Syrian Children are Children Too

When a gunman entered the school and shot dead 26 people in Newtown, Connecticut, the breaking news was a heart-breaking news. We were all saddened by the story, parents of six year old children hugged them tighter, and people asked one question over and over again, “Why?” Why would anyone want to hurt six year old children? Innocent children who didn’t understand evil until the day they experienced it firsthand that day? To find six-year-olds with multiple shot wounds was so devastating, that the Medical Examiner commented,  “I’ve been at this for a third of a century … but this probably is the worst I have seen or the worst that I know of any of my colleagues having seen,” he said.

But in Syria every news is heart-breaking news. Yesterday, dozens of people have been killed and many more wounded in a Syrian government air strike that hit a bakery where a crowd was queuing for bread. Many of the victims were women and children. Just because there aren’t reporters lurking all over Syria, taking interviews about the children’s favorite color, hobbies, or cartoon characters doesn’t make them any less important.  Their mothers suffered the back aches associated with carrying them around for nine months. Some of them watched their children say the first words, and curl their tiny fingers around an adult hand, and smile for no particular reason. And some of them watched their children die from gun wounds and disappear under the rubble of collapsed buildings, forever gone.

And it’s not just Syria.

19 November 2012: one of the top stories from Gaza was , “Four children killed in single Israeli air strike.”

17 December 2012: 10 Afghan children killed in bomb explosion in eastern province.

And that’s just the stuff that happened in the last one and a half month.

But the thing is , in in Syria, Palestine, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, th0se children are grouped into numbers to reduce airwaves and sound bytes, and any resulting shockwaves that could reverberate across the world. We don’t get to hear their names, and their favorite holiday events, whether they liked to color with crayons or preferred paint. Some of them lose their parents and siblings in the same attacks, and so their names would just remain on the birth and death certificates, if those even existed.

So Syrian children are children too. They are not collateral damage. Palestinian children are children too. They are not future terrorists. In other words, Muslim children are children too. They are not a threat to anybody, especially when they’re carrying their pacifiers. So let’s not forget them.

I wanted an image of a child from Syria and many of them showed dead bodies that were too disturbing. (Image from http://theglobaljournal.net/news/world/unicef-hundreds-of-children-killed-in-syria.html)

The Irony of School Shootings

It is popular to see people advocating the social message telling people that education is the key to get out of the ghetto and lead a respectable life away from drugs, guns and gangs. That makes ‘school’ shootings quite ironic if you think about it. People go to school to get away from a life of violence, but the hierarchies and status quo of the school system are conducive to nurturing a bullying culture until one  might end up in an explosion of violence, literally.

What opened the topic is that I read about a shooting in some university in Oakland on April 2. Even though investigations for this case are still going on, previous school shootings like the infamous Columbine one tend to connect these acts of violence to bullying.

And to think that the movie “Bully” hit selected theatres on March 30.

Talking about acts of violence, some terrorists blew up places in Mombasa  as can be read in this article. The message from the attackers reported in the article, “The Kenyan public must be aware that the more Kenyan troops continue to persecute innocent Muslims of Somalia, the less secure Kenyan cities will be; and the more oppression the Muslims of Somalia feel, the more constricted Kenyan life will be.”

Now I don’t know the validity of this statement since it was posted online, but the irony is they make these claims even though they attack the Coastal region which is filled with Muslims from different background including Kemenies, Indians and Somalis themselves. So what are they trying to do? Give mixed messages? It’s as if they are saying that to pay for Kenyan troops killing innocent Muslims of Somalia, they’ll kill innocent people in Kenya some of whom could have been Muslims, and where does that leave us….Conspiracy theorists might actually start to see something here.

Whether the victims are Muslims or not, these attacks are not justified at all. Attacking helpless civilians who might as well have been armed with butter knives against grenades is not the way to go about protesting against Operation Linda Nchi.  The main reason Operation Linda Nchi was initiated was because Somali militants were suspected to have kidnapped several foreign tourists and aid workers inside of Kenya – Kenya not Somalia. So if they step over the border first, what do they expect exactly, a Taraabu dance??!!!

In this case of Kenya vs. Al-Shabaab….who is the bully now?