Collateral damage

On the dead we don't see.

On March 1, 1932, Charles Lindbergh Jr. was kidnapped from his crib in New Jersey. The son of aviator couple Charles Lindbergh and his wife Anne Morrow, Lindbergh Jr.’s kidnapping captivated the American public the same way that OJ Simpson’s case would decades later. The baby was found murdered 72 days after his disappearance. One famous writer would go on to label the kidnapping and the subsequent trial of the alleged kidnapper “the biggest story since the Resurrection.” This case would be the impetus for the US Congress to pass an anti-kidnapping law that came to be known as the Little Lindbergh Law, which criminalised the transportation of kidnapped victims across state borders. Lindbergh Jr. was born to famous parents. These measures were only natural.

Decades later, on the other side of the pond, a British girl named Madeleine McCann was kidnapped on May 3, 2007 from Portugal where her family was vacationing that summer. Her whereabouts still remain unknown. The British media from time to time publishes stories related to her kidnapping, sometimes about fresh leads into her case and at other times speculative fiction about what may have happened to her that day.

Children are among the most vulnerable in society. Crimes in which they are the victims naturally elicit interest and outrage in equal measure. They deserve nothing less. The law must be swift and unforgiving for those who harm or try to harm children, as such crimes warrant the full force of justice. To protect children at all costs from any kind of calamity is a duty of the adults.

But it isn’t always the case.

In the grotesque, unequal world that we inhabit, some children are not like the others. The kidnappings and murders of some children don’t make any headlines and certainly don’t spur the passage of prohibitory legislation. Not even the slaughter of thousands of children and the unknown fate of thousands more children warrant “the biggest story since the Resurrection” or a similar epithet by the clever wordsmiths of the Western world. Instead, they are justified with such twisted wordplay as “legally killed” children.

Over 15,000 Palestinian children have been murdered in broad daylight by Israel over the last ten months. The country that passed the Little Lindbergh Law has willingly supplied almost all of the munitions that have killed those 15,000 Palestinian children. No one knows the whereabouts of a further 21,000 children in Gaza. Some of them are presumed dead under the rubble of their homes, others have been kidnapped by the Israelis. Some of those kidnapped are likely rotting in Israeli dungeons, where children are notoriously and routinely subjected to sexual abuse of the worst kind, and tried — if at all — against all conventions, in military courts. Some have simply disappeared — no one knows their whereabouts.

McCann’s country has been complicit in supplying its own munitions to the Israelis, and while its media still publishes stories about the circumstance surrounding her kidnapping, it doesn’t quite take the same approach to telling the truth to its public about the depraved role its government is playing in preventing the prosecution of the Israeli leadership which has systematically subjected the Palestinian children to the worst depravities human mind could conjure.

Which brings me to the sequence of events that led to some collateral damage. On July 31, Israel killed Hamas’s political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh in Iran. The much-loved leader of the Palestinians was in Tehran to attend the inauguration ceremony of the new Iranian president, but with his killing the dastardly Israelis underlined that no Palestinian is safe from its reach no matter how far away from home they are.

Hours after the killing of Haniyeh, Al-Jazeera’s Ismail al-Ghoul and his colleague Rami al-Rifi were at the site of Haniyeh’s home in Al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza. The family home of the Palestinian leader, known among other things for his eloquence and a beautiful Qur’an recitation voice, had long been reduced to rubble by Israel over the course of its months-long ongoing genocide. Al-Ghoul reported for his media organisation from the site and clicked pictures of children smiling and posing with a framed photo of Haniyeh over the rubble of what used to be the slain leader’s home, and posted some of them on his social media accounts.

The intrepid reporter and his cameraman were dead soon after. While leaving Haniyeh’s former home, the duo was targeted in their car by an airstrike in which they both died on the spot. The killing was so gruesome that al-Ghoul’s head had melted on to his vest that read in big and bold font “PRESS.”

The journalist duo was unrelenting in its reporting despite facing the same problems — of starvation, separation from family members, and a constant threat of looming death — as the people it was reporting on. The two deserve all the condolences that came their way, just like for Haniyeh, and way more.

However, one small detail that escaped the attention of nearly all outlets, including Al-Jazeera’s, was the killing of a boy with the same airstrike that targeted al-Ghoul and al-Rifi.

The boy was named Khaled Said al-Shawa.

Khaled was the only son of his parents and became another addition to the repulsive term that years of Western military-industrial propaganda has normalised: collateral damage. Khaled, a teenaged boy, became collateral damage. The innocent boy was doing the noble act of delivering food to injured neighbours on his bicycle near the scene of the ghastly Israeli crime before becoming its collateral damage.

Khaled was to his parents what the Arabs call qalbi (my heart) and what the Persians and the Muslims of South Asia call their children lakht-e-jigar (my beloved), but in the Western accounting system, he is just another addition to the near-200,000 number of dead Palestinians. He is nothing more than collateral damage.

His mother, like all Palestinian mothers, couldn’t be more proud of her boy and sees his martyrdom as an ascension.

“My son is not a number, not unknown. My son’s name is Khaled Said al-Shawa, and he was the only boy among his sisters. He was martyred while returning from his daily trip to deliver food to our injured neighbour,” she said, before going on to praise her Lord: “All praise to Allah, the Lord of the worlds. All praise to Allah.”

In the long list of ghouls who have occupied the highest seat of the most violent imperial power in human history, one particularly gnarled ghoul named Obama instituted a system of the wholesale slaughter of civilians in the brown and black world in a particularly ghoulish scheme called the drone programme.

Obama, the silver-tongued shameless psychopath, couched the real impact of his monstrous killing machine by claiming that it caused “much less collateral damage.” “[T]here are a lot of situations where the use of a drone is going to result in much fewer civilian casualties and much less collateral damage than if I send in a battalion of marines,” he said.

Someone should tell Khaled’s mother — whom one caption under a video of Khaled’s lifeless body lying over his bicycle, described as “crying blood for his loss” — that she is grieving over mere collateral damage; that the death of her only son in the middle of an ongoing genocide is no more than collateral damage.

Unlike in the case of Lindbergh Jr., there will be no laws in the imperial court to ban the transportation of savage munitions — not just across state lines but across national boundaries and vast oceans — that turn children like Khaled into collateral damage. And unlike the coverage of McCann’s unfortunate fate, there will be no factual reporting in the British press about the tragedy of Khaled becoming collateral damage.

Collateral damages don’t get newspaper obituaries. Or even a mention. In industrial scale slaughter campaigns, they are no more than rounding errors. Only their mothers remember them.

There will be no justice in this world for Khaled and his mother.

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