Comment by ivl
7 days ago
I do not understand this analogy.
A water source the entire population of an area relies upon is in no way the same as a specific, small organization's private means of communication that it distributed to its members.
Or are you under the impression Israel simply loaded a Lebanese RadioShack with explosive pagers and hoped Hezbollah would be the ones buying them? You could argue that it was not discriminate because there were pagers distributed to civilian Hezbollah members, who may not have been valid targets, but that is not the same argument.
Every bit of reporting on it tries heart-string tugging, just to quietly reveal one of the unintended targets picked up the pager to bring it to a Hezbollah member father, uncle, or brother.
Wait but all the Israeli reporting is the same. Flipping the script, how many military age abled men/women were taken as prisoners? I’d argue y’all over obsess on the few elderly/young ones they took. They weren’t targeted, they just happened to be the grandmothers, sons, nephews of IDF reserve/active members. This sounds good dum dum?
How does one accidentally kidnap someone like Kfir Bibas? A kidnapper has to be physically present, at which point it's rather obvious that a baby is not a soldier.
I bet they feared for his life. Leaving a kid there could have meant death for him/her. Knowing the kind of weird cultist behaviors certain Israeli groups exhibit. Not to talk about fratricide. ;) certainly better than distributing fentanyl laced diapers. A kid could have worn those
I'm confused: you acknowledge the possibility that there could be non-valid targets in Hezbollah, yet you cannot see parallels to the case of an attack against a water supply?
The one distinction I can see you raise is about the spatial concentration of the affected persons, but I don't see how this essential to the point.
You are of course free to put your delineations such that the matter of concentration results in two different arguments, but frankly I think you should just reject the use of analogies altogether and save everyone else a lot of grief.
I do not argue that civilian members of Hezbollah as a political movement are unacceptable targets, I simply acknowledge that perspective exists.
And the location of the target is entirely the point when the alternative to the pager attack is a JDAM, an attack with greater collateral damage, but still a valid target. Imagine instead of an explosive charge, these pagers were somehow phoning home and providing location data that Israel could use to perform airstrikes. Based on that intel, those air strikes would be entirely legitimate, and they would include far more collateral damage than the charge in the pager.
An attack on the water supply is indiscriminate. A water supply poisoning makes no attempt at differentiating between the targets and the civilian population.