Friday, January 29, 2016

Food for thought


This week, Mr Cameron announced in Parliament that the government would fund the building of a Holocaust Memorial in London, and that the memorial would be "a permanent statement of our values as a nation."  On the same day, he described desperate refugees who have fled terror and now survive in the horror of the Calais Jungle - because Britain will not let them in - as “a bunch of migrants.”

Meanwhile, the Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights has recorded the stories of the lives of every one of the 556 children killed during Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza.

Here is one little girl: 

Yara Mahmoud Abdelsalam Al Farrah




Date of birth: 9 April 2006
Date of death: 1 August 2014
Eight-year-old Yara from Khan Younis was a small innocent girl described as an ‘angel’. She was an outstanding student at school. She was a daring and independent child, making her own decisions. She also wrote and drew beautifully. Her teachers keep some of her paintings. She won many art competitions. Her ambition was to be a dentist. Yara was very elegant, and was said to have good taste in choosing and combining colors. “She told me that she did not want to grow up, and I was very surprised to hear that from her,” said her mother. Her mother says that, “destiny quickly made her wish come true,” leaving her with deep sadness. But she hopes that her daughter is in heaven.  
On 1 August 2014, the family home was targeted with a missile from an Israeli drone. The family started to evacuate. Yara and her siblings were targeted by another missile while they were running away from the house. They were killed on the spot.




2 comments:

marmee said...

so painful to look at that child! As you blogged a while ago: some weeks, some days just wear one down.

Sue Hepworth said...

Yes, Marmee, when I first read about her, it made me cry.