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Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Sandwich on June 28, 2003, 04:31:42 pm
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Morality through the periscope of a tank
Yehuda Avner, JP Op-ed, 19 June 2003
Classic warfare is fundamentally a contest of wills fought to impose so much stress on the enemy that he loses the will to fight. A war of terror has the same intent, but with a singularly insidious twist: The enemy can be anybody, anywhere.
He is without uniform or identification. His targets are random. His weapon is fear. He knows no constraints. He comes in all kinds of guises, often in the costume of his victims. He seeks to shatter nerves and break morale by flaunting the impotence of the authorities to protect the public. He uses his own women and children as his shield, and often as his combatants. He seeks to goad the defender into ever-harsher countermeasures so as to stoke the general hate. He strives to corrupt the defender's military professionalism and discipline through combat stress, demoralization, fatigue, boredom, overkill, inner conflict, and moral rot.
And, in so doing, he goes all out to sow despair and hammer the message into the agitated hearts of the other side that the conflict is immoral and unwinnable.
This was the gist of an armored brigade commander's remarks to a group of battalion and platoon reservist officers wrapping up a 48-hour refresher course before deploying with their men in the Nablus sector for a 32-day stint. The commander, whom we shall call Avi, dwelt at length on the IDF's operational responses to Palestinian terrorcraft, and rounded off with a pep talk on the army's Code of Ethics.
Then he handed over to the second-in-command, who ordered his men to gather their crews for a final night exercise, which he, the brigade commander, would observe.
I had met him at a private gathering some days before, when he gave a talk on "Morality in War," and was so taken by his quiet air of authority and intellectual honesty that I collared him afterwards to pump him for more. The result was an invitation to visit him at his base the following Thursday.
It was hot that Thursday, oppressively hot. The sun was going down when I arrived, but a wind blew relentlessly from the east, fanning the countryside like a blow-drier. A dozen tanks were parked higgledy-piggledy at ammunition trucks, where squads were loading shells by the glare of headlights. A guard at the gate directed me to the brigade commander. He was leaning against an armored jeep surrounded by his officers. And it was there that I heard him give his talk on terrorism.
"Crews, prepare to mount the tanks!" a junior officer yelled after the briefing was done. And then, "Crews, mount!" The brigade commander watched with the eye of a connoisseur while the engines of the upgraded Patton M-60s - the Magachs - ignited, coughed, snarled, and roared. Then, as the column began to move off, he slid into his command jeep and invited me to follow.
He was in his forties, a bulky fellow in drab olive green fatigues with a shock of curly, sandy hair covered by a knitted kippa. His epaulettes marked him as a colonel. And in that twilight hour, as he sped alongside the clanking, snorting armored column through a curtain of diesel fumes and whirling dust, he cut a dashing figure.
THE METAL brutes clawed and ripped at the elephant-colored stones, up a rugged slope to a ridge that terminated in a long, rock-strewn valley stretching into a narrowing V and dominated by steep, partially wooded hills. At the valley's tapered end was the rubble of broken concrete blocks, earthen bricks, and pulverized plaster. Strange dark weeds that always seem to sprout in destroyed places grew between the cracks.
And rising out of the debris, like the effigies of some wacky Stonehenge shrine, were the targets - a circle of blown-out tanks and banged up armored personnel carriers, punched through with bull's eyes.
Creaking and rearing on their stationary tracks, the steel beasts fired their salvos at them with savage precision, rendering a cacophony of thunderclaps, smoke and flashes redolent of the walloping and clanging and thumping finale of "1812."
And then, on some unseen signal, one of the behemoths began crawling along the valley floor. Avi, plugged in to the command network, handed me earphones to listen in:
"Driver, sharp right! Stop! Obstacle on left flank. Now, forward! Full speed! Reverse! Now, sharp right again! Go! "Gunner, combat range! Two thousand meters! Fire! Loader, reload! Driver, faster! Watch out, another obstacle on your left! Gunner, combat range, 1,500 meters! Fire! Direct hit! Mazal tov!"
