November 24, 2014
He was just a little kid, maybe nine years old, no more. You might have seen him on television.
He stood facing the camera, raised a skinny arm and his childish voice and recited an Arabic slogan he had memorized, something to the effect that what they have done in Iraq they will do in the White House. We will see them in Washington.
He sat down. The soldier beside him grabbed one of those skinny arms and jerked him up again, ordering him to tell the rest. He recited a few more words, with less certainty about what they were supposed to be.
I wanted to shake some sense into the soldier who was training a child to go to war. Choosing his enemies for him. Giving him a motive—a religion he doesn’t even understand.
Wondering how this happens, I thought of other children. In Damascus in 1994, Wayne and I, with two Lebanese friends, checked into a cheapy little downtown hotel. When we went up to our room there was a small boy there, an eight year old, I guessed. He was making a show of wiping the furniture with a rag. That done, he wandered around, as though looking for something more to do. We thanked him, gave him a few coins and permission to leave. Later we saw him down in the lobby, and I was shocked to see him smoking a cigarette.
I don’t usually do the kind of thing I did then. I sat down beside this boy, a frail, fair-skinned child, and told him, gently I hope, that what he was doing was very bad for his health. He turned his pale eyes toward me and then looked away again. I said, “I am afraid that when you are a man you will be very sick, because of what the tobacco is doing to you.”
Again I was surprised when sudden tears gushed out of his eyes and spilled down his cheeks. He wiped his face with an arm. He sniffed and said, “They wouldn’t let me go to school.”
I sat there trying to understand. “They wouldn’t let me go to school.” Slowly it came to me. His family, no doubt very poor, had made him go to work. Maybe someone told him he had to be a man now. Everybody knew that men worked, and when they took breaks they smoked.
What could I do? I didn’t think of anything.
Now I have a little great granddaughter, a bundle of energetic chatter, a stream of creative ideas. One day someone asked Violet what she wanted to be when she grows up. Immediately she said that she would own a big company and hire a lot of boys.
“What kind of boys will you need in your company?”
Without hesitation she said, “They have to have stubble.”
“You mean…a beard? Just a little beard? Why?”
A hint of incredulity flickered in her face, before Violet said, “That’s how I will know they are old enough to work.”
She knows at the age of six. Some people are too young to work, too young to smoke, too young to make war, too young to carry the burdens their world is laying on them.
The small Iraqi shouting promises to fight, a bit unsure of some of the words, and the little Syrian working and smoking, though he would rather go to school, haunt my thoughts today, because I have just read that enlisting children, even abducting children and indoctrinating them is an obvious strategy of ISIS. Children as young as 10 and 12 are being used as combatants, messengers, spies, and guards. They wear uniforms, sometimes with hoods over their heads, and they carry rifles. They man checkpoints and do domestic labor such as cooking and cleaning. In areas under their control in both Syria and Iraq ISIS has closed schools to free the children for military training. Sometimes they have simply enforced new curriculum to teach little boys their ideology and gain the loyalty of the young generation.
This is child abuse, pure and simple. As surely as the raping of women and forcing them into unwanted marriages, as surely as beheading men, this is a violation of human rights.
It is also a scary warning of things to come.
What can we do? I wish I knew.
Sometimes evil causes me just to crave goodness. When that happens I notice my own faults, and I become careful not to imitate the behavior I detest. Maybe now is a time when the only thing we can do is to look at ourselves critically and remember the example of our teacher. Let us, like Jesus, bless the children. At home, at school, at church, everywhere, let us cherish them, protect their innocence, value their simple wisdom, love them as whole little people with the right to be children, model for them responsible, peaceful adulthood and give them time to get there.