Davin News Server

Andrew Mitrovica
Al Jazeera columnist

By now, save her family and friends, the short life and dreadful death
of 10-year-old Fatima Abdallah Jaafar will likely have been forgotten.

But the sick circumstance of how, where and why Fatima was killed
requires remembering.

It requires remembering because her sudden, disfiguring death stands a
searing antidote to the almost giddy celebration of the “ingenious”
ways Israel devises to assassinate its adversaries.

It is also a halting harbinger of the scores of other innocents who
are bound to perish as the Middle East appears destined to be engulfed
by an even wider war. In 48 hours alone, 50 children have been killed
in Lebanon – all casualties of the latest Israeli strikes.

Fatima and an 11-year-old boy, Bilal Kanj, were killed during the
first wave of Israeli attacks targeting Hezbollah fighters involving
pagers housing explosives that detonated simultaneously at 3:30pm on
September 17 throughout Lebanon and Syria.

Fatima had just arrived home from the first day of the new school
year. She was in fourth grade. Her aunt remembered how eager Fatima
was to learn English.

“Fatima was trying to take courses in English,” she said. “She loved
English.”

Fatima was in the kitchen when a pager, resting on a table, began
beeping. She picked up the device, intending to deliver it to her
father. En route, it exploded.

Fatima’s small, cherubic face turned instantly into a mangled mess.
The room was now awash in the schoolgirl’s blood – an awful testament
to the improvised bomb’s lethal force.

At her funeral held in Lebanon’s Bekka Valley, grieving classmates
carried a large picture of Fatima aloft. Her mother, walking alongside
a tiny flower-draped coffin, wept.

Mourners paused in the town square before heading to a nearby
cemetery. There, they prayed while a religious elder appealed to God
“for justice”.

Fatima’s death was of little, if any, consequence to the host of
Western journalists and so-called “security experts” who “marveled at
the complexity” of Israel’s covert “plot” to infiltrate Hezbollah on
such a “colossal” scale.

Israel has neither confirmed nor denied its involvement. Still, it is
widely believed that the country’s security services were responsible
for organising and committing the attacks.

It is, of course, a familiar story. Children – whether they are
orphaned, traumatised, dismembered or slain in Gaza, the occupied West
Bank or Lebanon – are considered disposable fodder as Israel continues
to vent, unchecked, its “killing rage”.

Fatima and the thousands of children in Gaza, the West Bank, and
Lebanon who have already been killed and will be killed have been
reduced to an inconvenient asterisk in the myopic minds of Israel’s
legion of cheerleaders abroad.

Among them is Artur Wilcynski, a former Canadian ambassador and senior
security official, who promptly took to X to describe Israel’s
ruthless gambit that claimed the budding lives of Fatima Abdallah and
Bilal Kanj as “brilliant”.

“Today’s targeting of Hezbollah operatives was brilliant. It struck a
major blow against a terror group that has fired thousands of rockets
against civilians all while the useless UN mission in Lebanon stands
by. There is a price to pay,” Wilcynski wrote.

That the deaths of Fatima and Bilal were a shocking measure of the
“price” that Lebanese civilians had to “pay” did not deter Wilcynski
from posting what the retired Canadian diplomat apparently considered
a pithy GIF just hours after the deadly explosions began.

The GIF features two popular Looney Tunes cartoon figures. In the
short scene, Road Runner frightens Wile E Coyote. The caption reads:
“Beep beep.”

Later, in response to a tweet by acclaimed Palestinian writer Mariam
Barghouti, pointing out that the victims of Israel’s “premediated”
attack included children, Wilcynski posted another GIF – this time, of
a movie star in character, applauding.

Wilcynski’s egregious posts triggered a fierce and sustained backlash
– particularly given that, only months earlier, he had been appointed
the University of Ottawa’s “special advisor” on anti-Semitism.

In a cockeyed bid to explain away his damning posts, Wilcynski claimed
that the cartoon GIF was, in fact, “a statement about persistent
attempts to kill Jews over the centuries that fail”.

No, sir. Posting a snippet of a cartoon to make “a statement” about
the murderous pogroms Jews have endured “over the centuries” is an
outrageous affront to the memory of millions of victims – girls and
boys, women and men.

Remember, the author of this obscene absurdity was a career and
decorated civil servant promoting Canada’s values and interests at
home and overseas and was charged with confronting anti-Semitism on a
university campus.

My goodness.

Not done embarrassing himself, Wilcynski turned amateur psychoanalyst
by suggesting that his online detractors – who chastised him for
“joking” about children’s deaths – were guilty of “morbid projection”.

Then, Wilcynski trotted out the predictable, exculpatory bromide that
he found the “loss of innocent lives … abhorrent”.

“There has been significant misunderstanding of my use of the word
“brilliant”, he wrote on X. “The loss of innocent lives in any
conflict is abhorrent & must be avoided. As a retired national
security & intel leader, my use of that word was about the complexity
& sophistication of an operation.”

Whether Wilcynski is prepared to admit it or not, the shadowy
architects of Israel’s “complex” and “sophisticated” “operation” are
guilty of killing Fatima and Bilal.

They bear responsibility. They are to blame. The killings should haunt
their consciences since they will never be held to account. Instead,
they may win medals and promotions. They will be praised by Wilcynski
and callous company for their “service” and inventiveness.

Wilcynski’s hurried and self-serving clarification did not work.

On September 18, he took, once again, to a social media platform
renowned for its seriousness of purpose, intelligence, and nuance, X,
to announce his resignation.

“My posts on the Hezbollah/Israel war caused harm & affected my
ability to help combat antisemitism at U of Ottawa. My intent in
sharing is irrelevant when it is clear many were hurt by them. I
apologize. I resigned as Special Advisor on Antisemitism,” he wrote.

Wilcynski’s posts that caused such “hurt” and “harm” remain, as of
this writing, live on X.

Meanwhile, Fatima and Bilal have been buried. They will never
graduate. They will never marry. They will never have families of
their own to love.

And Fatima will never learn English.

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/9/25/the-brilliant-way-israel-kills-innocents