DR. LAINA FARHAT-HOLZMAN
April 11, 2014
Many years ago, Golda Meir, then President of Israel, was asked
when there would be peace with the Arab world. She said: "We will have
peace when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us." We
need to look at that astute observation again today because she was
right.
A UN observer has released a devastating report on Syria,
in which both the government forces and the Islamist insurgents are
imprisoning, torturing, raping, and killing children to make a point to
their oppositions. Both sides appear to be equally horrible. This
demonstrates the disinterest in human rights (and the disdain for
children) in today's Syrian society. Sad to say, this is not an anomaly
created by war. It is a global horror shared by more than just Syrian
culture.
o
Syria. When the Syrian insurgency began,
the government attempted to make a point that they were not going to be
rolled over. They kidnapped a dissident's child, tortured him, and sent
his body parts back to the family. When things like this happen today,
news of it spreads via modern communications around the world. It so
horrified the developed world that there was a movement to take sides
with the dissidents and there were cries from both French and American
political figures to go after the Syrian government with military
force. Unfortunately, the dissidents have shown themselves to be
equally horrible, with the additional threat that should they win,
Syria would no longer even pretend to be a modern state. It would be a
medieval Muslim state.
o
Gaza. The Islamist Jihad
terror group has set up a summer camp in Rafah for teens: not to play
sports but to join war games organized by Islamic Jihad. The boys are
taught how to strip down an AK-47 assault rifle, crawl through tunnels
and run across burning tires amid the sound of explosions. The
children, sad to say, are recruited from the UN's Palestinian refugee
agency, UNRWA, the longest and only refugee facility in the world
designed for permanence.
Hamas has opened other summer camps hosting 100,000 students, boys
and girls from 10 to 21, also doing military training. An alarmed Gaza
psychologist (anonymous) said that "This presents a danger to their
lives and contravenes international laws for the protection of
children." Indeed it does, but when children are encouraged to become
suicide bombers, one wonders how much such people love their children
at all.
o Child Warriors. It is difficult to see
how the many militants roiling Africa love their children either. It
has been a practice (dating from the civil wars in The Ivory Coast and
Liberia) to use boy children as drugged-up warriors and girl children as
sexual and manual slaves. The conflicts in the Central African
Republic has followed suit, indifferent to global outrage. This
practice has become ubiquitous all over the lesser-developed parts of
Africa.
o Haiti. It has long been known how too many
Haitians, both the desperately poor and the well to do, regard children
as things, not people. The poor rent out their young boys and girls
for sexual exploitation by sex tourists, as beggars, and as house slaves
(
rest avec).
o Thailand. Sex tourism has
also reared its ugly head in Thailand too, and perhaps because the
Thais love their own children, they recruit sex slaves from among their
poorer neighboring countries. India is a source for such child (and
particularly female) victims.
o Egypt. Impoverished
families have long sold their little girls (and boys) to well-healed
Saudi sex tourists. In addition, one must note that even among the
better off Egyptians (and others across North Africa), they do not love
their daughters enough to stop the traditional mutilation of their
genitals. Social pressure is much more important than love of one's
children.
o Modern World. The concern for children
is a product of our western modern world. We only need to look back
over a few centuries to remember that the children of the poor were
economic assets, not household treasures. Today's horrors are remnants
of a terrible past and must be condemned.
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