Reply To: Why force feed?

NE: Your original reply, like I said, seemed to be addressing Israel specifically, and hence my subsequent question regarding other countries. In each subsequent response, you kept on adding extra details, which just befuddled the subject. Had you simply been concise, there would have been no confusion.

More importantly, I realize now that I think you understood my original question to mean “I understand the whole hunger strike business, but why should any government be compelled to take action against it?”

As you wrote

and anyway, this kind of detail is not necessary to answer the question. Recognizing that hunger strikes cause this kind of reaction is a fact. And recognizing that fact was the basis of the answer to your question, which, if I may remind you, was:

If a prisoner wants to commit suicide by starving him/herself, why stop them?

In reality, my question was more “Why does a hunger strike accomplish anything?” (I understood that once it has an effect it’s more prudent to force feed him than to give in to terrorism.) And that’s why I wrote, “That’s the first time in three posts that you wrote that”, because on this point you wrote nothing more than it creates an arresting image, and hence my reply that you weren’t answering anything.