Hind Rajab, Alexei Navalny, Where Did We Go Wrong?

^{Hind Rajab – “I’m so scared, please come.”}

It’s hard to even write about the devastatingly sad case of Hind Rajab, the little girl aged just six years who lay wounded in a dead relative’s car for hours while desperately pleading for help on a mobile phone.

Help did arrive in the form of an ambulance and two Palestinian paramedics. It was blown apart by an Israeli tank only a few meters from the car in which Hind Rajab was lying, Both the occupants of the ambulance died instantly.

The dead bodies of the little girl and her relatives weren’t retrieved until a fortnight later, when Israeli forces finally left the area.

I remember when my daughter was six years old. To even begin to imagine how I would feel if she had been in that situation is to spend time in hell. Even now, the tears flow at the thought of what that little girl was feeling as she begged for help for three hours while waiting for the rescue that never happened. Then she lay and slowly died, her only companions the bodies of her dead relatives.

I am so tired of the word, “antisemitism,” which has been propagandized, politicized and utilized to allow Netanyahu and his band of pseudo-religious, right-wing compatriots to commit atrocities similar to those of the Nazis in WW2.

No-one would surely argue that the evil perpetrated by Hamas on October 7th did not deserve retribution, but not the genocidal outrage being perpetrated by Netanyahu, with the assistance of the US, UK  and EU governments.

Netanyahu is more concerned for his own political skin than the innocents he is slaughtering in Gaza and on the West Bank. It’s time he ended his days in a jail cell.

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^{Alexei Navalny-“Be scared of nothing.”}

If Vladimir Putin thinks that by murdering Alexei Navalny he will diminish the opposition against him in Russia he needs to think again. He may have got away with the assassination of Yevgeny Prigozhin by shooting down his private jet, but Prigozhin was not the beloved figurehead that was Navalny, and still is even in death.

Navalny and his associates pulled no punches in revealing the corruption in the Kremlin. He has now paid the ultimate price for doing so. Meanwhile, Putin continues to lie and deceive the Russian people into believing his war against Ukraine is merely a defensive stance against Western (NATO) aggression.

As though from some malignant volcano, the world seems to have spewed forth a number of vile, ruthless, or just plain selfish and greedy men, intent on bringing humanity to its knees in their quest for the insanity of ultimate power.

In fact, the numbers are quite small. Even if one includes the petty dictators like Orban of Hungary, Lukashenko of Belarus, Kagame of Rwanda, and others who, while a curse to those nations who would prefer an honest democracy, are hardly in the league of Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, Ali Khamenei of Iran, and if re-elected this year, Trump of the United States. These latter control nuclear armaments they would not hesitate to use if their positions were endangered.

Vladimir Putin is already threatening to do just that if NATO countries intervene in his invasion of Ukraine. If he did so,  it would almost certainly result in a world-wide nuclear war in which Russia itself would cease to exist. It says much for Putin’s total unconcern for the welfare of the Russian people.

Meanwhile the rhetoric both in the Middle East and in Europe piles up. As do the mutilated dead bodies of the innocents. Little children like Hind Rajab who only wanted to live; Alexei Navalny, prepared to die rather than bend the knee to a cold-bloodied assassin of a dictator who had stolen his country’s freedom.

We are eight billion souls on this planet, yet we allow less than perhaps twenty individuals to hold the power of life or death, freedom or slavery, over us all.

Where did we go wrong?