The thing is there are a lot of forces out there radicalizing Muslims. "Muslim terror attack" does provide the relevant information. We don't know the exact identity of the radicalizers, we don't know exactly how the radicalizers manipulated them, but unless that information permitted effective action to be taken against the radicalizers it adds nothing. (And if the government has actionable information they'll be keeping it a secret as it would be of little value if the bad guys knew we knew.)
If your point is that radicalization is real and dangerous, I agree. But that’s exactly why we shouldn’t reduce the label to “Muslim terror attack.” Because radicalization isn’t an inevitable consequence of being Muslim—it’s a distortion fueled by politics, ideology, war, poverty, and sometimes foreign interference. Labeling it by religion blurs those causes and narrows the public imagination to a single, lazy conclusion: Islam equals violence.
I never said it was inevitable. Any more than while you know the abortion clinic bomber is Christian it doesn't mean all Christians bomb abortion clinics.
That doesn’t help fight terrorism. It helps fuel it. It turns potential allies into suspects, communities into surveillance zones, and foreign policy into a self-fulfilling cycle of fear and reprisal. If your goal is to stop radicalization, you don’t do it by reinforcing the frame that terrorists themselves want: that they speak for all Muslims. They don’t. And the more we buy into that framing, the more power we hand them.
While the threat is the radicalizers that information is implicit in saying "Muslim terror attack". Some combination of money + manipulation got them to do it.
It's not merely when they kill in <insert group>'s name, but when they are radicalized by the group. As for Christian terrorism--I'm not coming up with any examples of "Christian" that are not better described by a subset. White nationalist terrorists. Abortion clinic terrorists. The thing is the Christians are in the majority, what you see is oppression, not terrorism.
What you’re describing is exactly the problem. When the attacker is Muslim, the religion gets top billing. But when the attacker is Christian, it’s qualified—“white nationalist,” “anti-abortion,” “lone wolf”—anything but “Christian terrorism.” That’s not objectivity. That’s selective framing.
I don't recall anything referred to as "lone wolf terrorist attack", although I have heard of lone wolves attacking. The others have well defined subsets, human nature is to use the narrowest grouping that defines a situation. The ones that are doing it for Islam might actually have a narrower focus but rarely is that apparent or communicated.
You say Christian terrorists are better described by a subset. But so are Islamist ones—Salafist, jihadist, Wahhabi. Yet we don’t hear those labels dominate. Instead, we get “Muslim terror” as the headline, as if 1.9 billion people share a motive.
"Jihadist" is certainly not a relevant category. The others--might be relevant but we don't see it so we don't describe it that way.
And saying “Christians are the majority, so it’s oppression not terrorism” just reinforces the double standard. Terrorism is defined by method and motive, not by the perpetrator’s demographic. If a white Christian man shoots up a mosque for ideological reasons, that’s terrorism—no less than if a Muslim man attacks a synagogue.
I do agree--but how often do Christians shoot up mosques?
What I'm saying about oppression is that while the objective is the same (impose their will) the method differs. Terrorism is the tool of the minority, not the majority. Doesn't mean Christian oppression isn't a bad thing, just that it's a different thing.
"try their best" and "take all feasible precautions" are the same thing. And that's all that's expected of them.
No—they’re not the same, and that difference is the heart of the law.
“Try their best” is subjective. It lowers the bar to intention—what someone meant to do. “All feasible precautions” is objective. It asks what could have been done, given the means and knowledge at the time. It doesn’t let you off the hook just because you claim you cared. It demands you act accordingly, even if that means not striking at all.
Except you still haven't established that they didn't do so.
If a military knows civilians are likely to die in large numbers and proceeds anyway, that’s not taking feasible precautions. That’s weighing civilian lives against tactical gain and deciding they’re expendable. And under the Geneva Conventions, that’s not just tragic—it’s unlawful.
And you still can't seem to get it that it's the ratio that shows what's going on, not the raw numbers.
It's not sleight of hand. It's demonstrating a tremendous effort to get people off the X.
You continue to act as if the numbers somehow prove something. They don't.
But they do prove something—just not what you claim.
A low average kill-per-bomb stat only matters if it reflects lawful targeting and civilian protection. But when you drop thousands of bombs into one of the most densely populated areas on Earth, where civilians are trapped and infrastructure is collapsing, then even “low” ratios add up to mass civilian death. That’s not just numbers—it’s evidence of systemic harm.
"If it reflects"??? Of course it reflects! It would be utterly impossible if they weren't being very careful.
And if your justification rests on aggregate statistics while hospitals, shelters, and aid workers keep getting hit, then you’re not showing “tremendous effort.” You’re showing selective math to excuse unacceptable outcomes. The law doesn’t care how efficient your bombing is—it cares whether it respected civilian life.
And once again you fail to get it. The numbers unquestionably show that they are taking great care. If they weren't things would be much, much worse.
The fact that you don't like it doesn't make it wrong. You have a very idealized notion of how war goes. (Not surprising, most people don't realize how bad it is.)
No—this isn’t about liking or disliking. It’s about misrepresenting the law.
War crimes are not just isolated acts like “someone pulled a trigger they shouldn’t have.” They include broader patterns: starvation as a method of warfare, disproportionate attacks, targeting civilian infrastructure, and collective punishment. These aren’t vague ideals—they’re codified in the Geneva Conventions, the Rome Statute, and decades of legal precedent.
And you still are taking the wrongs as a given, never proving them.
The list I referenced isn’t a rhetorical invention—it comes directly from binding international law. The Geneva Conventions, their Additional Protocols, and the Rome Statute all define war crimes with specific language and legal thresholds. For example, targeting civilians is prohibited under Geneva Convention IV and Additional Protocol I, which clearly state that civilians cannot be the object of attack.
