My kid isn’t going to be an iPad baby, but they’re definitely going to have some screentime.

I’ve accepted this. There will be times I need them to sit quietly in one location for 20 minutes while I do a load of laundry or put dinner on or something. That’s what happened to me as a kid — my mom once told me that Barney saved her marriage — and I turned out fine.

But obviously I want it to be as educational as possible and not just brain candy, so I’ve been putting together lists of acceptable shows. Old school classics like “Sesame Street,” “Barney” and “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” are on the list, but I’ve also been looking into newer shows. The big ones for kiddos these days, recommended by parents as well, seem to be “Bluey” and content produced by Ms. Rachel, a YouTuber.

I only recently found out that Rachel Griffin Accurso, the woman behind the magic, is originally from Maine. As Maine’s unofficial number one fangirl, I am now officially on board the Ms. Rachel train.

It’s not unusual for children’s entertainers to advocate on behalf of children’s well-being. Raffi, he of childhood baby beluga fame, has been an environmentalist and children’s rights activist for a long time. Ms. Rachel is no different. She has been advocating against the suffering of the children living in the Gaza Strip, even raising money for the international organization Save The Children.

In response, an international organization, Stop Antisemitism, has petitioned the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate whether or not Ms. Rachel is being “remunerated to disseminate Hamas-aligned propaganda to her millions of followers.”

The idea that an American YouTuber with 15 million subscribers and a Netflix deal would accept funding from terrorists beggars belief. Like, it makes no sense. Between the ad money, the merch and the concert sales, Ms. Rachel isn’t exactly hurting for legitimate sources of income.

On top of that, she is just stating simple truths. The situation for Gazan civilians is horrific. The health system in Gaza has collapsed. According to a May 22 report from the World Health Organization, only 19 of the Gaza Strip’s 36 hospitals remain operational, and “operational” is really stretching it, because they all have too many patients and not enough supplies. Of the 19 hospitals, seven are only able to provide basic emergency care.

At least 94% of all hospitals in the Gaza Strip are damaged or destroyed. The school systems are also pretty much inoperable, with the remaining buildings being used as emergency shelters rather than for education. And a United Nations report from May 30 indicates that 100% of the population is at risk of famine, due to the lack of supplies entering the strip.

If stating the inarguable truth that there are hundreds of thousands of children suffering physically and mentally in Gaza right now counts as pro-Hamas propaganda, then reality is guilty. Regardless of what you think of how the war started, how it should end, who is at fault and the entire history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it shouldn’t be hard to understand that there are innocent children suffering.

Even if you think that every adult in Gaza is guilty of being a Hamas sympathizer (which would be a wrong thing to think), you cannot possibly say that the kiddos in Gaza deserve their fate. Children suffer the most out of wars, despite bearing the least responsibility. A period of malnutrition in childhood will affect a child for the rest of their life. PTSD affects children for the rest of their life and damages their development. Children are more at risk of dying from contagious diseases, particularly the sorts that spread in crowded, unsanitary conditions like those in a hastily assembled refugee camp.

Not to mention the pregnant women in Gaza. I think of all the things I’m doing to give my baby the best possible chance at being born as healthy as possible. Do you think women in Gaza are eating large servings of fresh fruits and vegetables, avoiding stress and taking a daily prenatal vitamin with folic acid? Even the sacred fetus — practically a fetish object for American Christians and politicians — loses all value the minute it’s located in the Gaza Strip.

And then when those babies are born, they won’t be brought home to a house with a cozy crib and parents who sing quietly to them in the middle of the night to get them back to sleep like my child will. They will be born into tents in refugee camps, the sound of bombs and screaming damaging their little eardrums.

There are basically three possibilities here. One is, the folks filing this request are just plain stupid. I wish that wasn’t a legitimate possibility, but you don’t need to be particularly smart to end up running a large organization, so it is on the table.

The second is a bad-faith attack. They know the Hamas line is ridiculous, but there are people in the world (including some in our own government) who cannot abide anyone having even the slightest amount of sympathy for Palestinians in Gaza, even the most innocent ones among them — literal young children.

So anyone who has feelings to the left of “bomb them all out of existence” gets smeared and called a terrorist. Ms. Rachel, in this case, is being made into a public example. If someone as sweet and kind and with such a perfect image as her can be accused of being a terrorist sympathizer, what’s to stop the feds from saying any average American is a terrorist sympathizer?

The third possibility is the one that scares me most of all. That is the possibility that the people accusing Ms. Rachel of being paid to promote Hamas propaganda cannot understand, cannot even imagine, that she might simply have empathy for suffering kids.

There are indeed some people who think this way, who think that there’s no way a person could care about people unrelated to them, or who would be willing to take an unpopular public stance, without there being some kind of personal gain or benefit involved for them. I don’t care about the Palestinian children of Gaza because I’m being paid to do so. I care about them because I’m a human, and so are they, and that is how my DNA is wired.

The great American James Baldwin wrote in a 1980 essay, “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”

Maybe it’s the pregnancy hormones, but I’m starting to truly understand what he meant by that, deep in my bones.