Upon seeing the video of East Jerusalemite Ahmed Manasra lying bleeding on the ground after being hit by a car while fleeing after stabbing two Israelis; upon seeing him with his legs bent up towards his head, trying to get up – my heart went out to him… a 13-year old kid – as much victim, as I saw it, of Hamas, as were the victims of his stabbings. And I searched the internet to see if he was alive and was being treated in hospital. As he was, despite Abbas’s claim that he had been executed! – in a most beautiful hospital in the beautiful area of Ein Karem, being provided with “5-star” medical treatment and being hand-fed good food. At that point, I was not yet informed on the nature of the attempted murder this boy and his cousin had perpetrated on the 13-year-old Jewish-Israeli boy leaving a sweetshop on his bike. Who could imagine that a 13 year-old riding his bike could find himself subjected to a stabbing frenzy. Manasra and his 15-year-old cousin stabbed him 15 times. If I had known this, I do not believe my compassion would have stretched so far. Yes – I still believe he is a victim of Hamas and his own Israeli Arab leaders, as was his cousin. But this frenzied attack seems indicative of psychopathy – Hamas-induced, Isis-inspired psychopathy.
I understand that Manasra, now released from hospital into police custody, was treated by a Jewish doctor while his Jewish victim, admitted into the other Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus, in a critical condition, attached to a respirator and placed in an induced coma was operated on in the Department of Surgery headed by the Israeli Arab doctor Professor Ahmed Eid. A week later, this boy has woken up from his coma and has started communicating with people around him. While he is now out of danger, he has a long period of rehabilitation ahead of him.
A year ago, Elie Weisel made a point that needed to be made, and needs to be made over and over again, and which hardly anyone has been willing to make, and which most newspapers were even reluctant to publish! What Hamas is doing to its own children is severe child abuse – how could it be anything else? It is in fact child murder. To instill hatred in the minds of your children; to strap them with explosives and send them to murder innocent people and themselves in the process; to use them as human shields, and fire rockets from their midst. This is amongst the extremes of child abuse and child hatred.
This is the point Elie Wiesel was making, in his full page ad in and which 327 people who described themselves as “anti-Zionist” holocaust survivors and their (near or very remote) relatives obscenely distorted as abusing the history of the holocaust in order to justify “Israel’s wholesale effort to destroy Gaza and the murder of more than 2000 Palestinians, including many hundreds of children.” Appropriately described as “327 Moral Idiots” http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/327-moral-idiots/ and in terms of their “Moral Emptiness” http://forward.com/…/moral-emptiness-of-holocaust-survivor…/ – demonstrating that surviving the holocaust in itself is not something that gives someone a monopoly on morality!
But in Britain, on the other hand, 732 holocaust survivors, including my father, were admitted here under the 1000 orphans scheme. They formed a lifelong support group, calling themselves, including the few girls among them, “The Boys”. http://www.martingilbert.com/book/the-boys-triumph-over-adversity/ Certainly none that I have met would have gone along, or would go along, with the distortions of the 327 “moral idiots”. Although those of “The Boys” still alive are now in their 80s, many work tirelessly to promote tolerance and understanding among peoples, to go into schools to educate children on the holocaust. As one of these survivors said: “I implore you not to hate as it was hatred that caused the Holocaust in the first place. Had I lived with hatred in my heart … I would not be here today.”
In my review of Martin Gilbert’s book referred to above, I write: “The point is driven home, here, that within the scope of being a war against all Jews – the elderly, the disabled (whether or not they were Jewish), this was most specifically a deliberate war against Jewish children….” “….at the time of deportation,the SS did their utmost to hunt out every single Jewish child, and the fact of this war against children became even more evident at the selections where none were permitted to live.” (45 Aid Journal, 1999. 50-52.)
I have over the last few years come to understand the extent of the atrocity perpetrated by the German Reich towards German children during the years of, and preceding, WWII, with its intense and overpowering brainwashing apparatus: the “raping” of the minds of the children and susceptible adult civilians. With the result that many would have thought thoughts and performed actions that went profoundly against their true nature.
For Elie Wiesel, the holocaust is an obvious reference point for his witnessing of the specific targeting of children. Hamas’s targeting of Palestinian children as a means of targeting Israelis civilians may be viewed as “sacrifice” from their own point of view, and this is the term Elie Wiesel uses. Of course this same term could not be applied to the targeting of Jewish children during the holocaust, and an analogy is not applicable as far as Hamas’s abuse of Palestinian children is concerned.
But the main point is that nobody is showing the Palestinians any kindness or humaneness – especially not towards their children – by ignoring the fact that brainwashing children with hatred, “raping” their minds in this way, turning them into human bombs and into human shields, is child abuse of a most extreme nature.
Marilyn Herman 