A Pound of Flesh ...

Or ...... a lesson in justice.

In Elizabethan England there was a widespread animosity toward the Jew that was fairly well outlined in the subtext of Shakespeare's play the Merchant of Venice. While the Bard was bound to conform to popular prejudices of the day, his antagonist character Shylock the Jew was allowed to make his case for both the humanity of his situation and his right as a benefactor to be compensated before being screwed over in a court of  his detractors.

Richard Fernandez aka "Wretchard" of the Belmont Club puts us in touch with the modern day dilemma of  being uncompensated benefactors. In brief ...
- We are all being denied justice because of revisionist thinking in the form of political correctness
- The natural consequence of the denial of civil justice is the do it yourself sort
- This is being displayed in Israel and provides an object lesson to anyone who cares to pay attention

  The Pound of Flesh, By Richard Fernandez



Excerpt:
But a strange thing happened on the way to the 21st century: political correctness as imposed by a variety of lawyers, human rights activists and the like progressively reduced the power of the state to defend its population against external aggressors to the point where it failed to provide an adequate level of protection.  When private individuals could no longer rely on uniformed officialdom to protect them, they did the natural thing. They took the matter of warfare back into their own hands.
But along with the advantages of vigilanteeism came its drawbacks. Reuters reports that some settler groups are burning mosques on the West Bank.  That may be regrettable, but is also inevitable. For in doing away with the Westphalian system, political correctness unintentionally — or perhaps unthinkingly — undermined the Laws of War. The whole panoply of uniforms, ranks, discipline and obedience — so hated by pacifists — were all Westphalian mechanisms designed to ensure some kind of law and order on the battlefield. By taking the armies out of the game, the disciples of political correctness didn’t end war; they merely ended the old rules of war and returned the field to private warfare.
Maybe that isn’t too bad. If the 20th century is any gauge, Westphalian Armies did precious little to prevent widespread loss of life. Indeed World War 2, a Westphalian War, was the most devastating episode of belligerence in human history. For all its ugliness, one might argue that private war sheds less blood than the regular kind per unit of time. Unfortunately it also did away with that other Westphalian innovation, Victory. World War 2 for all its destructiveness had one great virtue. It ended. Today wars are far less destructive. The bad news is they never end.
Today warfare is no longer entirely a matter of soldiers fighting each other under the Geneva Convention. Instead, it every man for himself; it is the knife in the dark, the molotov cocktail thrown from the passing car and the IED along the road. What should really worry the politically correct class, however, is not that private war is waged against Hamas, al-Qaeda or Hezbollah.  What should worry them is that methods of Hamas have still been but imperfectly copied.