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How Israel’s bulky pager fooled Hezbollah

reuters.com

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Re: How Israel’s bulky pager fooled Hezbollah

#261

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #257
runarberg wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With that line of reasoning you could claim that the American Indian Movement is a foreign occupying power within the USA, as they receive support from and serve the strategic interests of other indigenous liberation movements around the Americas (including Nicaragua and Bolivia); Or you could flip the script and claim that the Nicaraguan Contras were a US backed foreign occupying power in Nicaragua. That is simply n…

This feels like an argument about definitions. Substitute whatever term you prefer. Though: I don't find it plausible that the American aboriginal rights movement is directed by foreign powers.

[deleted]

Re: How Israel’s bulky pager fooled Hezbollah

#262

Post by soulofmischief »

tharne wrote: post #72
soulofmischief wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only acceptable "civilian casualty per targeted combatant ratio" is zero . The recent terrorist attack committed by Israel in Lebanon and Syria breaks every respectable moral compass. Innocent people, including children, were harmed and continue to be harmed by Israel's ongoing war campaign. And I can't believe I have to say this, but "maiming" children is not any less morally bankrupt than killing them.

> The only acceptable "civilian casualty per targeted combatant ratio" is zero. A lot of German civilians were killed during World War 2. Would you have preferred handing the Germans all of Europe to prevent that? As others have noted, reality is significantly more complex than theoretical ethics. Often times your choice is not between right and wrong, but between wrong and somewhat less wrong.

> reality is significantly more complex than theoretical ethics

Actually, it's the other way around. This is covered by very rudimentary theoretical ethics. [0] The trolley problem has never been justification to cause harm to innocent people. It focuses on "impossible" binary choices in which either decision leads to innocent people being harmed. But reality is not a false dilemma. There exists a spectrum of choices that can be made, not just two. It's not "kill innocent Palestinians" vs "allow Jews to be killed".

Israel is a colonial apartheid state. The entire conflict has been manufactured from the beginning in order to establish Western supremacy in the Middle East. Now the colonial imperialist US government is supporting Israel in a genocide in order to secure its colonial presence. Tim Walz literally let it slip during the VP debate that this is about "the expansion of Israel". The UN is by and large condemning Israel for its role in this genocide, the ICC prosecutor considers Netanyahu a war criminal. [1] There is absolutely no moral justification for this, and I urge you to not be a victim to the Western military industrial complex's propaganda machine. This is a modern-day Holocaust and if we're lucky, history will remember it as such.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

[1] https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/statement-icc-prosecutor-karim-...

Re: How Israel’s bulky pager fooled Hezbollah

#263

Post by aguaviva »

edanm wrote: post #175
hmcq6 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember when Israel shot at that car with a family in it? Hind Rajab. Or when they sniped that journalist and attacked her funeral, Shireen Abu Aqleh? Or when they bombed the AP building in 2021 with no evidence. Or when the IOF threw a baby in an oven in front of the father during the Deir Yassin massacre? Hussein al-Shareef and Abdul Rauf Or when they bombed refugee camps? Or when they told people to evacuate sout…

Yes, you can make a list of terrible acts committed by almost any military, especially if you go back 76 years to before it was a state. It is very clear that some soldiers in the IDF, like in any army, have committed war crimes.

The vast majority (5/6) of the instances refer to were much more recent than 76 years ago, of course -- and fully 2/3 were from just the past 2-3 years. The Deir Yassin reference was just icing on the cake.†

So perhaps you'd like to address those most recent instances instead? With particular emphasis on "purposefully targeting civilians", which you seemed to suggest was no longer an IDF thing, or part of the brand the the State of Israel has gone out of its way to create for itself in the world today.

† Though there are some in the IDF who would strongly disagree, and maintain that Deir Yassin is very much relevant to the current moment -- https://imgur.com/a/UE5q2Fm

Re: How Israel’s bulky pager fooled Hezbollah

#264

Post by edanm »

aguaviva wrote: post #263
edanm wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you can make a list of terrible acts committed by almost any military, especially if you go back 76 years to before it was a state. It is very clear that some soldiers in the IDF, like in any army, have committed war crimes.

The vast majority (5/6) of the instances refer to were much more recent than 76 years ago, of course -- and fully 2/3 were from just the past 2-3 years. The Deir Yassin reference was just icing on the cake.† So perhaps you'd like to address those most recent instances instead? With particular emphasis on "purposefully targeting civilians", which you seemed to suggest was no longer an IDF thing, or part of the brand t…

> So perhaps you'd like to address those most recent instances instead.

I'm not sure what more you think I can say beyond what I've already said - "It is very clear that some soldiers in the IDF, like in any army, have committed war crimes." Some of the cases in that list are fairly clear war crimes, others are more complicated (and I don't know enough about them).

Let me make my position as clear as I can:

- I'm 100% sure that in this war, plenty of war crimes have occurred.

- I'm personally extremely angry with the lax professional standards of the IDF in many cases, and of the relatively lax threshold for choosing which targest to bomb.

- I would've been happy with a ceasefire a long time ago, mostly to start allowing Gazans to go back to normal life.

That all said, I think Israel's desire to remove Hamas is totally valid, and would probably be better for Israelis and Gazans themselves. Hamas is absolutely acting in many ways in order to maximize civilian deaths, which makes it really hard to take them out without killing civilians, and for the most part, the IDF is doing its best not to kill civilians.

I think if you compare the numbers of combatant vs civilian deaths coming out of Gaza, and look at expert military opinion on the IDF, they're pretty clear that the IDF is doing relatively similarly to how other armies faced with similar situations have done (e.g. the US in Mosul).

And I think war is horrible. You can sit down and list thousands of tragedies, and sometimes war crimes, in every single conflict. That's just not unique to this situation, and listing individual tragedies or crimes is just not by itself evidence of much except that war is terrible.

> With particular emphasis on "purposefully targeting civilians", which you seemed to suggest was no longer an IDF thing

So this conclusion, that the IDF targets civilians on purpose, as a policy, is just wrong. The IDF could kill as many civilians as it wanted with no IDF soldiers dying, pretty much at any time. It has never done so and never will do so, because it doesn't target civilians. Have individual actions been wrong, or do individual soldiers sometimes commit war crimes? Absolutely. But as a policy the IDF does not target civilians.

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