The six-year-old suicide bomber
Hold up! Before you read on, please read this...
This post was published more than 12 years ago
I keep old posts on the site because I often enjoy reading old content on other people's sites. It can be interesting to see how views have changed over time: for example, how my strident teenage views have, to put it mildly, mellowed.
I'm not a believer in brushing the past under the carpet. I've written some offensive rubbish on here in the past: deleting it and pretending it never happened doesn't change that. I hope that stumbling across something that's 12 years old won't offend anyone anew, because I hope that people can understand that what I thought and felt and wrote about then is probably very different to what I think and feel and wrote about now. It's a relic of an (albeit recent) bygone era.
So, given the age of this post, please bear in mind:
- My views may well have changed in the last 12 years. I have written some very silly things over the years, many of which I find utterly cringeworthy today.
- This post might use words or language in ways which I would now consider highly inappropriate, offensive, embarrassing, or all three.
- Factual information might be outdated.
- Links might be broken, and embedded material might not appear properly.
Okay. Consider yourself duly warned. Read on...
This (now quite old) report from the Guardian suggests that children as young as six are being used as suicide bombers.
The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) revealed that soldiers defused an explosive vest which had been placed on a six-year-old who had been told to attack Afghan army forces in the east of the country.
“They placed explosives on a six-year-old boy and told him to walk up to the Afghan police or army and push the button,” said Captain Michael Cormier, the company commander who intercepted the child, in a statement. “Fortunately, the boy did not understand and asked patrolling officers why he had this vest on.”
The vest was defused and no one was hurt.
That’s obviously terrible. I don’t think there’s any question of that. Unsurprisingly, no-one attempts to blame the child.
But if the child is 16, and as equally brainwashed as the six-year-old, we do blame them. Surely they bear no more responsibility? Both are equally indoctrinated into a clear belief that what they are doing is right. Essentially, the sixteen-year-old’s powers of reasoning have been reduced to the same as the six-year-old’s. Yet we still attach blame.
It’s really quite odd, when you give it some thought.
This 1,173rd post was filed under: News and Comment.
