I ran to bomb shelters in 1973, at the age of 8.

It was October in Damascus, the month the jasmine gives up its last flowers and the evenings turn sweet and cool. Then the sirens came. I remember the sound before I remember the fear, a long rising wail that climbed the stairwells of our building and pulled us down into the basement, into the smell of damp concrete and kerosene and too many bodies breathing the dark air. Dust sifted from the ceiling with every boom. I counted the booms, because counting was something a boy could do.

Israeli jets bombed my city that month. I did not know the word aggressor then. I only knew the sky had turned against us. Half a world away, that same October, Americans watched the war on their evening news. They saw maps with arrows on them. They never saw us.

Now, fifty-three years later, I live in Alabama, and American television is still telling me who the aggressor is in the Middle East. It is always the same answer. It is almost never the country doing the bombing.

Mehdi Hasan, the former MSNBC anchor who founded the independent outlet Zeteo, is known for cornering politicians and generals on air with their own records. In April, debating an Israeli military spokesman on Piers Morgan’s show, he put the whole argument in two questions:

“Which country in the Middle East has nuclear weapons? It’s not Iran, it’s Israel… Which country in the Middle East attacked six countries last year? It wasn’t Iran, it was Israel.”

Two questions. The answers aren’t secret. Israel has somewhere between at least 80 nuclear warheads, has never signed the treaty meant to stop their spread, and has never let inspectors into Dimona, the reactor where its bombs are believed to be made. Iran signed that treaty, let the inspectors in, and agreed to strict limits in 2015, until America walked away from the deal in 2018.

I grew up with the other side of the coin in my pocket. The side the West never sees.

In Damascus, the Golan Heights were not a headline. They were the hills Babba and his friends whispered about over tea, the land the United Nations said Israel had no right to annex. It annexed it anyway. Nobody called that aggression either.

So when American and Israeli bombs fell on Iran this past February and killed its supreme leader, I knew before I turned on the television which word would be waiting for me. Defense.

Here is what defense looked like on the first morning of that war. At a quarter to eleven on February 28, in the southern Iranian town of Minab, a missile hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school for girls. More than 170 people were killed, most of them girls between 7 and 12 years old. They were in class. Preliminary findings, reported by The New York Times, point to an American Tomahawk missile and a targeting error.

Girls. In class. On a Saturday morning, the first day of their school week.

An error.

I think about their backpacks. I think about the shelter in Damascus, and how I was lucky, because the bombs that October fell on someone else’s building.

I live in Birmingham, where we know something about little girls killed on a weekend morning. On a Sunday in September 1963, a Klan bomb at the 16th Street Baptist Church killed Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair. It took this city almost 40 years to convict the men responsible, but it did. We put names on the dead. We put names on the guilty.

The girls in Minab have no names on American television. Months later, the Pentagon still has not released its findings. No one has been charged. No one has been disciplined. No one has said sorry. If accountability was right for four girls in Birmingham, why is it wrong for 170 in Iran?

I already know the answer some readers will give me: But Iran is the enemy.

Let me be clear, then. I’m not defending the men who rule Tehran. They hang protesters. They arm militias that have bled Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. I grew up under a dictatorship; I know one when I see it. But the cruelty of Iran’s rulers doesn’t make it fair to punish Iran for the very things Israel is allowed to do. And it doesn’t mean a single one of those girls in Minab deserved to die.

A rule that applies to only one side is not a rule. It is a weapon.

When you grow up in Damascus, or Baghdad, or Gaza, or Beirut, you learn that security is something powerful countries talk about, and that you are the thing they need security from. Their safety is paid for with your nights in the shelter. Their protection leaves you in the rubble. When a friend of Washington drops a bomb, it’s called a strike. When anyone else does, it’s called terror.

And here is the part that should make every American angry, whatever you think about Iran. In July, the secretary of defense told the Senate this war will cost American taxpayers at least $37.5 billion. Here in Alabama, roughly one in four children can’t count on the next meal.

There is never enough money for our children. So why is there always money for the Tomahawk?

I think about that 8-year-old in the basement in Damascus, counting booms in the dark. He grew up. He became an American. He loves this country enough to tell it the truth. And the truth is that somewhere tonight, in Tehran or Gaza or Beirut, another 8-year-old is running down a stairwell into the smell of concrete and kerosene, counting the booms, the way I did.

No one on the evening news will say his name either. Not even when they find his body.