Maybe Hezbollah should worry more about making Israel mad instead.
Got it. Next time, just kill them all.
Using hi-tech, long distance assassinations is an imaginative strategy, but it invites hi-tech long distance assassinations in return. This strategy reminds me of a SE story by Dan Simmons in the Hyperion Cantos, where numerous Palestinians are assassinated by satellite weapons tuned into their cell-phones.
Simmons didn’t address the future of such a strategy, where retribution by hi-tech, long distance assassination becomes commonplace on both sides. I’d rather we didn’t go down that path.
Correction - while they were radical Islamists, they were not Palestinians; instead, the military officer who had them killed was a Palestinian Muslim himself, and one of the book’s protagonists.
That’s absurd. By that standard a cruise missile that precisely hits a military base is indiscriminate because you can’t know which specific individuals would be hit.
The Israelis could certainly know if the shipment had actually gone to, say, elementary school teachers and not detonated them in that case. Of course that’s silly because they knew they were going to Hezbollah, and could certainly confirm that at least some of the devices made it to legitimate targets.
Indeed- but that doesn’t address the likely future of such a world, where long-distance assassinations become routine. No doubt the assassinations will become less well-targeted and more imprecise.
Like drone warfare? How is sitting half way around the world and shooting someone from a Predator drone not “long-distance assassination”? That’s been routine for 20 years.
Pagers are not identifiably “military equipment” and it would not be evident to noncombatants that they could represent an explosive (or other) hazard.
It is a set of conventions and treaties that nations agree to in order to limit non-combatant casualties, and in this particular case, one that Israel explicitly ratified:
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/ccw-amended-protocol-ii-1996/state-parties
Stranger
Indeed, and this is not a good development.
I thought of that scene in relation to this too. I always concidered it one of the most memorable and bad-ass scenes in the book.
The text:
Summary
Two hours after he landed, Captain Kassad stepped out of his ship and broadcast a short announcement. He said that he had been raised as a Muslim. He also announced that interpretation of the Koran since the Shi’ites’ seedship days had definitely shown that the God of Islam would neither condone nor allow the slaughter of the innocent, no matter how many jihads were proclaimed by tinhorn heretics like the New Prophet. Captain Kassad gave the leaders of the thirty million zealots three hours to surrender their hostages and return to their homes on the desert continent of Qom.
In the first three days of the revolution the armies of the New Prophet had occupied most of the cities on two continents and had taken more than twenty-seven thousand Hegemony hostages. Firing squads had been busy day and night settling ancient theological disputes and it was estimated that at least a quarter of a million Sunis had been slaughtered in the first two days of the New Prophet’s occupation. In response to Kassad’s ultimatum, the New Prophet announced that all of the infidels would be put to death immediately following his live television address that evening. He also ordered an attack on Kassad’s assault boat.
Avoiding high explosives because of the Grand Mosque, the Revolutionary Guard used automatic weapons, crude energy cannon, plasma charges, and human wave attacks. The containment field held.
The New Prophet’s televised address began fifteen minutes before Kassad’s ultimatum ran out. The New Prophet agreed with Kassad’s statement that Allah would horribly punish heretics but announced that it was the Hegemony infidels who would be so punished. It was the only time the New Prophet ever had been seen to lose his temper on camera. Screaming, saliva flying, he ordered the human wave attacks to be renewed on the grounded assault boat. He announced that at that moment a dozen fission bombs were being assembled at the occupied Power for Peace reactor in Ali. With these, the forces of Allah would be carried into space itself. The first fission bomb, he explained, would be used on the infidel Kassad’s satanic assault boat that very afternoon. The New Prophet then began to explain exactly how the Hegemony hostages would be executed, but at that moment Kassad’s deadline ran out.
Qom-Riyadh was, by its own choice and the accident of its distant location, a technically primitive world. But the inhabitants were not so primitive that they did not have an active datasphere. Nor were the revolutionary mullahs who had led the invasion so opposed to the “Great Satan of Hegemony Science” that they refused to tie into the global data net with their personal comlogs.
The HS Denieve had seeded enough spysats so that by 1729 hours Qom-Riyadh Central Time, the datasphere had been tapped to the point that the Hegemony ship had identified sixteen thousand eight hundred and thirty revolutionary mullahs by their access codes. At 1729:30 hours the spysats began feeding their real-time targeting data to the twenty-one perimeter defense sats which Kassad’s assault boat had left in low orbit. These orbital defense weapons were so old that the Denieve’s mission had been to return them to the Web for safe destruction. Kassad had suggested another use for them.
At precisely 1730 hours, nineteen of the small satellites detonated their fusion cores. In the nanoseconds before their self-destruction, the resulting X rays were focused, aimed, and released in sixteen thousand eight hundred and thirty invisible but very coherent beams. The ancient defense sats were not designed for atmospheric use and had an effective destructive radius of less than a millimeter. Luckily, that was all that was needed. Not all of the targeting beams penetrated whatever stood between the mullahs and the sky. Fifteen thousand seven hundred and eighty-four did.
The effect was immediate and dramatic. In each case the target’s brain and cerebral fluid boiled, turned to vapor, and blew the encasing skull to bits. The New Prophet was in the middle of his live, planetwide broadcast—literally in the middle of pronouncing the word “heretic”—when 1730 hours arrived.
For almost two minutes the TV screens and walls around the planet carried the image of the New Prophet’s headless body slumped over the microphone. Then Fedmahn Kassad cut in on all bands to announce that his next deadline was one hour away and that any actions against the hostages would be met with a more dramatic demonstration of Allah’s displeasure.
There were no reprisals.
And it’s widely considered both terrorism and assassination.
“Terrorist is what the big army calls the little army”. This isn’t “terrorism” because a government did it, if a non-government organization did the same thing it’d be called terrorism.
Surely you noticed some hand wringing about that, too? I know I’ve been pretty upset that the US does that, for a whole host of reasons.
Is it? I see a lot of hand wringing about it, but I don’t think most countries consider it “terrorism”.
Of course. It’s done by a government, therefore it’s not terrorism. It’s not what is done, it’s who does it.
You keep repeating this mantra, but it doesn’t make you correct. Terrorism is the use of violence against the civilian population in order to inspire fear in them (hence the name) in an attempt to accomplish a political goal. This is true whether a government, like Hamas or Hezbollah does it, or a non governmental group.
I’ve never heard that definition used in serious discussions about terrorism or geopolitics, only when the goal is to attack a Western country by drawing a false equivalence.
Exactly. For example, if Israel does it, it’s always wrong.
And if Hamas does it, it’s a brave act of rapesistence and part of the “Global Left”. (according to Judith Butler)
That’s not how the term is used in practice. Governments engage in terror tactics all the time without it being called terrorism. This would have been called terrorism if a government wasn’t behind it.
And, of course, it didn’t happen.
Maybe you meant to say “would have been” instead of “is”?
So now more traditional bombing back and forth. More dying rather than maimed no doubt so MUCH better. Of course neither side knows exactly who is there. Of course the amount of damage to operational capacity per amount of collateral damage is much less than with the personal explosive devices. But somehow morally better.