There's no point to a terrorist attack for which the group involved claims no responsibility. The whole idea is to press certain specific demands, which does not work unless the group responsible lets people know who did it.

The reality is that most people who are murdered are murdered by people they know. Any serious murder inquiry begins with a thorough examination of the lives of the people involved in order to determine whether there was anyone amongst their family and acquaintances who might have had a motive and opportunity to kill them. This is particularly true when a murder takes place in a location to which access is heavily restricted. Before one simply assumes that someone with no right of access was able to enter and exit a heavily fortified, fenced-in, armed enclave without being detected or stopped, one starts by looking at the people for whom the issue of securing access doesn't arise - those living in or visiting the place (either the settlement or the home of the victims).

No attempt has been made to do any of this. It has merely been assumed that dead settlers equal Palestinian killers (though there has also been a roundup of Thai workers).

It is absurd to claim that questioning the immediate assumption that the killer must be Palestinian (even though no suspect has been identified and no group has claimed responsibility) means that one assumes that 'no Palestinian would ever do this'. No one has claimed that, and, to my knowledge, no one has operated on that assumption. On the other hand, there is a widespread, unchallenged assumption that no Jew could possibly have done this, which is the sort of thinking that one has encountered in places such as Kishinev in 1903.

As for the rest of Zach's post, it's childish, ad hominem nonsense and discredits itself.

Here's a random thought. If the 'activist Left' would like to prove themselves worthy of the name, they could point out that no one actually knows who committed the killings and condemn the cynical exploitation of the killings by people who have never shown any compunction when it comes to murder.

"Terrorism" as it is used in public discourse certainly is not a descriptive term; however, "terrorism" is in fact a legal term with a very clear legal definition. The reason this definition is virtually never relied on or even mentioned in public discourse is clear enough - it would constitute a confession that our political and intellectual class regularly engages in and condones terrorism.

Certainly (though the same people who think that failure to join child killers in condemning child killing is proof that one supports child killing will have no trouble missing the point. Speaking of which, I have it on good authority that you'll be hearing from Reider himself soon).

True enough. Everything I said about the Hebron case holds, at least for the parents.

Though it's worth remembering that any serious murder inquiry starts with the people closest to the victims, especially when the alternative is as improbable as a Palestinian making it undetected in and out of a heavily fortified and protected military enclave, and doing so armed with nothing more than a knife despite the likelihood of encountering people with guns.

They probably did at some point, certainly, but multilateral treaties (particularly those that, like the Geneva Conventions, are considered to reflect peremptory norms) trump customary law.

Excellent piece. However, it's worth noting that the Geneva Conventions provide no support for the idea of "belligerent reprisals" against a civilian population. In fact, they are expressly prohibited in absolute terms.

Well, "defeat" certainly doesn't make sense (and while he might put it that way in an off-the-cuff remark, he hasn't described it in those terms in his writings to my knowledge), I can see what he means when he describes it as a "disaster" for the US ruling class, particularly given the assumptions on which the aggression against Iraq was based (little or no resistance, quick installation of a "democracy", i.e., a pliant dictatorship that would ultimately ensure US control over Iraq's oil spigot, etc.). The result has been an unusual level of popular resistance from the very beginning (now renewed in the midst of the wave of popular uprisings in the region) that has forced the US-installed regime there to take positions inconvenient to the US in order to maintain even a veneer of legitimacy, the undermining of the longstanding US policy of isolating the only really independent (of the US) government in the region, Iran (which now has a much greater regional role than had previously been the case). On top of that, the amount of energy now dedicated to perpetual and ever-expanding war against Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc. has left the US unable to beat back the wave of Latin American independence.

So, while the oil industry certainly is not hurting from the whole thing, I think it can be argued that the net effect of the aggression against Iraq has been to weaken US imperial control in important respects. Of course, it would be absurd to suggest that the ultimate, unexpected (and certainly unintended) adverse net effects on US imperial power is proof that the decision to launch the invasion couldn't have been taken to advance US imperial power in the first place (post hoc != propter hoc), but I still think that the invasion of Iraq will ultimately prove to be the US' Barbarossa moment.

Having spent the past few days watching a livestream of NHK's Japanese-language earthquake coverage, I can confirm this. The overall impression is a combination of press conferences that are so hypertechnical that most people won't get much out of them (the average twitter responses from Japanese viewers in the feed next to the video are things like "Do they think anyone can actually make head or tail of this crap?") and admonitions to maintain calm and avoid believing "e-mails aimed at generating fear and panic".

And he forgot the rest. But rest assured, it was scathing and eloquent and occasionally flirted with a resemblance to factual argument before going home to good ole bullshit.