A New WMD: Women who are Mentally Disabled, used as bombs.
Feb 01 '08
The Bottom Line The situation in Iraq reaches a new low.
Sometimes, a news article hits you like an sharp slap in the face out of nowhere, a complete shock that wakes you up from the apathy that threatens us after being inundated for so long with news that is as horrible as it is mundane. Here's a snippet from one such slap that hit me today:
"Two mentally disabled women strapped with remote-control explosives -- and possibly used as unwitting suicide bombers -- brought carnage Friday to two pet bazaars, killing at least 91 people in the deadliest day since Washington flooded the capital with extra troops last spring." (Associate Press, Feb. 1, 2008)
The article gives further evidence that the women, both of whom had Down syndrome, were not capable of understanding their actions. This ruse to avoid security checkpoints is apparently not new (though it was news to me), as there are reports of other mentally disabled adults -- and even children -- being used as unaware weapons of destruction and death.
We are talking about comparing gradations of total evil. To the innocent bystanders strolling in the market, whether they are killed or injured by a suicide bomber who knows exactly what he or she is up to, is quite beside the point. But as a distant observer of these appalling events, the decision by someone to send out witless, mentally retarded women and children to their own deaths (along with the massacre of the scores of victims) reaches a dizzying height (or depth) of evil in this war.
The use of unwitting, mentally handicapped "suicide" bombers is so far from defensible as an action of war, that it strangely leaves the political theater it would normally be associated with, and enters a category of depravity that I would think might even make some terrorists or their sponsors blush. These are terrorist's terrorists, a special breed of men whose callousness and ruthlessness clearly know no limit.
Spike Lee's documentary, 4 Little Girls, about the murder of church-going girls in Alabama in 1963, was remarkable in many ways, one of which was in examining the toll those girls' deaths took on their families. The innocence and sweetness of these girls juxtaposed with the indiscriminate hatred of the men who bombed their church is so painfully obvious, their deaths so gratuitous and pitiful. With news stories and headlines now so rampant carrying images and stories of innocent civilians (not to mention, in this most recent case, animals) slaughtered in markets, I often turn my mind to Lee's film to help me appreciate a little how the families of the victims may feel. Tomorrow, or the week after, I will not remember this bombing or the one before, but the families and extended communities of these 91 (and counting) victims will be mourning until death. In 4 Little Girls, however, we know that the heinousness of the crime (and the innocence of its victims) was a touchstone of the civil rights movement, a moment that galvanized people throughout the nation to act, to say: enough is enough. Will families of the unwitting bombers and their close to 100 victims ever have such solace?
Will there ever come such a tipping point in Iraq, or are these situations not even comparable? Is the use of retarded women and children as weapons just yet another new low in the slow crawl to the bottom of this abyss?
And don't forget Beslan. There, in 2004, Chechen separatists took hostage 1,200 children and adults, and in the skirmish with Russian security forces, 186 children were killed (among the 334 civilian casualties). Why do these and such stories, sadly common as they are in the "big picture," nevertheless stick out as uncommonly awful? Of course, it is because the innocent are caught in the ruthless crossfire of warring factions of men.
Is it too much to ask of the killers on both sides of the fight, wrapped up in their causes and crusades, their hatreds and histories of enmity, and their convictions of being in the right, to leave the children out of their campaigns, and equally to spare all innocents and innocence?
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