A couple of hours later the crews eased themselves out of their protective gear and space-age helmets, slipped off their Galil rifles and bivouacked around bonfires at an encampment on the valley's edge, where they munched on sandwiches as thick as Bibles. Avi joined them, and I asked him why the tank commander had to give such precise instructions to his driver. "Couldn't the fellow see where he was going?"
"Yes and no," he answered. "When a driver's hatch is closed he can see virtually nothing on his flanks beyond a 17-degree radius, which is about the range of his periscopes. He has to rely largely on his commander in the open turret to guide him."
A picture flashed into my mind. It was of a Sky News reporter telling his viewers the previous week that the Israeli tank they were watching on their TV screens crawling along an alleyway in a West Bank town with its turrets closed was maliciously grating its flanks against the shuttered storefronts to vandalize them.
When I told this to Avi he laughed in an unmirthful way. "The driver was probably doing his damnedest to avoid hitting those storefronts," he said. "In such a narrow confine the slightest fraction of a turn can cause a scrape without him ever knowing it."
And then, in an odd mixture of challenge and mischief, he added, "Like to try for yourself - see what a tank driver sees when his hatch is closed?"
DISMAYED AT the prospect but too mortified to say so, I submitted to big meaty hands bundling me onto a tank turret, pulling on me a helmet and protective gear, seizing me by the waist and armpits and lowering me, neck craned, shoulders crammed, torso twisted, legs dangling, through a narrow hatch into a metal pit and suspending me thus until my feet, little by little, rested on the driver's seat below.
Then I squiggled down to squeeze my backside into it and found myself entombed inside a cramped steel belly, encrusted with rugged instrument panels, packed shell racks and other fearsome paraphernalia. The stench of cordite, diesel, oil, exhaust and sweat was overwhelming. So was the claustrophobia.
The colonel's tinny voice scratched through the helmet's earphones: "I'm sealing you in now - closing the hatch." Everything went momentarily black. I was not a happy warrior.
By the eerie beam of a searchlight mounted on the turret I could make out three periscope slits, one directed forward and the other two angled off at either side. Peering through them I saw what a tank driver sees - a constricted vista that gives him no view of either his flanks or his rear.
I was ready to climb out.
The colonel's voice clawed through again: "On the floor there's the accelerator pedal. You're in neutral, so just press it. Get the feel of the engine." I did. I had the sense of being inside a percussion instrument.
After what seemed an eternity the colonel opened the beast and hauled me out. He hosed down my fevered senses by leading the benevolent applause of the crewmen who had been watching the spectacle from the start.
"So now you know what it feels like!" he said, tossing me a smart-ass little grin. And then, "Now let's go for a spin - get the feel of a tank on the move." He strapped on a helmet and body gear, climbed into the commander's turret, had me contorted into the loader's turret by his side, switched on a searchlight, and spoke into his headset: "Driver, take us across the valley, up the hill, and back."
The fellow in the tank's belly sent the monster jolting, rumbling, lurching and crunching over the valley's rocks toward the target area, then up a terraced slope, causing my head to bounce about my shoulders like a jack-in-the-box. I tried to imagine what it must be like jammed into this thing in war, jittery, exhausted and befuddled in a world of screaming shells, fire and blood. By the time we clattered back to the encampment I was black and blue. My face, I fear, was as white as my hair.
It was now close to midnight, and the senior officers retired to their quarters while the rest of the men, aged anywhere between 22 and 45, bonded with all the wisecracking banter of a boy-scout summer camp before turning in.
Lawyers, bakers, teachers, falafel vendors, accountants, shopkeepers, factory workers, hi-tech executives - these motley crews of reservists who teamed up year after year for frontline duty displayed an infectious camaraderie and fraternal elitism one is hard-pressed to explain. But their uncommon acts of valor in combat are proof that this deep and stalwart bond exists.
MEDITATING ON this truth I, guest for the night, was about to doze off when I heard a voice speaking to another, whispering close together in the darkness of the tent: "Did you read the editorial in today's Haaretz?" "Yes." (I too had read it. It was about alleged IDF abuses of Palestinian civilians, and the imperative to protect the human rights even of terrorists.)
