Selective anger and the killing of children

One of the more disheartening things about hanging around internet fora is to experience the sheer amount of ignorance, bloody-mindedness and sheer racism, often dressed up in more “acceptable” clothes like anti-terrorism and antitheism.

And each time an alleged Muslim commits a terrorist crime, of course, the fora boil over.

A few days ago, a lone gunman took a cafe full of people in Sydney hostage. The coverage on BBC et al was saturation level, like a Hollywood movie circus. The Australian people, though, almost all refused to be panicked, or to target their brown/Muslim compatriots. They made it clear to all that this wasn’t a religious war.

Well, except for one Australian who put up something starting “The Religion Of Peace At It Again”. When it turned out that the maniac responsible was a lone nut who hadn’t found any mosque willing to indulge him, I waited to see if said Aussie would issue a corrective. You know already that he didn’t, don’t you? I’m sure you do.

 Then there was the Tehrik-i-Taliban attack on a military school in Peshawar, in which over a hundred and thirty kids were killed, along with plenty of others. You know how all of a sudden the net boiled over with indignation? The media too. How dare those evil Taliban kill kids? What utter unprincipled evil. (And the subtext, sometimes openly uttered, sometimes not: Islam Is To Blame.)

I often think these days that a lot of people, especially in the west, should go down on their knees in gratitude to Islamic terrorists, whether the cannibal headhunters of ISIS or mere terror bombers like al Qaeda or fidayeen attackers like the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan. These terrorists, after all, give them a perfect excuse to indulge their racist impulses to their hearts’ content, all in the name of being “objective”.

So, back to these Taliban, only they weren’t Taliban. They were Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, a completely different organisation comprising Pakistani Pashtuns who are of different tribes from the Taliban, who are Afghans and who owe allegiance to Mullah Omar. Not to reduce the enormity of the attack on the kids, but the only reason anyone would mix up the two is ignorance or deliberately as an excuse to continue the occupation of Afghanistan.

One of the blackly funny parts of the anger over the attacks is how, you know, many of these furious ladies and gentlemen would have a hard time locating Afghanistan or Pakistan on the outline map of the world, let alone differentiate between the Taliban and the TTP. These are the same people who would rush to blame Islam, despite the fact that the TTP themselves said they had launched the attack in retaliation for the Pakistani Army’s actions against the Pashtun tribes of the Afghan frontier.

I get it that people are furious. Of course it’s condemnable when civilians are targeted, kids or otherwise. So where was this fury when the US starved half a million Iraqi children to death in the 1990s? Where was this fury when five hundred Palestinian children were massacred by Zionist tanks and bombs in Gaza only a few months ago? Did these ladies and gentlemen get hot and bothered when the EUNazi junta in Rump Ukraine shelled schools in Lugansk and Donetsk, murdering children? Do we hear anything of this anger when the Nobel Peace Prizident’s drones blow Yemeni, Afghan and Pakistani children to pieces, well, every day?

Gaza, 2014. Go ahead, tell that guy that Islam, not Zionists, killed that kid. [Image from globalresearch.com]

And that brings me to the point. If you get angry when children are killed, let’s see you getting angry when all children are killed. Not just pick and choose when the kids getting killed are on the “right” side. Is everyone ready for that?

The Beslan Massacre, 1 September 2004. The top Chechen terrorist warlords responsible are today sheltered and protected in London and Washington. 

I’m not holding my breath.

Also read:

Killing Children.