israel and excessive force?

Question

Suppose a knife-wielding thug breaks down your door and convincingly announces that he will kill you and your family. You grab a gun and kill the intruder as he lunges at you. A couple of rounds hit him in the chest and he collapses dead at your feet. Later, someone complains about your 'excessive' use of force:

The man had a knife; you fired multiple 9 mm rounds into him; you didn't use proportionate force; you should have parried his attack with a knife. That would have been a fair fight. What's more, you killed him, but he merely tried to kill you, etc.

This little complaint expresses the sort of preternatural moral obtuseness found on the Left. It leaves out the crucial fact: the aggressor is wholly in the wrong, and the defender wholly in the right. The defender is perfectly morally justified in a situation like this in using deadly force to stop a deadly attack.

Answer 1

though not technically a question your statement is entirely accurate. And, to put an even finer point on this, since the attacker has expressed in no uncertain terms the desire to destroy you, you would be in the wrong morally if you refused to use whatever means at your disposal to defend your life and the lives of those you are entrusted to protect.

Answer 2

i think a better metaphor was that, in 1982 you had gone into the robbers house. you stayed there and controlled whatever he did for over 18 years when in 2000 you left it. Now I'm pretty sure that guy would do whatever he could to get you to leave, like create some kind of way to fight you i.e. hezbollah which was the only real military lebanon had. afterwards though, you leave that guys house, and i mean you cant blame him for being a little mad at what you did for so long. All right having Hezbollah bomb Israel was bad, but come on, is it fair for Israel to just start bombing everything? airports and grain silos too and then talk about creating a buffer zone which would cause thousands of lebanese people to lose the homes they had near the border? in the end i think what israel has done is to create more fed up people in the middle east. i really think that for something like this you really got to know the facts for both sides and look at the history of what happened until now.

Answer 3

Let me explain to you why the force Israel is using is disproportionate or excessive.

The rockets fired by Hezbollah killed less than 50 Israelis, but the bombings by Israel have killed 300+ ordinary Lebanese. Almost none of those poor people are connected with Hezbollah. Israel says it's fighting Hezbollah, but it is actually killing ordinary Lebanese, destroying their homes, bombing towns and cities indiscriminately. Perhaps you don't know all of this?

Coming to your example, where a knife-wielding man attacks another person, I'd say you have made a big mistake in your analysis of the event. The victim would be justified in killing the attacker for self-defence. But he wouldn't be justified in killing the attacker's whole family. That is what's happening in Israel's case. Israel is not merely targeting Hezbollah, the attacker, but it is actually using its might to ruin Lebanon.

Answer 4

Isreal has every right to shoot rockets at lebanon, but they aren't accomplishing anything. The hezbollah, (Al Queda 2: The Sequel), are firing rockets at isreal, not the lebanese firing rockets at isreal. We need spies or something to take out the cowardly hezbollah . Dude, hezbollah are *****. They have positioned their headquarters BESIDE a hospital. They are causing this problem, not lebanon, but if this was Mexico bombing the US, but actually the Al Queda bombing the US what would we do? This is a ****** up war and lets hope it ends soon. Plus, your example isn't quite fitting for this situation, but I see what you mean.

Answer 5

Actually, youre wrong. In your hypothetical situation, you would be found innocent and totally within your rights to have shot him.

...Provided it was less than three times that you shot him, or something like that. Its between 3-6.

Answer 6

you theory lies on the presumption that it was Hezbollah who started it. It was in fact Israel who provoked Hamas to break their 16 month ceasefire by bombing a gaza beach.