Theos-Talk Archives (June 2002 Message tt00207)

stevestubbs wrote:
> The question is not whether a response was required to such a vicious
> crime as the slaughter of a family. Any reasonable person would
> agree that this sort of thing cannot be tolerated. The question is
> whether it is justified to wipe out a village as a response to the
> commission of a crime. 

A more important question is: was the slaughter of the family a crime,
or an act of war? Clearly Israel considered it to be an act of war, just
as Bush today considers acts of terrorism to be acts of war (and Clinton
considered them to be crimes, and, as long as the only ones killed were
U.S. military personnel, minor crimes at that). It is certainly a
subject for debate, and I am not sure there IS a correct answer.

Bart Lidofsky