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by jpcfl 974 days ago
It’s comparing apples and oranges, since Hamas deliberately targets Israeli civilians, while using Palestinian civilians as human shields. Many Palestinian casualties are Hamas’s fault, not IDF.
1 comments

I'm sure their intentions are very different but it's dehumanising to say it's apples and oranges. Seeing your family members killed is the same, regardless of who you are, and being collateral does not abdicate responsibility, and does not reduce the resulting anger. IDF does have a choice of tactics and they do appear to be using shelling on a dense civilian location while providing unrealistic opportunity to evacuate.
> I'm sure their intentions are very different but it's dehumanising to say it's apples and oranges.

Relax. It's a figure of speech. It means, "these two things are different." It in no way dehumanizes anyone.

> Seeing your family members killed is the same, regardless of who you are

Would you agree that it's important to recognize who is responsible for the killing?

I think if a missile blew up my wedding and killed my family, and I found out it was because some bad guys were hiding among the guests, I'd still be pretty angry at the people who fired the missile no matter who they were aiming for.*

Experts who study the propagation of violence say that the currency of radicalism is grievance. The more grievances happen, the more support goes to violent extremists to strike back, even if this only results in more bullets coming back their way in the future. I can certainly see this feedback loop playing out on both sides of this conflict, because every Israeli civilian casualty results in more support for hard-line military response against Gaza, and every Palestinian civilian casualty results in more support for Hamas.

* This example is taken from an Obama-era US drone strike in Pakistan, because I'm far too distressed to track specific tragedies happening in Israel and Palestine in real time.

I believe you're talking about the 2008 missile strike on wedding convoy in Yemen while Bush was in office during a firefight between US forces and the Taliban. I do not think the US officially took responsibility for that attack.
You're partially right; I can no longer find a source for the strike in Pakistan that I thought I was remembering, although there are numerous that weren't wedding-related. Perhaps I was confusing it with a few different US wedding airstrikes (as perhaps you are as well, as the Yemen wedding attack was in 2013, and no Taliban firefight was involved).

Afghanistan, 2002: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/jul/03/afghanistan.lu...

Iraq, 2004: https://web.archive.org/web/20050310145831/http://www.guardi...

Afghanistan, Nov 3, 2008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wech_Baghtu_wedding_party_airs...

Afghanistan, 5 July 2008: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA599423.pdf

Afghanistan, 6 July 2008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haska_Meyna_wedding_party_airs... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jul/11/afghanistan.us...

Afghanistan, 8 June 2012: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/08/general-apolog...

Yemen, Dec 12, 2013: https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/02/19/wedding-became-funeral... https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/us-investigates-yemenis-c...

Okay. If you're going to make a point based on an event, I would recommend making some effort to get the details right. It's hard to have a discussion that isn't grounded in truth.

AFAIK, the US and Israel make explicit efforts to avoid killing civilians in an effort to abide by international rules of engagement. Compare this to Hamas, who makes explicit efforts to target civilians and use them as human shields (even glorifying and celebrating it), and you can see why it's impossible to draw a moral equivalence of the two. Like I said, apples to oranges.

The person responsible is the one who pulls the trigger. If a murderer runs into a crowd of people it wouldn't be OK for the police to just mow down those people to catch them. And that's an exact analogy here, just because a terrorist hides within a community does not mean you have any kind of moral justification for killing with impunity. Blame the community? Sure, does that blame extend to the kids growing up in that community who know nothing about what's going on. No, it doesn't.
> And that's an exact analogy here

Not even remotely close.

Please expand
I’ll pass. If you’re unable to see the difference on your own, I’m afraid I cannot help you.

Besides, we are way off topic. This is not related to the dismissal of an employee because of his tweet.