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Originally Posted by Pointman
I decided to educate myself on the matter of international laws and war crimes. I admit, before I didn't really have good understanding of it except for gut feeling of what is wrong thing to do on the battlefield. But when I went on to read Geneva conventions, it really reads like a set of rules of some Knight's tournament or something.
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Yup.
(Incidentally the context of this is an argument for assassinating the leaders of terrorist groups which... I dunno if that's feasible, but...)
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Pepsifree
This isn’t really unique to this situation. Many people cheered on the US while countless children and babies were victims of war-related aggression during the war on terror. Countless Palestinian children and babies have been killed as a direct result of Israeli responses and people cheer that on.
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Which raises the question of whether there is a moral difference, or whether there should be a legal one (in terms of what gets you sent to the hague) between:
a) A military decision to fire a rocket at an apartment building because you have credible info that there are terrorists who attacked your country in there, despite either not knowing whether there are children in there or even being confident that there are and that those children will die; and
b) Deliberately targeting and murdering children as an end in itself, using hand-held weapons, as has been credibly alleged has happened repeatedly in the past week.
I do see a difference between those two things despite the fact that they both result in dead babies because I think the intention matters - others may disagree. Regardless, murdering babies for the sake of murdering babies is not a new thing in situations like this one, where an armed, semi-organized group of militants is attacking another group that they hate en masse largely on the basis of their identity -
Rwanda is the obvious example, but here's another one. There's no real reason to suspect that anyone would need to make this sort of thing up - it's horrifying and yet not even terribly surprising given the context.