From a description of Tyre, July 22, by the CNN journalist Cal Perry, as reported here.
More children are in a nearby basement. The true cost of the shelling can be seen in their frightened eyes.
I am the first visitor to walk down the long stairs, and as I get there, a little boy starts screaming and pointing at me. He is hysterical.
His mother says, “He thinks you are Israeli.”
I speak to the boy in Arabic. “I’m a journalist,” I tell him, but he still cries.
I shall try to return next Sunday to the [ir]regular Sunday grammar and style blog…
I have relatives (also children) in the same position on the other side of the border. I am told I should be reassured “When they sleep they are safe underground.” I do wish children could be kept out of adult lunacies. I wish even more adult lunacies didn’t happen. Blaming one side or the other doesn’t help – finding a way everyone can stop killing would be far better.
Absolutely, Gillian. that was the point I was trying to make in my previous post as well. There is no sense to all this, none. And no difference between the child cowering in a basement in Tyre, or in a shelter in Israel.
As a mother and grandmother, I am so angry. All I can see is more storing up of rage in that region; more children to grow up traumatised by horrible memories, some of whom will end up as suicide bombers.
I think perhaps Friedman in his book “From Beirut to Jerusalem” said it best years ago. I don’t have the book with me, but it was something along the lines of:
“All this horror will continue until people care more about their children than their clan.”
By clan (or was the word he used tribe?) he meant the whole caboodle that we drag with us into our outlook on life – religion, culture, language, history, etc etc.
When we care more about these things than we care about our children this kind of mindless idiocy will continue. I guess what strikes me as particularly idiotic is that in this particular region, it’s all been done before, and yet it solved nothing. The wars and invasions and suicide bombings and shellings – none of it has solved a single solitary issue. Don’t they ever learn?
There must be a better way.