Appearances…

Remember the photgraph of the girls drawing little Israeli flags on artillety shells? Below is a disclaimer in the form of “context”:
CJR Daily: About Those Photos of Little Girls and Artillery Shells …

They had just spent the last five days underground in a bomb shelter and this was the first time they had come up for some air. A new army unit had arrived in town, attracting a lot of media attention, and the children and their parents gathered around the missiles. It was the parents who wrote a few messages, then, as Goldman relates it, “the photographers gathered around. Twelve of them. Do you know how many that is? It’s a lot. And they were all simultaneously leaning in with their long camera lenses, clicking the shutter over and over. The parents handed the markers to the kids and they drew little Israeli flags on the shells. Photographers look for striking images, and what is more striking than pretty, innocent little girls contrasted with the ugliness of war? The camera shutters clicked away, and I guess those kids must have felt like stars, especially since the diversion came after they’d been alternately bored and terrified as they waited out the shelling in their bomb shelters.”

Which makes me think that, although I don’t doubt the real story of the pictures, it still doesn’t justify that children are used to fan hate across religious and ethnic lines. There is enough hate in the region to fuel Hell for millennia. Why show innocence side by side with hate? Or is it that there are really no innocents in the whole region and that all children born there are flying flags of a mindless dogmatic “Original Sin” and derervers of Hell on Earth? If there is no innocence left, where is hope?

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