When Leaders Become School Shooters

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I'm sure you noticed that on the very first day of the current U.S. war with Iran, American missiles struck a school compound. In that single horrendous attack 165 people (most of them little girls between the ages of 7 and 12) were slaughtered. Their classrooms became rubble. Their playground became a graveyard.

There's no "fog of war" here. This was a first strike presumably meticulously planned before hostilities began. Put plainly: Trump's and Netanyahu's first targets in their completely illegal and immoral war were school children - little girls.

A War of Aggression

Even before considering the victims, let's underline the war's undeniable illegality. It was completely unprovoked. That makes it a war of aggression. In international law, initiating such a conflict is considered the gravest of crimes. The judges at the Nuremberg Trials famously declared that to launch a war of aggression "is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, because it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." That principle was meant to ensure that powerful states would never again unleash violence against another country simply because they could.

Yet here we are.

Targeting Civilians

As I said, the opening strike on that Iranian school could hardly have been accidental. Moreover, it followed a pattern already well-established by Israel's war in Gaza under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Again and again, the world has seen images of bombed schools-- places that had become shelters for displaced civilians, classrooms for children, or simply the last fragile spaces where families tried to survive. Critics have begun to describe this tactic grimly: the "Gaza-ing" of cities-- systematic bombing of densely populated areas where civilians inevitably live.

Now that same logic appears in Tehran.

In this context, be reminded that dense urban neighborhoods are not empty landscapes. They contain apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, and nursing homes. They house women, children, the elderly, and the disabled -- people who cannot easily flee when bombs begin to fall. When such areas are targeted, civilian casualties are not accidents. They are predictable consequences. They are intentional.

An Epstein War

And here the moral horror becomes even sharper. That fact that most of the victims of that first strike in Teheran were girls between the ages of seven and twelve, connects it unmistakably with Jeffrey Epstein scandal from which the Iran War seems anxious to distract us. (Some are even calling it "The Epstein War.")

Once again, young girls are the victims. Once again, power stands on one side and vulnerability on the other.

No one is claiming that the dynamics of sexual exploitation and the Trump and Netanyahu school shootings are identical. But the pattern is deeply unsettling. Powerful men act with near-complete impunity; little girls suffer the consequences. When this happens repeatedly-- whether in elite abuse scandals or in the conduct of war-- it raises questions that go far beyond ordinary sexism. It points toward a culture in which the suffering of the most defenseless becomes politically invisible.

"Leaders" As School Shooters

Meanwhile, Americans continue to express horror at school shootings at home. The 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech where 32 people were killed shocked the nation and remains the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history. Americans rightly consider such crimes monstrous.

But what should we call it when a government destroys a school killing pupils and teachers with missiles?

I'll tell you what I call it. It's a school shooting. And Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are the most lethal school shooters on earth. The phrase shocks precisely because it strips away the language of strategy and exposes the reality for what it is.

And when national leaders behave this way, they do more than destroy buildings and lives. They set an example. Leadership shapes moral culture. If governments normalize violence against children abroad-- bombing schools, flattening neighborhoods, "Gaza-ing" cities --why should we be surprised when violence seeps back into our own societies?

Conclusion

There I've said it: the two men just referenced are far worse school shooters than the worst we've seen. The moral logic in all cases is nonetheless frighteningly similar. They murder because they can.

If we truly believe that children's lives are sacred, that principle cannot stop at national borders. It reveals the slogan "pro-life" for the grotesque instrument it has become: a banner raised in defense of unborn life at home while bombs fall on little girls sitting in classrooms abroad.