Hawra Hassan is four years old. She lives in Mosul, Iraq, which we bombed the other day, killing 200 civilians.
The wounds on Hawra’s face were manufactured here in the USA.
Mosul was called Nineveh in the Bible.
It was to Nineveh, whom Yahweh had decided in his Godly opinion was wicked and worthy of destruction, that Yahweh sought to dispatch Jonah to warn of impending doom. Jonah was of the same opinion as his God regarding the idolaters of Nineveh, who worshiped Ishtar, the feminine Goddess of fertility, love and sex who was often in contention with our cray male desert God.
But Jonah suspected that Yahweh, despite his bluster and pronouncements, would soften in the end, as he was sometimes wont to do, and spare Nineveh Sodom’s fate, so he fled from his mission, rather than risk a good stoning. Yahweh chased Jonah down and had him disgorged from the belly of his whale where Jonah had spent three days contemplating the wisdom of following Yahweh’s orders. The undigested Jonah then hastened to Nineveh to save it, which was presumably Yahweh’s plan all along.
There is no Jonah, now, and Ishtar and Yahweh have apparently abandoned Mosul to the tender ministrations of ISIS, The Iraqi Army, Iranian Irregulars and the United States Air Force.
“ Air Force Brig. Gen. Matthew Isler, a deputy commander for the coalition's air power, tells U.S. News that fighting in Iraq's second-largest city has intensified to unprecedented levels now that fighters from the Islamic State group are surrounded and that their leaders and foreign comrades have fled.
"The density of the local fighting for those ground forces has changed," Isler said from the coalition headquarters in Baghdad, describing the dangers facing the Iraqi security forces on the ground in Mosul. "What has not changed is our support, our diligence in making sure we are taking the appropriate levels to make sure we are avoiding any harm to innocent civilians."
Nice job, there, Gen. Isler.
Civilians were informed by leaflets dropped by the Air Force ahead of the raid to stay in their homes.
Then their homes were bombed.
What news of little Hawra?
“The 4-year-old girl runs her fingers over her shorn scalp, over the scabs on her face, then reaches down to her lap for a blond Barbie doll she named after her favorite new doctor, Noor.
Sometimes Hawra asks for her mother. Her father promises they will see her when Hawra gets better. The truth is, his wife is buried next to their neighborhood mosque along with her parents, all killed in a U.S. airstrike March 17 that destroyed their block in Mosul’s Jadidah neighborhood.”
I don’t know what would have happened to Hawra, had her now dead mother’s fate been left in the hands of Saddam back in 2003, or had Hawra been left to the designs of ISIS this year. But I do know that her injuries, and the decimation of her family and neighbors, would not have come in that case from ordinance manufactured in Indiana, or Florida, or Texas or where the hell ever.
And I know that we, as a people, need to rethink our policies.
In the end of Jonah’s story, after he does as Yahweh has told him and Nineveh is spared...
“Jonah obeys the call to prophesy against Nineveh, causing the people of the city to repent and God to forgive them. Jonah is furious, however, and angrily tells God that this is the reason he tried to flee from Him, as he knew Him to be a just and merciful God. He then beseeches God to kill him, a request which is denied when God causes a tree to grow over him, giving him shade. Initially grateful, Jonah's anger returns the next day, when God sends a worm to eat the plant, withering it, and he tells God that it would be better if he were dead. God then points out: "You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labour and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”
We have no shade.
The worm is fat and we truly do not know our right hand from our left.