1. What is "proportionality" in a war with an opponent that's genocidal?
We keep hearing the response should be proportional, but proportional to what?
How far does being proportional with homicidal forces go?
What it doesn't mean is that "you killed ten, so we get to kill ten."
What was proportional to the Holocaust, if that was the measure during World War Two? It wasn't, of course, but was proportional to being invaded by the Nazis?
2. Why should the response be proportional?
Mind you, I think it should, but I'm a Catholic. Catholics developed the theory of just war.
Most peoples don't have a theory of just war, although the Israeli's by Jewish tradition would, as the Old Testament at least tangentially discusses it.
Does Islam? I have no idea.
Anyhow, when people say a war should be proportional, what they're implying is that the war should be fought as if it's being fought by Christians, which implies that the Christian world view is correct. It's an entire package. If you adopt just part of it, you reject all of it, which means, in the end, accepting that fighting war the old way is just fine.
Most non-Christian people, when they fight wars, don't worry about proportionality. We instinctively know that. That's why we are horrified by the Germans in World War Two, but pretty much yawn about Japanese atrocities. And that's why were are justifiably horrified by My Lai in Vietnam, but don't really worry that much about the NVA in Hue.
It's probably also, at least partially, why we worry about what the IDF does in Gaza, but are pretty acceptable of Hamas being willing to kill everyone, pretty much in Israel.
We ought not to think that way.
3. Why does Hamas get a pass with so many people and Israel does not?
What the root of that?
It's either anti-Semitism (which a lot of it is) or that we, ironically, hold Israel to a higher standard, which means that we hold Hamas to a very low one. We discussed that above.
The most disturbing part is that there remains a lot of people who really hate the Jews. And it comes out, strangely, in the left in recent years, which is more closely associated with that demographic than the right.
But perhaps we should not be surprised. The extreme left has always surfaced in the popular left, and since the early 20th Century it's always been genocidal. It loved bloody Lenin, then Stalin, and so on. That it would love Hamas, in the same spirit that it loved the Reds, isn't really too surprising.
4. Why do we keep saying that "Hamas doesn't represent the Palestinians?".
There's no evidence of that, except that the last election in Gaza was quite a few years ago. So we really don't know. Hamas might represent the views of the majority of Palestinians. What if that's true?
And why do the Palestinians uniquely get a pass this way. People would shout down somebody stating that "most Germans weren't Nazi's".
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