lysander,
I'm certain that at some point the Marines did kill somebody's mom. Which gives some 16 year old Muslim kid the impetus to seek revenge. I am not defending the actions of a suicide bomber...I'm just trying to give their actions some perspective based upon their circumstances.
The problem here is that you keep equating "dead mom by accident" with "dead mom by purposeful murder." Those two are not moral equivalents. If an ambulance kills someone's mom while racing to the hospital because of an accidental collision, is that morally the equivalent of someone who breaks into a house just to shoot his enemy's mother?
It becomes a chicken/egg argument. Who hurt who first? Who is more morally justified in killing the other.
Wrong. You yourself said in the last post: Two wrongs don't make a right. This has nothing to do with chicken and egg. This has everything to do with whether or not it's ever morally justifiable to intentionally kill random, unarmed, and nonthreatening people.
In addition, I'm not stretching the relativism of morality at all. You keep wanting to call these bombers dishonorable...fine...by the standards of the west they may be. In some cultures winning a fight by dropping a bomb from 20,000 feet might be considered dishonorable...doesn't stop us from doing it.
The only culture that finds suicide bombing of old ladies honorable is that of the suicide bomber gang. It is condemned by literally everyone else.
And again, you're misstating the issue...it isn't "is it moral to use weapons to kill?". The issue here is: Is dropping a bomb on a daycare center
on purpose so that you can kill kids the same thing as dropping a bomb on a tank platoon, and in the process accidentally killing some children who were nearby? If you are equating those two acts, then you are definitely stretching your ideas of relativism. Justifying the purposeful slaughter or innocents as you are doing it requires inventing a culture that does not exist (ie, one that glorifies maiming and killing innocent people on purpose) in order to justify a supposedly "alternative view." It should tell you something about how moral the idea is, when you can't find any significant number of people on earth who buy it.
As far as the bombers are concerned...they have aided and abetted the enemy...thus fair game. I'm sure that at the wedding party there were some anti-west sympathizers who got hurt...that's the collateral damage.
A palestinian family's wedding!? The bombing was obviously the product of cultural dimensia...Zarqawi got so full of himself and so stuck in his cult mentality (as has happened with many cult leaders) that he believed people would see what he does in every act. Hence, he exceeded (as he's done before, and been warned about according the news reports on letters between Al Zawahiri and Zarqawi) all bounds of decency for his own culture, and ended up being cast as a monster by everyone, including former supporters (who were just fine when they could blame all of the beheadings on Jewish propaganda spoofs...but now won't.)
The bottom line is, the only way you can keep explaining away condemnations of suicide bombers as cultural bias is by: 1) claiming an equivalency that does not hold (ie, accidental death versus intentional) and 2) Inventing a culture that considers fighting wars by western methods dishonorable, yet at the same time honors blowing up old ladies and kids at bus stops. There is no such culture outside a few criminal gangs, and the best you will find if you look for people who defend that behavior in other cultures are denials that it's actually muslims (the blame the jews argument) or claims that the dead were in fact military targets and that the media is lying.
What does it tell you when no one is willing to admit "Yes, we wanted to kill old ladies just because and that's a good thing to us!"? I think it's good evidence that as much as you'd like to imagine a world where there are no mostly immutable moral concepts...they do in fact exist.
