“Anthem for Someone’s Child” (written and recorded in memory of all the children killed in the Middle-East conflicts and forming the centrepiece of the http://www.forsomeoneschild.com/ website) has received the “Best Songwriter” award (France) in the national category in the 2006 Music Aid International Music Awards Contest.

The song brought tears to my eyes and I could not resist but to make the following clip (hard to watch). Selected photos of Israeli, Palestinian, Iraqi and Lebanese children (in no particular order), victims of war crimes.

Visit the site, listen to the song (will open External Media Player) and include ALL those children that have needlessly been killed (on both sides of this Apartheid Wall and the region at large) in your prayers this holiday season. Copy the code and republish the clip from here:
http://www.ibloks.com/my/detail/?mid=53194

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Anthem for Someone’s Child (Lyrics):

“That’s someoneks child”, she cried,
I sighed,
his life lay broken on the ground.
The man who shot him down
just smiled,
beguiled by his amazing aim.
How can you go
back home to show
your face to all those lively children of your own?

He looked into the air,
that stare
was where there once had been a smile.
A woman sat alone
nearby
bled dry by grief and mother’s pain.
She wondered why
he searched the sky
with those warm eyes she�d known so well from birth.

A shot sent to the head
Instead of life
He�s buried in the earth.
They’ve dug a six-foot hole
to hide
their crime so all the world won’t know.
So much to give,
no more to live;
“It�s all in the name of freedom”, so they said.

And yet they dare to cry
that I
should bear the guilt for all they’ve done.
Because I said “No war!”
They roar
and project all their hate on me.
Democracy
is just a dream,
if to create it you have to kill that child.

There’s places you can go
with snow
and rain and sunshine all around.
But where that child now lay
in clay
is scorched and birds don�t make a sound.
He died in vain -
this war�s insane -
And the earth cries out this Anthem for her child.

The earth cries out that Anthem for her child. That “Someone’s Child” may have died in vain; but he didn’t live in vain. This is why there is a melancholic optimism at the end of the song. Let us visualise that child as our teacher, showing us our madness and leading us to better, higher, things with his living smile.