[Cyrus]

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I do not know if it is true that Israel has racked up hundreds of civilian deaths but I will assume it is.
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So what? Lets say we knew for an absolute fact that Israel was specifically targeting civilians to terrorize and kill. Would it not be fair to say that Israel at worst is simply engaging in the same tactics as its enemy who we know for a fact is specifically targeting civilians to terrorize and kill them?
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If both sides agree to use the same tactics then let them fight it out.

[/ QUOTE ] By the same token, we are not supposed to be horrified when a terrorist organisation explodes a bomb in a Tel Aviv supermarket or when a suicide bomber detonates himself in the middle of a Haifa disco.

So, I disagree. If we are to remain different from the other animals, if we indeed do not accept "the natural laws" last seen propagated on this Earth by angry men in black uniforms, we must protest the barbarism of others, of any others.

I will also remark that your term "agree" can only be used metaphorically. Each side unilaterally justifies its atrocities; they have not "agreed" to anything. The other side's atrocities are proclaimed as such; our atrocities we find a way to justify and excuse and call by a different name.

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There is no morality in war and civilian death tallys are silly.

[/ QUOTE ] In order precisely to halt the descent into such an abyss and hold fast to higher humanistic principles, there are various agreements between nations, eg GCP, however idealistically or utopically formulated, which try to claim for Man a somewhat less savage mode of conduct.

Note that your mode of thinking practically excuses each and every atroctiy committed by terrorists against Jews and Israel. It reduces every moral argument to a quest about who's stronger and who's weaker.