I'd still protect the Palestinian's right to wave his flag, but I'd allow police to search him for bombs first under current circumstances. I might also criticize the man for being stupid, but in truth he has done nothing actually wrong. Lynching him, however, is wrong. They are two very different criticisms, and they are not mutually exclusive. > 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. I think we disagree on the amount of risk a public should be willing to endure in order to preserve essential freedoms, and what constitutes an essential freedom. There is no clash of rights here, IMO, just an obligation of all to preserve the rights of all. There is no credible threat to the lives of the vast majority to justify the limiting of the essential freedoms of a few. Moreover, the people whose freedoms are being limited are not the people who pose the threat, so why penalize them for being victims? Marvin Long Austin, Texas
