Children Dying in Gazza: That's What War Is, You Know...

 

Images of children dead and dying, or simply stunned into silence, coming out of Gazza are horrific, no matter what your background. 

Any human being has got to respond to these.

Gazza

Since the advent of total war, civilian casualties, the slaughter of innocents, has become a constant, and yet, curiously, sometimes we are focused on these deaths and sometimes not; sometimes we totally ignore the deaths of children, mothers, innocents and sometimes it's all we hear about.

Some have noticed you never see a Hamas soldier in any of the photos coming out of Gazza. It may be the images have been controlled and restricted by Hamas, so the war looks as if it is being waged exclusively against defenseless women and children, so there may be some manipulation by the Hamas propaganda machine. 

Oddly, the Israeli women and children killed by Hamas with it's surprise attack which started the war are nowhere to be seen.

 But the fact remains, children have died and are dying still in Gazza.

Gazza

Watching PBS News Hour and listening to NPR, my impression is that Israel is committing senseless war crimes out of sheer rage, or possibly out of carelessness or simple indifference.

Hirsoshima

And yet, I have asked myself, are children, their mothers and women not always part of the casualty lists in modern wars?  Once total war is launched, is it not guaranteed that innocents will be slaughtered?

Tokyo

Were no children killed at Hiroshima?

Did American and British bombers not kill women and children in Dresden?

Dresden

Did no children die in the London Blitz, when Germany bombed England? 

London

We distinguish between those children killed by American soldiers when they massacred Indian children in their villages at Wounded Knee and other reservations from those killed inadvertently in bombings. It's hard to know, but from what reports we have, the Hamas soldiers swept through villages killing children and raping women in something more akin to Wounded Knee than to the London Blitz.

When children were "collateral damage" from American firebombing of Japanese cities, we never saw photos of that. Children deliberately imprisoned in concentration camps are clearly a crime, but children who die as bombs explode at a wedding in Afghanistan or Iraq, those are just accidents.

Nanking

But Palestinian children are dying in what we do not excuse as accidents. 

Through all this,  at my back, in my ears, I always hear ringing those immortal words of Slim Charles in "The Wire:"  

"That's what war is, you know."