2-Jun-07: Victimhood of Pal-Arab children... on film

From today's New York Sun:

In 2004, 24-year-old Brooke Goldstein spent her summer in the West Bank filming more than five hours of in-person interviews with terrorists — all of which she conducted without a bodyguard and without a weapon... She interviewed suicide bombers' families and children, who aspire to "martyrdom." The resulting film, "The Making of a Martyr," will screen as part of the Brooklyn International Film Festival on Saturday and Tuesday. In the interviews, parents of suicide bombers sit in living rooms adorned with posters of their dead, and teenage terrorists sit with their hands tensely gripping machine guns that rest against their knees as they answer Ms. Goldstein's questions... The fanaticism was worse than she ever imagined. "The most shocking thing was reconciling the normal appearance of these kids and what was coming out of their mouths," she said. "I was holding these beautiful children in my lap, and my translator was translating words of hate."

Read it all.

In the recent past here in Jerusalem, we've had the opportunity to personally raise the appalling subject of what Palestinian Arab society is doing to its own children. The context was face-to-face private conversations with officials of the UN. (We have never written about these meetings before, but it's time we did.)

The most recent was with Radhika Coomaraswamy, UN Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, in April.

A second was with Louise Arbour, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights last November.

The third, and by far the most disturbing, was with John Dugard, Special Rapporteur of the UN Commission on Human Rights on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories, two years ago (UPDATE February 2, 2008: I wrote about how that went).

All three individuals are intelligent, over-achieving professionals with impressive careers behind them. And all three produced not the smallest indication that anyone at the UN or anywhere else plans to do anything about catastrophic Arab abuse of its own youth.

Seems there are far more important issues on the agenda of these officials and their employer.