Suffer The Children

Children have been abducted, abused, forced to commit atrocities as unwilling members of militias dedicated to destroying the civil infrastructure of many countries in Africa, some 300,000 of them at present, taking up AK-47s by demand of the adults who control their destinies. From Uganda, to Rwanda, Liberia to Algeria, Angola to Burundi, Congo to Central African Republic, Sudan to Sierra Leone, children have been inducted into death-dealing.

The message is out there. There are so many children, they're so vulnerable, so helpless, so incapable of judgement, so culpable to threats against their own lives, they become ripe for this most evil of exploitation of their innocence and their fear. If it's all right for Africa, it's all right for countries of the Middle East. There have been well-publicized accounts of al-Qaeda submitting to using distraught women and young girls to prosecute their agenda of suicide missions.

But then, you don't need al-Qaeda, just the determination of adults with completely blackened souls that equip them with the required inhumane perspective that no sacrifice is too great for a child to bear. In Iraq a 15-year-old orphan, a young woman already married to a Sunni Muslim, whose family conspired to drug the girl, wrap her in an explosive vest, and send her out to a busy market square in Baquba. She, like the mentally retarded girls before her, was innocence abused incarnate.

"My husband took me to see some of his relatives I'd not seen before. I stayed the night.... Then, in the morning, they brought me breakfast with apricot juice. It tasted funny, so I asked what was in it. They told me 'nothing, just drink'." She never got past the security checkpoint, her long voluminous garment casting suspicion; her explosives vest was soon revealed, and she taken into custody.

As in Iraq, so goes it also in the Palestinian Territories, where pre-teen children are being taught terrorist activities, given live firearms training from the Salah al-din Brigades, of the Popular Resistance Committees. Their mission is to go out and kill children: "I want these parents to get a taste of what it's like to have your children killed, just as the Palestinians experience every day", said an 11-year-old terror trainee.

There are photos showing boys handling Israeli-furnished M-16 rifles, the weight difficult to support; the rifles given in trust to the Palestinian Authority police. "I would rather die fighting the occupation than die at home from a missile, which is what happened to hundreds of Palestinian children", said the boy. The critical propaganda fed these children; the critical training and exposure to militancy and death-dealing successfully imbibed.

This is the considered, humane response of Palestinian militias, the organized and determined terror groups, battling the "occupation", unwilling to dedicate themselves to mutual peace and respect. Military training aimed at older boys and young men is insufficient unto their need;, they've recognized the successful prospect of training child killers to fulfill their futures.

According to a spokesman, "The Palestinian people support the resistance and understand that we are responding to the occupation and that these children are being recruited to help defend their homes and their land. We are preparing these children to fight the enemy, as the enemy does not differentiate between children and adults; it wants to annihilate the entire Palestinian nation."

The lovingly, carefully cultivated land in Gaza that saw the forced evacuation of Jewish settlers in 2005 by the Israeli government, in the futile hope that this unilateral step would be seen as an advance toward a peaceful settlement, that the Palestinians would make the most of the opportunity given them to become productive and self-supporting there, saw a military parade of armed terrorists on Saturday.

"We will unleash the fires of hell if the Zionist enemy continues its crimes" claimed the parading group's military chief, Abu Hamzeh. "We're getting ready for the next round. The Zionist enemy will have neither peace nor security while it occupies our land." So much for peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

So much for cherishing Palestinian children and protecting them from harm. So much for preparing children to become killers and justifying the inhumane atrocity with pride and honour.