Murdering Children

Members of the Religion of Peace mark the end of their holy month.

A bomb hidden in a cart of toys killed two children and wounded 17 others in a playground in northern Iraq on Friday, the first day of a national holiday to celebrate the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Police Colonel Abbas Mohammed said a would-be suicide bomber pushed the cart into a play area in the predominantly Shi'ite northern town of Tuz Khurmato. He said the bomber was wounded.

The town's mayor, Mohammed Rasheed, told Reuters two boys aged between 10 and 12 had died and another 17 people under the age of 18 had been wounded in the deadly attack.

And of course the 3-page Reuters article dedicates only a couple of paragraphs to this headline story- the deliberate murder of young children- but gives the rest over to the accidental deaths of civilians killed in a US strike against a suspected Al Qaeda target. They, of course, make no mention of the fact that the terrorists the US troops were doing battle with at the time, fled into the building housing the civilians and began firing on the Americans from that location.

The sad thing is that there are too many people who will think that these accidental deaths during combat are as bad as, if not worse than, the deliberate targeting of children in a playground.