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Comment by jbstack

3 hours ago

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.

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jbstack

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yoavm  3 hours ago

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.

  • jbstack  2 hours ago

    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.