Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Outrage over child soldiers: "Save the Children" forgot some
The British arm of the charity "Save the Children" is getting some pick-up of a press release decrying the recruitment of child soldiers ten years after the promulgation of the Cape Town Principles against that practice. According to Save the Children, there are 13 offending jurisdictions:
Fighting forces are recruiting and using child soldiers within Afghanistan, Burundi, Chad, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast, Myanmar, Nepal, Phillipines, Sri Lanka, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda.
Save the Children "forgot" to notice some child soldiers. Here are the names of just a few of them (age at death or capture): Ismail Abu Nada (12), Anwar Ill Azi Mustafa Hamarna (13), Yosef Basem Yosef Zakut (14), Abdullah Quran (12), Hussam Abdo (16), Nasser Awartani (15), Muataz Takhsin Karini (16), Ahmed Bushkar (17), Ayub Maaruf (16), Aamer Alfar (16), Mahmoud Tabouq (15 or 16), and Hassan Hashash (15).
They are Palestinian Arabs.
The question is, did Save the Children ignore them because it does not care about Palestinian Arabs, or because it supports the cause of the armies recruiting them to such a degree that it is unwilling to condemn their crime even in a press release devoted to the subject? What could be the third explanation?
18 Comments:
By 
Dan Trabue, at
Tue Feb 06, 08:48:00 AM:
Your hunch is right: Save the Children wants to see Palestinian children in the military. It only wants to see other children saved from forced service in the military but it hates Palestinian children and wants to see them serve as soldiers. Also, Save the Children is hoping that these children will kill Israeli children.
It's all there in their mission statement.
Geez.
By SR, at
Tue Feb 06, 08:54:00 AM:
Must have been an oversight then Dan huh?
By Charlottesvillain, at
Tue Feb 06, 09:16:00 AM:
There is a third explanation, and its simple: STC intentionally refrained from listing Palestine among the offenders, because doing so would deeply offend a good portion of their fund raising base. Associations such as these are only one or two fund raising cycles away from oblivion, and keeping the donors happy is job #1.
By 
, at
Tue Feb 06, 09:41:00 AM:
"Save the Children" is, and always has been a haven of scoundrels on the left. (What fiend could possibly be against this concept?) Indeed, H. Clinton and her mentors early in her career used this very skillfully. The result was an attempt to create legislation allowing children to sue their parents, guaranteeing intellectual chaos and goverment disfunction, as if we didn't have enough of that already.
By , at
Tue Feb 06, 10:30:00 AM:
I'm pretty sure it's okay to have child conscripts as long as they're tasked with killing Jews.
By , at
Tue Feb 06, 10:53:00 AM:
Child solders is nothing new the nazis did it near the end of WW II they had young boys in uniform and wealding weapons and so did the communists as well
By , at
Tue Feb 06, 12:41:00 PM:
Why not list them, John?
After all it's the article of the Left that suicide bombers, terrorists, and such are due all rights for soldiers while civilians and victims are due no rights whatsoever. Not even their survivors able to sue foreign governments (such as the PA) for killing their family members.
At any rate, the anti-semitism of the Left is well known. Stalin was an anti-Semite, and for most Leftists thats' enough. Certainly Save the Children has no objection to Palestinian Child suicide bombers, nor the extensive glorification in Palestinian and Muslim media of the same. As long as they are killing Jews of any age the Left is fine with that.
By , at
Tue Feb 06, 06:56:00 PM:
Palestinian brainwashed child soldiers
Click on "to view the full movie - click here".
Is that OK SJ?
Will that remove your head from your ass? - It's state organised thoughout the ME, in school books and Media, 27/7/365.25, from birth.
Ain't you got no learning curve?
By , at
Tue Feb 06, 07:19:00 PM:
By Gary Rosen, at
Wed Feb 07, 02:40:00 AM:
Yeah, that's great Shochu John, that the Palestinians are using kids as suicide bombers, not soldiers! And how about that time they sent a retarded teenage kid as a suicide bomber? I'm sure you can figure out a way to blame that one on the Jews, too.
