Amos Guiora had an op-ed in the LA Times yesterday which seeks to justify the Israeli blockade of Gaza and its plans to stop the Freedom Flotilla. The arguments Professor Guiora employs are standard Israeli hasbara which makes you wonder why the paper chose to print this uninspired and hackneyed piece.
Guiora, who is an Israeli citizen, was born and educated in the US, is identified only as a law professor at the University of Utah and the author of Freedom from Religion: Rights and National Security. What the newspaper does not reveal is that Guiora spent 18 years in command positions in the Israeli Defense Forces, having risen to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the Judge Advocate General Corps. This omission has been brought to the attention of the editors, but there has not been any correction made.
I first learned about Guiora in 2007 when my wife and I were writing about a “lawfare” institute at Syracuse University. At that time, Guiora was the head of The Institute for Global Security Law and Policy at Case Western University which he had founded. The institute was a typical “lawfare” shop that advocated changing international humanitarian law relating to asymmetrical warfare. The idea was to avoid troublesome charges about the use of disproportionate force by armies against insurgencies. Naturally Guiora was a strong supporter of the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and defended the IDF against charges of crimes in the conduct of that war.
In a 2006 interview with the Cleveland Jewish News, Professor Guiora outrageously claimed that Israel is a proxy for the Western world in what he predicted would be a one hundred year war against the Arabs. This is just one of a number of highly controversial and idiosyncratic statements this “Strangelove” has made. Many are available on the Net.
H/T to Watcher who asks that you write to the LA Times, here, requesting that they inform their readers of Guiora’s IDF history. See his post for more on Guiora.