"Did you ever do anything like that?"
"Like what?"
"Abuse civilians."
A longish hush. "Sort of. Once - last year."
"What happened?"
"I don't care to talk about it."
"Come on, get it off your chest. You'll feel better."
In a flat, inflectionless whisper, as if to dull the memory of it, the owner of the voice told how, on the outskirts of Jenin, the tank he commanded had come face to face with a parked Mercedes taxi, its roof rack loaded with suitcases. The taxi stood outside an isolated Arab house.
Seeing no one around, he had ordered the driver to crush it, shove it aside, and move on. Just like that! The humdrum way in which he related it made him sound like a casual onlooker delivering a monotonous report on some inconsequential occurrence to an uninterested party.
"Why didn't you knock on the door and tell the car's owner to move it?"
"What - leave the safety of my tank? Are you crazy?"
"True!"
"And, besides, we were dead beat. We were sleep-deprived. We hadn't closed our eyes in 36 hours. It was hot. We were bored. We were fed up. The tedium was enough to drive one crazy. And just the week before we had lost two of our own. So we were hurting as well."
"But, surely, none of that can justify ?"
The other man cut him off with a hiss that was harsh and cracked. Wallowing in his own sorrow he whispered in gory detail how an explosive device had slammed into the side of their friends' tank in a Jenin labyrinth, raining blood, oil, shrapnel, brains and smoke over theirs.
"They had been fool enough to get out of their tank to check out some minor repair," he lamented.
"And what happened to you? Were there repercussions for the Mercedes?"
"Avi court-marshaled me. He threw the IDF Code of Ethics at me."
"What did you get?"
"A stiff reprimand and a big fine." And then, wearily, "Enough! I'm going to try and get some sleep. Nablus awaits us in the morning."
Poignant emotions churned in my breast throughout the rest of that sleepless night. As the weeks fade to months and the months to years, I mused, the images of that man's two dead friends by their smashed tank, and of the Arab Mercedes he crushed afterwards, will surely linger in his memory. I reflected, too, on the way normal people can behave in abnormal times.
This led me to ponder our own kids and grandkids in uniform, and the extraordinarily abnormal and perilous circumstances they have to face fighting a foe that knows no humanity.
Which, in turn, led me to dwell on the tradition of humanity in the IDF - an army where human-rights transgressions are brought to light, penalties are paid and justice is done.
And this, ultimately, led me to thinking that in the broad scheme of things, there is surely no other army anywhere where brutality has been so consistently humiliated by inborn decency, cruelty so shamed by ingrained morality.
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Is that thing somehow ****ed up or is it just me?
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...."that thing"???
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The HTML in your post seems to have some kind of problem with my browser. Oddly enough, it just happens when I'm viewing your post from the thread itself - right now (in the reply to topic screen) I can view it just fine.
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What browser are you using, and what looks messed up? I tested it in Mozilla and IE5.0.... oh, wait, lemme guess: IE6 screws it up, right?
*loads thread on IE6-equipped computer*
EDIT: Hmm... IE6 here seems to view it fine. What's the problem?
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What i,ve never understood, is why the media is biased in the first place, i doubt its a true lack of understanding in regards to the difficulty a tank would fact in avoiding damaging stuff and why Al-queda are terrorists, but hamas are militants.
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Originally posted by Sandwich
EDIT: Hmm... IE6 here seems to view it fine. What's the problem?
http://www.geocities.com/levyathan2/opera.png
That is what it looks like. And I'm using Opera 7.01 - there's no problem when using Internet Explorer 5.
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Al-Qaeda are "terrorists" because they are an international organization, with varying and multifaceted goals, that specifically targets civilian populaces and symbolic structures- besides which, they have the capacity to assault strictly military targets, and choose not to. Hamas are "militants" because they are a local organization, with a dedicated and clearly defined goal, that attacks all targets of opportunity- in other words, an army.