By Gary Rosen, at
Wed Feb 07, 03:18:00 AM:
"Save the Children wants to see Palestinian children in the military. It only wants to see other children saved from forced service in the military but it hates Palestinian children and wants to see them serve as soldiers. Also, Save the Children is hoping that these children will kill Israeli children."
First thing Dan has said that makes a lick of sense.
By , at
Wed Feb 07, 12:27:00 PM:
"After all it's the article of the Left that suicide bombers, terrorists, and such are due all rights for soldiers while civilians and victims are due no rights whatsoever. Not even their survivors able to sue foreign governments (such as the PA) for killing their family members."
I'm sorry, where do "the Left" claim that? Apart from in your imaginary world, I mean.
"At any rate, the anti-semitism of the Left is well known. Stalin was an anti-Semite, and for most Leftists thats' enough. Certainly Save the Children has no objection to Palestinian Child suicide bombers, nor the extensive glorification in Palestinian and Muslim media of the same. As long as they are killing Jews of any age the Left is fine with that."
Apart from the obvious idiocy of the equation "Save the Children = the Left", what evidence do you have for the apparently "well known" anti-semitism of the Left? And the claim that Save the Children has no objection to Palestinian child suicide bombers?
Oh, and maybe you missed the part where the press release calls on "All governments and armed groups immediately to release all children associated with fighting forces, and to put a stop to all on-going recruitment and re-recruitment." So how does that not include Palestinian armed groups?
By Assistant Village Idiot, at
Thu Feb 08, 01:03:00 AM:
SJ may be correct that it is numbers, not ages, that catch the eye of "Save The Children." I think the original explanation of ignoring inconvenient information is more likely, but his is at least plausible.
merkur, Save the Children is definitely leftist. Not all of the left may agree with them, but that is their natural habitat. As to the article of the left in granting rights to terrorists, that has been much of the debate concerning captured terrorists. There has indeed been advocacy, mostly from the left that such be treated as regular POW's or others with specified rights.
You seem to be saying "Well, not all people of the left are that way, so you can't make that generalization. My suggestion is that those others, if they are more responsible, should elect more people who de facto position is not moral equivalence between Israel and Palestine. Problem solved.
By , at
Thu Feb 08, 12:59:00 PM:
Dear Assistant Village Idiot:
Thanks for the reply, but you haven't actually answered my question. Where, exactly, do "the Left" - in this case, Save the Children - claim that "suicide bombers, terrorists, and such are due all rights for soldiers while civilians and victims are due no rights whatsoever"?
I don't have a problem about generalisations about the left, the right, or any other position on the political spectrum. What I do have a problem with is the slack argument that "the Left" is "well known" for its anti-semitism, in the absence of any evidence at all.
Oh, and using Stalin doesn't count, because it's just a leftwing equivalent of Godwin's Law.
By , at
Fri Feb 09, 04:03:00 AM:
Another with their head up their ass
By , at
Fri Feb 09, 11:13:00 AM:
Nimrod, your intellect sparkles as brightly as your repartee. Care to actually address the question, or sit on your ass while the world burns?
By Assistant Village Idiot, at
Fri Feb 09, 10:04:00 PM:
Well first, merkur, you should look up what Godwin's law really is. Credibility score that you actually know what you're talking about on anything: minus one to you.
The formulation that civilians and victims have no rights usually refers to the fact that the rights of people who are dead are rather moot. If you are choosing to interpret that statement to mean that Anonymous was suggesting that citizens would be arbitrarily losing their rights to drive mopeds, you would be technically correct as far as the syntax goes, but otherwise essentially stupid. I t is common when people are discussing murderers on trial, for example, to note that their victims are not receiving the same rights. This was analogous. There are some limits to that position, of course, but as you chose to take another line of attack, I won't discuss those here.
As to the left and antisemitism, it has been quite a surprise to those of us who were on the left in the last generation. The Jews seemed the one untouchable group, and rightfully so. But liberal Jewish magazines such as Tikkun began noticing over 20 years ago an increase in support for the PA which took the form of identifying the Jews as oppressors. Since that time, it has increased slowly but steadily. Black activists increasingly identified Jews as oppressors, and bearing essential responsibility for the problems of the ME. Universities began to give prominence to speakers who made such claims, and employ professors whose interpretation of victimhood and colonialism led them inexorably to positions of identifying Israel as an aggressor, and American Jews as covert supporters of this aggression.
