Originally posted by Stryke 9
The Japanese kamikazes were not terrorists. If they were, anybody who ever used a gun in wartime or was involved with the conduction of war would be a terrorist, because one's own death is not what makes one a terrorist by any definition. The kamikazes attacked hostile military targets who were generally already actively firing upon them.
I grudgingly agree with this assessment. The kamikazes weren't
strictly speaking terrorists. My definition of a terrorist is someone who utilizes violence against non-combatants for political ends. The kamikazes were Japanese soldiers using suicide tactics on other soldiers with whom they were at war (and, thus, there was no political objective involved; it was a military tactic).
Still, there's no doubt that the kamikazes scared the **** out of the American sailors who were fighting in the Pacific...
The Japanese were wasteful in using the kamikazes. The japanese sacrificed countless pilots to suicide tactics and it didn't win the war for them.
Suicide for reasons of honor has only one result:
fewer honorable people. As for the 9/11 terrorists, yeah, they used planes in a suicide manuver, but they did it against non-combatant civilians in peacetime (even if the war started right after), and al Qaeda has proclaimed long and long that this was done for political purposes.
Thus, they're terrorists. Same for the Palestinian suicide bombers.
As for Israel assassinating that Shalam terrorist dude, I would have tried to assassinate him with a sniper or a covert team first. If that didn't work,
then I would have sent the F-16.
Truth to tell, though, Israel
did try to assassinate him through other means first, so Israel did this exactly as I would have done it.
The Palestinians are such hypocrites. They bomb Israeli civialians by the dozens (remember the Passover massacre?), then when israel justifiably retaliates in self-defense, taking extraordinary care to avoid Palestinian civilian casualties which minimizes civilian deaths to less than a dozen, the Palestinians complain of the Israeli government deliberately engineering a 'massacre' of Palestinians.
As long as there are Palestinian terrorists killing Israeli civilians, there won't be a Palestinian state. Pure and simple.
