Who gets to be a child?
Trapped in a bullet-ridden car in Gaza City, surrounded by her dead relatives, six-year-old Hind Rajab pleaded with the Red Crescent for help. That help, in the form of a medical team, eventually came – only to be slaughtered on arrival. Hind was killed, too, her decomposing body found weeks later.
Back in January, little Hind died one of the most awful deaths imaginable. Unlike most of the more than 13,000 other dead children in Gaza, Hind has been written about extensively. Still, despite the fact that Hind said on a recorded phone call that Israeli tanks were firing at the car, Israel has refused to accept any blame. They’ve said that the IDF had absolutely nothing to do with Hind’s death and they weren’t anywhere near her. An Al Jazeera analysis and a Washington Post investigation, meanwhile, found that to be what some people might term “inaccurate” and what others might describe as a “brazen lie”. Satellite imagery found that Israeli armored vehicles were in the area and that the damage caused to the ambulance and the car was consistent with Israeli weapons.
Again, Hind isn’t just an anonymous statistic rotting in a mass grave, like lots of dead Palestinians. Her death has been documented and I encourage you to read about it if you haven’t already. I am not here to rehash the nightmarish details; I am simply here to say this: Hind was six years old when she was murdered. Six. She was a child. A six-year-old is a child.
Why am I spelling out the obvious? Because the fact that Palestinian children are children doesn’t seem obvious to many in the western media. It’s clearly not obvious to CNN host Kasie Hunt. During a segment on Columbia University students taking over Hamilton Hall and renaming it “Hind’s Hall”, Hunt explained to viewers: “Hind is a reference to a woman who was killed in Gaza.” A woman.
A few minutes after this, Hunt interjected to say that she had “misspoke” and noted that Hind was not a woman, she was “a five-year-old girl”. (She was actually six). We all word things imperfectly sometimes. But Hunt – who has small children herself – casually referring to a six-year-old as a “woman” isn’t just clumsy wording. Rather it appears to be yet another example of what some CNN staffers have described as a pro-Israel bias at the network, one so dramatic that it amounts to “journalistic malpractice”. In February, the Guardian reported that some CNN staff fear the network is “acting as a surrogate censor on behalf of the Israeli government”, systematically playing down Palestinian suffering and uncritically amplifying Israeli narratives. In March, the Intercept similarly reported that international news anchor Christiane Amanpour confronted network executives about the “double standards” at play in CNN’s coverage.
It’s not just CNN, of course. There is a long history (one that stretches back way before October 7) of mainstream media outlets dehumanizing Palestinians. Part of this dehumanization is an inability to see Palestinian children as children. In January, for example, Sky News reported on the IDF shooting of a child in the West Bank with the following language: “Accidentally, a stray bullet found its way into the van ahead, and that killed a three- or four-year-old young lady.” The Washington Post, meanwhile, published an incredibly racist cartoon by Michael Ramirez last year that suggested all dead children in Gaza were being used as human shields by Hamas. After all, there is no such thing as an innocent child in Gaza! Republican representative Brian Mast certainly doesn’t think so: when asked by an activist whether he’d seen pictures of dead babies in Gaza, Mast replied: “These are not innocent Palestinian civilians.”
Childhood is synonymous with innocence. Israel, which arrested between 500 and 700 Palestinian children aged 12-17 a year before October 7, 2023, (that number has only increased now) has consistently pushed the notion that there is no such thing as an innocent Palestinian. Organizations like Save the Children have repeatedly raised the alarm about the abuse of Palestinian children detained by the Israeli military: a July 2023 report, for example, notes that “four out of five (86%) of them [are] being beaten, and 69% strip-searched”. There have also been numerous reports of violence of a sexual nature. These reports tend to be countered by pro-Israel voices that insist none of these children should be considered innocent.
It’s not just Palestinian children who are consistently denied the status of children, I want to stress. The adultification of Black children in the western world is well-established. A 2017 study by the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, for example, found that Americans view Black girls as less innocent and more mature for their age than white girls, resulting in harsher penalties in the juvenile justice system. A similar study has found that African American boys as young as 10 years old were significantly less likely to be viewed as children than their white peers. Black children are also 18 times more likely than white children to be criminally sentenced as adults rather than children. Adultification has serious consequences.
Through no fault of their own, children in Gaza have never known a life without airstrikes and military incursions. The constant trauma means that – back in 2022 – four out of five children in Gaza lived with depression, grief and fear. Now, with Gaza in ruins, every single child in the strip has been robbed of a childhood. But that doesn’t give journalists like Kasie Hunt the right to pretend they’re not children.
Jerry Seinfeld, who dated a 17-year-old when he was 38, thinks the world is too woke
It would be unfair to suggest that privileged white children aren’t sometimes adultified as well. They are – normally, when some creepy dude wants to date them. Which leads me to Jerry Seinfeld, who is currently in the news moaning that comedy is dead because of the “extreme left and PC crap and people worrying so much about offending other people”. Unfortunately for Seinfeld, his crusade against woke has revived the memory that he used to date a high-schooler. Seinfeld once told People magazine it was fine because the girl in question “is a person, not an age”.
Cher, 77, says she only dates younger men because men her age are ‘all dead’
Speaking of age gaps, Cher is currently dating a 38-year-old. This is partly, she says, because her male peers are deceased. Which isn’t entirely true: they’re running the US government.
Denmark to allow abortions up to 18 weeks
Previously, abortions were legal up to 12 weeks. That limit was set in 1973, because “at that time all abortions were performed surgically, and at that time an abortion after the 12th week entailed a greater risk of complications”, the health ministry has said. “After 50 years, it is time for the abortion rules to keep up with the times.” Tell that to America, please.
Perimenopausal women have a 40% higher risk of depression
That’s according to an analysis of data involving more than 9,000 women around the world.
Saudi Arabia activist sentenced to 11 years in prison for ‘support’ of women’s rights
“With this sentence the Saudi authorities have exposed the hollowness of their much-touted women’s rights reforms in recent years and demonstrated their chilling commitment to silencing peaceful dissent,” said Amnesty International’s campaigner on Saudi Arabia.
Women would prefer to be alone in the woods with a bear rather than a man
This is according to a somewhat unscientific online poll on TikTok, which has resulted in heated discussion.
The week in pawtriarchy
Researchers have documented an orangutan successfully treating a wound with a medicinal herb – a first for wild animals. It’s a fascinating reminder of how intelligent the critically endangered creatures are.
• This article was amended on 4 May 2024 to clarify that CNN anchor Kasie Hunt corrected the mistake about Hind Rajab being a woman and said that she had misspoken.
