Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
I hadn't heard about the Palestine Hotel incident. I mentioned this before in the thread that determining intent is strongly dependent on who you believe. Everyone knew there were journalists inside but did someone in NATO really have a good motive to kill one random group of them? Maybe. The only impartial judge involved seemed to think so.
I tend to think the motivation was more about dissuading other journalists rather than targeting those in the hotel, but I don't know how important that distinction is
Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
Psyops are interesting morally. It's an attack, in fact the whole point is often to produce terror, yet if/when they work lives are saved on all sides.
I'm not trying to take a shot at all psyops, however, when you have professional APA psychologists informing your torture program, there are probably reasons to say this is "terrorism". Also, there are reports that early American psyops in Afghanistan included mutilating the bodies of soldiers and putting them on hillsides to try and prevent villagers from joining the Taliban. All I'm really saying is that psyops opens other avenues to think about what constitutes "terror" in "innocent civilians". Obviously, effective psyops that follows general moral codes is a good thing, especially when compared to straight out combat.
Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
The ends often do justify the means, it's just not an automatic justification like people often want it to be.
sure, and anything can be phrased in that way, for instance, buying some chips and salsa today justified the effort it took to walk to the store. The end totally justified the means.
I think my point is the same as yours, "fighting terrorism" isn't a carte blanche the kill all the civilians you want
Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
I really don't know what to make of Israel and Hamas.
no, totally, thats a whole other thing. But the specific situation I brought up does sort of get at what I was saying earlier in the thread. It is really irrelevant, imho, whether we can call what Israel or Hamas does "terrorism", when the end result is a building full of people are dead, as a result of an attack that targeted a democratically elected official.
I, personally, don't think there are too many ways to spin that situation (I can name similar incidents by Palestinian militants if you need me to seem more "fair and balanced"😉. It is wrong, whether it is terrorism or violence in the name of freedom. Such titles are meaningless if all they do is serve the powers that be in their ability to cause damage to innocent people. What a terrorist is seems like the most inconsequential question ever, when the actual moral impact of terrorists and freedom fighters is essentially the same.