By now, save her family and friends, the short life and dreadful death of 10-year-old Fatima Abdallah Jaafar will likely have been forgotten.
But the sick circumstance of how, where and why Fatima was killed requires remembering.
It requires remembering because her sudden, disfiguring death stands a searing antidote to the almost giddy celebration of the “ingenious” ways Israel devises to assassinate its adversaries.
It is also a halting harbinger of the scores of other innocents who are bound to perish as the Middle East appears destined to be engulfed by an even wider war. In 48 hours alone, 50 children have been killed in Lebanon – all casualties of the latest Israeli strikes.
Fatima and an 11-year-old boy, Bilal Kanj, were killed during the first wave of Israeli attacks targeting Hezbollah fighters involving pagers housing explosives that detonated simultaneously at 3:30pm on September 17 throughout Lebanon and Syria.
Fatima had just arrived home from the first day of the new school year. She was in fourth grade. Her aunt remembered how eager Fatima was to learn English.
“Fatima was trying to take courses in English,” she said. “She loved English.”
Fatima was in the kitchen when a pager, resting on a table, began beeping. She picked up the device, intending to deliver it to her father. En route, it exploded.
Fatima’s small, cherubic face turned instantly into a mangled mess. The room was now awash in the schoolgirl’s blood – an awful testament to the improvised bomb’s lethal force.
At her funeral held in Lebanon’s Bekka Valley, grieving classmates carried a large picture of Fatima aloft. Her mother, walking alongside a tiny flower-draped coffin, wept.
Mourners paused in the town square before heading to a nearby cemetery. There, they prayed while a religious elder appealed to God “for justice”.
Fatima’s death was of little, if any, consequence to the host of Western journalists and so-called “security experts” who “marveled at the complexity” of Israel’s covert “plot” to infiltrate Hezbollah on such a “colossal” scale.
Israel has neither confirmed nor denied its involvement. Still, it is widely believed that the country’s security services were responsible for organising and committing the attacks.
It is, of course, a familiar story. Children – whether they are orphaned, traumatised, dismembered or slain in Gaza, the occupied West Bank or Lebanon – are considered disposable fodder as Israel continues to vent, unchecked, its “killing rage”.
Fatima and the thousands of children in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon who have already been killed and will be killed have been reduced to an inconvenient asterisk in the myopic minds of Israel’s legion of cheerleaders abroad.
Among them is Artur Wilcynski, a former Canadian ambassador and senior security official, who promptly took to X to describe Israel’s ruthless gambit that claimed the budding lives of Fatima Abdallah and Bilal Kanj as “brilliant”.
“Today’s targeting of Hezbollah operatives was brilliant. It struck a major blow against a terror group that has fired thousands of rockets against civilians all while the useless UN mission in Lebanon stands by. There is a price to pay,” Wilcynski wrote.
That the deaths of Fatima and Bilal were a shocking measure of the “price” that Lebanese civilians had to “pay” did not deter Wilcynski from posting what the retired Canadian diplomat apparently considered a pithy GIF just hours after the deadly explosions began.
The GIF features two popular Looney Tunes cartoon figures. In the short scene, Road Runner frightens Wile E Coyote. The caption reads: “Beep beep.”
Later, in response to a tweet by acclaimed Palestinian writer Mariam Barghouti, pointing out that the victims of Israel’s “premediated” attack included children, Wilcynski posted another GIF – this time, of a movie star in character, applauding.
Wilcynski’s egregious posts triggered a fierce and sustained backlash – particularly given that, only months earlier, he had been appointed the University of Ottawa’s “special advisor” on anti-Semitism.
In a cockeyed bid to explain away his damning posts, Wilcynski claimed that the cartoon GIF was, in fact, “a statement about persistent attempts to kill Jews over the centuries that fail”.
No, sir. Posting a snippet of a cartoon to make “a statement” about the murderous pogroms Jews have endured “over the centuries” is an outrageous affront to the memory of millions of victims – girls and boys, women and men.
Remember, the author of this obscene absurdity was a career and decorated civil servant promoting Canada’s values and interests at home and overseas and was charged with confronting anti-Semitism on a university campus.
My goodness.
Not done embarrassing himself, Wilcynski turned amateur psychoanalyst by suggesting that his online detractors – who chastised him for “joking” about children’s deaths – were guilty of “morbid projection”.
Then, Wilcynski trotted out the predictable, exculpatory bromide that he found the “loss of innocent lives … abhorrent”.
“There has been significant misunderstanding of my use of the word “brilliant”, he wrote on X. “The loss of innocent lives in any conflict is abhorrent & must be avoided. As a retired national security & intel leader, my use of that word was about the complexity & sophistication of an operation.”
Whether Wilcynski is prepared to admit it or not, the shadowy architects of Israel’s “complex” and “sophisticated” “operation” are guilty of killing Fatima and Bilal.
They bear responsibility. They are to blame. The killings should haunt their consciences since they will never be held to account. Instead, they may win medals and promotions. They will be praised by Wilcynski and callous company for their “service” and inventiveness.
Wilcynski’s hurried and self-serving clarification did not work.
On September 18, he took, once again, to a social media platform renowned for its seriousness of purpose, intelligence, and nuance, X, to announce his resignation.
“My posts on the Hezbollah/Israel war caused harm & affected my ability to help combat antisemitism at U of Ottawa. My intent in sharing is irrelevant when it is clear many were hurt by them. I apologize. I resigned as Special Advisor on Antisemitism,” he wrote.
Wilcynski’s posts that caused such “hurt” and “harm” remain, as of this writing, live on X.
Meanwhile, Fatima and Bilal have been buried. They will never graduate. They will never marry. They will never have families of their own to love.
And Fatima will never learn English.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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