** FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 662 11 January 2016 SLAYING THE INNOCENT

IT IS GHOULISH TO TEACH THAT IN WAR CHILDREN CAN BE KILLED 'BECAUSE OF FUTURE DANGER'.
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‘It is legitimate to kill the children of Palestinians, even babies. Because they will pose a future danger to us’. The considered legal ruling of some extremist Israeli rabbis.

Unlike combatants, children are weak, vulnerable, defenceless beings. Hence the accidental death of a child in warfare always shocks. Directly and deliberately aiming at slaying the little ones is worse. A moral enormity to make you shudder. Paraphrasing Albert Camus in the play Les Justes, surely ‘even in hatred there is a right way and a wrong way – and there are limits’.

The ferocious opinion of the lawfulness of child-killing can be contrasted with that of Father Francisco De Victoria. A Spanish Dominican theologian writing in the 16^th century. As Spain was engaged in a bitter war with the Ottoman Empire, De Victoria claimed that the innocent have God-endowed natural rights. Rights that encompassed also the hated enemy. ‘Thus the children of the Turks should not be killed, because they are innocent’, he wrote.

What does being innocent mean? Children below a certain age are morally irresponsible, hence free from legal guilt and cannot be prosecuted. But in the natural law tradition championed by De Victoria the definition is a stricter one. ‘Innocence’ comes from the Latin ‘nocere’, causing harm. That is why whether anybody, adult or child, is objectively innocent depends not on his subjective mental state but whether the person is threatening you with actual physical harm or not. Babies, by any standards, are innocent. Because a baby cannot point a gun at you and harm you. Geddit?

It is a terrible thing to teach children to hate. Like the father of the Carthaginian general Hannibal who forced him to swear eternal enmity towards the Romans. A hatred that brought untold strife and destruction to both nations. The Palestine-Israel conflict too entails, alas, that many children will grow up hating the other side. Still, human beings are not fatefully determined to hate. A Croatian writer I knew and respected, Dr Ante Ciliga, told me his own father wanted him to hate and fight Italians for the raids they had carried out on Croatian territory. He declined: ‘I told my dad that justice should take precedence over revenge’, the good doctor related to me. That shows that a noble and righteous character can rise above the low, primitive sentiments of revenge.

It is lawful to kill children in a Jewish war, the ruthless rabbis say. Ghoulish enough but why do they stop there? Why not claim that unborn babies in the womb should also be slain, along with their mothers? If the criterion was that the unborn Palestinians will one day fight Israelis, that would be logical. Non-pregnant women, little girls, also by the same vile reasoning could also be regarded as fair game…Where would the unfeeling rabbis stop? Only the total extermination of Palestinians, in principle ‘posing a future threat’ would ultimately satisfy them.

Is there anything more heart-rending than a seriously sick child? Children with cancer or other terminal conditions? Yet I suppose the same sinister logic should result in the ghastly rabbis not feeling compassion for the sufferers, like any decent human being would, but rubbing their hands in glee. ‘Ho, ho! The little Arab blighter has cancer… Soon he will die. Another one who will not grow up to hate and kill us. Very good. Hope more lethal diseases strike their accursed brood…’ Do they really reason like that?

The direct, deliberate killing of the innocent, i.e. non-combatants, is forbidden by the laws of war as set out in international law. In WWII the Allied policy of obliteration bombing of German cities, along with their civilian populations, clearly violated the Geneva Conventions. Apologists for such unjust means of war-fighting tried to contend that German civilians were somewhat aiding their country’s military efforts and could therefore be slaughtered. Brave Fr John Ford, an American Jesuit, rebutted that. He responded in the Journal Theological Studies by giving a long list of civilians who could not by any stretch of the imagination be involved in the enemy’s war machine. One example was indeed babes in arms. It did not stop the killers but, to the eternal merit of Fr Ford, it drew a clear limit. Never mind the sophistry, a baby is and always will be innocent.

‘The King’s Torah’, a book by a fanatic ‘man of God’, invokes Jewish sacred law to justify killing children. If anything would bring religion into disrepute, that would. Conscious of such danger, De Victoria taught that religion was not a just cause for going to war. What about the Old Testament holy wars then? Undertaken at God’s behest? Including the total extermination of all living beings in enemy cities? If such wars were God’s will, were they not right and moral?

Christian writers like Origen have long interpreted those savage conflicts not literally but allegorically. ‘Otherwise disciples of the Lord Jesus who came to teach peace, would never have allowed those Old Testament passages to be read in the Church’, Origen pointed out. And of course the enemy would understand God’s will very differently. That is why De Victoria argued not from revelation but from natural law – a law inscribed by God in the human heart and valid for all human beings.

‘Shedding the blood of Palestinian children will get you to Heaven’, I suppose the author of The King’s Torah feels God is telling him. But that could never be God’s voice. Rather, it is the Devil’s.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli


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