The year is 2023 and "Child" Terrorists are hitting the headlines world-wide. The word "child" makes them sound like preschoolers, and the history of mankind shows that sometimes that is the case, but here we are talking about teens who go out to kill Jews instead of hitting their books and partying as teenagers do in the western world. And the West refuses to comprehend the difference.
The value of children thousands of years ago was used to appease the gods by the Amalekites of Southern Israel, descendants of Amalek, who fed their children to the fire for their cause. So did the Canaanites to their god Moloch. Hard for us to imagine, but true. These children had a value in their culture, a value when they were burnt to death. And it is not very different in today's Hamas and Fatah world.
This week we saw teenage terrorists aged sixteen and seventeen fighting the Israeli army in Jenin. From birth their leaders had brainwashed and weaponised a whole generation to believe that their mission in life was to fight Israel and push the Jews into the sea. These are the same leaders who fled with their own women and children before the Israeli army who had come to root out their bombs and weapons to prevent killing of Israeli civilians.
We see school-aged children carrying arms in Gaza summer camps where they are taught to hate Jews. We see children being used in African wars. It is not a new thing. Iran had 9 year-olds fighting in the Iran-Iraq war. Anti-Israel propaganda has labelled these young terrorists as "poor little children" because the Western mind cannot imagine sacrificing teenagers. But here it is, children and teens are being encouraged to go out and kill in the name of their cause.
The mindset of their leaders sees them as adults, capable of fighting, capable of killing. Never mind that their targets are civilians, never mind that they kill defenseless children, never mind if they are killed themselves. Videos are taken of them before they go out to kill, they are named “shahids” meaning martyrs. These are not lone wolf killings, they are carefully planned and prepared by their leaders.
While this is going on individuals on the payroll of the United Nations and their compatriots are weeping buckets of crocodile tears on TV for these teen terrorists, and a BBC broadcaster says that Israel "enjoys killing children" who are actually armed teenage terrorists, never ever opening their mouths when children in Israel are killed.
That is how the enemy of Israel carries out its wars – all resources are used when armed warfare is their way of life – to the extent of sending their teenagers out as terrorists instead of themselves.
Children are of value to their cause – dead as much as alive.
Leonie Ben-Simon is a freelance journalist with an MBA from Monash University, Victoria Australia.