Justifiers abandon one rationale for another when accusations strain credibility

Evidence

Hijackings and the abduction of innocent foreign nationals as hostages were other practices that violated Islamic law and hence required moral justification. Hezbollah often used hostages as leverage to release its detained fighters and to publicize its cause worldwide. Fadlallah could find no Islamic moral or legal exoneration of hostage taking (Kramer, 1990). Nevertheless, clerics who were not schooled in Islamic law offered a variety of justifications. Militants accused their hostages of being spies, which warranted treating them as foes. This linguistic solution, however, defied credibility when it came to hijacking airplanes. It was highly implausible that whole planeloads of passengers, most of whom were tourists, could be spies. Overwhelming power imbalance then became the justification. Faced with tyrannical might, the terrorists claimed they had “no other choice than to adopt this means” (Kramer, 1990). They used the same justification that Fadlallah devised for suicide bombing. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2240

Categorization

• XREF: When ‘they’re spies’ fails credibility test, the justifier silently swaps to power-imbalance necessity — mirroring how policy apologists drop discredited frames (e.g., security rationales) for new ones without acknowledging the shift.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2240