Are All Dead Children Created Equal?

While furious mobs of leftists draped in Keffiyahs and corn syrup were shrieking about Gaza in the public squares of every major city, ISIS was continuing its genocidal advance on Baghdad. In the last 24 hours, the Yazidis, a non-Muslim minority, fled ISIS to a mountaintop where their children are dying of thirst. 

The stark reality of their plight, caught between thirst and a genocidal army, is in sharp contrast to the phony claims made about Gaza where truckloads of goods continue passing from Israel during wartime, where the malls have iPhones and the five star hotels offer cakes so tall they can only be cut from a crane.

The dead Yazidi children won’t inspire any protests or much in the way of outrage. The hysterical rallies for Gaza won’t suddenly turn into anti-ISIS rallies. If any of the angry white hipsters with dead baby posters are asked about it, they will offer some variation on, “It’s Bush’s fault” or “It’s Tony Blair’s fault.”

And they had been out there in the early part of the century denouncing any move to remove Saddam Hussein from power. The dead children gassed by Saddam, along with the children in his prisons, were unfortunately created less equal than the photogenic, oddly blonde children of Gaza’s Hamaswood.

Anna, a two-year-old girl whose feet were crushed by Saddam’s torturers, never mattered to them.  It isn’t the children that they care about, not the dying Yazidi children in Iraq, the tortured children in Saddam Hussein’s prisons, or even the dead children of Gaza, used as human shields by Hamas in life and then brandished at rallies after their deaths as cardboard propaganda shields by furious Marxists.

When they thought that Israel had bombed a playground near the al-Shati refugee camp killing nine children, they went into murderous paroxysm of outrage. When it turned out that a misfired Hamas rocket was responsible, they fell silent. 

They have equally little interest in the 3-year-old Gazan girl killed by a Hamas rocket in the early days of the war. 

The same thing had happened in 2012 when a dead 11-month old baby, formerly an iconic front page photo, vanished into obscurity once the death turned out to have been caused by a Hamas rocket. The same thing happened to Hadil al-Haddad, a 2-year-old girl in Gaza, who went from iconic photo to yesterday’s news once it turned out that a Hamas rocket had been responsible for her death. 

However the photos of those dead and wounded children, along with the dead children of Syria and perhaps soon the dead children of the Yazidi, will go on showing up at spitefully angry anti-Israel rallies.

If they genuinely cared about children, they would be at least as outraged, moved and pained by the death of a child at the hands of Saddam Hussein, as they were by ISIS terrorists dying at the hands of American and British soldiers. Instead dead Iraqi children inspired apathy and dead Al Qaeda outrage.

If it was the children that they cared about, then the death of an Israeli child or a Muslim child at the hands of Hamas would matter as much to them as the ones on the bloody placards they now brandish.

But they don’t and they never did.

They don’t love children or anyone else for that matter. They only hate. The dead children are only pieces of photographic paper to them which they use to shamelessly assault their ideological enemies.

Once Israel pulled out of Gaza, a report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs found a striking increase in the amount of internal violence as the majority of deaths were now being caused by clan feuds. 

During 2007’s battles between Israel and Hamas, as many Palestinian Arab children died in clan feuds as they did in Israeli air strikes. And unlike air strikes, children killed in clan feuds aren’t accidents. 

The dirty little secret is that while Palestinian identity is as phony as a three dollar bill, clan identity is a powerful and defining force. Furthermore it is often hard to tell whether Hamas and Fatah terrorists are aligned with a movement because of personal belief or because their clan is aligned with a movement.

Hamas and Fatah aren’t just ideologies. They are also large extended clan families which fight over land, honor and economic control. 

The origins of Israel’s struggle with terrorism go back to the roots of the al-Husayni clan which arrived in Jerusalem after the Crusades and has been trying to control the city and everything else ever since. 

Prominent members and associates of the clan include Hitler’s Mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, and Yasser Arafat. (Arafat however was more directly associated with the Al-Qudwas, a clan which extends from Iraq to Egypt. Both clans considered themselves to be a sort of titled aristocracy, yet another fact which makes their post-colonial posturing as oppressed peoples ridiculously hypocritical and laughable.)

Muslim children being killed in clan feuds between huge families whose local branches claim to be the leaders of the Palestinian people even as they fight with equal ferocity for control over Syria and Iraq is not a subject that any of the placard wavers are interested in. Open that door a crack and their whole self-righteous campaign collapses into incoherent bleating as they struggle to justify the primacy of one terrorist group over another based on the claims of descent from Mohammed by its leading clans.   

There are stories that are simply not told.

When UN inspector and anti-war activist Scott Ritter visited Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, he encountered a prison which, in his own words, “appeared to be a prison for children — toddlers up to pre-adolescents — whose only crime was to be the offspring of those who have spoken out politically against the regime of Saddam Hussein. It was a horrific scene.”

Ritter refused to discuss it any further, “because what I saw was so horrible that it can be used by those who would want to promote war with Iraq, and right now I'm waging peace.”

Scott Ritter, who was later arrested for soliciting underage girls on the internet, wasn’t waging peace. No more than the placard wavers in London, Sydney and Montreal are waging peace. He was fighting to keep Saddam Hussein power. And he was willing to sacrifice a prison full of children to do that. 

He was willing to sacrifice little girls like Anna, who had her feet crushed in a torture chamber, to keep Saddam Hussein in power. Ritter was willing to do it because he had the same morals as Saddam.

That is the same attitude that the placard wavers have toward the children of Gaza, of Iraq and of countless other places. They use them to wage war in the name of peace when they come in handy.

And when they die of Hamas rockets and clan feuds, when they are killed by ISIS and the entire murderous alphabet soup of Islamic terrorism, they drop them like yesterday’s garbage. 

For Hamas and its supporters screaming “Free Gaza” at the top of their lungs, children, dead or alive, are just another propaganda weapon in the arsenal of terrorist theocracy.

They are eager and willing to let Hamas go on killing Jewish and Muslim children in the name of its war. 

(A version of this article originally appeared at Front Page Magazine)