End game

The little girl with curly hair wears a powder blue shirt. She sits on her father's shoulders (or is it an older brother?) with a small smile on her face - her fingers in a V for victory sign.

Now we pan out and take in the other symbols. The checked keffiyeh shows up, as do the red-black-green-white colours associated with the Palastinian cause. Behind the girl - a smiling picture of Yasser Arafat - with a German statement of "our democratically elected President".

Then the shock.

The girl is wearing a head-band with some things written on it in Arabic script - and around her waist is tied some soft sausage like things. They look like oblong cotton wool sticks. And yet they are meant to signify something totally different - the sticks of dynamite or other explosives that are exploded around a person - by that person in a suicide bombing.

What does this little girl know about the grisly end that so many have trodden? Has she watched their testimonial videos, earnest faces denouncing others and urging more to join their ranks - before they blast themselves and as many bystanders as possible into eternity?

And what of the man who carries her. What does he plan to do with this girl. They are clearly in Europe. Will they go back to the promised land to carry out the grisly act?

How sad that when my children can read about Winnie the Pooh, and write essays on the Dodo, and when we can have wonderful people for dinner (as guests - not to eat them like Puddleglum and co. were about to be in The Silver Chair) - and yet here are girls who are being held aloft as little poster girls for destruction.

I read last year about a little 5-year old girl being seen in Britain wearing a tee-shirt saying 'Porn Star' on it. We mourn for this generation of little ones who have the crudeness of so-called 'adult' sexuality pressed down on them. With the little girl in the blue top and wearing the cuddly dynamite belt we see a similar overlaying of adult cruelty.

We knew that when we named our daughter 'Asha' that we were doing so prophetically - that there is so much need for 'hope' the longer our lives send their shadows across the paths we have trodden so far.

Today Asha and Enoch played with kittens. They read from books. They went with me on chores. They were polite to their elders and full of abandon in playing with a new friend. They heard about a group of builders who may be building in the national park - and promptly made a game of 'cops and builders' where the police locked up the builders - and escaping builders were recaptured by a king (the latter game carried out with gusto at a small lego mini-man scale).

Would that more kids be blessed like our two are being blessed. We may be living in an age of AIDS - we may be seeing destruction all around - but for our two we are not in the end-game as yet.

But where is the little girl in the blue top today?