How to "Legally Kill Children." An Investigation.

An actual human — OK, more like “Atlantic staff writer”— wrote the following paragraph to justify Israel barring Western journalists from going into Gaza.

Even when conducted legally, war is ugly. It is possible to kill children legally, if for example one is being attacked by an enemy who hides behind them. But the sight of a legally killed child is no less disturbing than the sight of a murdered one.

Kill children legally?

What an insane sequence of words. And this did not appear in a perverted Reddit thread, or like Joe Rogan’s website, it’s an article in the Atlantic.

Let’s check in with the Internet about whether you’re allowed to “Legally kill a child.”

Huh. I guess it doesn’t come up much. Because it is insane.

Maybe the U.N. has some guidance about when it’s legal to kill a child.

As it turns out, it’s frowned upon.

Killing and maiming children during conflict is one of the six grave violations identified and condemned by the UN Security Council .  The six grave violations form the basis of the Council’s architecture to monitor, report and respond to abuses suffered by children in times of war. Ending and preventing these violations is also the focus of the Special Representative’s work and advocacy.

The killing and maiming of children is a trigger to list parties to armed conflict in the annexes of the annual report of the Secretary-General on children and armed conflict.

Graeme Wood, the author of the story, who I’m sure also had some very ethical and humane things to say during the US global carnage following 9/11, recently posted the following story.

What Hamas Called Its Female Captives, and Why It Matters

Reading too much into the language seems, at this point, to be less of a danger than reading too little into it.

Let’s take a dive into this thoughtful perspective on the power of language.

This week, Israel released an appalling video featuring five female Israeli soldiers taken captive at Nahal Oz military base on October 7. Fearful and bloody, the women beg for their lives while Hamas fighters mill around and alternately threaten to kill them and compliment their appearance. The captors call the women “sabaya,” which Israel translated as “women who can get pregnant.” Almost immediately, others disputed the translation and said sabaya referred merely to “female captives” and included no reference to their fertility. “The Arabic word sabaya doesn’t have sexual connotations,” the Al Jazeera journalist Laila Al-Arian wrote in a post on X, taking exception to a Washington Post article that said that it did. She said the Israeli translation was “playing on racist and orientalist tropes about Arabs and Muslims.”

My lord, give me the confidence of a white man who questions the award-winning journalist, Al-Arian, and Arabic speaker, on her translation.

“Graeme Wood” continues.

These are real women and victims of ongoing war crimes, so it does seem excessively lurid to suggest, without direct evidence, that they have been raped in captivity for the past several months. (“Eight months,” the Israelis noted, allowing readers to do the gestational math. “Think of what that means for these young women.”) But to assert that sabaya is devoid of sexual connotation reflects ignorance, at best. The word is well attested in classical sources and refers to female captives; the choice of a classical term over a modern one implies a fondness for classical modes of war, which codified sexual violence at scale. Just as concubine and comfort woman carry the befoulments of their historic use, sabaya is straightforwardly associated with what we moderns call rape. Anyone who uses sabaya in modern Gaza or Raqqah can be assumed to have specific and disgusting reasons to want to revive it

These are, indeed, “real women” (the kind of incisive observation that gets you an Atlantic gig). Their ordeal is absolutely horrifying. And, the documented deaths are also horrifying beyond words.

So given how much well-documented horror there is, why is there so much projected sexualization/rape narrative into the story of the Oct. 7th attacks? There’s the New York Times’ ludicrous “Screams Without Words,” which has yet to be retracted. There’s Sheryl Sandberg heroically fighting her Botox to make melancholic facial expressions in “Screams Before Silence,” her documentary, which is basically entirely based on the testimonials of Zakah fabulists, which have been debunked. Pretty much every pundit has to cite “weaponized rape” despite almost no evidence of widespread sexual assault.

The same guy who, seemingly blithely, wrote the words, “Kill children legally” wants you to stop reading “too little into language.”