The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) reported on Saturday that over 50,000 children in the Gaza Strip are in urgent need of treatment for acute malnutrition, Anadolu Agency reports.
In a statement, the agency said that “with continued restrictions to humanitarian access, people in Gaza continue to face desperate levels of hunger.”
“Over 50,000 children require treatment for acute malnutrition,” it added.
I was thinking just in terms of murdering children including the specific targetting of children (which the IDF has done both with snippers and by bombing playgrounds).
In absolute terms of civilians, there were a number of worst atrocities, though in terms of percentage of the target population, not so much (possibly none at all but the Nazis, depending on what the the proportion between counted deaths and real deaths amongst the Palestinians is, since those whose corpses were not found and brought to Hospitals - i.e. those still buried in the rubble of the over 70% of Gaza building that were destroyed - were not counted, something which got worse after Israel destroyed almost all Palestinian Hospitals: the 40k deads are likely a significative underestimation and we might never know how significative that is because Israel does not allow independent UN observers to go check it).
What’s really “special” in the genociding done by the Zionists is the number of children being killed, the percentage of the target population killed, the targetting of Hospitals and medical personnel, the targetting of Humanitarian Personnel (worst ever, according to the UN) and the targetting of Journalists.
But, yeah, in absolute numbers of adults killed, things like Darfur and the Rwanda Genocide were worse.
I don’t really see the point of singling out children. Murder is murder. Is killing a mother better than killing a child?
The killing of children is widelly deemed the most immoral kind of murder, because there is no way it can be spinned as the killing of people guilty of anything or a self-defense: children are almost by definition innocent and incapable of defending themselves or overpower an adult, especially young ones - it takes a special kind of individual (namelly, sociopath or psychopath) to not only willingly take human life, but even that of those who are guaranteed innocent and totally incapable of defending themselves, much less attacking.
This actually is reflected in the numbers of murder victims, were children are killed in a far, far lower proportion of their numbers than adults, and ditto for war casualties: adults on both sides usually will go a lot further in protecting children, even not their own, than they will for adults.
It is surprising that in your moral framework you do not see the murder of children as an especially cold and calous kind of murder.
I dunno, to me that’s a little arbitrary. Killing someone outside of self defense is just murder. So in your view is a school shooter worse than a mall shooter? Would you say murdering a handicapped stranger in a wheelchair who cannot defend themselves is worse than killing a healthy young adult stranger?
To me it’s all just killing innocent people, their age or health is irrelevant. The law makes no difference as far as I’m aware, it’s all murder. I don’t see any point in differentiating murders based on the traits of the victims.
The vast majority of people in this World see the killing of other human beings as something that covers a moral range, with something like self-defense when in direct danger for one’s life being at the more acceptable end of the scale and the killing of the young children at the more unacceptable end of the scale.
This moral scale within murder also applies to the murderers themselves, which is why - as I pointed out earlier - in murder statistics and deaths in wars, children form a far smaller proportion of the deaths in comparison to the total of children, than people of other ages for in proportion to the total of people of those ages.
So even if you yourself haven’t a heightened sense of revulsion for some murderes versus others (which, by the way, is not normal), even people who kill other people generally find the killing of children harder or even unnacceptable.
In practice child murder is pretty well correlated with the highest levels of sociopathy and psychopathy, so a military which practices high levels of child murder has higher levels of psychopaths and sociopaths in their midst and leadership, and they have freer reign to act in psychopathic and sociopathic ways with no punishment - there are always some psychopaths and sociopaths in the military, but there being so many that child-murder is a generalized practice including specific targetting children - for example snipping children or bombing playgrounds - is incredibly rare.
We saw this with the SS and the Nazis, and we see this with the IDF and the Zionists.
This seems a bit made up. Again, the law makes no difference.
Regarding this moral scale, I disagree. I think the vast majority of the world sees it as binary. Murder bad. Self defense okay. Either/or, no sliding scale present. Do you have any sort of evidence?
This is not sound. There are many reasons children could die in wars less, with evacuation from conflict zones being a big one. Similarly with crime, where things like gang violence will never target them due to them not being gang members.
This is not sound. You point out leadership in the very next line, and leadership absolutely makes a big difference. One correlation is not enough to draw such a conclusion when there are other factors.
I’m academically inclined, personally, so I pay great attention to details and do not think with my feelings. So these details are important to me.
Every single Justice System in the World has a range of sentences for even the same kind of killing crime (for example for Murder) and even different crimes for the killing of another human being (such as Murder vs Manslaughter).
So even the various Justice Systems in the World recognize different levels of blame and deserved punishment for different situations where a human being kills another.
Justice Systems, even if containing plenty of unfair or ill-drafted laws, at the high-level encode what Society finds acceptable and unacceptable - you might have some countries with the Death Penalty and others without, and different minimum sentences for Murder across the World, but there isn’t a single Justice Systems in the World with a single fixed sentence for Murder, which would be what matches your “Murder is Murder” position.
Meanwhile your argument on this is “the law makes no difference”. Full, unadulterated, 100% personal opinion of the denialist kind.
Denialism is not Skepticism and it’s the very opposite of “academically inclined” and putting forward and holding a theory entirelly on what you believe without in this entire thread even once putting forward even the most basic piece of supporting evidence that the rest of the World thinks like you (everything has literally been what you think and what you disagree with) is about as anti-academic as it gets.
Granted, for you it is as you say - Murder is Murder - (that’s pretty well established by now).
For everybody else there are only two logical possibilities:
Occan’s Razors is a pretty straighforward way to determine which of the two possibilities is the most likely.
Okay, so do murderers of children get worse sentences then, on average? With supporting data, preferably.
Murder and manslaughter are differentiated via intent, same with things like first or second degree murder. Afaik, the traits of the victims are not taken into account, that I’ve ever heard anyway.
The very first link in a Google search - several states have explicity sentences for the murder of children, either with higher maximums, higher minimums or transforming things which would otherwise be Manslaughter into the same as First Degree Murder. (Just search for “Child” in that page to find those).
Also check this paper. Even though it’s about gender rather than age, you can find the point I made earlier about “vulnerability” for example at page 435 section B.1 as well as explicity references to children in the various Sentencing Aggravatory Scales under Apending I (from page 464) explicitly under scale I and IV and implicitly in other scales (i.e. Scale 3 - Heinousness) which whilst they don’t prove that child killing explicitly is deemed more heinous than others, does prove my point that society has Heinousness criteria for Murder, disproving your “Murder is Murder” take.