Comment by compsciphd

yes, it's bad to bomb hospitals, but before you go all gotcha, war is bad in general, that doesn't mean war is always wrong or evil and what occurs in war is always evil or wrong. If the enemy is using a hospital as cover to fire at you, it's bad that one has to perform attacks that put it at risk, but its not evil.

We know for as close to a fact that we can get that gazan hospitals were used as cover. (bbc, nytimes et al reported from under hospitals in places that Hamas used for shelter and stored weapons and equipment)

But what is especially evil, is accusing people wrongly when you knowingly accuse them when you know you have no ability to validate your accusation. Which is clearly the case with the accusations launched against Israel in regards to the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion.

But to many people it doesn't matter, to paraphrase the word they made about on the Colbert Report, it's all about "truthiness", one doesn't really care if this thing is true or not, the fact that it feels true and fits with one's general perception of what's true or not and good or not, is all that matters.

I even might go a step further, those who accuse someone knowingly that they don't know the truth, bare moral culpability for bad thing the person they accuse does is the future.

It's human nature for someone accused of bad things falsely to simply not care in the future. "I tried my best to do right, but they falsely accused me, I am simply not going to put as much effort into doing right in the future, as it doesn't matter".

Personally, I disagree with that sentiment, and is very much part of my internal criticism at somethings that have occurred, but I also think its a very human reaction and therefore while it doesn't excuse those who do wrong because they simply don't care anymore and doesn't reduce their blame, it also places moral culpability on those who made the knowingly false accusations. Much like if I would falsely tell someone that "So and So killed your kid" knowing that it would make them go crazy and take revenge.

Life is complicated, and human reactions to the complications of life are complicated. But when an outsider inserts themselves into a complicated situation and presents lies about it in the name of "doing good", they might very much be evil.

Or to put it a bit differently, if one believes that that Bush Administration members were evil for spreading lies that led to the Iraq Invasion, why is Francesa Albanese and her cohort fundamentally different. Why are their lies better and more justified?