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They are killing babies
Editorial…
(Kaieteur News) – Remember this name: Sam Fahd Abu Haikal. He died on Friday, June 5. He did not live to see his first birthday, gone by his seventh month in a blood-soaked holocaust. Shot and killed by Israeli soldiers in the Tel Rumeida area near Checkpoint 17 on the West Bank. He could fade away into the mists of the ongoing carnage in Gaza.
What is one more Palestinian life among tens of thousands ripped apart by bombs, blasted to pieces by machinegun fire? The dead Sam Fahd Abu Haikal could be that rallying cry, except that the world is occupied with Cuba, the latest excesses from a world leader given to extremes of paranoia, and the touch-and-go war between Iran, the U.S. and Israel.
When babies die in their mother’s arms from gunfire, who is safe? When Palestinian life is so cheap, who still cares like before? A war machine on the loose, blood thirsty war criminals on the hunt, the world turned upside down, and observers watch silently, helplessly. When land was awarded, seized, under the most dubious of justifications, it was just a matter of time for life and limb to be of little value. Palestinian life of no account, with as much recognition as the lowest, most despised, animals, if even those. What started 80 years ago has never really stopped aside from a few shaky, nervous intervals of artificial calm. The remaking of the world order now provides the perfect cover for the atrocities that have flourished in Gaza.
New boundaries arbitrarily drawn. New weapons of destruction tested in the real-life laboratory of battle. New casualties, new alignments, new visions that reek of inhumanity and man’s basest, most deformed side. The killings go on, while there are weak, sporadic talks about talks. That alone should convey the willingness of those who have the ascendancy in the Gaza, and still lust after blood, whenever there is an easy opportunity. Killing a seven-month-old baby represents such an opportunity. It is less a case of the trigger happy in action, and more of a callous mentality at work.
An early official report from the side of the shooters noted “uninvolved civilians.” The usual curtain of darkness is now firmly in place with the usual bland cover of a review activated and findings to be presented to the relevant authorities. If there is anyone who expects condemnation of those who fired at the vehicle in which the since dead Sam Fahd Abu Haikal was travelling, they are sure to be out of luck. The first efforts at coverup and justification have already begun. Reports are of a perception of soldiers at the Tel Rumeida checkpoint of a vehicle accelerating toward them, one soldier firing. We do not know if the stage is being set for the justification of defensive action, but it does have that whiff already.
Again, we find it necessary to ask that fateful question. What is one more Palestinian life, even if it is that of a seven-month baby lost? In view of the unchecked brutality and horrors of this still unfinished war that rejects all attempts at settlement, the mindset could be that the only good Palestinian is a dead one. And that includes babies drawing their first breaths in a savage corner of the world. When a maniacal world leader could be pushed so far that he explodes in public about a friend and ally as being crazy, then there is not much more left to be said. Crazy people, especially those who fill the role well, do not think twice, maybe not at all, about more madness, regardless of the destruction of life that occurs.
We think of a mother whose heart is wrenched to bits, and how inconsolable she must be. She has plenty of company in her neighbours who also have lost sons and daughters in what has been a long grim struggle. A struggle of humans trying somehow to survive in the manner of animals trapped in a gruesome cycle of violence, one without end, without remorse. Sam Fahd Abu Haikal would have died a martyr in another part of the world. In Gaza, he is a number on a body bag.
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