Islam in Europe: perception and reality

[TheRocketSurgeon]

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.

We're also ignoring that the USA (the nation under discussion here) happily engaged in deliberate, mass napalm firebombing of major cities, not simply precision bombing, with the express intent to kill enough civilians to make the war so horrible (terrifying... isn't that terrorism, when you use force and fear to get what you want?) that the people would cry out for the Japanese leadership to stop the war, as if Japan was a democracy.

ETA: If you ever want your blood to run cold, read some of General "Hap" Arnold's writings on the subject of the use of the USAF bombers, both pre- and post-nuclear age.