The New Child Porn?

In his blog American Digest, Vanderleun has written a brilliantly cynical piece about the vivid images we see saturating the media of dead children killed by American and Israeli bombings in the Middle East, likening them to a new and particularly odious kind of child porn aimed at eliciting not our lust but our compassion. Here is an excerpt from his article on The Weaponization of Children:

I feel this [compassion fatigue] not so much because of the platters of dead babies being served up in Gaza and Lebanon, but rather because I know it for what it is -- the cynical attempt by a weak and cowardly cadre of killers to manipulate my compassion gland that is just as base and unrelenting as the attempts of pornographers across the internet to manipulate my lust. The main difference being that the Terrorists are getting better at their game and you don't have to swear you're 18 to see their creations. Most major media outlets around the world are only to happy to beam them into your brain 24/7...One of the downsides for those who are manufacturing dead-child porn in the Middle East is that they know the West becomes numb to your ordinary dead-child porn after a bit. And so they do what pornographers always do when the suckers don't get that rush any longer, they make it more base than ever before. One of the iron laws of porn, be it the porn of sex or the porn of violence, is that there really is no bottom to it.

Vanderleun even goes so far as to suggest that Hezbollah may have herded those children into that building in Qana and that when the world wearies of seeing babies dragged out of bombed buildings on cue before cameras, we will then start witnessing even grosser images of "the body parts of children harvested from some grave-site out along some nameless highway, strewn...across Israeli tank tracks, and then run over...a few times before the appointed photo-op."

I think he's probably right. I think Hezbollah and its supporters will sink to just about any depths of depravity to further their malignant cause of Islamicizing the world. But what are we to do about it? Turn off our cameras and close our eyes to the carnage, or, when we see it, feel only hatred for murderous terrorists and no compassion for the innocent victims of the awful violence raging there?

Child porn is reprehensible, no matter what its form or purpose. But its victims will always merit as much compassion as we can summon.