Don't go there Nathan. If you start justifying what at this point is the merely hypothetical, though utterly vile, proposal to kill or otherwise harm the families of suicide bombers, you will have passed not only out of the left, but out of humanity. I don't care how Zionist you are, and I don't care what you think of what Hamas has done, or did what it has done, which I don't care to justify anyway. Remember Lidice. Remember Lidice. jks
jks
>
>So is Hamas committing war crimes? The term war crimes is being thrown
>around with a bit of abandon. Civil wars are actually largely outside UN
>conventions on war crimes, except for the singular exception of genocide,
>and until Palestine is recognized as an independent state, all the legalese
>around "war crimes" is kind of misguided -- remember, they were going after
>Sharon only for his acts in Lebanon back in 1982 because of this basic
>international rule over war crimes.
>
>One reason that civil wars have problems fitting into easy
>civilian/military
>target definitions is that such internal wars have a tendency to involve
>whole populations in the war, with no simple division between civilian and
>military actors. That is the basic logic of Hamas's terrorism and Schiff's
>response.
>
>I happen to oppose both approaches, but not for the simplistic argument
>that
>civilians on each side have no responsibility for the murders of each
>respective population,which is demonstrably false, but because such terror
>just perpetuates a cycle of endless violence without exit for either side
>in
>the present Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
>
>-- Nathan Newman
>
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