They May Grow Up to Become Mothers One Day…

EDITORIAL, 27 Apr 2026

#948 | Marilyn Langlois – TRANSCEND Media Service

The Psychopathology of Murdering Innocents

The horror of US and Israel’s vicious, unprovoked attacks against Iran on February 28 (my 76^th birthday) is breathtaking. The war commenced with a duo of atrocities.

The brazen murder of Iran’s beloved, wise and peace-seeking supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, in his humble Teheran abode and office, resulted in galvanizing the population, including many erstwhile opponents of the government, into fierce determination to fend off the aggressors. Considering that Khamanei steadfastly insisted throughout his life that Iran not acquire nuclear weapons, his brutal murder could indicate all bets are now off on that score.

Iranian school girls

The first news reports revealed bodies of dead children in southern Iran. US missiles murdered 170 young girls in their elementary school. Some say they were ritually murdered by the ruthless and degenerate Epstein syndicate that is fueling this war. While Western corporate media downplays this massacre of innocents, the outrage it has sparked throughout Iran is palpable as reported by numerous sources in the country, further cementing Iranian resolve to punish the perpetrators.

Former military intelligence officer and weapons inspector Scott Ritter exposes the attack on the school in MInab as a heinous “double tap” bombardment. His essay, The Backpack Girls, details how the attack unfolded and puts a human face on the victims. He asserts that in determining initial targets for the war, the US cut corners (thanks to Secretary of Defense, aka Secretary of War Crimes, Pete Hegseth), by not verifying that all targets were non-civilian. It’s been known for 10 years that this building was a school, and not part of the nearby naval base. Following the initial strike, when remote US missile operators saw video footage that “people” were running around outside the damaged building, they struck again, more ferociously than ever, to finish everyone off. Ritter generously suggests the video was unclear and the missile operators thought those “people” were “soldiers”.

Some contend the video was clear enough to show panicked children scurrying for safety. Many of the school girls were daughters of IRGC officers. Was the strike intended to demoralize and intimidate the Iranian military right out the gate? If so, it clearly had the opposite effect.

I’d like to suggest two additional messages this horrific school bombing sends.

Message #1: We rich and powerful men view young girls as dispensable objects we can toy with and dispose of at will and with impunity.

So much for hypocritical Westerners citing women’s rights as rationale for destroying the Islamic Republic. How can one even compare the increasingly lax enforcement of culturally sensitive, modest dress codes with the outright slaughter of young females? Not to mention the rampant rape and abuse of young women and girls by the Epstein syndicate that encompasses as yet unindicted top level financial and political figures, as first widely exposed by the intrepid independent journalist Whitney Webb in 2019, as I elucidated in a TMS editorial at that time.

According to former US Congressman and Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich,

This is, in fact, an extension of the Epstein saga, the destruction of innocence through child rape, murder and cannibalism by powerful people whose thirst for blood will never be slaked in this cartwheeling carnival of human sacrifice called war.

Message #2: These girls may grow up to be mothers one day and give birth to children who will become our enemies and harm us.

If you wonder what could have motivated US soldiers to wantonly murder a school full of young girls, consider how closely the US and Israel have collaborated in executing multiple war crimes, and whether Israel might have pushed the US to bomb the school. Think about what might motivate Israeli soldiers to wantonly kill children in Gaza by crushing their homes and schools and even sniping them individually with head shots.

If boys, they may grow up to be Hamas fighters; if girls they may grow up to be mothers who give birth to future Hamas fighters. No understanding that it is the killing of children itself that is likely to generate future resistance fighters among those that survive. This rationale is part of the Israeli modus operandi going back at least 44 years, according to first-hand evidence provided by a handful of perpetrators of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres.

Around 25 years ago, a remarkable documentary entitled Massaker was produced by a Lebanese and Swiss team. Several years after the horrific 1982 massacre of mostly women, children and elders in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon, the filmmakers sought answers to the question of what drives some people to commit such excesses of cruelty.

The film consists of haunting interviews with six of the perpetrators, members of the Christian phalangist militias who had been carefully conditioned, trained, armed, fired up, enabled and their crimes initially covered up, all by the Israeli military under Ariel Sharon. Each of the unnamed men is sitting on a hard chair in an empty room, their faces either blurred or not shown at all. In each case, while speaking about the murders they personally committed as well as the Israeli role in abetting the crimes, their twisting, wringing and fidgeting hands reveal the emotional toll this shameful episode continues to take on them.

When asked why they would kill women and children who couldn’t hurt them, they each echoed the words of their Israeli trainers: the women will give birth and raise more enemy fighters; the boys will grow up to hurt you, the girls may grow up to become mothers one day…

It is a genocidal, dehumanizing, supremacist and self-perpetuating mindset that persists today and nullifies any chance for peaceful coexistence.

The war in Iran raged for nearly 2 months, then entered a dubious pause and repeated US threats disguised as “negotiations”. The US and Israeli attacks on Iranian civilians have not been limited to that initial school bombing. On day two of the war, the Gandhi hospital in Tehran was struck, a slap in the face to the principles of healing and nonviolence that this hospital and its namesake embody. Already in the first ten days of the war more schools, hospitals, parks and playgrounds were struck.

Independent journalist Eva Barlett noted another cruel irony:

To add further insult, days after the girls’ school massacre, Melania Trump presided over a UN Security Council meeting on children in conflict. You can’t make this insanity up. The wife of a US president who is co-waging a war on children in Iran feigns concern over children in conflict.

Independent journalist Vanessa Beeley in Lebanon has reported extensively on occupation, murder, and mayhem conducted there by Israel expanding the war to that country. Besides hitting apartment buildings, schools and hospitals, its civilian targets include local cooperative banks:

This morning the Zionist terrorists announced they were going to go after the Qard Al Hassan Cooperative Bank that offers loans with no interest to all Lebanese civilians – usury-free banking that is criminalised by Israel as “providing funds to the Resistance” – reality it is a lifesaver for the Lebanese people, denied any reconstruction funding or free health care by the Zionist-aligned regime members. This strike is 1 km away from Hazmieh..on Mar Mkhayel road, so central Beirut. Zionists oppose usury-free banking..

Lest we lose all hope for humanity, it’s important to remember that resolute opposition to Zionist and US imperial aggression remains strong among the people of Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen and members of the Iraqi and Syrian resistance. Beeley has posted an essay by Mohammad Aloush explaining the resilience of what he terms the resistance environment, which is deeply embedded in the collective consciousness.

There are still plenty of strong, spirited young girls throughout the axis of resistance who may grow up to become not only mothers one day but fierce women champions of peace, love, dignity, ethical principles and solidarity with all oppressed peoples. Women like Marwa Osman in Lebanon and Prof. Setareh Sadeqi in Iran, whose conversation with Beeley a few weeks into the war offers a refreshing glimpse of traits we should seek and demand of our leaders.

A tree in Lebanon. Photo: Vanessa Beeley

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Marilyn Langlois is a member of the TRANSCEND Media Service Editorial Committee and of TRANSCEND USA West Coast. She is a volunteer community organizer and international solidarity activist based in Richmond, California.  A co-founder of the Richmond Progressive Alliance, member of Haiti Action Committee and Board member of the International Center for 9/11 Justice, she is retired from previous employment as a teacher, secretary, administrator, mediator and community advocate.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 27 Apr 2026.

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