By now, except for her family and friends, the short life and terrible death of 10-year-old Fatima Abdallah Jaafar will probably have been forgotten.
But it is necessary to remember the sickening circumstance of how, where and why Fatima was murdered.
It is worth remembering this because his sudden and disfiguring death is a searing antidote to the almost dizzying celebration of the “ingenious” ways Israel devises to assassinate its adversaries.
It is also a faltering omen of the scores of innocents who are destined to perish as the Middle East looks set to become engulfed in an even wider war. In just 48 hours, 50 children have died in Lebanon, all victims of the latest Israeli strikes.
Fatima and an 11-year-old boy, Bilal Kanj, were killed during the first wave of Israeli attacks against Hezbollah fighters with pagers containing explosives that detonated simultaneously at 3:30 p.m. on September 17 across Lebanon and Syria.
Fatima had just arrived home from the first day of the new school year. She was in fourth grade. Her aunt remembered how eager Fatima was to learn English.
“Fatima was trying to take English classes,” he said. “She loved English.”
Fatima was in the kitchen when a pager on a table started ringing. Fatima grabbed the device with the intention of giving it to her father, but it exploded on the way.
Fatima's small, angelic face instantly turned into a mangled mess. The room was now awash with the schoolgirl's blood, a terrible testament to the lethal force of the improvised bomb.
At her funeral in Lebanon's Bekka Valley, grieving classmates carried aloft a large statue of Fatima. Her mother, walking alongside a small coffin covered in flowers, wept.
Mourners paused in the town square before heading to a nearby cemetery, where they prayed as an elderly cleric called on God for justice.
Fatima's death was of little or no significance to the multitude of Western journalists and so-called “security experts” who “marveled at the complexity” of Israel's covert “plot” to infiltrate Hezbollah on such a “colonial” scale.
Israel has neither confirmed nor denied involvement, but the country's security services are believed to have been responsible for organizing and carrying out the attacks.
Of course, it is a familiar story. Children – whether orphaned, traumatized, dismembered or murdered in Gaza, the occupied West Bank or Lebanon – are considered disposable cannon fodder as Israel continues to unleash its “murderous rage” unchecked.
Fatima and the thousands of children in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon who have already been and will be killed have been reduced to an uncomfortable asterisk in the short-sighted minds of Israel's legion of cheerleaders abroad.
Among them is Artur Wilcynski, a former Canadian ambassador and senior security official, who was quick to describe Israel's ruthless tactics that took the lives of young Fatima Abdallah and Bilal Kanj as “brilliant.”
“Today’s attack on Hezbollah operatives was brilliant. It was a major blow against a terrorist group that has fired thousands of rockets at civilians while the useless UN mission in Lebanon stands by. There is a price to pay,” Wilcynski wrote.
The fact that the deaths of Fatima and Bilal were a shocking measure of the “price” Lebanese civilians had to “pay” did not deter Wilcynski from posting what the retired Canadian diplomat apparently considered a pithy GIF just hours after the deadly explosions began.
The GIF features two popular Looney Tunes cartoon figures. In the short scene, the Road Runner scares Wile E Coyote. The text reads: “Beep beep.”
Later, in response to a tweet by acclaimed Palestinian writer Mariam Barghouti, who noted that among the victims of Israel’s “premeditated” attack were children, Wilcynski posted another GIF, this time of a movie star in character, clapping.
Wilcynski’s atrocious posts sparked a fierce and sustained backlash, particularly given that only months earlier he had been appointed a “special adviser” to the University of Ottawa on anti-Semitism.
In a far-fetched attempt to justify his damning posts, Wilcynski claimed that the cartoon GIF was, in fact, “a statement about persistent attempts to kill Jews over the centuries that fail.”
No, sir. Publishing a fragment of a cartoon to make “a statement” about the murderous pogroms that Jews have suffered “throughout the centuries” is a scandalous affront to the memory of millions of victims: girls and boys, women and men.
Remember, the author of this obscene absurdity was a decorated career civil servant who promoted Canadian values and interests at home and abroad and was charged with confronting anti-Semitism on a university campus.
My God.
Unashamed, Wilcynski turned into an amateur psychoanalyst, suggesting that his online detractors — who criticized him for “joking” about children’s deaths — were guilty of “morbid projection.”
Wilcynski then resorted to the predictable and exculpatory argument that he found the “loss of innocent life…abhorrent.”
“There has been significant misunderstanding about my use of the word ‘brilliant,’” he wrote in X. “The loss of innocent life in any conflict is abhorrent and should be avoided. As a retired intelligence and national security leader, my use of that word referred to the complexity and sophistication of an operation.”
Whether Wilcynski is willing to admit it or not, the shadowy architects of Israel’s “complex” and “sophisticated” “operation” are guilty of the murder of Fatima and Bilal.
They are responsible. They are to blame. The murders should torment their consciences, for they will never be held accountable. Instead, they can earn medals and promotions. Wilcynski and his cruel companions will praise them for their “service” and inventiveness.
Wilcynski's hasty and self-serving clarification did not work.
On September 18, he once again took to a social media platform renowned for its seriousness of purpose, intelligence and nuance, X, to announce his resignation.
“My posts about the war between Hezbollah and Israel caused harm and affected my ability to help combat antisemitism at the University of Ottawa. My intention in sharing them is irrelevant when it is clear that many people were harmed by them. I apologize. I have resigned from my position as special adviser on antisemitism,” he wrote.
Wilcynski's posts that caused so much “damage” and “harm” remain, as of this writing, active on X.
Meanwhile, Fatima and Bilal have been buried. They will never graduate. They will never get married. They will never have families of their own to love.
And Fatima will never learn English.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
