frabbit

According to what _Bentley_ posted it sounds as though there is a moral signal: some states that object to Israel consider it to be beneath their standards to participate in the Eurovision. This implies that those that do participate have no problem with what Israel does. That includes the Australians and the others mentioned earlier by _alphanerd_. Otherwise they too could just not participate.

In a comment by _alphanerd_ in this subthread he points out that problematic states such as Russia, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Australia are in the Eurovision.

Maybe Israel's neighbors object to that?

Or maybe they can't find bad enough musicians to get an entry together and are afraid of losing?

Exactly. You don't see them blowing up ten year old girls. It's the power of love.

Again you are responding to an argument which was explicitly and clearly not made. The comment you are replying to asserts that this is an illegal act of war.

Everything only works by agreement and adherence to rules: some explicit, some considered to be so blindingly obvious to a human that there should be no need to state them.

Some of the rules around warfare involve doing your utmost to avoid collateral damage. In this case the collateral damage involves a ten year old girl.

Please try to respond to the actual arguments instead of a cheap, easy strawman. It helps improve the quality of the site.

I cannot see any comment in the immediate sub-thread making a distinction between explosives per se?

Certainly to me I don't see the difference between explosives supplied in a missile produced with US tax-subsidies to arms profiteers or explosives produced by someone else. Except that in the first case US voters have some control over the supply -- not much, but some.

The GP comment is clearly talking about the lack of precision or targeting. Here you may have a point if we consider absolute quantities instead of some relative measurement: a US-taxpayer-supplied-with-profits-to-a-private-company Hellfire missile fired into a refugee camp full of women and children might kill 10 obviously-innocent people for 1 presumed-to-be-a-terrorist-without-any-sort-of-trial person; whereas a pager bomb exploding might blow up the we-dont-know-yet-anything-but-he-was-in-Hezbollah and his ten-year old daughter.

If I were a moral simpleton I might argue that the Hellfire missile murders were worse than the pager murders.

But what do I know? After all hundreds of years of protocols and treaties and norms about this sort of thing are probably just old and in need of being re-envisioned by some clever code jockey.

That's a good summary of the dangers of normalizing the actions that previously were the domain of only terrorists. The world works because most countries and people rejected amoral results-based reasoning and considered such actions in the light of another dimension: morality. It's difficult to define, but there was some sort of consensus. How long those agreements, formal and simply normative, will last remains to be seen. I do not look forward to their further erosion.

I'd go further than that: the truth may be completely outside of the poles established by the stories concocted by involved parties.