U.S. Army recruits 13-year-olds

Seven demonstrators were arrested May 2 at the “Army Experience Center” at the Franklin Mills Mall in north Philadelphia in the struggle against the latest U.S. crime against humanity: the recruiting of 13-year-olds. This Army recruitment center was effectively shut down for over an hour until police made the arrests. Prior to this, well over 200 people held a spirited march through the streets of the adjacent working-class neighborhood and then blocked the entrance of the Army’s new $12-million-plus video game recruiting center.

The protesters handed a criminal complaint to the Army’s commanding officer at the mall and to mall management. The Franklin Mills Mall is owned by the Simon Property Group, Inc., the biggest retail outlet owner on the entire planet. The Pentagon is in flagrant violation of the treaty to prevent the military recruitment of children, the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict, which the U.S. Senate ratified in 2002 along with 124 other nations.

The U.S. propaganda machine castigates popular liberation struggles—like those in Palestine—for allegedly using children as fighters. And these are struggles where the oppressor army targets civilians, including children. Here, where the Pentagon is actively recruiting children for future use as cannon fodder, there has been no significant protest in the corporate media.

The government has insidiously planted high-tech weapon simulators next to the mall’s skating rink, music store and other mall businesses frequented by youth. These real weapons system simulators have movie theater-sized screens that can’t be missed through twenty-foot-high plate glass windows, luring and trapping poor and working class youth into the despicable task of killing the youth of the Middle East for the profit of oil companies.

Philadelphia locals told Workers World that the huge Franklin Mills facility is the Army’s prototype. Another such installation has been built in Ohio, and lots more like them are planned. The united aim of the several dozen youth, veteran, religious, community, educational and left organizations that participated today is to shut all of them down! Organizers vowed to mount larger demonstrations.