Now, I get it. You love your kids, warts and all.
Ebola has twitches that drive us mad. We drive him crazy.
Our teeny family.
We love him unconditionally, of course.
I get it.
But if your child is, say, an axe murderer, reality does – or should – temper that love with knowing that some things are inexcusable.
Right?
It is possible for a much-loved child to inflict ghastly wrongs on the world, or attempt to. A parent who is a parent should have raised a child to accept consequences for their actions, even as they love them in spite of them.
A lot of those lessons have been lost along the way as these past few generations have been raised by parents who, increasingly, have themselves never suffered the consequences of their own bad choices, having been bubble-wrapped from birth in excuse-making and blaming everyone else for their own personal failings.
Failure and disgrace have not been allowed to be options because #feelingz might be hurt, triggering further failures and feelings of inequity. Vicious cycle, according to modern sociological claptrap. There is almost always some underlying cause to be blamed, or sad circumstance, rather than simply the lack of character or judgment of the individual.
In many cases, enabling parental units (when there are such creatures) have created little uninhibited, unrestrained, impulsive social monsters who do as they please and continue on doing so into ‘adulthood,’ as they have learned no lessons to the contrary.
A case I ran across today seemed to illustrate this clearly.
A British mother Xweeted a really lovely picture of her daughter from the front of one of the British papers this morning, with what seemed to be heartfelt gratitude for the story within. The first few comments I read led me to think she was a victim, perhaps of a rare disease, or some other awful misfortune to befall one so young and, frankly, ethereal-looking.
Your daughter’s poem had me in tears. She is obviously a wonderful young woman and a great credit to you. Holding your family in the Light.
— Gillespie (@hookslight) August 17, 2025
OBVIOUSLY, a ‘wonderful young woman,’ and sensitive poet to boot.
Until you can see the headline for the story.
‘My daughter Zoe is not a terrorist. Why has she spent a year in prison?’
Well…hang on a minute here.
What did Zoe do, good gravy goodness?
Zoe Rogers has not been charged with a terrorist offence. On Saturday, she marked a year in detention without trial inside HMP Bronzefield, a high-security prison in Surrey.
Rogers, 21, was arrested during a Palestine Action raid on a site run by Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit in Filton, near Bristol, last August.
“My daughter is not a terrorist,” said her mother, Clare Hinchcliffe. “They charged them with violent disorder, criminal damage and aggravated burglary,” she added, referring to her daughter and her co-defendants, who are collectively known as the Filton 24.
Wait, whut?
Oh. And a note about Zoe.
…Shy and autistic, Rogers is one of two dozen defendants in that case who have been denied bail. She has pleaded not guilty.
Of course she is.
Dear sweet Zoe started going to marches after October 7th, but to support the Palestinians.
…She said that in the weeks after Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel in October 2023, her daughter had started attending marches.
Dear sweet, shy girl.
…Hinchcliffe remembers, too, when Rogers began to lose hope after months of protests as the bombing and aid blockades continued in Gaza. “It’s the deaths of the children that she cannot bear. She decided she was going to write all the names of the children who’d been killed so far and their ages on this big bedsheet. And she never wrote a single name. She just couldn’t face it.
“She just became overwhelmed. She didn’t go to the march, she didn’t leave her bedroom the whole weekend. I think that was the point when she decided: the marches aren’t working; our government’s not listening.”
The deaths of slaughtered Jewish babies, or their mums or grandparents, or girls Zoe’s age dancing at a music festival, never kept dear, sweet Zoe up for a single moment.
So Zoe and her little friends were compelled to act because they just couldn’t bear it.
This ever-so-friendly and sympathetic article calls it a Palestine Action ‘raid‘ on a site run by an Israeli weapons manufacturer. As benignly described as if all the kiddos were in the Scooby Doo Clubhouse, and said, ‘RRut-roh! RRRet’s go!‘ on the spur of the moment.
What Zoe and her friends actually did was pile into a van, but then they did this:
Scooby Doo would not approve.
And golly, gee, Nell, if that headline doesn’t look just as frightening as the video.
Six arrested and police officer hospitalised after activists attack arms firm
Zoe’s mum didn’t mention any of this, and, oddly, neither does the article. Two police officers were injured, someone who worked there as well, and those high-spirited kids crashed a van through a gate and the entrance to the facility.
A prison van was driven through the perimeter fencing at around 4am and used to ram into the entrance of the premises on Bolingbroke Way in Filton.
More than a dozen activists from Palestine Action got out of the van and smashed as much as they could inside the Israeli-owned arms manufacturer’s site; leaving behind sledgehammers, axes, whips and other homemade weapons.
Police say that two officers were assaulted with a sledgehammer with one taken to hospital with injuries to her back, while the other officer received medical treatment at the scene by paramedics after being struck on the back of his legs.
At least one Elbit employee was also treated at the scene for an injury to their head.
There is a picture of one of them smashing away with a sledgehammer in the linked story.
Dear sweet Zoe was aboard for all of it – in the decommissioned van, ramming the building entrance, popping out with sledgehammers and axes, attacking police officers and employees, and destroying private property that, ironically, is manufactured for the British government, not the Israelis.
BUT SHE’S SO PRET-TEE AND WRITES POEMS
“She’s so pretty, obviously not a terrorist. That’s crazy talk.” The gullibility is sickening.
— dabhidh m (@clannanrothaich) August 18, 2025
Yeah. About that ‘poem’ – it’s as deluded and demented as you’d expect something from dear, sweet Zoe to be.
…Standing in her daughter’s undisturbed bedroom, Hinchcliffe unfurled a black screenprint that showed the text of a poem Rogers, who faces trial in November, wrote from prison.
“When they ask why,” she wrote, “I tell them about the children…I tell them about the boy found carrying his brother’s body inside his bloody backpack. I tell them about the girl whose hanging corpse ended at the knees. I tell them about the father holding up his headless toddler.”
The final line reads: “It was love, not hate, that called me.”
And for the woman who raised her to be proud of.
I hope they pack Zoe and her little friends away for a long, long time.
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