But still, this was in some sense still the fringes, merely voices in the debate, and none of us thought it would go much further.
The the European left began defending the violence against Israeli civilians, and pushing their governments to remove support and implied legitimacy from the Israeli government in general, regardless of their response. This has grown to the extent that Oxbridge scholars now refuse to have anything to do with Israeli academics.
The American left has followed suit, but more slowly. Until quite recently they restricted their official displeasure to the Israeli government. Enough comments and actions would leak out to convince those of us familiar with leftist phrasing that groups of American Jews were being described as well, but there was little overt enough to call them on it. In the last few years it has become blatant on the far left.
More recently, prominent political figures such as Wesley Clark and Jimmy Carter have made comments about the influence of American Jews in foreign policy that go beyond mere calls for "balance." These are both figures who would have been considered conservative Democrats at some point in their careers. Now that they are allies of nutcases, I don't know what we call them, but they are not fringe-y.
Are six links enough? If not, you can google antisemitism left and start on the 1.3 million links there. Thanks for playing.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=6651
http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_7_23_02td.html
http://www.jafi.org.il/education/antisemitism/nf/left1.html
http://www.aijac.org.au/updates/Oct-03/311003.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_antisemitism
http://www.workersliberty.org/node/5041
Okay, my verification letters are wtcjuz. That's just weird.
By , at
Fri Feb 16, 10:31:00 AM:
"Well first, merkur, you should look up what Godwin's law really is. Credibility score that you actually know what you're talking about on anything: minus one to you."
I know exactly what Godwin's law is. I was pointing out that by invoking Stalin earlier in the post, "Anonymous" was effectively going to a leftwing equivalent of Godwin's law, which doesn't really help the discussion. So I'm not sure why you're making a point about credibility, except to casually demonstrate that you have limited reading comprehension skills.
"The formulation that civilians and victims have no rights usually refers to the fact that the rights of people who are dead are rather moot. If you are choosing to interpret that statement to mean that Anonymous was suggesting that citizens would be arbitrarily losing their rights to drive mopeds, you would be technically correct as far as the syntax goes, but otherwise essentially stupid."
Yeah... I'm not sure how what you're talking about relates to what I was actually asking. Anonymous stated that "it's the article of the Left that suicide bombers, terrorists, and such are due all rights for soldiers while civilians and victims are due no rights whatsoever." I asked for evidence that the Left - in this case, Save the Children - claim this.
Anonymous went on to say that "Save the Children has no objection to Palestinian Child suicide bombers, nor the extensive glorification in Palestinian and Muslim media of the same. As long as they are killing Jews of any age the Left is fine with that." I then asked for evidence that this is Save the Children's position.
Listen, I hate to be a pest, but could you actually read what I posted before responding?
"As to the left and antisemitism, it has been quite a surprise to those of us who were on the left in the last generation. The Jews seemed the one untouchable group, and rightfully so. But liberal Jewish magazines such as Tikkun began noticing over 20 years ago an increase in support for the PA which took the form of identifying the Jews as oppressors. Since that time, it has increased slowly but steadily."
Yeah, fair enough. The argument for the so-called New Anti-semitism makes a fair case that the left is hiding its anti-semitism behind a veil of anti-Zionism. I don't buy into this argument for a number of reasons, but the simplest one is that it puts a large number of Jews both inside and outside Israel squarely in the "anti-semitic" camp. You may disagree, and that's fine too.
In that context, the sentence makes sense; but Anonymous very specifically said that "Stalin was an anti-Semite, and for most Leftists thats' enough," then links Save the Children to this argument. Perhaps I should have been more specific, but I was essentially questioning the idea that the New Anti-Semitism takes it cue from Stalin, and further questioning how valid it is to tie Save the Children UK to this line of thinking.
"More recently, prominent political figures such as Wesley Clark and Jimmy Carter have made comments..."
I hate to break it to you, but it's only in America that Clark and Carter would be considered "left"; in global terms, but particularly from a European perspective, their politics are right-wing.
"Are six links enough? If not, you can google antisemitism left and start on the 1.3 million links there. Thanks for playing."
Thanks for having me!
