Meditations On A Six Year Old Amputee Crawling Through Gaza - With The Help Of A Roller Skate

Meditations On A Six Year Old Amputee Crawling Through Gaza - With The Help Of A Roller Skate

Dec. 14, 2024

U.S. and ISRAEL IMPERIALISM - FOLLOW THE MONEY

Caitlin Johnstone

It’s funny the things that get to you when witnessing the nightmare in Gaza, out of all the horrors you’ll see there from day to day. Today I saw a video of a six year-old Palestinian boy whose legs had been amputated dragging himself through his tent camp with the help of a roller skate worn on one of his hands, and it just about destroyed me.

It was one of those inline skates that showed up in the nineties. Rollerblades, we called them. Western boys played with them in summers full of joy and laughter and skinned knees and grass stains. Now a little boy named Mohammad Saeed uses one to help him scoot through the dirt, because his legs were blown off by western military explosives, launched by Israelis who probably played with inline skates when they were small.

It’s the kind of thing that might inspire you if it were something you were just passively witnessing instead of something the western power structure you live under is actively inflicting on people. For those of us who live under the shadow of the U.S. centralized empire it’s a bit more emotionally complicated than an inspirational story about the indomitable spirit of the Palestinian people, because it’s also a story about how we failed to stop this from happening.

When we look at Mohammad Saeed crawling through the dirt on his leg stumps with the help of a roller skate, we are seeing our own civilization reflected back at us. A genocidal dystopia of complete moral bankruptcy. This is what we have become. This is what we have allowed our rulers to turn us into.

Reading by Tim Foley

Article with supporting links: https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/12/15/meditations-on-a-six-year-old-amputee-crawling-through-gaza-with-the-help-of-a-roller-skate/

Original: https://youtu.be/LXLDnq0Pngs

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I write about the end of illusions. 100% reader-funded writer. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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