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Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say

reuters.com

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Re: Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say

#821

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Who says "kill the infidels"?

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1726739588457156922.html

I think you're either trolling, really out of touch with reality, but here is an excerpt from the above:

2. We hate you because your secular, liberal societies permit the very things that Allah has prohibited while banning many of the things He has permitted, a matter that doesn’t concern you because you separate between religion and state, thereby granting supreme authority to your whims and desires via the legislators you vote into power. In doing so, you desire to rob Allah of His right to be obeyed and you wish to usurp that right for yourselves. “Legislation is not but for Allah” (Yusuf 40). Your secular liberalism has led you to tolerate and even support “gay rights,” to allow alcohol, drugs, fornication, gambling, and usury to become widespread, and to encourage the people to mock those who denounce these filthy sins and vices. As such, we wage war against you to stop you from spreading your disbelief and debauchery – your secularism and nationalism, your perverted liberal values, your Christianity and atheism – and all the depravity and corruption they entail. You’ve made it your mission to “liberate” Muslim societies; we’ve made it our mission to fight off your influence and protect mankind from your misguided concepts and your deviant way of life.

Is that enough for you? The part about "waging war against non believers caught my eye", how about you?

Re: Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say

#822

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine this was Hezbollah detonating hundreds or thousands of devices in Israel? If these were devices used predominantly by IDF, I wouldn't consider it an act of terror either. However, Hezbolla prefers to indiscriminately target civilians. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/druze-shock-war-be...

Since we're bringing other conflicts into this... How come Ukraine is able to put in every effort to avoid civilian death when their opponent deliberately uses cruise and ballistic missiles on residential areas?

> How come Ukraine is able to put in every effort to avoid civilian death

Ukraine, which regularly shells civilian areas of Belgorod? That Ukraine?

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/belgorod-city-where-war...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62042455

Re: Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say

#823
post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hezbollah is not a mobile device distribution organization. From my understanding they bought these to avoid Israeli tracking for their own people. No civilian doctor would use these pagers but there are medics working for Hezbollah like any militia/army. Due to the nature of the devices I doubt it's physically possible to verify every explosion. Just like you can't verify it with a bomb or even a bullet. It's tragic…

> Hezbollah is not a mobile device distribution organization. From my understanding they bought these to avoid Israeli tracking for their own people. That's exactly my point, if for example, Hezbollah just bought 2500 pagers out of a lot of 3000 armed pagers that means 500 were distributed to civilians. > No civilian doctor would use these pagers but there are medics working for Hezbollah like any militia/army. And w…

I would think that a 2000 of the devices are sitting in a warehouse as spares or waiting for distribution. These are relatively new devices.

> And why wouldn't they use these pagers? Doctors use pagers all of the time.

These devices were specifically ordered by Hezbollah. An army buys its own equipment not in order to hand it out to the civilian populace. They don't hand out guns to doctors who carry. Why would they hand out their internal communication device?

> Even if the doctors were all Hezbollah that doesn't make them all part of the militia wing of the party

It doesn't make them a great target but it does put them in the valid line of fire. The fact that someone works as a civilian doctor isn't relevant. If they have a Hezbollah beeper they are probably an army medic.

Hezbollah put the entire populace of Lebanon at risk without a second thought, people acting as their "beard" trying to legitimize a terrorist organization (that killed many Americans/French too) are part of it. This is a military communication device, the only case where a civilian has access to it is if they took it from a combatant.

The fact is that if there were significant civilian victims they would have been paraded in front of cameras repeatedly. There were some probably, but not many.

