[wat0n]

They weren't attacking Hezbollah. They were targetting civilian infrastructure that Hezbollah had a theoretical potential of using - in the same way that a farmer becomes a legitimate target because his wheat feeds soldiers - while simultaneously demoralizing civilians through a show of force (shock and awe).

But they were attacking Hezbollah

Hizbullah HQ destroyed in Israeli attacks
Staff and agencies

Fri 14 Jul 2006 14.25 EDT

Israeli warplanes today destroyed the headquarters of Hizbullah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, as the attacks on Lebanon intensified.

Dahiyah is where Hezbollah's HQ was (and still is). Attacking Dahiyah is like attacking Israel's Kirya in Tel Aviv or the Pentagon in DC. Is that illegal?

[Fasces]

Going back to the standard set by that doctrine - attack civilian infrastructure that the enemy has the potential of using...

If you blanket bomb Washtingon D.C. and Alexandria, killing hundreds of thousands, to take out the Pentagon - if it isn't illegal, it should be, and we should hold our armed forces to that standard. If we don't, by what measure can we expect others to do the same?

[wat0n]

Israel didn't kill hundreds of thousands in Lebanon, though. Dahiyah has a population of 800k+.

[Fasces]

Imagine, for a second, the mindset where that feels like a response to anything.

[wat0n]

My point is that you're making a false analogy.

[Rich]

Dahiyah is where Hezbollah's HQ was (and still is). Attacking Dahiyah is like attacking Israel's Kirya in Tel Aviv or the Pentagon in DC. Is that illegal?

That's why 9/11 was really the last straw for me with the Liberals. The Twin Towers were prime economic targets. How could anyone claim that the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and the White House were not legitimate military targets? I said Al Qaeda are real Muslims genuinely trying to follow the example of the Prophet Mohammad and "the rightly guided Caliphs" and apply the teachings of the Koran and the Hadith to the modern world. Therefore they need to be mercilessly attacked until they are annihilated or give up their beliefs, even though their tactics on 9/11 were totally moral.

Since then I've had zero tolerance for Liberals moralistic whining. And as far as I remember not a single Israeli came forward to defend the legitimacy of Al Qaeda's tactics.

[Tainari88]

That's why 9/11 was really the last straw for me with the Liberals. The Twin Towers were prime economic targets. How could anyone claim that the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and the White House were not legitimate military targets? I said Al Qaeda are real Muslims genuinely trying to follow the example of the Prophet Mohammad and "the rightly guided Caliphs" and apply the teachings of the Koran and the Hadith to the modern world. Therefore they need to be mercilessly attacked until they are annihilated or give up their beliefs, even though their tactics on 9/11 were totally moral.

Since then I've had zero tolerance for Liberals moralistic whining. And as far as I remember not a single Israeli came forward to defend the legitimacy of Al Qaeda's tactics.

Well, if you think like an extremist Al Qaeda type and you hate liberal shit? They went after the center of liberalism in the West.

I never liked religious fanatics Rich. They wind up being the worst of the bunch in terms of God needing me to kill for him. The liberals though claim to be freedom fighters and they do not kill for God and Mohammed or God and Jesus, they kill for money and for secular corporations, banks, and some soulless pendejadas.

I think the posts I like the most from you is your honesty about criticism of liberal stances on the issues of the day. They are extremely hypocritical and incredibly immoral in general. And an important thing to point out.

[wat0n]

That's why 9/11 was really the last straw for me with the Liberals. The Twin Towers were prime economic targets. How could anyone claim that the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and the White House were not legitimate military targets? I said Al Qaeda are real Muslims genuinely trying to follow the example of the Prophet Mohammad and "the rightly guided Caliphs" and apply the teachings of the Koran and the Hadith to the modern world. Therefore they need to be mercilessly attacked until they are annihilated or give up their beliefs, even though their tactics on 9/11 were totally moral.

