A world gone haywire

In a recent interview, Wole Soyinka, the 88 year old Nobel literature prize recipient from Nigeria, spoke of “a world gone haywire”, about the human world completely transformed in the way people are understood and treated. He spoke of the current focus on events and not on understanding people, and he said there is no longer moral education or an ethical factor in societies.

The infection has trickled down from influential people into society. “Kidnapping of children by the hundreds — what is going on?” The late Desmond Tutu, South African 1984 Nobel peace prize recipient, has many times said that people killed in war “are not collateral damage. They are human beings of flesh and blood.”

Absent in this ‘rule-based-order’ is the simple humanity articulated in many children’s books: “A person’s a person no matter how small.”

Start with Soyinka’s question: what is human…how are humans capable of this kind of behavior? He states that economic values and class conflict insufficiently explain why human expectations since Hitler and Stalin get lower and lower. What makes Trump and Putin possible? There is not a single cause or explanation. Who are the perpetrators and facilitators and what do they tell themselves? And most urgent, how come attention to children is on the back burner across the political spectrum in the face of real extermination threats?

Here are several brief, representative case reports about Israel’s meticulous brutality to Palestinian children, perpetrated in addition to inflicting huge war casualties. Defense for Children International/Palestine [DCI] documents Israel’s child crimes. This NGO was shamelessly charged with terrorism by Israel. DCI interviewed 17 year old Mahmoud who was arrested on a beach in Jenin when he was with his friends. He was driven far away by soldiers where he was beaten, blindfolded, handcuffed, and told that he was under arrest. He was kept in a prison yard in the cold night for 10 hours. He was interrogated and stripped searched a number of times, and he did not know where he was or why he was arrested.

He was placed in a cell 2 meters by 1 meter in solitary confinement for twenty days. It smelled and the lights were so disturbing he could not sleep. The walls were so rough and cold that he could not lean on them and the mattress was dirty. They wouldn’t give him food when he said he was hungry.

The walls were so thick that no one could hear him. He particularly spoke with anguish about his mother. There was nothing to do and what was hardest was that there was nothing he could kill himself with. He was deprived of everything except being alive. After he was released, he said he wasn’t able to recover his love of being with people or his ability to be calm.

Hawaida Arraf , a Palestinian American lawyer and a founder of the International Solidarity Movement, spoke about the death of five year old Gaza child Aisha al-Loulou. She was a bubbly child until one day something was wrong and she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. She could not be treated in Gaza as Israel does not let in medical supplies. A Palestinian hospital in Jerusalem could treat her, and she got permission from the Israeli government to go to the hospital.

Israel’s military would not grant permission for her parents to accompany her. The parents applied and re-applied, and then applied for all Aisha’s relatives to accompany her but no one was granted permission.

Finally an elderly woman whom Aisha did not know was allowed to accompany her. Aisha was treated but her surgeon sent word to the parents that she was in such distress about being separated from her family that it was severely affecting her recovery. She stopped talking, and still Israel would not allow her parents to cross the border. When she closed her eyes for the last time she was all alone. When news came out, Israel blamed the parents, as prime ministers Golda Meir and Netanyahu have so cruelly blamed Palestinian parents for Israel’s killing their children.

Ben Ehrenreich recounts Netanyahu’s carefully orchestrated vendetta to whip up a vengeful frenzy to avenge the murder of three Israeli teenagers. The kidnapping and killing of Mohammad Abu Khdeir, is comparable to the gruesome killing of Emmet Till. 16 year old Mohammad Abu Khdeir, was a small thin boy “with large and slightly mischievous eyes”. His corpse was badly burned and was too disfigured to display.

The autopsy found soot in his lungs. He had been forced to swallow petrol. He was breathing when his kidnappers lit him on fire and the burns affected 90% of his body. He appeared to have sustained head injuries from repeated injuries by a sharp object. Each blow was accompanied by a recital of the names of Jewish victims of terrorism. The kidnappers also attempted to kidnap a 7 year old boy whom they choked.

Who are these people and why do they do this – the leaders, the people who enact this cruelty, and the people who are in the position to see it or who are silent?

Is it enough to just blame the Pope for residential school deaths and not identify and investigate the religious staff, the teachers, social workers, doctors? Who and why would people be so thoughtless as to implement orders against giving toothbrushes to children in ICE detention or who comply with orders against comforting crying toddlers suddenly separated from their parents?

What kind of person is Madeleine Albright, whose family escaped from Nazi Hungary, to be able to say that the death of ½ million Iraqi children was “worth it”? Who are the Argentinians and Russians who kidnap political opponents’ children? Or the Chinese and Cambodian totalitarian control over children’s minds and the African leaders who terrorize children to be murderers? Every week Nurit Peled-Elhanan, the Israeli mother who lost her daughter to a suicide bomber, has said that her suffering is nothing as great as that of Palestinian parents, who found that In her Jewish/Palestinian parent bereavement group the Israeli mothers readily abandon all empathy and sharing of grief when they hear the drums of war and excitedly talk about their handsome sons in uniform.

Children at most are reported as numbers or elements, not as people: ½ million dead Iraqi children due to the UN Oil-for-Food Program sanctions, the 2.2 million Yemeni children acutely malnourished, the 1.1 million Afghani children facing severe malnutrition and death due to Trump’s and Biden’s decisions, Obama’s extrajudicial execution of 16-year-old Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki and his cousin in Yemen, Trump’s execution of Abdulrahman’s eight-year-old sister in Yemen, U.S. police killing 12-year-old Tamir Rice, the state-sanctioned murder of 43 Ayotzinapa youth. 

Here is a case of individual and group psychology interacting within the UN, causing ½ million child deaths under the UN sanctions and Oil-for-Food Programme. Denis Halliday and Hans C. von Sponeck, in their position as UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, both resigned to protest and expose gross malfeasance, but nothing changed despite their extensive documentation and meetings with high-level officials.

Counterpunch