Killing children, no matter the number, is the ultimate crime against the present and future. The Jewish people having suffered the unfathomable blow of having a generation of their children—1.5 million futures wiped out by the Nazis during the Holocaust—are acutely sensitive to this issue.
But how to react when adults entomb children to dig tunnels on a mission-to-murder other children? What to do when those in power groom youngsters to be the next generation of human shields, or axe wielders, or suicide bombers?
US Representative Barbara McCollum’s (DFL-Minn.) answer is to blame Israelis when they have no choice but to do what they did a few weeks ago with the shooting of a 17 year-old Palestinian after he nearly murdered a 35-year-old father, injured a 70-year-old Jew standing at a curb and tried to stab other Jews near the community of Efrat.
Just before Thanksgiving, Representative McCollum introduced a House bill 4391, to restrict U.S. aid to Israel if “Israeli military forces or police” engage in “physical violence” or use “military detention” against Palestinians under the age of 18. In other words, should it become law, the next terrorist attack, just like the one in Efrat, would likely trigger a U.S. aid cutoff against Israel, our only reliable Mideast ally, for the crime of defending its citizens every time a Palestinian kid, indoctrinated with hate tries to murder or maim an Israeli.
The use of Palestinian children to carry out terrorist attacks against Jews in the Holy Land actually predates the 1948 Israel War of Independence. In Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism, David M. Rosen shows how during the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem modeled his lethal child soldiers after the Nazis’ Hitler Youth.
Last year, Representative McCollum was silent when on January 17, 2016, 16-year-old Morad Abdullah Adais broke into the home of Dafna Meir, mother of six children 4 to 17, in the town of Otniel, armed with an 8-inch knife. Later he bragged, “I plunged the knife into her so deeply that most of it was inside her body. She started screaming, the children saw me and also started screaming, then I stabbed her in her upper body another three or four times. She tried to fight me and tried to take the knife from me. The two children who were there were still screaming, but she continued to resist, so I pushed her, and overpowered her.”
Under McCollum’s bill the Israeli army’s arrest of Adais would likely also be deemed “illegal and abusive.”
Hamas doesn’t even try very hard to hide its criminal and systematic abuse of Palestinian children. A televised video is available for anyone to see children from ages of 3 to 5 dressed like suicide bombers, 10 to 13 year-olds embracing a collective death wish, while 14-year-olds prepare for suicide attacks, sometimes wishing farewell to their beaming parents.
The UN-backed Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers tries to redress such human rights abuse that spans the globe from Africa to Southeast Asia. Indeed, even the UN Security Council designated a “Red Hand Day” to highlight such ultimate serial abuse of children. Yet Hamas openly commits war crimes, not only by targeting Israeli toddlers with rockets, but against Palestinian children who are sacrificed as “human shields.” Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, leverage control of the school curricula, the mosques, and TV to promote a culture that reveres death over life, that prepares youngsters for the next war.
Already in 2012, journalist Nicolas Pelham, no friend of Israel, wrote in The Journal of Palestinian Studies, condemning a “cavalier approach to child labor and tunnel fatalities [that has] damaged the [Palestinian] movement’s standing with human-rights groups, despite government assurances dating back to 2008 that it was considering curbs”. During a police patrol that the author was permitted to accompany in December 2011, 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. At least 160 individuals have been killed in the tunnels, according to Hamas officials.
Far from imitating the song lyric about constructing a “stairway to paradise,” Hamas prefers to build tunnels to hell.
Embarrassed by revelations, such as Pelham’s about high casualties against child suicide tunnel builders, Hamas decided that the best defense is a good Big Lie offense. It launched a new PR campaign to coincide with Israel’s upcoming 70th anniversary- accusing the Israel Army for “crimes” of killing innocent Palestinian children. No mention of Hamas’ child recruits for violence and terrorism.
Whatever her motivation, McCollum and her nine co-sponsors unfortunately are serving as willing instruments of Hamas’ inversion of this awful truth.
And now, the promised Palestinian “days of rage” over President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. To be sure, it will be young Palestinians that the “brave” leaders of Hamas and Fatah will use as cannon fodder for their bloody photo ops. So the real question remains: Who will finally stand up and demand that Palestinian youth really be protected– from their corrupt and cynical leaders and from the morally bankrupt “Protection Act”?
Rabbi Abraham Cooper is Associate Dean and Director of Global Social Action of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Dr. Harold Brackman, a historian is a consultant to the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Who Will Protect Children From The Morally Bankrupt Palestinian Children Protection Act? : http://ift.tt/2k2g7gB
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