Once upon a war...

I was only six years old when Israel invaded Beirut, and from that terrible time, I kept only one memory: My brother and I are playing on the balcony when thousands of colourful confetti rained down on us. We picked them up and they were flyers with writing on them. A carnival! There's going to be a carnival in Beirut soon! It was all so exciting. We started collecting the flyers and making paper planes and throwing them down the street. Every thing was full of colour. I remember it being so beautiful. The memory vanishes after that...

Years later, the family is having a reminiscing moment about the war, and I mention the confetti, wondering if we ever went to that carnival. My brother looks at me incredulously, "What carnival? These were flyers thrown by Israel warning of the threat of the PLO and explaining that we, the Lebanese, are not the target of their invasion". I was speechless... The six-year-old me must have tried to protect herself by conjuring this pleasant memory from what could have been awfully frightening. Of course the invasion ended up costing over 20,000 civilian lives, with 40,000 wounded. Because that's how "targeted" Israel's wars have always been.

I share this today because it's been on my mind for a while, the ability of a child to protect herself by erasing scary memories. And it keeps taking me to the children of Gaza and Syria, and all the horrors they are seeing. How powerful does their defense mechanism have to be to reinvent a bearable memory from all this? How will they ever be able to unsee images that the strongest of us shudders at in one glance? These aren't flyers falling from the sky, after which you can pack up and leave. These are phone calls and text messages informing you that your life as you know it is over, with nowhere to go, nowhere to hide and no means to forget. This stays with you, and your childhood is lost, forever.

It has to stop... It must stop.

The definition of psychopath

"Psychopathy is a mental disorder characterized primarily by a lack of empathy and remorse, shallow emotions, egocentricity, and deceptiveness. Psychopaths are highly prone to antisocial behavior and abusive treatment of others, and are very disproportionately responsible for violent crime. Though lacking empathy and emotional depth, they often manage to pass themselves off as normal people by feigning emotions and lying about their pasts."

So in my opinion, anyone capable of doing this and telling a seventy year old mother, while beating her up, 'We're going to teach you a lesson. Obviously you did not know how to raise your kid', cannot be anything but psychopaths. Nothing explains this lack of humanity other than the perpetrator's physiological inability to be human. Of course this also applies to all those who give out the orders.

I really do hope Malek Jandali manages to get his family out of Syria. But I hope more that one day soon, he can play his music back home, where he belongs.