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Who can be a child?
Trapped in a bullet-riddled car in Gaza City, surrounded by her dead relatives, six-year-old Hind Rajab is pleading with the Red Crescent for help. That help, in the form of a medical team, eventually arrived – only to be slaughtered on arrival. Hind was also killed, her decomposing body discovered weeks later.
Back in January, little Hind died in one of the most horrific deaths imaginable. Unlike most more than 13,000 other dead children in Gaza, Hind is written broadly. Still, despite the fact that Hind said in a recorded phone call that Israeli tanks were firing at the car, Israel refused to accept any blame. They said the IDF had absolutely nothing to do with Hind’s death and were not close to her. Ann Al Jazeera analysis and a Washington Post investigation, meanwhile, found it to be what some people might call “inaccurate” and what others might describe as a “blatant lie.” Satellite images found that Israeli armored vehicles were in the area and that the damage caused to the ambulance and the car was consistent with Israeli weapons.
Again Hind is not just an anonymous statistic rotting in a mass grave, like many dead Palestinians. Her death is documented and I encourage you to read about her if you haven’t already. I’m not here to recount the nightmarish details; I’m here simply to say this: Hind was six years old when she was killed. six. She was a child. A six-year-old is a child.
Why am I stating the obvious? Because the fact that Palestinian children are children it doesn’t seem obvious to many in the western media. Apparently not obvious to CNN anchor Cassie Hunt. During a segment about Columbia University students taking over Hamilton Hall and renaming it Hinds Hall, Hunt explained to the viewers: “Hind is a reference to a woman killed in Gaza.” A a woman.
We all sometimes express things imperfectly. But for Hunt – who has young children herself – casually referring to a six-year-old as a “woman” isn’t just clumsy wording. Rather, it appears to be yet another example of what some CNN staffers have described as the network’s pro-Israel bias so dramatic it amounts to “journalistic abuse“. In February, the Guardian reported that some CNN staff feared the network was “acting as a surrogate censor on behalf of the Israeli government,” systematically downplaying Palestinian suffering and uncritically amplifying Israeli narratives. In March, the Intercept similarly reported that international news anchor Christiane Amanpour confronted network executives about “double standards” in CNN reports.
It’s not just CNN, of course. There is a long history (one that dates back to before October 7) of the mainstream media dehumanizing Palestinians. Part of this dehumanization is the inability to see Palestinian children as children. In January, for example, Sky News reported on IS shooting a child in the West Bank with the following language: “A stray bullet accidentally ended up in the front of the van, killing a three- or four-year-old young lady.” Meanwhile, the Washington Post ran an incredibly racist cartoon by Michael Ramirez last year this implies all the dead children in Gaza were used as human shields by Hamas. After all, there is no such thing as an innocent child in Gaza! Republican Rep. Brian Mast certainly doesn’t think so: When asked by an activist if he had seen pictures of dead babies in Gaza, Mast replied, “These are not innocent Palestinian civilians.”
Childhood is synonymous with innocence. Israel who arrested between 500 and 700 Palestinian children aged 12-17 before 7 October 2023 (this number has only increased now) consecutively pushed the idea that there is no such thing as an innocent Palestinian. Organizations such as Save the Children have repeatedly raised the alarm about the abuse of Palestinian children detained by the Israeli military: July 2023 reportfor example, notes that “four out of five (86%) of them [are] were beaten and 69% strip-searched”. There are also numerous reports of sexual violence. These reports are usually countered by pro-Israel voices who insist that none of these children should be considered innocent..
It is not only Palestinian children who are consistently denied child status, I want to emphasize. The the adult black children in the western world it is well established. A 2017 Georgetown Law Center study on poverty and inequality, for examplefound that Americans view black girls as less innocent and more mature for their age than white girls, resulting in harsher punishments in the juvenile justice system. Similar research found that 10-year-old African-American boys were significantly less likely to be viewed as children than their white peers. Black kids are too 18 times more likely than white children being criminally convicted as adults rather than as children. Aging has serious consequences.
Through no fault of their own, the children of Gaza have never known a life without airstrikes and military incursions. Persistent trauma means that – in 2022 – four out of five children in Gaza were living with depression, grief and fear. Now that Gaza is in ruins, every single child in the strip has been robbed of a childhood. But that doesn’t give journalists like Cassie Hunt the right to pretend they’re not kids.
Jerry Seinfeld, who dated a 17-year-old when he was 38, thinks the world is too awake
It would be unfair to suggest that privileged white children are sometimes not adults either. They are – usually when some creepy dude wants to date them. Which brings me to Jerry Seinfeld, who is currently in the news moans this comedy is dead because of “far-left and PC crap and people who are so worried about offending other people.” Unfortunately for Seinfeld, his crusade against awakening revived the memory he was using dating a high school student. Seinfeld once told People magazine that it was okay because the girl in question “is a person, not an age.”
Cher, 77, says she only dates younger men because men her age are ‘all dead’
Speaking of the age gap, Cher is currently dating a 38-year-old man. That’s partly, she says, because she male peers have died. Which is not quite true: they run the US government.
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