Some abuses of children
What percentage of adult children who live with their parents was abused as children? We have recently encountered several examples of this, and wonder how prevalent it is. No doubt it might serve the parents’ desires to limit the spread of the sordid tale, and perhaps to assuage their guilt by giving themselves the illusion that they are now caring for their children. But the most distressing part is the adult children. They were beaten or otherwise abused into submission, and now cannot function as adults; like whipped dogs, they fear to go too far from the false comfort of their cruel masters.
How much worse, then, is it to force children, whose human nature is aimed towards life and to continuation of our species, to believe in suicide from an early age? Should not anyone teaching this cruel, abusive, sick and evil doctrine be banished from the brotherhood of man? Unfortunately, there are plenty of men teaching this loathsome thing. Consider this from Matthias Küntzel in TNR:
“In the past,” wrote the semi-official Iranian daily Ettelaat as the war raged on, “we had child-volunteers: 14-, 15-, and 16-year-olds. They went into the minefields. Their eyes saw nothing. Their ears heard nothing. And then, a few moments later, one saw clouds of dust. When the dust had settled again, there was nothing more to be seen of them. Somewhere, widely scattered in the landscape, there lay scraps of burnt flesh and pieces of bone.” Such scenes would henceforth be avoided, Ettelaat assured its readers. “Before entering the minefields, the children [now] wrap themselves in blankets and they roll on the ground, so that their body parts stay together after the explosion of the mines and one can carry them to the graves.”
These children who rolled to their deaths were part of the Basiji, a mass movement created by Khomeini in 1979 and militarized after the war started in order to supplement his beleaguered army.The Basij Mostazafan–or “mobilization of the oppressed”–was essentially a volunteer militia, most of whose members were not yet 18. They went enthusiastically, and by the thousands, to their own destruction. “The young men cleared the mines with their own bodies,” one veteran of the Iran-Iraq War recalled in 2002 to the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine. “It was sometimes like a race. Even without the commander’s orders, everyone wanted to be first.”
The sacrifice of the Basiji was ghastly. And yet, today, it is a source not of national shame, but of growing pride. Since the end of hostilities against Iraq in 1988, the Basiji have grown both in numbers and influence. They have been deployed, above all, as a vice squad to enforce religious law in Iran, and their elite “special units” have been used as shock troops against anti-government forces. In both 1999 and 2003, for instance, the Basiji were used to suppress student unrest. And, last year, they formed the potent core of the political base that propelled Mahmoud Ahmadinejad–a man who reportedly served as a Basij instructor during the Iran-Iraq War–to the presidency.
Ahmadinejad revels in his alliance with the Basiji. He regularly appears in public wearing a black-and-white Basij scarf, and, in his speeches, he routinely praises “Basij culture” and “Basij power,” with which he says “Iran today makes its presence felt on the international and diplomatic stage.” Ahmadinejad’s ascendance on the shoulders of the Basiji means that the Iranian Revolution, launched almost three decades ago, has entered a new and disturbing phase. A younger generation of Iranians, whose worldviews were forged in the atrocities of the Iran-Iraq War, have come to power, wielding a more fervently ideological approach to politics than their predecessors. The children of the Revolution are now its leaders.
In 1980, the Ayatollah Khomeini called the Iraqi invasion of Iran a “divine blessing,” because the war provided him the perfect opportunity to Islamize both Iranian society and the institutions of the Iranian state. As Saddam’s troops pushed into Iran, Khomeini’s fanatically devoted Revolutionary Guard moved rapidly to mobilize and prepare their air and sea forces. At the same time, the regime hastened to develop the Basiji as a popular militia.
Whereas the Revolutionary Guard consisted of professionally trained adult soldiers, the Basiji was essentially composed of boys between twelve and 17 and men over 45. Photo by Reuters/NewscomThey received only a few weeks of training–less in weapons and tactics than in theology. Most Basiji came from the countryside and were often illiterate. When their training was done, each Basiji received a blood-red headband that designated him a volunteer for martyrdom. According to Sepehr Zabih’s The Iranian Military in Revolution and War, such volunteers made up nearly one-third of the Iranian army–and the majority of its infantry.
The chief combat tactic employed by the Basiji was the human wave attack, whereby barely armed children and teenagers would move continuously toward the enemy in perfectly straight rows. It did not matter whether they fell to enemy fire or detonated the mines with their bodies: The important thing was that the Basiji continue to move forward over the torn and mutilated remains of their fallen comrades, going to their deaths in wave after wave. Once a path to the Iraqi forces had been opened up, Iranian commanders would send in their more valuable and skilled Revolutionary Guard troops.
This approach produced some undeniable successes. “They come toward our positions in huge hordes with their fists swinging,” one Iraqi officer complained in the summer of 1982. “You can shoot down the first wave and then the second. But at some point the corpses are piling up in front of you, and all you want to do is scream and throw away your weapon. Those are human beings, after all!” By the spring of 1983, some 450,000 Basiji had been sent to the front. After three months, those who survived deployment were sent back to their schools….
These Imams are in our view committing crimes against humanity by teaching suicide to little children, and getting them to completely negate life before they even know it. They should be in jail, or worse, though we are a long distance yet from that. For starters, then, we’d like to hear a remake of a song with the lyrics: “Hey, Imam, leave the kids alone!”