Posted on 12/23/2003 1:29:08 PM PST by anotherview
Dec. 23, 2003
All war and no play
By FRIMET ROTH
For a secular nation, we excel at self-flagellation. Monks could take lessons from us.
Despite our already strained consciences, we seem eager to shoulder the blame for every injustice floating around. And often we get a little help from our European friends, kindly pointing a reproachful finger at us.
So I suppose I should have expected an article like Ruth Sinai's in Haaretz, "Humiliation can scar a boy for life" (December 1), about the UNICEF Conference on "How to Protect Israeli and Palestinian Children from the Intifada."
UNICEF has grown passionate about assisting Palestinian children with day camps and other play activities. But, the article stressed, it fears that Israel's curfews are liable to torpedo one such project - the handball competitions.
Says one UNICEF official: "In an environment of arrests, violence, funerals, closures and humiliations, the opportunities for children to play and grow up like normal children are very limited. The elementary right of children to play as it is entrenched in the convention on children's rights is forgotten at times of intense violence.
Is no one in UNICEF brave enough to speak the truth? The Palestinians themselves have caused their children's plight. The conference and Sinai both carefully skirted this reality.
Sinai quoted the UN Representative for the Issue of Children in Areas of Conflict, Henrik Hagstrom. He reported to the conference that "his office has begun 'outing' the countries that use children to fight their wars."
"The tools to halt the practice are available to the international community," he noted. "It is only a question of the political world's will to use them."
Sinai added that Hagstrom's office is busy gathering incriminating material with which to prosecute Congolese rebels who have drafted boys aged between 9 and 17 to fight against government forces.
Had I expected Sinai to explore the murky issue of the Palestinian Authority's exploitation of children, I would have been disappointed. She wrote: "In the same context, many of the conference participants cited Israel's refusal to enable international supervision in Gaza and the West Bank."
Undoubtedly a typo. She surely meant "In another unrelated context." Because had she remained in the context of child-soldiers, Sinai would have told us that at the same time that UNICEF entertained some 40,000 Palestinian children in their camps during the summer of 2003, the Palestinian Authority ran its own camps. These catered to some 25,000 children and included the sport of firearms use, the design of Molotov cocktails, how to succeed at kidnapping, and the art of the ambush.
Operation SICK (standing for Stop Inciting Children to Kill) describes the PA's camps, among other information about the exploitation of children by militias, on its Web site. SICK is an independent network of students combating abuse of this kind. It is nondenominational, nonpartisan and globally focused. It operates via campus networking and government lobbying.
SICK has this to say about the Palestinian attitude toward children: "The Palestinian Authority's Muslim religious establishment - the Wakf - plays a central role in the incitement of the Palestinian public in general, and of the children in particular. The Imams glorify the martyrdom of children, promising a glorious paradise to those brave enough to die while attacking."
FAINT VOICES of criticism of this sort of thing can be heard inside the Palestinian Authority. In July 2002, a Kuwaiti newspaper reported Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) as saying: "I am against little children going out to die. At least 40 children in Rafah lost their arms from the throwing of Bangalore torpedoes [pipe bombs]."
But voices like that are isolated. Mainly what Palestinians hear is Yasser Arafat. In January 2002, he was interviewed on PATV:
Journalist: "What message would you like to send to the Palestinian people in general, and in particular, to the Palestinian children?"
Arafat: "This child, who is grasping the stone, facing the tank, is it not the greatest message to the world when that hero becomes a Shahid? We are proud of them..."
Could these revelations possibly explain the following statistic cited in the Haaretz article? "In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the number of Palestinian child victims is particularly high, over 50%."
Yes, the children's elementary right to play explicitly guaranteed in the Treaty for Children's Rights is forgotten in periods of intensive violence. Spot on. But the question is: Forgotten by whom?
Could Arafat be one of the culprits? Is it possible that in diverting nearly a billion dollars in public funds to his own personal accounts, as the CBS 60 Minutes television program recently reported, Arafat was momentarily forgetting the children's play needs?
Perhaps when the Palestinian Authority wires Suha Arafat her $100,000 monthly allowance - pilfered from public funds once again - Arafat's lackeys are again forgetting the children's deprivation.
And when the Palestinian Authority doles out millions of dollars to the families of dead terrorists, is anyone concerned about the play needs of Palestinian children?
In her book Funding Evil; How Terrorism is Financed - and How to Stop It, Rachel Ehrenfeld writes: "[Of] a total of $250 million allocated annually to the PLO, $10 million was designated for the 'families of the martyrs.'"
The mind boggles at the creative activities UNICEF could have offered Palestinian children with such sums of money.
UNICEF'S PROFESSED worry about Palestinian children disturbs me for another reason: its exclusion of Israeli children.
Their rights have been violated by Palestinians throughout this intifada without UNICEF batting an eyelid. Hundreds of our children have been murdered while eating, sleeping, studying, traveling to school - and not while pointing any guns in a quest for the shahid's paradise.
Hundreds more of our children have been doomed to eternal longing for their dead mothers, fathers, brothers or sisters - and sometimes for all of the above. And UNICEF could not care less.
The writer is a freelancer living in Jerusalem.
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