Re: Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say

#824

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really quite bizarre how official history sources unironically talk about a 'terrorist boat' inflicting a surprise attack on a 'destroyer'. https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/uss-cole-bombing

I’m not too familiar with the story but the lead sentence is “On October 12, 2000, two suicide pilots of a small bomb-laden boat pulled alongside of the USS Cole at midship, offered friendly gestures to several crew members, and detonated their explosives.”. Could this possibly fall under Article 37 c of the Geneva convention (“The feigning of civilian, non-combatant status”)? In that case, calling it terrorism would…

It's hard to say. Military deception is a bit of a grey area by definition. Faking as medics or burial staff is generally regarded as an absolute no-go, but deceptive use of uniforms and so on is sometimes excused. There is a fairly extensive history of this in naval operations, where practicality dictates a whole ship has to be disguised if a deception is to be effective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-ship

Re: Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say

#825

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Why do you assume they had your sense of ethics? 10 was often considered the age of adulthood. Little men had no specific exception from work or war, or expectation of education outside specific classes. Being a regular troop was more often from 16, but plenty fought from 10 up or had other roles in battle.

1) You need to start somewhere, 2) people don't realize how good we have it today and it's because of people like the founding fathers we can enjoy this reality, going back as far as plato and socrates.

There is a reason why you choose to live in a democratic society, because it's the absolute best system we've ever had, and probably will for some time.

Re: Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say

#826

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so sure you need anything to do with Hezbollah to be afraid. One example of many. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/02/israel-opt-ne...

OK, also don't stand near Hamas fighters when they flagrantly violate international law and fight from designated humanitarian zones. (Obviously, voting in Hamas was a huge mistake, but Palestinians probably didn't expect Hamas to make that the last election. Unfortunately, you only need to elect a totalitarian government once.)

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Re: Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say

#827

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rules of war prohibit planting explosive in objects which are likely to be picked up by civilians. The rules of war also discourages fighting in civilian areas. Members of an enemy organization are not automatically valid military targets according to the rules of war. Especially when they are just going about their civilian lives far away from the battlefield. This is attack consistent with terrorist tactics, no…

> The rules of war prohibit planting explosive in objects which are likely to be picked up by civilians. Yes, and? They didn't just leave a bunch of attractive nuisance bombs all over Lebanon; they specifically targeted devices provided by Hezbollah to coordinate activities which were meant to be carried around on their persons. That seems like the opposite of leaving them where civilians might pick them up.

Man if only we didn’t live in a global society where carrying electronic communication devices in non-combatant (aka civilian) settings was the norm, you’d maybe have a point here. Multiple children have been reported as killed. Do you think that may fall under the category of “indiscriminate?”

Re: Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say

#828

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But by definition the founders of the USA were terrorists. And they knew it too, viz. Benjamin Franklin's famous line 'Gentlemen, we must all hang together or we shall most assuredly hang separately.' Preemptively invalidating all non-state actors is just a way for people with power to avoid challenges to it. Every single oppressive regime describes rebels as terrorists and employs circular arguments to assert its ow…

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Since 2009 Hezbollah's charter has been far more nationalist than religious (even endorsing democracy as the desirable form of polity). This isn't to say they're not influenced by their religious views, but nor do I think Islam has any monopoly on bad ideas. I am not a fan of monotheistic religions in general, as they all rest on the conceit that there is only One True Way to think about spiritual matters and such certitude is often used to excuse atrocities. More often, religious rhetoric is used as a common framework to organize participants in what is often a much more prosaic struggle over resources and geographic advantage.

Re: Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say

#829
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I can't say I'm a big fan of this massive scale booby trapping devices all over civilian society and I suspect most nation stats are not very happy about this either. The EU is probably not going to be happy at all about Israel using an EU flagged company to do it either. This is going to create a lot of distrust in the international supply chain.

Exactly it’s one thing to target operatives it’s another thing to target large number of people when they’re among the civilians. Phone exploding in a market, doesn’t make it OK if the owner of the phone is a militant. With that logic the Hamas terrorist attack last year isn’t a terrorist attack because many of the victims served in the IDF, which illegally occupies their territory. This is getting ridiculous. Israel…

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Re: Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say

#830
post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know this? you can't know it. You have no idea how many people had these devices.

it was a shipment of pagers paid for by heznobollas to communicate because they thought mossad was able to listen and track everything else. it was never a general Lebanese market pager that happens to be used by heznobollas occasionally. they bought in bulk and handed them out to their soldiers.

Cool man, checked in on the story lately? Because literal solar panels are now exploding across Lebanon. I'm sure everyone within 20 yards of them is clearly a terrorist.
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