Islam in Europe: perception and reality

[Thumpalumpacus]

I would also assess it by methods. Assessing it by intent is tricky anyway because people can and do lie about their intent. Yes, this includes people in the military hierarchy.

US bomber crews in WWII were given alternate targets in the event their primary was clouded over. If their secondaries were also clouded over, they were permitted to bomb "targets of opportunity" which could and did simply list an entire city as a target.

Many were also given instructions to not bring bombs back to the base in such a case. (this info comes from Bendiner's memoir, The Fall of Fortresses).

However, to this day the USAF insists on using the term "precision bombing" in describing 8AF operations ... this when fewer than 20% of their bombs landed inside the target zone. Hap Arnold, Carl Spaatz, Ira Eaker, and Jimmy Doolittle all knew of this gross disparity between PR and actual facts, yet slept easily at night with their intentions being to minimize civilian casualties. Yet to the half-million Germans who died under RAF and USAAF bombardment those intentions were and are entirely irrelevant.

You seem to be missing the point. On the one hand, you (and others before you) say that intention was "entirely irrelevant" to the people killed... Yeah... but in the same manner that a sniper who is trying to save a room full of hostages and accidentally takes out one of the innocent victims instead of the perpetrators; in which case, you might ask, "Did intention matter to the person accidentally shot dead?" Uh, no, but it matters to those judging the action of the sniper versus the actions of the hostage-takers!

On the other hand, your example, if anything, only spells out how important intentions actually are--my point exactly--for clearly in the case you gave the intentions were, at least in part, ill-advised.

I think I didn't make my point, then. Their intentions were absolutely meaningless because they lacked the tools to give their intentions actuality.

Yet despite knowing that, they clung to the comfort of their intent, and continued the bombardment anyway.

That is, to my mind, equal to deliberately killing civilians, overlaid with a veneer of self-serving rationalization. As such, the only real difference is what the killer is telling himself.