A Boy Called Daniel

Perhaps forgiveness is a good thing, but there are times when it has limits. Do any of you think that we should forgive the vile parents of Daniel Pelka after what they subjected him to? Systematic, prolonged, and pre-meditated torture. Imprisoned, beaten, starved, humiliated, forced to eat pure salt until he vomited. Caged inside a room with no inner door handle and with only an increasingly urine stained mattress to sleep on, his final hours spent alone as his emaciated body drained of life, a body incidentally that weighed approx. one and a half stone.
Don't talk to me about forgiveness. Don't seek to persuade me that it's better to forgive than to hold anger and rage in the heart. Perhaps nine times out of ten you would be right, but not here, not today, not further to the suffering this child has endured. A young boy, a beautiful life teeming with potential, brutalised and crushed under the shadows of what appears to be almost beyond evil.
The parents have been sentenced to thirty years. What Daniel would have given for such a life span. And please, no tedious talk of heaven and of Daniel walking in paradise with God. He's dead. He has been extinguished. His story is over. And do not talk to me about God or the useless nonsense that he allows us to do evil for reasons of free will. These are the arguments of intellectual midgets, pathetic and sickly and worthy of no reflection.
I do not forgive the parents of this child. I choose not to. I consciously elect to hate every fucking sinew in their bodies, and I wish nothing but suffering and torment for them. The legendary Christopher Hitchens often quipped that for some people he almost wished there was a Hell for them to go to. I'm with him on this. But in the absence of a real Hell it is my sincere hope that they suffer on Earth. That they know pain, that they know fear, that they are forced to cower in terror. I hope they die inside, I hope depression casts a perpetual cloud over their every waking minute. Can any of you honestly hope for their rehabilitation? Could it ever be right for them to be freed to enjoy life as we do?
They tortured a child. I have two children. I know in the very core of my being that what they have done is evil, unfathomable, despicable in every possible way. I want their last breaths to be filled with terror. I want them to gasp, their eyes to bulge, their bowels to evacuate. I want them to die in humiliating squalor. And then, and only then will I consider they have served their time.