Parenting & Family Quote by Barbara Amiel

A predator-prey parable, sharpened into an accusation: someone is nourishing the very forces that will later consume them. Amiel’s line works because it compresses a whole political worldview into one brutal, maternal image. “Feeding” isn’t neutral; it’s intimate, domestic, almost virtuous. You feed because you’re responsible, because you believe in reciprocity, because you assume tomorrow’s guest won’t burn your house down. Then she flips the scene: the fed become the devourers, and the debt is repaid in teeth.

The specific intent is to indict elites, institutions, or nations for subsidizing their future enemies - materially (aid, trade, technology, welfare) and culturally (legitimacy, attention, tolerance). It’s a warning about moral vanity: the comforting belief that generosity or openness automatically civilizes the recipient. By yoking the threat to “their children,” Amiel escalates it from policy dispute to existential negligence. The subtext is not simply “be careful,” but “your leaders are complicit,” and “your empathy is being exploited.”

Context matters: Amiel’s journalism is often associated with a hard-edged, hawkish sensibility, skeptical of progressive pieties and naive internationalism. Read through that lens, the “world” isn’t a random danger; it’s the outside - or the newly inside - portrayed as alien, hostile, and growing stronger on Western resources. The line’s power is also its provocation: it frames complex interdependence as one-way sustenance and inevitable betrayal, daring readers to feel protective rather than cosmopolitan. It doesn’t argue; it recruits.