UNICEF broadcast a film on Belgian television last week from which the clip above was taken. It was screened to popularise the slogan: “Don’t let war effect the lives of children”
The film does raise a couple of potentially interesting questions. Should children’s cartoon characters be hijacked to make adult political points? How do you explain the contents of the film to a wide-eyed three year old?
Mark Steyn makes the point that large numbers of children who suffer during strife do so in ways much more old fashioned than air-strikes:
Good luck to Unicef and all. But I can’t help thinking that, if you are that concerned for children in war zones, you might have done something closer to what real conflict is like in those places. In Rwanda, Sudan and a big chunk of west Africa, air strikes are few and far between. Instead, millions get hacked to death by machetes.
Come to think of it, wasn’t wholesale amputation of limbs by machete the official native outreach policy of a certain Belgian monarch less than a hundred years ago?
First seem at Emily’s.
