With all due respects and while I understand the sentiment behind the 'broad' comment you make, I am not a naive 'pacifist at all costs'. Wars happen, and when they do one should aim to win. But ones aim has to be based on literally 'aiming' ones force at the actual aggressors to the greatest degree possible. Hamas deliberately hides amongst a civilian population that do not uniformly or necessarily agree with all of its aims. And that makes any legitimate response inevitably hard to confine. The war in Palestine is the result of a sequence of bad and unjust judgements by many players over many centuries, right back to the crusades and earlier in fact. All sides feel all of their indignations are justified, of course.
However my comments were addressed to one particular posting, because such over-generalisations are never a sound basis for picking up a gun and murdering total strangers who just happen to belong to a particular religious / national group, solely because they belong to that group. That is as true globally as it was in Christchurch.
I have to politely assume that you can see the lack of logic in that approach. The logic of what your comments seem to advocate is that humanity is composed of uniform blocks of people that are entirely characterised by narrowly defined sets of ideological views (most of which are demonstrably flawed or false in themselves). And that we all belong to our own group and show no deviation within it. Please ask yourself how true that question would be if outsiders applied it to you as part of whichever definitive group they decide you happen to belong to. Are you simply one of a million identical clones? You know that to be false.
Yet you seem to be happy to take that view, amplify it to a national level and say "all those 'X's' are all same as each other, therefore we should regard them all as interchangeable and equally responsible for all of the actions or statements of any and all other members their 'group'. Is that really logical? Is that true of you? Of any of 'us' in 'our' groups? Even if a perspective is widely shared with a group, is it logical, is it right, to include and blame and punish, as you say, the 1/3 you admit may exist and that do not hold to the majority view?
I suggest you look back within European history to see how the same thinking led to wars, pogroms, burnings at the stake, and massacres galore within groups that were otherwise fairly homogenous and had far more in common that not. You have to face the facts that our own ancestors have all been terrorists of one sort or another towards other groups (and some would say, still are!). And in the main it is the very same reasoning framed in your argument that put them into that category and that led to most of the violence of our history, from the Roman conquest, to the crusades, to the colonisation of the 'new worlds', to the struggle between catholicism and protestantism, to the communist revolutions, to world wars 1 and 2, to Vietnam, Ukraine, and, God forbid, to the next one.
I suggest that such views should be recognised as being knee-jerk shallow grunts and are best seen as such, and should not amplified by endorsing them even in part. Call that naive if you wish. I call it being civilised.
Apologies to anyone offended by my comments (including moderators), but many in my city are still horrified at the barbaric actions of one lone deranged cowardly terrorist who killed 40 innocent people in locations we have to pass by very frequently, including the play school I understand was to be his next target. I recall the constant wails of the ambulances and all the people who tried to help the victims on that day.
Regrettably there are still some here who openly endorse those actions as somehow being 'patriotic' and necessary to 'our freedoms'. They are the naive ones I think.
This is my last comment on this subject. Back to Weebit.
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