Oh, I’m good with him being targeted at home, while he takes a shit.
Do you think Israel needs to share all of their intelligence on Hamas operations in Jabalia so that you can come to your own conclusions? If they were striking a Hamas cell in a refugee camp do they owe you a detailed account of Hamas operations there, the sort of information that would compromise Israeli intelligence assets, just so they can get your opinion on whether it was a justified strike or not?
Sorry, but that’s an entirely unreasonable standard. No nation on Earth fights wars that way, and I don’t feel the need to armchair general every move the IDF makes. The fact that I don’t view everything the IDF does through the lens of colonialist genocide probably helps, of course.
You describe what I wrote as positing this as though I was taking your perspective seriously. For the avoidance of doubt, I was mocking what you said.
Is your understanding of the rules of war that a terrorist militant may be targeted during business hours when they are actively murdering civilians, but on evenings and weekends he must be allowed to pursue a normal social life free from molestation? And that if Hamas commanders are located in the most densely populated locations among the most vulnerable civilians it is therefore likely coincidence, that was probably the only way they could make up a 4 for bridge?
No kidding.
Bin Laden missed a trick here, he should have retired and moved to Florida.
We didn’t kill a lot of bystanders when we assassinated Bin Laden. That’s something i give Obama a lot of credit for.
Exactly. I think a lot of folks are missing what makes the targeting of a Hamas leader in a refugee camp problematic. It’s not the targeting of a Hamas leader.
I don’t know whether it’s reasonable to give Bin Laden “credit” for this, perhaps he just thought it was the best place to hide. But he wasn’t using human shields.
And from what I recall, the decision to send a team in rather than just bomb the compound was not based on protecting the fairly small number of innocents in the building. It was primarily because of the uncertainty about whether he was actually there.
Do you think some of the kids were secretly Hamas terrorists? They bombed a refugee camp to kill one person. I feel comfortable saying that’s a line too far, no matter what importance that one person held. Find another way to take him out.
Given this perspective, I don’t imagine there’s a line Israel could cross where you’d think “that’s too far.” It’s a tautological argument - you have decided that Israel wouldn’t ever go too far, therefore whatever they do must have been justified.
That’s not a fair reading. @Babale has expressed the hope that Israel’s actions will be investigated. That’s different from judging them right now, in the midst of the war, with certainly.
We assassinated Bin Laden in the context of invading and occupying the neighboring country.
Which folks? Literally nobody here thinks that what Hamas does justifies any egregious act by Israel, or that it is anything other than deeply problematic targeting an enemy in a heavily populated area.
But the framing of the issue by some posters here is truly bizarre.
Huh? The phrasing here is weird, but are you saying that we all agree the strike on the refugee camp is deeply problematic?
This is what i’m talking about when I say I’m not sure how much actual communication is going on here.
I give credit to Obama, not Bin Laden.
And i agree that the reason to send in a team was that we wanted proof he was dead, and also wanted to dispose of the body in a way that was both respectful and couldn’t be used as a shrine.
I found a some documentary footage demonstrating how this works.
I wrote to my congressional rep, both senators, and the president begging them not to invade Afghanistan, and not to kill lots of innocent people in revenge for our dead. I absolutely did not support that invasion. The actual assassination, on the other hand, i could get behind.
The only two views I’ve seen in the thread are (a) we know for sure it was wrong, and (b) we are just not privy to enough reliable information to make an ethical judgment about whether a specific action was justified.
I don’t know how you read “deeply problematic”, but I did not mean “definitely wrong”. My interpretation in this context is that I think everyone agrees that it’s an extremely difficult calculus to judge whether the likely civilian casualties are ethically justified to achieve the objective.
Given how out of the norm this was in US war on terror policy, I’d guess the real reason they did a special forces op instead of lobbing a giant bomb with no regard for civillians is that the former was the vest way to get a confirmed kill.
This is the same US that leveled an MSF hospital in Afghanistan because it was fulfilling its humanitarian mission of treating people without asking which side they were on.
What on Earth gave you that outlandish idea?
[Citation needed]
I’m sorry you feel that way. I have no idea why you make that assumption, but alright, you do you.
Obama did not cause Bin Laden to hide out in an isolated compound. If Bin Laden hid out in downtown Gaza, the sort of strike the US pulled off wouldn’t have been possible.
That’s the bizarre part to me - that people are hemming and hawing, “well maybe it really was worth it to kill all those kids. I just can’t say.”
Just to clarify my point: Absent the occupation of Afghanistan, we almost certainly would not have been able to kill Bin Laden.