Political assassinations vs. military assassinations

The Washington Post has a story about targeted assassinations conflating two separate issues:

Dubai’s police chief — as well as commentators in Israel — have laid blame on Israel’s Mossad spy agency. Israel has not addressed the issue of responsibility, in keeping with its policy of neither denying nor admitting involvement in assassination missions.

The episode, which has become the talk of intelligence specialists on at least three continents, recalled the extensive use of closed-circuit television images and lab work during the British government’s probe into the agonizingly slow death of former Russian security agent Alexander Litvinenko in 2006.

The problem with this implicit comparison is that they’re not even close to the same. Israel is at war with Hamas, a terrorist outlet committed to Israel’s destruction that engages in the wanton murder of innocent Israeli civilians. The man recently killed in Dubai was a senior Hamas official and a known purchaser of weapons used to attack Israeli civilians.

Litvenenko, meanwhile, was killed by his own countrymen for being a political enemy of Vladimir Putin. He was assassinated for trying to blow the whistle on the crime and corruption that encircles Russia’s upper political echelons. The difference here is pretty simple: What Israel did is an acceptable act of war, no different from Americans bombing tribal areas in Pakistan. What Putin’s flunkies did was a crime, no different than James Earl Ray’s assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

It’s a subtle distinction for the morally blinkered, perhaps. But it’s an important one.