Your children will have seen more than That Video
“Speak to your children! They will have seen That Video”.
I've seen variations on this statement on every social media app, every few minutes, since white supremacist YouTuber Charlie Kirk was shot dead. It's been on the news too. There has been so much handwringing.
If I'm honest, I feel as if I might be living in some twilight zone. Are parents aware that if their child has access to social media or friends with access to social media, 'The Video', as it's called, will not have been even in the top 20 most violent and brutal images they've seen?
The idea that parents may not have spoken to their kids in two years about the images of Palestinian bodies that have been flooding social media apps daily is astonishing to me.
That Video is likely the first video they’ve seen of violence that wasn’t perpetrated against a Palestinian.
In my view, the important conversation to have with your children is about that difference. It's about why the public death of one white supremacist seems to matter more to people than the deaths of countless Palestinians. And why they think their children will already be desensitised to the bodies of Palestinian children to such an extent that a white man's death is more scarring for them.
Our children witnessing any death on social media is horrendous. The plight of Palestinians who, every day, see their children, parents, partners, loved ones, and neighbours literally blown apart is true horror.
I personally, without seeking out any videos, have seen three videos of babies decapitated by Israel's terrorist forces in bombings. I've seen countless children and adults on fire. I've seen paramedics trying to save journalists and watched the screen go dark as they exploded. I've seen an arm by a bag of flour, more blood than seems possible. I've seen so many shrouded bodies that it feels impossible even to know what to do with those images. Piles of body parts. Fathers carrying what remains of their children in plastic bags. Israeli terrorists pissing on Palestinian children, Israeli terrorists blowing up animals and laughing about it, Israeli terrorists raping detained Palestinian men in the corner of a prison. Mothers screaming, tearing their hair out over the bodies of their children. Audio of a five-year-old being shot more than 300 times by Israeli terrorists.
The sheer scale of Israel's genocide means we will see images daily of the most inhuman savagery - this is the Holocaust our children will grow up seeing. The difference is that we were able to say we didn't know the scale of the Holocaust; our children are having to watch indifferent adults send the message that when genocide happens to Arab or brown people, it doesn't matter.
The psychological damage being inflicted on our children is wrapped in how we separate ourselves as us versus them. How we put people in Palestine and Congo and Sudan and Haiti into a different camp - a camp where unfathomable state violence isn’t shocking or worthy of daily outrage and action.
And even then, we must always keep the perspective that our privilege means we are only viewing violence and not experiencing it in the way that other children around the world are.
Should you talk to your children about what they're seeing on social media? Absolutely. But I hope too that you'll speak with them about the way shock jocks and fascist governments want us to harden our hearts to all violence. And only feel sadness or shame when it's politically valuable for a Western regime.
Due to Israel, your children have seen unimaginable violence. I hope parents will reflect on that.
If you're horrified, like I am, that any children anywhere are exposed to violence directly or indirectly, I hope you'll join us at protests today and onwards. I hope you'll email your MPs, join Palestinian liberation groups, call for sanctions against Israel and boycott products that serve their bloody campaign of ethnic cleansing.
Now that it seems many people have decided that public executions are bad (took them a long time but hey they got there), I'm sure I'll see them outside the Israeli embassy, showing their children that we will stand for our values.
