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jbstacktoday at 11:10 AM1 replyview on HN

I believe what they are saying is that "He was discussing targeted assassinations. One doesn't "target" an innocent person" seems to imply a logical fallacy:

(1) Person X is targeted -> (2) innocent people don't get targeted -> (3) therefore person X must not be innocent

The problem is that (2) contains too many bad assumptions: that the person doing the targeting is benevolent, that there's sufficient due process to ensure the targeter is correct, that there's a universally agreed definition of "innocent", etc.

History has proven that innocent people DO get targeted, so even from a common sense perspective your statement doesn't withstand scrutiny.


Replies

yoavmtoday at 11:24 AM

Thank you for explaining. I did not mean to say the innocent people in Gaza were not targeted. Of course they did, and many times. I meant to say that in Hebrew (and I believe that in other languages too), when someone calls for "targeted assassinations", it precisely means targeting non-innocent people. The term is literally used as the opposite of "carpet bombing", collective punishment etc. The fact that innocent people were targeted during the war is clearly a crime, but again, it is not what was being called for in the aforementioned quote.

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