Gazans name their children after Iranian rockets
TO Gaza, where the locals are celebrating the region’s munitions by naming their children after missiles and rockets. YNet news reports that Muhammad al-Shafi’i Abu Nassat has named his newborn son Fajr, after the Imported Iranian missiles. Amira Abu Assus has also named her son Fajr, Arabic for ‘dawn’. She says the lad will have – no pun intended – “a bright future within Palestinian resistance”.
Naming your kids after rockets will be good news for the Palestinian media who like to distribute and set up photos of injured and dead children. How long before Israel’s Iron Dome defence shield hits a Junior Fajr? How long before the BBC’s man in the know promotes it online?
The hideous and horrific image of a dead child kills the unwary journalist’s objectivity.
Giles Fraser summed up much reporting on Israel’s war with Hmas when he wrote:
“‘[The pictures of dead children] arrived before me on the same screen that I had previously been writing a letter and playing a silly computer game. My initial reactions were as much physical as emotional. It was as if I didn’t know how to process the emotional charge that spiked through my body… So Giles. What are you doing about all of this? That is what these photographs say to me.”
As Tim Black writes:
Fraser experiences the images as a call to arms, but on what is this call based? Political solidarity? A commitment to the self-determination of oppressed peoples? Good old fashioned anti-imperialism? No, it’s based on emotional identification and fuelled by something distinctly narcissistic. That is, without the distance that understanding brings, the suffering of the Palestinians becomes my suffering. Over there, in the blood and rubble of Gaza, Fraser sees himself.
Fraser might then look over here at the Fogel Family.
How does he feel? What can he do?
Photo: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh holds a child during a rally protesting against the publication of cartoons in European newspapers depicting the Prophet Muhammad, in front of the Palestinian parliament in Beit Lahiya in northen Gaza, Friday, Feb, 3, 2006.
Posted: 27th, November 2012 | In: Reviews Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