Since then I've had zero tolerance for Liberals moralistic whining. And as far as I remember not a single Israeli came forward to defend the legitimacy of Al Qaeda's tactics.

"Economic" targets, you said it yourself. Not military targets.

[ingliz]

@wat0n

In total war, economic targets are military targets.

[wat0n]

@ingliz Israel isn't fighting a total war for now

[Pants-of-dog]

@JohnRawls

If an area is a military location simply because of the presence of a combatant, then many terrorist attacks are completely legal military operations.

Your argument even makes the October 7yh attack by Hamas into a perfectly moral military operation, since there were IDF soldiers in the area attacked that day.

[JohnRawls]

They weren't attacking Hezbollah. They were targetting civilian infrastructure that Hezbollah had a theoretical potential of using - in the same way that a farmer becomes a legitimate target because his wheat feeds soldiers - while simultaneously demoralizing civilians through a show of force (shock and awe).

If they are lowering their standards to that level, and calling their own attacks 'disproportionate' while doing so... if the IDF itself can say what it is...

The first time strategic bombing became a tactic of war was in WW2, the pioneers themselves said that if they lost the war, they would be prosecuted as war criminals. These men are making these decisions accepting that they are immoral and criminal, yet accepting it, because they believe in the victory.

You are in a position where you simultaneously accept that immorality, in theory, but are in complete denial about the ethical cost - despite the fact that there is no ethical cost to you. You're not stuck in an impossible trolley problem between protecting your comrades and killing civilians. Despite that, you want to have your cake and eat it too - bombing of this nature is a war crime, but Israel doesn't commit war crimes, as such, this bombing was not a war crime even if Israel itself characterizes it as such.

They have to weigh the costs and benefits of their decisions in a very real way, and they recognized their own hypocrisy. Why can't you?

It costs you literally nothing to condemn this action - with zero practical effect - and yet you're spending energy trying to jump through intellectual hoops to justify the unjustifiable.

Shock and Awe is different though, you attack mostly military infrastructure but also some civilian one that is used by the military. The problem with your analogy is that Hezbollah is actually using a lot of civilian infrastructure to hide itself while placing its military assets near civilian infrastructure or peoples housing. This is all known things. So it is hard to blame Israel for collateral damage and blame them for War Crimes.

[Rich]

Shock and Awe is different though, you attack mostly military infrastructure but also some civilian one that is used by the military.

"Shock and awe" was a military deception. It was designed to make the Iraqi leadership think there was going to be a sustained and long winded air campaign before the commencement of ground operations, like there had been in the 1991 war, when in fact the plan was to use rapid mechanised advances through the desert to completely disorient and disrupt the Iraqi defence. It was the sort of campaign, that although exploiting modern military technology had been practiced by brilliant generals for thousands of years..

[albionfagan]

Hamas would probably describe October 7th as 'Shock and awe'.

[ingliz]

@wat0n

Houses of suspected Hamas operatives are now targeted regardless of rank.

That is a lot of houses [30,000 to 40,000]. Hamas members who don’t really mean anything live in homes across Gaza. So they mark the home and bomb the house and kill everyone there.

— Israeli intelligence official discussing the 'Gospel' AI targeting platform

I attempted to provide a link and got this ...

Access denied
Error 16
http://www.home.idf.il
2023-12-01 10:46:09 UTC

This request was blocked by our security service

[Rich]

"Economic" targets, you said it yourself. Not military targets.

Economic targets are military targets and always have been. In World War II the bombing campaign was done under the euphemism of de housing, the argument being that if the workers had no homes, it would seriously impact their productivity. The West should be judged by its behaviour in three instances.

1 World War II. Britain was seriously threatened with invasion, the Channel Island were actually occupied. The US was attacked in Hawaii. They responded with a genuinely genocidal bombing campaign.

