Comment by yoavm
5 hours ago
I'm sorry but I can you elaborate? What exactly isn't hanging together? I'm assuming you don't mean that in other contexts is is okay to target an innocent person, but I'm not sure what you do mean.
Being targeted is indeed not the same as being guilty. One is being used in the context of war, and the other is used in the Justice system.
I believe what they are saying is that "He was discussing targeted assassinations. One doesn't "target" an innocent person" seems to imply a logical fallacy:
(1) Person X is targeted -> (2) innocent people don't get targeted -> (3) therefore person X must not be innocent
The problem is that (2) contains too many bad assumptions: that the person doing the targeting is benevolent, that there's sufficient due process to ensure the targeter is correct, that there's a universally agreed definition of "innocent", etc.
History has proven that innocent people DO get targeted, so even from a common sense perspective your statement doesn't withstand scrutiny.
Thank you for explaining. I did not mean to say the innocent people in Gaza were not targeted. Of course they did, and many times. I meant to say that in Hebrew (and I believe that in other languages too), when someone calls for "targeted assassinations", it precisely means targeting non-innocent people. The term is literally used as the opposite of "carpet bombing", collective punishment etc. The fact that innocent people were targeted during the war is clearly a crime, but again, it is not what was being called for in the aforementioned quote.
I can't comment on the Hebrew, but in English the phrase "targeted assassination" says nothing whatsoever qualitative about the person being targeted. It merely says:
Targeted -> this will be a specifically identified person
Assassination -> they will be killed
For example, a dictator might perform a targeted assassination on a rival, in order to stay in power. Innocence or non-innocence has nothing to do with it. Or to give a more relevant example, someone might target and kill a Palestinian so that settlers can take their land. Whether the Palestinian was innocent or not doesn't matter. The land was the objective.
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My god how many „Israeli snipers are shooting children in the head“ statements from non-profits and doctors do we need before people finally stop peddling this „only evil hamas members are targeted“.. Just look at satellite pictures of Gaza man. Every palestinian is a target, which is why we are calling it genocide.
I do not disagree with any of the things you said, hence I'm not sure what you're rambling about.
My point is that the Israeli government has been claiming, in every way imaginable, that their actions are „targeted“, when the evidence clearly shows that they are not. So when someone like Gvir says „targeted assassinations“, what he means (based on previous evidence) is „let’s kill some Palestinians“. What people say needs to be put in context of how they have behaved in the past.
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