I remember about 5 years ago there was some highly sought after terrorist kingpin that they had located. He had surrounded himself in a house with 200 innocent civilians. We had plans to blow up the house but we decided against it due to the fact that we would have turned that house into a mass grave of 200 innocent civilians with one really deadly terrorist. The problem is that we put so much weight into the so-called innocents that we encourage it.
What happens is this. The kingpin tells the people to surround or go into the house. If they don't then he will kill them. They do what any wise person would do and then do what he says. Then we don't kill him which encourages this kind of action for next time. Furthermore, not all civilians are spared. In many cases they don't know about them or they decide that a few dead civilians is acceptable. Innocent people do die anyways.
The proper way to deal with this is to ignore the civilians. First not all are innocent. Some are willing to help. Some stand in there to help them. They believe in the cause. They are not standing in there out of fear but out of pride. Secondly, those that are truly innocent are making things worse. They are doing the sensible thing so what we must do is not make it sensible. We must kill the terrorists even if it means dead civilians. Even many dead civilians. I assure you that if 200 innocent people were to die as a result, then the next time they would think twice. If they saw that there was a good chance of dying no matter what then things would be different. They might not listen to the terrorists next time. Or they might be scared of them and run away before they could be threatened. They might fight back? Or they might just let us know more things. Either way in the long run LESS civilians would die. Consider the following scenario. A child cries because he doesn't get what he wants. The parents cave in and give him what he wants. Next time he will for sure cry since it worked so well last time. Same thing. It works so they do it. If it stopped working then they would stop using this tactic because they would just be wasting their time.
So who is innocent? Well if your neighbor is a terrorist and you didn't tell us then you are not innocent. If your neighbor has a weapons cache and you don't tell then you are not innocent. Of course by killing terrorists no matter what we will encourage the real innocents to come out. They will be scared of the next bomb falling on their neighbor's house. The quasi innocents who support it quietly will not report it and will die as they should. This is the real solution.
If it comes out that this doesn't work then they were never innocent to begin with. Also don't tell me you don't know what your neighbor does. Before I moved to Israel I lived in an affluent area where the houses are at least 100 feet apart and in our case there was even a small forest between us and the neighbor I am speaking about. We knew they were up to something. People coming to this house at odd hours. Weird activity in the house also at odd hours. We reported it. It eventually came out that he was arrested by the FBI. He was a major narcotics supplier in our area. When your neighbor is up to some serious no good, you know. They know too and if they don't tell us then they are terrorists themselves.
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