2 The Cold War. The Soviets implicitly threatened the occupation of western Europe with their perceived conventional military superiority. The West's response again was genocide, this time in the form of nuclear weapons. Only now it was believed that we might cause not just a genocide, but a humanicide. I don't object to these extreme responses. In fact I'm proud to say that I had the moral strength of character to support the deployment of nuclear armed cruise missiles to Europe, as part of flexible response, whose aim was to make the path of nuclear escalation more credible. No what I object to is us being prepared to threaten a humanicide in order to defend our homelands but whining when our enemies kill a few civilians. Its pathetic and ridiculous.

3 9/11 No threat of retaliation and a one off attack that only killed 1% of 1% of the population. Enough said, Liberals please just shut-up about proportionality.

[Beren]

Hamas would probably describe October 7th as 'Shock and awe'.

It was rather the opposite of Shock and awe, though, as they actually meant to provoke a harsh response.

Shock and awe (technically known as rapid dominance) is a military strategy based on the use of overwhelming power and spectacular displays of force to paralyze the enemy's perception of the battlefield and destroy their will to fight.

[Tainari88]

They weren't attacking Hezbollah. They were targetting civilian infrastructure that Hezbollah had a theoretical potential of using - in the same way that a farmer becomes a legitimate target because his wheat feeds soldiers - while simultaneously demoralizing civilians through a show of force (shock and awe).

If they are lowering their standards to that level, and calling their own attacks 'disproportionate' while doing so... if the IDF itself can say what it is...

The first time strategic bombing became a tactic of war was in WW2, the pioneers themselves said that if they lost the war, they would be prosecuted as war criminals. These men are making these decisions accepting that they are immoral and criminal, yet accepting it, because they believe in the victory.

You are in a position where you simultaneously accept that immorality, in theory, but are in complete denial about the ethical cost - despite the fact that there is no ethical cost to you. You're not stuck in an impossible trolley problem between protecting your comrades and killing civilians. Despite that, you want to have your cake and eat it too - bombing of this nature is a war crime, but Israel doesn't commit war crimes, as such, this bombing was not a war crime even if Israel itself characterizes it as such.

They have to weigh the costs and benefits of their decisions in a very real way, and they recognized their own hypocrisy. Why can't you?

It costs you literally nothing to condemn this action - with zero practical effect - and yet you're spending energy trying to jump through intellectual hoops to justify the unjustifiable.

This is the issue I have on this forum with @JohnRawls on almost everything where he knows the truth (especially the actions and the decisions that the US government does wrong that are morally, ethically, and historically immoral and wrong yet he never acknowledges it either. He feels that the US government has to be backed by him, hell or high water because they are the good guys in the world that saved the world from Russian aggression. His hatred of the Communists even though fucking Putin is not a communist he is a Right-wing fucking nightmare fascist, yet he insists that he has to be loyal to the good guys that are the US government). He is doing the same with the IDF.

I do not have a problem acknowledging atrocities committed against civvies and innocent people who did nothing to deserve mass death. That is what backing human rights is about in the world. WWII ended and they founded the United Nations to try to prevent from another world war from happening. Why? Because if you do not start implementing universal standards of universal human rights? You do not start respecting the parameters of international law? You do not start respecting the borders and territories of nations who are sovereign and independent? Then another WWIII will happen!

That starts with being OBJECTIVE about immoral behavior and unethical and inhumane behavior. No matter who that nation or government IS!!

Th United States of America is the nation with the most arms in the world. It is the nation that has engaged in the most expensive wars in the last 100 years. It arms a lot of nations all over the world. If you do a cursory search of how many legitimately elected governments have been toppled by the CIA, and other intelligence agencies funded by the US government over the years? It is a lot of governments. They are destabilizing whole regions of the world. Why? They want to be the only superpower controlling the entire globe for the next century. No matter how many innocents die, and how many democracies fall to their machinations. It is IMMORAL in the extreme. Yet, they have people like John Rawls thinking they are the good guys in history.

