Middle Eastern cultures are heavily based on clan/kinship relations and honor. I would expect that just accurately killing guilty people would lead to a rage effect as bad as killing innocent ones, because of the enormous number of people in the guilty person's kinship group whose honor you have just besmirched.
I would guess you are probably right, but the bigger question here is how strong is any "rage effect" compared to other factors which might influence human decision-making. For example, lets suppose ISIS rolls into your town, throws a few gay dudes of off roofs, blows up the local church or mosque, and publicly tortures to death a few suspected informants. One can imagine that perhaps this will create a large Tsipursky Rage. At the same time, it will probably result in a lot of fear and despair; these emotions might actually discourage people from working against ISIS. Which is stronger in the short or long term? What other factors might be in play? These are not easy questions to answer.
For Tsipursky to claim that he knows the answer with reasonable certainty based on a few magazine articles in which a few captured terrorists cite "rage" as their motivation is the height of the worst kind of irrationality.
That said, your point does illustrate how silly Tsipursky's position is if taken to its logical conclusion. i.e. that we should not even kill actual ISIS operatives in Syria or Iraq because that will make people angry and result in more attacks.
That said, your point does illustrate how silly Tsipursky's position is if taken to its logical conclusion.
It's not really silly. Focusing on cutting funding sources might be better than focusing on killing ISIS operatives, As long as a NATO country buys their oil for money, weapons and hospital care killing individual ISIS operatives won't go very far.
Here's my op-ed that uses long-term orientation, probabilistic thinking, numeracy, consider the alternative, reaching our actual goals, avoiding intuitive emotional reactions and attention bias, and other rationality techniques to suggest more rational responses to the Paris attacks and the ISIS threat. It's published in the Sunday edition of The Plain Dealer, a major newspaper (16th in the US). This is part of my broader project, Intentional Insights, of conveying rational thinking, including about politics, to a broad audience to raise the sanity waterline.