Remember these stories whenever someone tries to tell us that people everywhere are the same. Bullshit. Cultures that value human life don't use children as cannon fodder and mine detontators. People in the Free World want their children to grow up and have better lives that their parents. Palestinians raise their kids to be suicide bombers - dressing them in suicide vest while they're still infants. Palestinians cheered on 9/11 while civilized people the world over reacted in horror. People everywhere may have the same potential but some cultures produce monsters.
Germany did in WWII - yet I must say living here in this culture feels safe and sound today.
Stalins gulags, spanish behaviour in south america etc etc where no example for human kindness - still noone says that russians are beasts or that christedom is a death cult.
Muslims are people like you and me - only some live in regimes that need a serious reorganization.
And no, palestinians don't raise their children to be suicide bombers - it's bad enough that many of them do so theres no wisedom in brandishing those few and brave people who stand up against hamas brutality as beasts by painting them all with the same nation wide brush.
In WWII we used the deaths of civilians as a deterrent to further aggression. Presently the enemy uses those same civilians as human shields to prevent us from attacking them directly, since we now consider the lives of those same civilians as sacrosanct.
It's high time that we stopped listening to the fools who worry about world opinion in our choices of targets. It is said why should we stoop to their level. Why is it stooping to their level?
In WWII the US firebombed Dresden and Tokyo. Nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who exactly was living there at the time....CIVILIANS.
Soldiers were once children who come from the same civilian populations which are now sacrosanct. If you kill a soldiers family he may fight to the death. However, if he thinks you may destroy his family and have not done so yet, he may reconsider.
Either way we have to start to attack the civilian populations which create these new enemy combatants. If there is no price for Mama to pay when she sends her little Abullah out as a suicide bomber, then she will encourage this type of behavior.
Part of this mindset comes from the idea that not all of the population supports a given ideology. True enough, but in the islamic street that is not the case and yet the civil population(s) pay no price for it's open support of terrorists and terrorism.