More death

Funeral in Iskandariyah on Saturday. Photo by Haidar Hamdani for AFP/Getty Images, via New York Magazine.

Between the horror last week in Brussels, in Europe, and this week in Lahore, among Christian kids in a public playground (which struck me too as very poignantly awful though I don't like the implicit message that the Christianity of the victims makes it somehow worse; because it's not just an attack on Christians but on the ethnic-religious pluralism that has somehow survived in Pakistan, the "Land of the Pure", over the 70 years since Partition), most of us missed out on yet another thing, in Iraq of all places, where at least 41 non-Christian non-Europeans were killed, 17 of them boys aged 10 to 16, at an amateur soccer match in the mixed Sunni-Shi'a town of Iskanderiyah south of Baghdad, and 105 wounded, by another teenage boy killing himself on behalf of the Da'esh, another blow against integration and against even the most uncomplicated and inoffensive forms of happiness.

Chas Danner at New York Magazine (see the picture credit above) adds:

The Associated Press notes that analysts and members of the US-led anti-ISIS coalition believe attacks of this type may proliferate, both inside Iraq and abroad, as the militant group continues to lose ground to Iraqi forces in the country’s North and West.

These awful incidents really are the consequence of the defeat of the Da'esh, its gradual devolution from ideas of statehood to elementary nihilist gangsterism, and I can't say the government forces and its Western backers should stop defeating them, so I don't know quite what to say.

Something just made me Google the Wannsee Conference, detailing the steps of a "final solution" to the "Jewish question" for the assembled ministers of the Reich, held in January 1942 just after a decisive turnaround moment in the progress of the war, when the Soviet forces finally began to counterattack the Wehrmacht outside Moscow and the US joined the allies following Pearl Harbor, and a bad harvest had left Germany short of food; as if the Holocaust were a direct consequence of those events that would assure Germany's defeat, which would obviously be a ridiculous oversimplification of what happened, and no sane person would make it a parallel to what's going on in Iraq and Syria anyway.

Maybe the point of remembering it is just to remember that it's always important, and to remember thereby that attention, as we say, must be paid. If it's the only thing we have to bring to the situation, then we have to bring it.