WarSclerotic

If liberal elites really cared about Gazan children

By Jennifer Rubin July 31
We remarked upon the jaw-dropping hypocrisy of the U.S. media in virtually ignoring tens of thousands of children murdered in Syria by jihadists and President Bashar al-Assad while endlessly castigating not Hamas, but Israel, for the horrible but inevitable deaths of innocents in Gaza who were used as human shields for terrorists in order to ring up the death toll. Whether one looks upon it as bias against Arabs (“What do you expect?’ seems to be the attitude when Arabs kill Arabs) or an overt double standard whenever Israel is concerned (there’s a word for that — anti-Semitism), the Gaza coverage tells us much more about the media (and liberal elites more generally) than about the wars the media cover.

But if the media are so terribly devoted to the plight of Gazan children, you would think they’d make a tad more of the story raised in Israeli media but relegated to a few conservative and Israel-focused U.S. outlets. The Jerusalem Post reports:

Hamas used children to help them dig numerous tunnels into Israel and Egypt, a 2012 paper written for the Journal of Palestine Studies reported.

The paper, titled Gaza’s Tunnel Phenomenon: The Unintended Dynamics of Israel’s Siege says that little had been done to stop the phenomenon of child labor during the digging of the tunnels by Hamas in Gaza.

In December 2011, the paper’s author Nicolas Pelham accompanied a police patrol in Gaza and reported that “nothing was done to impede the use of children in the tunnels, where, much as in Victorian coal mines, they are prized for their nimble bodies.”

He continued and said that “at least 160 children have been killed in the tunnels, according to Hamas.

You wonder what the real number is if Hamas admitted to at least 160.

Writing in the Times of Israel, Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center has a marvelous suggestion: “How about we human rights activists launch a fundraising campaign to underwrite a UNHRC investigation of 160 Palestinian children who perished in Gaza. Make that under Gaza. The number and fate of these (nearly) forgotten young martyrs was actually confirmed by Hamas officials. Yet to date there have been no NGO-led outcries for justice, no blaring headlines decrying these killings, no tears shed by Palestinian Sabeel Church activists over their tragic demise—and of course—no Goldstone Report either by the UN Human Rights Council or UNICEF, whose mandate is to protect and nurture the world’s endangered children.”

This entry was posted on August 6, 2014 at 9:29 PM and is filed under Israel, Palestinians. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.