A Boring Dystopia

If I walked up and started punching you in the face because I said you looked like you were about to punch me...

Would you just let me beat you up to prove you weren't gonna punch me?

Especially knowing there's no one that would stop me from beating you up if you didn't defend yourself?

Hezbollah counter-attacking after being attacked by Israel, does not mean that Hezbollah would have attacked if they had not been attacked first. If your neighbour is a bully, then it's probably best to not be a pushover.

What does lend the "pre-emptive" claim credibility, is that afterwards Hezbollah said that they had retaliated for the murder of one of their commanders in Beirut. So the Hezbollah attack was not a counter-attack, but rather an attack that they had been preparing for weeks already.

If attacked they attack, that's shitty evidence because they would have struck back anyway.

About as much as you punching somebody on the face could, after they punched tyouback, be claimed by you to be a preemptive punching of their face: i.e. it's complete total bullshit.

And here we have the press from nations with heavily pro-Zionist governments and power elites spinning that bullshit into their stories whilst !World@lemmy.world moderator's beloved "trust gatekeeper" has their own bot telling readers they're totally trustworthy and even in some cases that those media sources spinning the-ethno-Fascists-are-the-real-victims-here takes on their stories were they're the ones initiating violence, are lefties.

I'm not quite sure what's the bullshit power in this, but it's at least square.

PS: It's funny how me and somebody else seem to have independently come up with the same metaphor, even if I worded it in a reversed way so as not to come out as aggressive.

If Hezbollah rockets had fired first, would this have meant they were responding pre-emptively to Israeli airstrikes?