julianpenrod
Joined: 07 Mar 2002
Posts: 303
Location: west caldwell, new jersey, united states |
U.S. soldiers apparently using children as human shields
 Fri Oct 01, 2004 4:09 am
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Julian Penrod
4 Fairfield Avenue
West Caldwell, New Jersey 07006
(973) 220-1601
julianpenrod@comcast.net
September 30, 2004
Letters to the Editor
Dear sirs:
As bad as it is to engage in the malignant and low, it is just as bad to be aware of the foul and craven, and not acknowledge it.
Deceit is an undisputed primary tool of the liar. But deceit can have many forms. One is hypocrisy. Whenever a liar practices, hypocrisy seems an inevitable outgrowth. More than that, so reliable is the association between liars and hypocrisy, that, to even see hypocritical attitudes is all but to decisively brand the individual as deceitful and conniving!
In the evident failure to provide anything even remotely promising about the program termed the "war on 'terrorism'", the administration has apparently chosen the strategy, not of praising its purpose, but, rather, of perennially condemning those they call "terrorists". One common denunciation is accusing them of utter contempt for human life, purportedly using "human shields" being one "proof", and carelessness about hitting "innocent civilians" being another.
The media's careful excising of questionable, even incriminating, records among those attacked allows the determined denial of culpability among them. Steadfastly denying - by omission, if not commission! - the guilt of numerous "terrorism" victims seems geared toward promoting a sense that "terrorists" are mindless and insane, killing anything that moves! When Israelis on the street are targeted by bombs, for example, they are uniformly described as “innocent non-combatants”. Carefully avoided, however, is the fact that all Israelis are conscripted as soldiers from birth, meaning that everyone in the country is an automatic combatant! The media couldn’t enflame hatred for the Palestinians, however, if they revealed that fact!
Equally side-stepped is the degree to which “The Allies” decimate non-combatant populations. And, when not possible, it is summarily tabled as “unimportant” or “validated”! When Israeli recklessness, for example, kills Palestinian children, it is written off as “an unfortunate outgrowth of the need to maintain the Jewish state”, and maintaining that state, it has to be acknowledged, has shaped up to be the one overriding tenet of all American foreign policy! If charity is supposed to begin at home, any dramatic display of it centering almost exclusively somewhere else has to be taken as a sign of something wrong somewhere! But the United States, too, has displayed enormous callousness toward the welfare of indigenous populations, and incredible forgiveness for their own, when they slaughtered them! A recent movie, for example, denounces “terrorists” for using the term “collateral damage” to describe non-combatants caught in the path of an explosion. Carefully ignored, however, was the fact that the U.S. seems to have initiated the use of that term, to describe whole villages of non-combatants caught in indiscriminate carpet bombing or napalming during the Vietnam War!
And even the U.S. has demonstrated the utter disdain for others implicit in the idea of using “human shields”!
On September 30, 2004, at least four bombings in Iraq claimed a number of lives, including at least 30 children. Automatically attributed to “’terrorist’ ruthlessness”, rather than, say, “Iraqi patriot attempts to cleanse their country of the invaders and their collaborators”, they were instantly condemned for causing the deaths of children, even though it is not easy to see how they would have known children would even be there! But, for those who live, witlessly and thoughtlessly, on provocative epithets and convenient characterizations of everyone who doesn’t want to be enslaved by Halliburton as a “deranged ‘terrorist’”, this kind of rhetoric was easily palatable! Suggestions were made that the target may have been an American convoy, in the area, with the casualties exacerbated by the presence of a civilian ceremony, celebrating the opening of a sewage treatment plant, and the large numbers of children, apparently invited by the “interim government”, who were being given handfuls of candy by American soldiers.
But this raises innumerable important questions. Such as, why send the convoy near so heavily populated a civilian area as an opening ceremony? Or why would the “interim government” invite children to such an affair? A convoy would be an obvious target! Why practically invite civilian casualties by routing it through there? And, if the threat to bystanders is so great, why would American soldiers persist in the evidently hazardous practice of handing out candy to children? Where do soldiers get the gall to endanger children by deliberately luring them with candy, when they know that will put them in the path of any attacks on the military?
If they aren’t throwing the children into the cannon’s mouth, to get further enraged support for maintaining the evident home invasion of Iraq, then they, at least, seem to be using them as human shields! Constantly making sure children are near, by enticing them - as all criminals do! - with candy! They evidently seem to hope this will make the troops less a target, using the children as shields!
For that matter, it has to be added, why even place their headquarters inside Baghdad, the largest city in the country? That, too, seems intended to use civilians as protection between themselves and those trying to save their country from theft by Halliburton!
Tellingly, too, the fact that the military seems to prefer using people as human shields, implies that they actually feel the “terrorists” would be more respective of the welfare of the public than the Bush White House claims they are!
Just because the unscrupulous and unethical try to deceive you using misrepresentation does not mean you are obliged to accept it, or allow yourself to be deceived!
Julian Penrod |
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