783
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
783 points (96.8% liked)
News
23367 readers
3135 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
In one sense this is much worse, and more terrifying than the run-of-the-mill IED's used by militant groups. Having to be suspicious of everything around you would be maddening. It's indiscriminate mass psychological warfare, where the collateral damage goes way beyond the people actually carrying the devices.
OK, I’m gonna tell a little story that we used to tell in my part of the country. In my part of the country they grow a lot of watermelons.
So there was this watermelon farmer who got upset that everybody kept sneaking into his fields at night and taking watermelons.
So he came up with his great idea that he put a sign at the edge of the field that said one of these watermelons is poison. Now he knew that no one could take a watermelon cause they wouldn’t know which one was poisoned. He was quite proud of this idea.
So we came back in the morning to see how his sign worked. And sure enough no watermelons have been taken overnight.
However, he noticed the number one on his sign had been crossed out and somebody had put two.
That is both genius and a total Bond villain origin story.
Imagine if China, Taiwan or Korea would start doing this shit. Or maybe they already have! Maybe the device you are reading this on would explode in the event of war!
In another thread I was also performing that thought experiment, specifically related to the possibility of Chinese hobby drones being banned for national security purposes, while at the same time possibly allowing Chinese made EVs to be sold in America. It's inconsistent if nothing else. A car would be a much more terrifying IED than a pager. Shame on Israel for showing the world that acts like this are not immediately condemned as acts of terrorism and unanimously rejected as being a bridge too far.
Edit: actually it looks like there may be consistency: https://www.newsnationnow.com/world/china/us-to-propose-ban-on-chinese-software-hardware-in-connected-vehicles/
Don't you just have to watch out for your Hezbollah-supplied devices?
Also, fat chance they could pull the same thing off again
Yeah, Hezbollah absolutely fired their IT guy after the second time it happened.
It's Hezbollah. They likely killed him thinking he's a mole.
People here really have forgotten Hezbollah is also a monstrous group. One monster existing (Israeli government) doesn't negate the other one existing too (Hezbollah).
How is it “indiscriminate” if solely Hezbollah operatives were targeted?
A booby-trapped baby stroller is indiscriminate - it goes off when anyone touches it, friend, foe, or child. Israel attacked the communications of its enemy and literally nothing else. That’s inherently discriminating between friend and foe.
It's indiscriminate because Israel doesn't know who is in proximity of the device when it explodes, or even if the target is nearby. It's no stretch to think one of the targets could have been frisking a journalist or aid worker when their device detonated.
That being said, the "indiscriminate mass psychological warfare" comment I made was about how the effect of blowing up common devices as an act of war will have negative psychological effects on everybody who was nearby and probably even those in Lebanon who were not nearby, and potentially even Lebanese people who were in other countries who have family back in Lebanon.
But they do know. They know that it’s an agent of Hezbollah, or else they would not have been issued a pager by Hezbollah.
Ok, but that didn’t happen, so clearly it is a stretch. You’re asserting that Mossad achieved better than 99% target accuracy by accident, but the fact that it’s better than 99% proves it was no accident at all. It was a deliberate and discriminate attack on a terror network responsible for more than 8000 indiscriminate attacks on Israel in this year alone.
Alleged agent of Hezbollah receives the pager. Alleged agent places it on a table at home. Alleged agent's innocent daughter picks it off the table and uses it as a toy prop. Signal is sent, pager explodes, and kills the daughter.
There's an plethora of situations that could occur that result in an explosive pager being deployed while in the hands of someone not a Hezbollah agent, and that's if we take it at face value that Mossad can identify who is and isn't a Hezbollah agent. Wouldn't be the first time they've been overzealous and killed an innocent person. May they be judged accordingly by their Maker.
Anybody with access to secure coms knows that they’re not permitted to allow others to access the device, including family members. So your situation is inherently implausible and ultimately comes down to the agent themselves not following the rules, with devastating consequences to their family.
But they didn't occur. So they couldn’t have occurred.
No, we just have to take it at face value that Hezbollah can identify who is and isn’t a Hezbollah agent. So that they give them a secure pager. Why wouldn’t that be the case?
Bullshit, unless you're privy to the internal workings of alleged Hezbollah agents. Where's your documented proof?
So you claim that 10 year old girl who died was a Hezbollah agent? I'd sooner think you're spewing more bullshit.
See #2.
Now you're building strawmen and arguing in bad faith. Discussion's over.
I’m clearly in good faith
You are clearly a troll, that is for sure.
I'll also propose a counterargument: Mossad, the IDF, and Israeli gov't in general doesn't give two shits about collateral damage, how many innocent civilians they kill, and whether or not the intended target is a Hezbollah agent (or Hamas, for that matter). If they kill a thousand innocents for every genuine terrorist, that's a good day in their book. "Innocent before proven guilty" doesn't exist in their world view. Guilty by association is.
If that's not true, they've got a lot of work ahead of them to improve their public image. The whole lot of them are no better than the terrorists they claim to be fighting against
But that’s false. You’re just imagining that.
There wouldn’t still be a war in Gaza if that were the case.
Why one? Why not zero?
Because said operatives were often within exploding distance of civilians when the pagers were detonated. Shrapnel, even from a small explosion, can be deadly and has a fairly large range. Especially if you don't have line-of-sight to your target before detonating the device; you have no idea what or who is nearby when it goes off.
"Explosive" and "targeted" generally don't go hand-in-hand.