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Nepal Seismic tremor: The Stories Media Hasnt Let you know Yet
Before the April 25 Nepal earthquake, not many knew about the surrogate Nepalese and other Asian mothers renting their wombs to the homosexual couples and single parents of Israel. However, the news isn't this. Three days after the 7.9 magnitude earthquake hit Nepal and killed more than 6600 people and left thousands injured, with many still missing under the rubble, an Israeli Boeing-747 flying from Nepal hit the tarmac of Ben Gurion International Airport carrying among 229 passengers, 15 Israeli babies born to surrogate mothers in Nepal. All the babies were born within the past six weeks. Where are the women who carried the babies in their wombs for nine months, even if for money? One ought to ask. They are probably in Nepal and there’s no news of them.
Tragedies and disasters, undoubtedly but not necessarily, as in this case, evoke emotions and empathy from people irrespective of their religion, caste, creed, gender and economic status, often diluting borders and razor wires. What one makes out of Israel’s act of flying, its newly born, though originally and scientifically half-Israeli, reflects a grossly skewed, and frankly speaking, racist response to the human tragedies.
The question is not of flying the surrogate mothers, too, to Israel but of empathy. If tragedies don’t shake a human conscience then what does?
If post-earthquake ravaged Nepal was unsuitable for infants, then how did the hundreds of Nepalese children, cuddled in their mother’s laps under open skies and shivering cold, survive?
What has the Israeli government done to help those surrogate mothers in Nepal who have delivered 15 of its future citizens?
Reportedly, there are a hundred pregnant surrogate mothers in Nepal with Israeli babies in their bellies. Israel surely is concerned about them and this is why it has set up a field hospital to assist local doctors and the evacuation of the newborn children is the top priority of the organization leading the initiative.
However, this statement by Israeli Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein that “he would allow the most heavily pregnant to be flown to Israel to give birthâ€, is enough to clear the smokescreen. What after they give birth?
Trading Nationalisms
Nepal is news. It’s also a platform to outweigh and stalemate your opponents at geo-political level, as it has appeared since last week. One of the worst tragedies of the post-Nepal earthquake has been the way helplessness, poverty and supposed inability of Nepal as a country to deal with natural calamities, was used by its powerful neighbours in scoring points over the other.
As if India has a full proof mechanism to deal with disasters!
Take the case of India and China’s relief efforts in the region. While TV studios in Delhi and Mumbai kept flashing mug shots of earthquake victims being helped over by Indian military personnel, headlines of India outfoxing China in relief efforts because of common Hindi language.
There are certain questions which spring from simple logic: If relief and rescue effort, supported by dozens of countries sending their men and equipment, and touted with hyper-media limelight, then why did protests against slow relief and lack of coordination break out on the streets of Kathmandu? Many reports from Nepal suggested that victims, battling the devastation, clashed with police after the promised buses to ferry them to their homes on the outskirts and villages, never showed up.
