The writer is a Canada-based editorial cartoonist and his work has appeared in several international publications
When children start becoming barometers of our depravity, it signals an irreconcilable crack in our humanity. Recently, an Israeli soldier, Mor Ostrovski, caused global indignation with a photograph he published on a website. The photograph shows the cross hairs of a rifle aimed at the head of a Palestinian boy playing on some steps. The boy is oblivious of the sniper but the message of the image is clear: children are legitimate targets. It is an utterly dehumanising photograph. A group of Israeli Army veterans raising public awareness about life in the occupied territories, published this image, alongside another, and wrote: “This is what the occupation looks like. Both pictures are testaments to the abuse of power rooted in the military control of another people.”
In 2007, I was sent a link to a video of a 2007 US military helicopter strike in Baghdad that is known to have killed a dozen Iraqi civilians including two Reuters staff. The video, later posted on WikiLeaks, showed disturbing images and audio of the helicopter pilots firing live ammunition rounds at a group of innocent men and their rescuers. A camera mounted in the helicopter captures everything. The video clearly shows the helicopter circling a group of men on the ground identified by the pilots as insurgents — confusing both cameras and equipment carried by the Reuters photographers for guns and grenade launchers. The pilots open fire, immediately killing everyone. The pilots are then heard requesting permission to shoot at a van that arrives to assist the wounded men. “Come on, let us shoot”, a pilot's voice is heard. The pilots get permission to fire at the van. More civilians are shot at, including two children. “Well it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle”, the pilot's voice is heard saying.
The humanitarian organisation, Save the Children, has been releasing photographs of children who have been tortured in Syria. The organisation has collected disturbing testimony from Syrian refugees, who have exposed how children have been the targets of brutal attacks. Children have seen their parents and siblings killed in front of them and have witnessed and experienced torture. Justin Forsyth, Save the Children’s chief executive said, children are telling them of their schools "being bombed or tanks knocking down their houses. They’re telling us of relatives that have been killed by the army, of breaking into the house in the middle of the night, of watching their brother or sister or father being shot. They’re even telling us of children being tortured in prison; little children of only 10-years-old having their fingernails pulled out, even their fingers cut off. This is appalling, and it has to stop now.”
Do we remember what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different from what we are as adults. It is to have spirit — it is to believe in love, to believe in the beautiful, to believe in self; it is to know that lions can be friends with sheep; it is about cats that smile and all things that are wild — for each child cherishes a shining goblet of magic within their tiny souls. But as adults, we have most certainly put an end to that. Innocence is dead.
Published in The Express Tribune, February 21st, 2013.
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@faraz; so you know things to be different or you think a snide answer would do?
There are no winners in any war - there are merely survivors.
@numbersnumbers: The money must be good. I wonder if it is paid by the word or if they give out retainers.
Interesting that you refer to the Israeli sniper scope picture, where the soldier did not shoot. However you neglect to mention the April 7, 2011 attack on a big yellow Israeli school bus at Shaar HaNegev! In this incident Hamas militants PURPOSELY fired a Kornet laser-guided antitank missile at a school bus, killing one child, and then launched a mortar barrage on the bus attack site to keep medical response personnel away!
In his zeal, the author effortlessly sew unrelated videos and events to suit his purpose and fail in the end the children of Hazara and Palestinian and the innocent children caught up in the war.
The Iraq incidence was well investigated and one may conclude that the soldiers did act in good faith, and took to the firing only after they were fired upon.
It was only after the fact it was known that there were two camera men but it was also known that others, iraqi insurgents, were carrying weapons. The soldiers in the helicopter did not know that there were two children in the van, and it was indeed idiotic to bring children in the war zone.
In all fairness, we should also assume that they did not bring in the children deliberately in the van, the van just happened to come to the rescue and we can hear the confusions whether to engage the van or not.
What the Zealots are doing against Hazara, in Syria, and perhaps even in Palestine and elsewhere is deliberate targeting with planned intentions of targeting innocent children, women and men who have nothing to do with the conflicts. Their intensions were exactly the same as shooting Malala and many more like her and these zealots specifically target children either as victims or as victor suicide bombers or child soldiers.
Let us not lose side of these facts and dilute the gravity of the situation.