Power-imbalance and equivalence justifications are self-contradictory yet function together to excuse killing

Evidence

Until his death, Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, a senior Shiite cleric affiliated with Hezbollah, was one of Lebanon’s leading authorities on Islamic values and laws. He argued that overpowering oppressive regimes requires unconventional means of self-defense: “The oppressed nations do not have the technology and destructive weapons America and Europe has. They must thus fight with special means of their own… . We view this as religiously lawful warfare against the world’s imperialist and domineering powers” (Kramer, 1990). This is the necessitarian moral justification mentioned earlier. To vindicate the morality of the suicidal means, Fadlallah argued that the unconventional means of dying in a suicide bombing for a moral cause is no different from dying at the hands of any enemy soldier. “There is no difference between dying with a gun in your hand or exploding yourself” (Kramer, 1990). Kramer notes the contradiction in the moral logic. On the one hand, Fadlallah said that suicide bombing is a necessitated unconventional means, but on the other hand, he said it is just a commonplace type of death in battle. Suicide bombing cannot be both unusual and usual. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2238

Categorization

• XREF: The shift from ‘unconventional necessity’ to ‘just like ordinary death in battle’ shows the same elastic justification-switching seen in Islamophobic elites who alternately claim their positions are rational security concerns and ordinary mainstream politics. — connects to: Opponents of welfare suicide statistics employed mutually incompatible arguments; True-enough logic treats hostile intent and capacity as adequate support — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 124
• DEFINE: Concrete exemplar of the ‘necessitarian moral justification’ mechanism whereby the target’s overwhelming power is invoked to excuse otherwise-forbidden means.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2238