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but they have no real government to serve, just an athority that the people they are trying to kill were nice enough to give to some people that in hind sight they probly shouldn't have. if the plaistinian 'government' were to tell them to, for example, stop they would not, the only diference between hamas (ect) and Al Qeda is that (for now) they are more interested in killing Isrealis than Americans, and there (quite) a bit smaller.
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Uh... no. Not at all. The distinction is as I said above, and a pretty clear one- Al Qaeda is a far less organized operation, a franchise, really. An army has never depended on a civilian government to rule it, that is a modern convention entirely. And given how wishy-washy and ineffective the PNA is, it's no surprise they can't control their people- they were set up by the Israelis, and intentionally crippled by same so as to not have a strong resistance- 'course, what they ended up getting is an entirely different story.
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Originally posted by Levyathan
http://www.geocities.com/levyathan2/opera.png
That is what it looks like. And I'm using Opera 7.01 - there's no problem when using Internet Explorer 5.
That has to be the most screwed up thing I've ever seen. :lol:
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Originally posted by Stryke 9
Al-Qaeda are "terrorists" because they are an international organization, with varying and multifaceted goals, that specifically targets civilian populaces and symbolic structures- besides which, they have the capacity to assault strictly military targets, and choose not to. Hamas are "militants" because they are a local organization, with a dedicated and clearly defined goal, that attacks all targets of opportunity- in other words, an army.
Armies don't intentionally target civilians and thus Hamas are terrorists, as they use terror on a civilian population to try and achieve their goal.
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Originally posted by Zeronet
Armies don't intentionally target civilians
Tell that to the citizens of Berlin in 1944
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Or any other military, at any other time in the world.
Hell, right now we're knocking off, what, 20 a day in Iraq? Most of whom are civilians even by our own definition?
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I believe the prefered term is 'guys with guns'. Love that military slang.
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Originally posted by Sandwich
That has to be the most screwed up thing I've ever seen. :lol:
The screw up itself or the fact that I'm using Opera? :p
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Originally posted by Levyathan
The screw up itself or the fact that I'm using Opera? :p
The screw up itself.;)
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that article, as true as it could be, sounds much like propaganda to me, and nothing else...
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It's an emotional perspective on what the soldiers go through - I posted it here simply because it's a perfect account of things that I went through in Jenin and elsewhere.
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Originally posted by Stryke 9
Or any other military, at any other time in the world.
Hell, right now we're knocking off, what, 20 a day in Iraq? Most of whom are civilians even by our own definition?
:rolleyes: :wtf:
You actually believe modern armies deliberately attack civilians?!?!? Berlin 1944, was that, 1944. Everything possible is done to protect civilian lifes in wars post Geneva convention.
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Zeronet, that is true, but there's also a damn lot of psychos in the army. That is not directed at any army in particular, for exemple, in the french army: 5 months ago, 5 french soldiers ambushed in Congo ( the new republic blablabla ) by 30 rebels ( or whatever they're called, it changes to often ). How can you expect a 0/30 for the french, if they're not psychotic guys who played it ala Terminator? ( the stories you never ear on news, like the "laughable" latests french deaths on an armed front, a few months ago: they crashed their car into a tree, in the middle of nowhere, only one tree around :doubt: ). Of course I won't blame them for defending themselves, but still, with such a result, one would think that the last ones probably tried to flee...
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Originally posted by Zeronet
Everything possible is done to protect civilian lifes in wars post Geneva convention.
And enforced by valkyries riding winged pigs over the battlefield as they sprinkle the cure for cancer (as created by the Moon-men) over the poor little enemy combatants, right? Get real, man. obeying the law is optional if you own the police.
Here. Five seconds' search on the subject, smart guy- the article is (naturally) biased as hell, but the quotes speak for themselves.
http://www.agitproperties.com/newsDetail.php?itemID=119&PHPSESSID=c93ad8d2c0835e265cd014e6a2fe64ae
Venom: Slightly different story, that's being thorough in self-defense. ****, I wish I had those guys working for me.
