Calm down. You presented yourself badly but I don't think you're a moron or a bad person; you just ****ed up a post on the internet.
I don't think it's going to make a super interesting discussion to yell about how I literally support terrorism and disregard basic human rights - you know that's not true, and you're just lashing back at what you see as a personal attack. It's a tired exchange that won't teach anyone anything, though I can empathize with the fact that you've probably been in a lot of shouting matches w/r/t this highly charged and complicated topic. I'd go so far as to guess that you probably think I'm anti-intervention, anti-Israel, any of that - which isn't necessarily true; these are huge problems and they defy reduction to simple valences.
What is a really interesting discussion is what America (or Israel) should do when faced with threats like this. You've leapt to the assumption that I'm an advocate of gentle diplomacy (again, it reads like you've been in this discussion so many times you're just replying to what you usually see as opposition talking points). But I'm not in favor of that kind of policy at all, and I think you're making the same mistake you did when you leapt to assumptions about how Israel 'handles' cyberattack - drawing up a clear binary between 'violent direct retaliation' and 'pretty much do nothing'.
The response spectrum is actually a lot more complicated than that; we've touched on some aspects of it right here in this thread. How do you, as a state actor, retaliate against an asymmetric threat without accidentally feeding into the enemy's biggest advantages - their ability to paint themselves as victims and you as the aggressor, their ability to tap a groundswell of moral outrage? This is the question the IDF faces when people throw rocks at them, that America faced after 9/11, that Israeli cyberwar faces when they deal with a situation like this. It's the reason that bin Laden didn't simply bite off more than he could chew, the reason that bin Laden was actually the strategic victor for a lengthy period of time after 9/11 due to errors in American strategy (errors that were eventually overwhelmed by his own inability to lead his organization, that 'organization's' cannibalistic attacks on its own power base, and much more deftly measured American retaliation).
What do you think the proper response is? So far, yeah, I'd agree with your assertion that my understanding of the situation has been better - it's really complicated, and I don't think you've done a great job of acknowledging that complexity. But this has been a pretty casual discussion so far and I'm genuinely interested about your thoughts on the topic.