Yeah, and we see zero targeting of civilians. Note the word "targeting". Geneva does not say that it's automatically wrong if a civilian is in the area.
Collective punishment is explicitly outlawed in Article 33 of Geneva IV, making it illegal to penalize people for acts they did not commit.
And you still haven't established that there is any punishment involved.
Disproportionate attacks—where expected civilian harm outweighs the direct military gain—are banned under Additional Protocol I.
The world has basically defined proportionate based on what we see actually happening. And Israel raised the bar considerably.
The destruction of infrastructure essential to civilian survival, like food and water supplies, is forbidden unless absolutely required by military necessity.
And where's your evidence of any destruction of either by Israel? Note that supplies in the hands of Hamas are not civilian supplies.
And starvation as a method of warfare is not a vague accusation; it is codified as a war crime in both Additional Protocol I and the Rome Statute.
And, once again, you have failed to establish that it's an objective. Or that it's happening.
These aren’t emotional appeals or theoretical ideals. They are specific legal prohibitions agreed upon by the international community. If you believe they don’t apply in this context, then make that case. But don’t deny that the legal standards exist—or pretend that citing them is just moral posturing.
It's not a matter of not apply, but not happening.
Examples? Sure. Let’s start with Nuremberg. The Nazis didn’t say, “We’re committing war crimes.” They said they were defending their nation, restoring order, and acting under law. They invoked national security, enemy sabotage, and collective threats. But the tribunal cut through those justifications and established that even in war, some acts—like targeting civilians or using starvation as policy—are criminal.
And that's relevant how?
Take My Lai in Vietnam. U.S. soldiers massacred over 500 civilians, many of them women and children. The initial reports were buried, sanitized as “a firefight,” and those involved claimed they were following orders or couldn’t tell civilians from enemies. None of that changed the facts on the ground—and when exposed, it was prosecuted as a war crime.
Is anybody saying that it wasn't a war crime?
(But note that the not being able to tell civilians from enemies can be a very real issue. That's why Geneva is strict about markings. Soldiers will shoot at those who look like those who are shooting at them. When those look like civilians that will tend to get actual civilians shot at. Look at the history of such massacres by forces that would generally be regarded as good guys--you'll always find they were taking a lot of fire from people in civilian attire. Unfortunately, sometimes people will not recognize that who they are looking at is clearly not a combatant even though they look like (civilian attire) those who have been shooting at them (in civilian attire.))
Or Srebrenica. Serbian forces claimed they were responding to enemy provocations and conducting evacuations. What they actually did was murder over 8,000 Bosniak men and boys. Again, layered in military rationale, but the legal system recognized it as genocide.
Again, what's the relevance? You're taking things everyone agrees are wrong.
These weren’t crimes because they were simple. They were crimes because, beneath the strategy and language, they violated the basic protections international law was built to preserve. That’s what the law is for—not to rubber-stamp the actions of the powerful, but to hold them to account even when they hide behind complexity.
They were simple: Killing those who were clearly not combatants.
The problem is that you are demanding the impossible. I've never been in the military, I can't evaluate all the details. But I can look at what happens: Israel has by far the best record. And I have a very hard time with the notion that the world's best is an abysmal failure. Especially since nobody is making any realistic proposals of how to do better. There are plenty of countries with skilled people who don't like Israel, if they can't see something why do you think there is something??
If the “world’s best” record still means tens of thousands of civilians dead, then maybe the world’s standard is broken. The point isn’t perfection—it’s responsibility. If a country claims moral and technological superiority, then it must be judged by that standard, not by the worst wars in history. Saying, “no one’s offered a better method” isn’t a defense. It’s an admission that we’ve normalized the mass death of civilians as acceptable collateral. And once that’s the bar, “best” stops meaning good—it just means least horrific.
You don't get to decree what reality is.
And I'm not judging based on the worst wars in history, but on the typical modern conflicts.
And saying that no one has offered better is not a reason is saying you believe there is better. Why in the world do you believe you know more about it than the world's military experts?
The point is the data is sufficiently flawed as to probably mean combatants exceed civilians.
That’s not how the burden of proof works. You don’t get to assume a civilian is a combatant just because the data might be flawed. If you claim more fighters than civilians were killed, prove it with independent, verifiable evidence—not speculation from the party doing the bombing. Civilian protections exist because war zones are chaotic and truth is contested. You can’t erase those protections by guessing at a ratio. That’s not law. That’s convenient math wrapped in moral evasion.
There is no independent, verified evidence in either direction and thus no way to know. However:
1) We have two data points that Hamas inadvertently leaked. Both showing that casualties are quite disproportionately male.
2) We have at one point at least a 20% fraud rate in the Hamas data. That's just the low hanging fruit, reality is certainly worse. If it's still 20% we are at civilians = combatants. But we also have a large number of Hamas rockets that fell in Gaza. Thus some of the dead (which will almost all be civilians) aren't due to Israel. Note that that leaves combatants > civilians. In past conflicts this tends to run around 20%, this time around we have no data so far.
Two completely different methods of estimating, both coming up with the same conclusion. In the absence of certainty I'm going to go with what looks most probable.
None of what you discuss proves your point. You have a flawed idea of what war entails.
That’s not how the burden of proof works. You don’t get to assume a civilian is a combatant just because the data might be flawed. If you claim more fighters than civilians were killed, prove it with independent, verifiable evidence—not speculation from the party doing the bombing. Civilian protections exist because war zones are chaotic and truth is contested. You can’t erase those protections by guessing at a ratio. That’s not law. That’s convenient math wrapped in moral evasion.
NHC
You keep demanding independent, verified evidence--yet have none supporting your position. Everything that "supports" your position fundamentally traces back to what Hamas says with no verification whatsoever.
