The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) reported on Saturday that over 50,000 children in the Gaza Strip are in urgent need of treatment for acute malnutrition, Anadolu Agency reports.
In a statement, the agency said that “with continued restrictions to humanitarian access, people in Gaza continue to face desperate levels of hunger.”
“Over 50,000 children require treatment for acute malnutrition,” it added.
Oh, it’s absolutelly cultural, probably derived from empathy (check the Vulnerability chapter in the paper in my second link), and it seems to be almost universal at least in the modern Western World.
And indeed, going back to the very beginning of our discussion, I was giving emphasis to the killing of children by the Zionists as an especially abhorrent crime because I do share that feeling as I am part of that culture just like I expect are the majority of those that would read my post. I don’t write comments to convince the tiny subset of people who find it easy to have a very detached view on the purposeful killing of human beings, I write my comments to convince most people and I wasn’t even being manipulative because the take I have on the morality of child killing is based on the feelings I have on which deaths are more abhorrent which seems to be the same as most people likely to read my comments.
That said, a purely logical and as objective as possible analysis would still yield that the murder of children is generally a worse act than the murder of adults, simply because children have in average a lot more years as a productive citizens ahead of them than adults: in pure, emotion aside, almost Accounting terms, targetting children in a war is targetting the Future of a nation by taking out their Future productive capability.
In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that’s exactly the calculation that the Zionists made - if one has no empathy and hence no sense of added abhorrence when it comes to child murder and one has as a strategical objective to weaken now and forever an entire enemy ethnicity, it makes logical sense to target the children of the “enemy ethnicity” in order to further that strategical objective and the absence of empathy guarantees there are no pesky feelings like guilt getting in the way.
Taking it back to Gaza, a genocide is a genocide. It’s an attempt at eradication of a whole group of people. Of course it’s heinous, and it’s difficult for me to think of any other way to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, which clearly is the goal as said by their own nationalists, without killing the people there. If there are kids there, they will be involved.
This is inherently heinous, by virtue of its scale and overarching goal. The fact that it necessitates killing children is simply obvious to me, and in no way changes how I see the whole thing. It’s like pointing out a candle when the whole house is already on fire.
I suppose a core difference is I’m not really trying to convince anyone of anything regarding Gaza though. Lemmy is overwhelmingly against the genocide, which I think is good and correct. I’m more interested in personally understanding various things, and correcting misinformation when I run into it, particularly with regards to history or science. Which is why I originally jumped in to talk about the prevalence of genocides in the modern era.
Back to child murder, you’re still applying an inherent value, this time on the good of the society, where children have more years ahead of them. This is still a cultural influence, a purely objective position would not apply additional value to anything like human health or happiness. Nobody has to care about the future, and I’d say recent times illustrate that a great many people even desire a future of human extinction. All these apocalypse-cheering types you run into online, the hardcore religious rapture folks, groups like that. I do not agree with these positions, but I cannot understand them unless I am capable of being coldly objective about these things.