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Originally posted by Venom
How can you expect a 0/30 for the french, if they're not psychotic guys who played it ala Terminator?
Because they are highly trained, professional soldiers with top of the line military equipment helping protect civilians, not kill them. The dictionary definition of a terrorist, is somebody who uses terror to achieve a often political goal, often causing the terror by attacking a innocent population.
Stryke, did you even look at that site? It says "Faux Headlines", you know french don't you? Vrai=true, faux=false? IE the whole text is falsification.
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Uh... no. Never read a left-wing politico site before, have we? If you care to check, most of the articles with online sources can be found, from said sources, online. IE the salon.com and such. They're real, they're calling them "faux" because their whole spiel is lampooning FOX- (Fox News=Faux News). Unless they chose to put one fake article in a whole mess of real ones for confusion value, that's a real article and those are real quotes. Next time, look a bit beyond the title bar.
I've said it before and I'll no doubt have to say it again- don't condescend to me, boy, especially when you don't know what you're talking about.
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:rolleyes: Your the one who reckons the Army is exactly the same as Al-Queda in that they deliberately target civilians. To label an entire group, because of the words of a few, is generalisation.
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Whutchoo talkin' about, Willis? I said there was a clear defining line between al Qaeda and militant operations. You were the one trying to argue against that. Just because you find out your position's untenable doesn't mean you can go and trade with the other guy without asking, you know.:lol:
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:rolleyes:
Yeah, that clear defining line is the Military doesn't target civilians, Al-Queda and Hamas do.
Not to mention the lack of credibility in the quotes, London Evening News is such a good source.
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"Conspiracy"?
Pathetic. Get lost. If you can't debate without making up the other person's position entirely, you have no right to talk. It's utterly ludicrous and naive to assume that military forces are all these honor-bound paladins who would never ever ever harm a civilian if their life depended on it- these are guys with big guns, going into civilian environments, with marginal (at absolute best) ability to distinguish between what's a target and what's not. They shoot up civvies all the time. Take a look at the ****ing statistics in ****ing Iraq right now, why don't you? Doesn't target civilians... *snort*
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last I saw the statistics were something like 200,000 military targets to 2000 civis (military targets being defined as someone shooting at you)
though that is no doubt out of date
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Your the one ignoring my point.
They don't target(in other words, they don't set out with the aim of hitting that civilian, they don't launch operations to slaughter innocent people) civilians. Whether or not they are accidently hit is irellevant, as accidents are bound to happen, where as when a suicide bomber walks into a Restaurant, they is a clear intent to slaughter civilians, they don't accidently walk into the Restaurant, they step in, see the people eating and blow themselves up. If all Hamas did was target soldiers, that'd make them militants, but they deliberately target the civilian population.
Thats the difference.
Just because a missile gets a error and plows into a residental area, doesn't mean the military is guilty of deliberatly targetting civilians. Its a accident, when a bullet misses the Iraqi irregular and hits his human shield, its not deliberate, its a mistake, the bullet was for the iraqi irregular, not the civilian.
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Oh, so those are all warning shots they're firing into the Iraqis' chests during the riots! I get it! They don't mean to hurt anybody, it just hasn't been adequately explained to them that civilians aren't bulletproof!
Here's a little tip for future reference: Generally speaking, when you're insisting on an absolute in any form of human behavior, you're wrong.
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Lets not forget the US is maintaining law and order in Iraq and when people throw stones and violently try to storm a building, the policing force has to use whatever means to protect it.
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Protect the buildings! Forget about lives, innocent property is at stake! YES!
They're throwing gravel? The fiends! Right, out with the grenade launchers! We're hopelessly outarmed and unable to defend ourselves, but maybe, just maybe, we can take a few of them with us!
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I think the whole highfalutin bit about "protecting law and order" is lost to the average Iraqi who it's apparently being protected against. Make no mistake, our law and order is essentially those laws and that order that best benefits our corporations as they establish themselves.
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Originally posted by Stryke 9
Protect the buildings! Forget about lives, innocent property is at stake! YES!
