The Deadliest Place for Children

Nicholas Kristof's latest column in The New York Times highlights Angola, where despite being a relatively rich oil and diamond country, has the highest rate of child mortality in the world. This high mortality rate is due to a complicated mix of poor nutrition and lack of access to health care.

Photo: The New York Times

Update on an Assymetrical Conflict

As of today, the ongoing conflict between Israel and Gaza has resulted in an estimated 213 Palestinians dead versus one Israeli dead. As with other Israeli assaults on Gaza, the conflict is grossly asymmetrical. Canadian for Justice and Peace in the Middle East explains:

"Israel is a military superpower, with F-15 fighter jets, AH-64 Apache helicopters, sophisticated missiles, an anti-rocket defence system (and nuclear arms.) Hamas and other militant groups have primitive and ineffective – often “home made” – rockets." 

Indeed, Hamas rockets have killed one Israeli man who was delivering food to Israeli military personnel. But Israel seems to ignore the international law of proportionality, which permits countries to respond to threats, but the response must be proportional to the threat faced. If the rockets coming from Gaza have killed one person and Israel's response has killed over 200, then Israel's response should be questioned by the international community.

Of course, firing rockets from Gaza violates international law as well, for Hamas is certainly targeting civilians as well as military targets. And UNRWA found that Hamas stored 20 missiles inside an abandoned school in Gaza, which is also a violation of international law. But the brutal strikes on Palestinian civilian homes, cafes, and other civilian sites (whether or not Israel provided warnings to the inhabitants) violates international law too. For example, today, four young boys were killed by Israeli bombs while playing on a beach in Gaza. The New York Times photojournalist Tyler Hicks wrote a short piece about his experience photographing the event surrounding their deaths, noting

"A small metal shack with no electricity or running water on a jetty in the blazing seaside sun does not seem like the kind of place frequented by Hamas militants, the Israel Defense Forces’ intended targets. Children, maybe four feet tall, dressed in summer clothes, running from an explosion, don’t fit the description of Hamas fighters, either."

Below is a photo from the Middle East Children's Alliance of a Palestinian mother reacting to news that her son was among the four children killed on a Gaza beach. I don't usually like to post photos of such visceral pain and suffering, but I think it is important in this context, where Palestinians can be dehumanized through media reports and Israeli news conferences.

Photo: Ayman Mohyeldin

The fear/anger/sadness was also reported upon from another New York Times editorial written by Rula Salameh describing her experience in East Jerusalem, which has been threatened by long-range missiles from Hamas as well as other sites throughout Israeli.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

Anne Fadiman's excellent examination of the clash of two cultures - one the Hmong refugees, and the other, Western medicine - not only proves the importance of holistic child development and a family-centered approach, but also draws attention to the struggle many families in forced displacement must face. The following passage, describing how families with young children coped during their flight, is horrifying, yet still (unfortunately) within the boundaries of comprehension in the context of armed conflict.

"Many people carried children on their backs. The babies presented a potentially fatal problem: they made noise. Silence was so essential that one Hmong woman, now living in Wisconsin, recalled that her son, who was a month old when the family left their home village, didn't know a single word when they arrived in Thailand two years later, because no one had talked that entire period except in occasional whispers. Nearly every Hmong family I met in Merced had a story to tell about a baby - a relative's child, a neighbor's child, a member of the group they escaped with - who had been drugged with opium. 'When the babies would cry,' a young mother named Yia Thao Xiong told me, 'we would mix the opium in the water in a cup and give it to them so they would be quiet and the soldiers would not hear, because if they heard the babies, they would kill all of us. Usually the baby just went to sleep. But if you give too much by mistake, the baby dies. That happened many, many times.' When I heard these stories, I recalled something I had once read about an Israeli child, hiding from Palestinian terrorists, who, when she began to cry, was accidentally smothered to death by her mother. That death, in 1979, was said to have driven the entire Israeli nation into mourning. The horror of the opium overdoses was not only that such things happened to the Hmong, but that they happened so frequently that, far from driving a nation into mourning, they never made headlines, never caught the world's ear, never reached beyond a community of families that numbly accepted them as a fact of life" (p. 162).