Category: War and Coercion
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What the ICC gets wrong about Israel
25 November 2024. Nigel for The Spectator. Legal reasoning is only as good as the ethical concepts it uses. That’s why the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister and former defence minister is basically flawed. The ICC claims reasonable grounds for believing Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant guilty of…
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Double Effect and Human Rights in War
11 August 2024. Nigel for Quillette. The flawed moral reasoning of the ICC’s panel of legal experts would have approved the arrests of Churchill and Eisenhower. When, in June, the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor sought arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defence minister over their conduct in Gaza, the Conservative government objected that the…
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Podcast Against Antisemitism
25 July 2024. “Reverend Canon Nigel Biggar is a historian, theologian and ethicist currently serving as Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford. Nigel has been described as “one of the leading living Western ethicists” by the New Statesman, and is named as one of Prospect Magazine’s Top Thinkers of 2024.…
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Making Moral Sense of the Wars in Ukraine and Gaza
01 July 2024. By Nigel for The Centre for Independent Studies. The pacifist answer to the problem of war is straightforward. Any use of violent force by anybody in any circumstances is immoral and should cease. War is always worse than its alternatives; peace is always preferable. This is not a view to which I…
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Oxbridge protestors can’t hide their ignorance
7 May 2024. Students and staff are united through their foolish misunderstanding of Israel’s founding It’s no surprise that the widely broadcast pro-Palestinian protests in the US should have inspired some Oxford students to pitch their tents outside the Pitt Rivers Museum, decrying Oxford University’s historic complicity in the British Empire’s “disastrous colonial legacies” in Palestine. …
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Israel’s founding is complex and messy – but it certainly wasn’t imperialist
3 March 2024. By Nigel Biggar for The Telegraph. Opponents of the Jewish state smear it as a colonial project. This is a false narrative and fake history. The “decolonisation” story is a moral melodrama, performed in stark divisions: black versus white, oppressed versus oppressor, good versus evil. That’s the comic- book source of its…
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The Spoils of War
18 January 2024. By Nigel Biggar for The Spectator. Israel’s fight against Hamas is not genocide. Last week Lord Cameron, the Foreign Secretary, expressed his concern that Israel ‘may have breached international law’ in its three-month bombardment of Gaza. Two days later, at the International Court of Justice, South Africa’s lawyers presented their case accusing…
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The Inspiration Project
16 November 2023. Nigel joins Brendan Corr of The Inspiration Project, an Australian Christian College (ACC) podcast. Listen through the player or ACC link below. From the ACC website description: On this episode of The Inspiration Project, Brendan Corr talks to Emeritus Professor Nigel Biggar about what attracted him to an academic life, why books…
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Times letters: Moral legitimacy of military action in Gaza
31 Oct 2023. Nigel Biggar for The Times. Sir, to be fully proportionate, Israel’s response to Hamas’s deliberately indiscriminate slaughter of October 7 needs more than the prospect of military success and a reconstructed Gaza (“Is this a just war? Let’s apply some tests”, Philip Collins, Oct 30). It needs to belong to a political…
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Israel has every right to defend itself against Hamas’s war crimes – but it must find a just peace
15 October 2023. By Nigel Biggar for The Telegraph. An ‘Iron Wall’ will never make the Jewish state safe. The last 100 years shows it will only make some Palestinians nihilistically violent. Hamas’s attack on Israel has given fresh voice to the view that a just political end legitimates the use of any military means…