Dead Children of Toulouse

By AM Wednesday, April 18, 2012

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He didn't appear to want to go out and stayed in his room to recite the Koran and read books. As soon as he'd hear the muezzin (calling for prayer), he would run to the mosque - Mohammed Benalal Merah, father of Mohammed Merah

As recent events in the French city of Toulouse have demonstrated all too bloodily, Jewish children are not merely in need of protection from disease ridden mohels who sexually assault them under the self serving label of religion.  There are others listening to a different, but no less murderous god, who see Jewish kids aged four and five walking to school with their eight year old fellow Jewish pupil and Rabbi father as fair game for premeditated slaughter.

Writing in the Guardian Jonathan Friedman referred to the mindset of some who view attacks of the Toulouse types as legitimate: ‘deeming even the unborn child inside an Israeli mother's womb a legitimate target, because that child will one day grow up to wear his country's uniform.’ We will kill people not for what they have done but for what we have ordained they will do according to our self exculpatory doctrine of predestination.

Hiding behind the rationale that Palestinian kids were being murdered simply does not cut the mustard. That is an excuse rather than a reason. Children the world over are regarded as non combatants (and where they are not the argument that they should be holds good) that have inalienable rights against being mowed down in the streets at the point of a gun no matter what the political cause.

Padraig Reidy at Index On Censorship slices through the ambiguous heart of the matter:

The horrendous rampage of Mohamed Merah, the French man who killed North African soldiers, a rabbi and three Jewish children, has brought all the usual responses from the usual corners. Britain’s “anti-Imperialist” left the Stop The War Coalition’s Lindsey German, decided that it must, must be the fault of French institutional racism, the war in Afghanistan and even the 50th anniversary of the Algerian war ...  The French hard right, led by Marine Le Pen of the Front Nationale, has blamed “politico-religious fundamentalists” and the liberal multiculturalists who apparently enable them. The government, meanwhile, has blamed the internet ... All these apparently excuses for the anti-Semitic murder of children.

There is no moral difference that I can think of between the actions of the Toulousse child killer and the Israeli soldier who murdered Mohammed Elargi. I still have a graphic magazine photo of that particular Palestinian child being lowered into his grave. I never like to look at it because of the sense of sadness that it induces. Yet there is no ethical difference that marks out his grave from the freshly dug burial sites in a Jerusalem cemetery where the innocent children of Toulouse would be laid to rest.

The life of Mohammed Elargi is not made valuable, and his death absolutely wrong, merely because of who killed him. He was a child with the same rights against being butchered as other children. The same for the innocent of Toulouse: Aryeh Sandler, Gavriel Sander and Miriam Monsonegro.

Those eager to hound the US Army psychopath who murdered 9 children and many adults in Afghanistan yet are somewhat less strident about the Toulouse killings fail to flag up any comprehensible ethical difference between Merah and Robert Bales, leaving us to conclude that the sole differentiating factor lies not in the morality of the actions but in the numbers killed. Reportedly, Mera’s biggest regret is that he was not as successful as Bales.

The father of  Merah has threatened to sue the French police, believing that his son was clinically executed, and insisted that he would not be 'shut up'. The response of the French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe left much to be desired: ‘If I were the father of such a monster, I would shut my mouth in shame.’ This attempt to silence demands into the circumstances behind state killings while deplorable should not be allowed to detract from the ethical probing that must excavate the Merah actions and frame more solidly how we think through the relationship between rights and war.