CHILDREN BEAR BRUNT OF CONFLICT IN MIDDLE EAST: That's the title of the article I received from the UN now that I subscribed to their mail list last week for a project at work. It turns out that the stuff I receive is good fodder for blogging as well. This particular email is not yet appearing online, unlike the other post I did about UNESCO.

It's an odd and superficial email that I received today, about the children in Lebanon, Israel, and the Palestinian territories--and according to the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict Radhika Coomaraswamy:

Especially among Palestinian youth, she sensed a “great deal of anger and a desire for vengeance.”

Needless to say, there is no mention of how Palestinian children are trained to be that way--at least not until the end of the article:

The Special Representative said that much of the “incitement and hatred” between the two groups is “fed by the education system,” adding that peace education was a distinct possibility.

Apparently the Israeli education system is also to blame. No doubt Coomaraswamy is referring to the countless videos of Israeli children holding Uzi's and declaring how they are going to kill Arabs and go to heaven.

More from Coomaraswamy:

While she said she understood the country’s security concerns, “in certain contexts, the balance towards security over humanitarian affairs has shifted too far and is having enormous consequences on Palestinian children and also on Israeli children.”

So the humanitarian concerns of Palestinians trump Israel's security?
Or is Israel's security simply not a humanitarian concern?

But never fear, she really laid down the law with Abbas about the ongoing firing of Kassam rockets at Israeli civilians:

She also encouraged the President to curb the firing of rockets from Gaza into Israel, “especially since those rockets do not separate civilians from combatants.”

That's right--she did not encourage him to stop, just to "curb" the number of rockets being fired into Israel.

You can almost sense the tension as Coomaraswamy strains to tiptoe delicately around the real issues and avoid confrontation.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Radhika Coomaraswamy and UN.