The Israeli Children's Crusade in Gaza

A few days ago, below the fold in the local newspaper, there was a picture of a Palestinian boy crying at some relative's funeral. It didn't seem very much like the heartwrenching images that prompt me to sympathy with Palestine; those are usually, but not always, girls, deeply stoic and blood-streaked. Then I realized where the discordant note was coming from.

These propaganda photos have many fathers. Some, the most affecting because they show the truth, come from Al Jazeerah and its ilk. Others, like the boy, come from the disengenuous, the liars and the mockers, for whom that kid in the paper was just a crybaby Palestinian brat being taught a well-deserved lesson by the sternly even-handed IDF.

Maybe my cynicism has become tinged with prejudice? I tried to find the picture of that boy on the Internet, but I couldn't. Instead, and this stuff can't be faked, I saw photographs of dead children with missing bits of skull and brains slopped out of their natural containers onto the ground. You don't see brains much these days — it's not a popular variety meat at the butcher's counter. But once you've seen the brawn laid out on butcher's paper, you know what that stuff leaking out of children's heads is.

It's not news, of course. Only obscene.