this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
260 points (100.0% liked)

World News

22063 readers
35 users here now

Breaking news from around the world.

News that is American but has an international facet may also be posted here.


Guidelines for submissions:

These guidelines will be enforced on a know-it-when-I-see-it basis.


For US News, see the US News community.


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (11 children)

that frankly isn't the situation that we're dealing with. the idea that israel either has to let Hamas operate unchallenged or kill civilians is a vast oversimplification of how conflict works, and giving the IDF blanket permission to kill civilians if it also hurts Hamas is fucking monstrous. you suck.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I would argue a blanket statement of "killing civilians is always reprehensible" is a vast oversimplification of how conflict works.

Yeah, it sucks, war sucks, and it often turns out that the least bad option involves a decision where innocent people die. I know it feels like a hot take to say we shouldn't give blanket permission to kill civilians, but it turns out no one is claiming that.

This thread makes it clear that lemmy commenters are not equipped to debate the vanilla trolly problem, let alone the Iranian/Palestinian conflict.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"killing civilians is always reprehensible" as a moral statement has nothing to do with the mechanics of conflict. i'm telling you what i believe. giving room for acceptable civilian casualties in a moral framework provides a ready made justification for bad actors, that so long as they present a situation as looking enough like the acceptable kind of civilian casualty then its fine that an innocent person was killed.

i am taking issue with the rhetoric of acceptable casualties. no. there are only casualties, and they are all horrific. rhetoric that is not an explicit condemnation of war can be used as a justification for it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Anytime you are doing any kind of military or police action within a civilian area there is always the risk of unintended civilian harm.

If police and military forces took this doctorine that any amount of risk is too much then they simply would be unable to operate.

There has to be a certain amount of acceptable civilian risk and that should be proportional to the threat you are attempting to stop.

Just to clarify, I'm not advocating that Israel is taking acceptable risks. But I am advocating that those risks will always exist with ANY police or military action and the primary debate is over where the red line of acceptable/unacceptable is.

load more comments (8 replies)