Comment by C6JEsQeQa5fCjE
2 years ago
Let us imagine a residential building with about 100 people living there, and let us imagine that there is information that some enemy combatants are living among them. A decision is made to strike at the building in order to eliminate the combatants. Consider two different approaches:
1) An air strike at the building, destroying it and killing most of its inhabitants, and leaving a minority of them wounded.
2) A squad of soldiers enters the building and executes most of the inhabitants at close range, and wounds and leaves alive a minority of them.
Most people would call scenario 2) a deliberate massacre that cannot be justified. Many people would, however, call scenario 1) a legitimate military strategy with unfortunate collateral damage that cannot be avoided. Question is, why? The outcome is the same, but for some reason the impersonality of striking from distance (air strikes, missiles, or artillery fire) seems to make it acceptable in many bystanders' eyes.
You seem to have rejected 3: do nothing at all.
Nowhere in any civilised state in the world do the authorities just go in and kill everyone in a building to get to a few.
It's beyond insane.
The fiction you've created to rationilise this is that there is a "war", but there is no fucking war. It's an occupying force slaughtering its hostages to punish a relative handful among them.
I am not in favour of striking, and you have misunderstood my message. You can see that if you read my replies to the other person who replied to me.
Wow, hello hyperbole and loaded terms. If we can’t even agree on basic facts like the very existence of a war, then there’s simply no point in discussion.
I agree. So long as all you know is Israeli propaganda, you're blinded to the truth and there's no point in discussion.
If there's a war, where is the army that the IDF is fighting? How many losses have the IDF had? Where is the front-line of this war? Where is the footage of this so called "war"?
1 reply →
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> Because in scenario 2, you’re presumably also shooting at unarmed civilians with their hands up who are posing no threat to you. There’s no reason to shoot them if you have the choice not to. In scenario 1, an air strike is coarse-grained enough that you don’t have such a choice to make.
But in scenario 1, one is bombing unarmed civilians residing inside their homes. The only reason they do not literally have their hands up is that they do not even see the strike coming before they and their families are killed; and they pose even less of a threat to the person sending the missile than they would pose to a soldier that is physically located next to them.
> The outcome is not the same, because scenario two involves a high likelihood of more casualties on your side. It is legitimate to care more about your own soldier casualties than about enemy civilian casualties.
My initial reply to the parent was in the context of "deliberate massacres of civilians", pointing out that people seem to find such massacres much more acceptable when done from a distance. The rest of your reply seems to provide motivations for such actions, and your last paragraph even provides justifications (unless I horribly misunderstood it). Regardless of whether one agrees with the motivations and justifications, the reality of the outcome is what it is — a deliberate massacre of civilians. Whether that is done by bullets at gunpoint or by a missile from a long distance makes little, if any, difference to the people being slaughtered by tens of thousands (and ongoing), and makes no difference at all to the death reports.
> But in scenario 1, one is bombing unarmed civilians residing inside their homes. The only reason they do not literally have their hands up is that they do not even see the strike coming before they and their families are killed; and they pose even less of a threat to the person sending the missile than they would pose to a soldier that is physically located next to them.
We must be talking past each other. I don’t see how any of this contradicts or lessens what I’ve said.
> pointing out that people seem to find such massacres much more acceptable when done from a distance.
You misunderstand. People such as myself find such “massacres” (loaded term, by the way) acceptable when they’re part of collateral damage rather than intentional killing of civilians.
> The rest of your reply seems to provide motivations for such actions, and your last paragraph even provides justifications
Of course. Like I’ve just explained, killing civilians is justified when it’s collateral damage. You understood me correctly.
> the reality of the outcome is what it is — a deliberate massacre of civilians.
That phrasing sounds like civilians were deliberately targeted. They were not. They were simply in the way of the military assets that were deliberately targeted.
> Whether that is done by bullets at gunpoint or by a missile from a long distance makes little, if any, difference to the people being slaughtered by tens of thousands (and ongoing), and makes no difference at all to the death reports.
I’ll grant you that. But intentions matter. Intention implies that if civilians and combatants were clearly separated, the IDF would not continue to kill civilians at the same rate they’re doing now. If the IDF does not have the intention to target civilians specifically, then the only other party that can make a difference is Hamas, and that is where the blame lies for all civilian deaths.
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