Important administion is at stake, as well as the safety of the civilian workers inside the building, the documents important to the reconstruction effort, and the work being done there, which is vital to the reconstruction of iraq.
Though i think the British are better than the Americans at this, using plastic bullets instead of real ones.
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Wow, we're good at quoting Fleischer, aren't we?
Documents! Administration! Well, it's a good thing they're keeping those damn dirty apes out, if they didn't shoot 'em on sight, something important might get hurt!
But... wait a minute. If we're killing the Iraqis in order to keep them from sabotaging the reconstruction... who's the reconstruction for? Halliburton? Wow, that makes the Army FUCKLOADS better than terrorists!
You know, you've gone from calling every non-Western-style military organization terrorist, to making sweeping, completely inaccurate terminology statements about anyone that kills civilians, to trying to defend the killing of civilians. Just thought I'd point that out.
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terrorist
adj : characteristic of someone who primarily employs terrorism (especially as a political weapon); "terrorist activity" n : a radical who employs terror as a political weapon
militant
adj:
Fighting or warring.
Having a combative character; aggressive, especially in the service of a cause: a militant political activist. n:
A fighting, warring, or aggressive person or party.
Based on these defs Hamas, which certinly is a militant organization, is more accurately described as terrorist. While all terrorist are militant, not all militants go that extra step to be concidered terrorist.
Fleischer's an ass, Rummy talks out of his, and Bush ought to ride the short bus to work, but... THEY DO NOT ACTIVELY TARGET CIVILIANS! This is war and **** happens; the CO of the 101st does not wake up in the morning and think "Hmmmm... maybe we should blow up a crowed resturant today. That would sure shut them up" Accidents happen, less would happen if we wern't there, but we are and we're going to fix this broken-ass nation. People are there who oppose it. People are going to die.
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See, Zero, this is a proper argument.
Granted, under that definition Hamas fits more comfortably into the first category than the second. But then you've got to question motives- from what I've seen, Hamas isn't killing people in order to press an agenda, they're killing people so that Israelis will die, so that eventually life will become unpleasant enough that the rest will leave, but if they don't, they'll kill them, too. Under that definition, a militant group- in my book, probably worse for it, but there ya go.
As I said, they're opening fire on protests and riots now. Cases where the targets are, at this point, exclusively civilian. Seems intentional to me.
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Originally posted by Stryke 9
See, Zero, this is a proper argument.
Hamas isn't killing people in order to press an agenda, they're killing people so that Israelis will die, so that eventually life will become unpleasant enough that the rest will leave, but if they don't, they'll kill them, too.
Cool dude, you just made my point! Terrorism is not killing, but filling life with so much terror (or unplesentness) so that a group will bend to your will.
Originally posted by Stryke 9
As I said, they're opening fire on protests and riots now. Cases where the targets are, at this point, exclusively civilian. Seems intentional to me.
Once a gathering crosses a threshold where it represents a danger to people and property something must be done. Unfortunatly the Army doesn't have much in the way of non-leathals. If you ask me the occupation job is far better suited to the USMC which has the means and the know how to get it done. They've been doing **** like this for 150 years, only recently has the Army gotten in on it.
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If there wasn't an intent to kill there, rubber bullets and sandbag guns would be being issued. There's a pretty clear-cut divide between riot control and battle gear.
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Originally posted by Stryke 9
But then you've got to question motives- from what I've seen, Hamas isn't killing people in order to press an agenda, they're killing people so that Israelis will die, so that eventually life will become unpleasant enough that the rest will leave, but if they don't, they'll kill them, too. Under that definition, a militant group- in my book, probably worse for it, but there ya go.
Uhm... what part about wanting Jews out of Israel and into the sea isn't a "political agenda"?
And as for live fire vs. riot control (FYI)... every single Israeli patrol jeep, armored or not, has riot control equipment. The order in which they are used is: flash-bangs, tear gas, pellet shots (not sure of the official term for this), and rubber bullets. Maybe someone should point the American CinC to this post? ;)