No such thing as good guys, bad guys and black or white shit in human history. Humanity is COMPLEX. It is a mixture of events and people that are full of contradictions, paradoxical crap and difficult to solve problems. Letting the ones doing the damage off the hook because of blind loyalties to myths in your own mind is not facing the truth of what human beings are in this world.

Real civilians are being bombed, killed and destroyed because some asshole in a position of power wants to win over a side that is probably reacting to a lack of some ability to negotiate or reach an agreement. What religion and politics are in this world are attachments to ideas of power. Spiritual power for the religious and political power for the secular. If you allow yourself to be blinded by power and gaining it? You wind up destroying the world in your wake.

The world can not be controlled by human ambitions. All you need to do to realize this fact is look at the sun or the moon in the morning. We are dependent on those heavenly bodies.

People talking about living in Mars? After we trash this planet we are going to go to Mars to live. Yeah, right.

It took billions of years to have the correct conditions to be able to have mammals even be commonplace species in this planet. A bunch of lucky breaks. We depend on the good will and laws of this world. Thinking that humanity is made up of some simplistic chains of events that are easy to reproduce in some other planet that we can then trash again because we never learned to live with sane limits is STUPIDITY in the biggest way.

This Isreali Palestinian conflict that people like John Rawls keep defending the actions of the unjustifiable has to do with his sense of attachment to the idea of GOOD GUYS.

It is simplistic and cartoonish. None of that shit exists in political life of human governments. What one needs to do is follow universal human rights and universal international laws and allow no tolerance for abuse of power from very powerful nations used to abusing everyone they can abuse.

Because once the humans being abused get fucking angry and do not care if they live or die anymore because another day of abuse is not tolerable for them anymore? They will be suicidal and ready to take everyone who did that shit to them...making their lives mean nothing, and not caring if they live or not anymore. They will say...what the fuck, let me take down these abusive fucks on my way out of this hopeless existence.

That is what happens when you do not see the suffering of the others who are on the receiving end of all this immorality!!

[wat0n]

@wat0n

Houses of suspected Hamas operatives are now targeted regardless of rank.

That is a lot of houses [30,000 to 40,000]. Hamas members who don’t really mean anything live in homes across Gaza. So they mark the home and bomb the house and kill everyone there.

— Israeli intelligence official discussing the 'Gospel' AI targeting platform

I attempted to provide a link and got this ...

Access denied
Error 16
http://www.home.idf.il
2023-12-01 10:46:09 UTC

This request was blocked by our security service

That's not what total war is. If Israel was truly fighting a total war, there would be no house or structure standing in Gaza by now, regardless of use.

Economic targets are military targets and always have been. In World War II the bombing campaign was done under the euphemism of de housing, the argument being that if the workers had no homes, it would seriously impact their productivity. The West should be judged by its behaviour in three instances.

1 World War II. Britain was seriously threatened with invasion, the Channel Island were actually occupied. The US was attacked in Hawaii. They responded with a genuinely genocidal bombing campaign.

2 The Cold War. The Soviets implicitly threatened the occupation of western Europe with their perceived conventional military superiority. The West's response again was genocide, this time in the form of nuclear weapons. Only now it was believed that we might cause not just a genocide, but a humanicide. I don't object to these extreme responses. In fact I'm proud to say that I had the moral strength of character to support the deployment of nuclear armed cruise missiles to Europe, as part of flexible response, whose aim was to make the path of nuclear escalation more credible. No what I object to is us being prepared to threaten a humanicide in order to defend our homelands but whining when our enemies kill a few civilians. Its pathetic and ridiculous.

3 9/11 No threat of retaliation and a one off attack that only killed 1% of 1% of the population. Enough said, Liberals please just shut-up about proportionality.

This is exactly how total war looks like, again, if Israel was fighting that type of war there would be no structures standing in Gaza by now. Modern bombs aren't just more precise than WWII ones, bombers can also carry heavier payloads than back then.

[ingliz]

Our self-professed neutral observer, @wat0n, believes using artillery or a big JDAM on a residential area to take out a lone terrorist is a proportionate response.