Feb 23, 2012
ARTICLE
Bringing up a Palestinian child
Palestinian incitement continues. Why are governments not demanding the end of this as a prerequisite for further aid?
Image: Palestinian Media Watch (palwatch.org)
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On 11 March 1978 19 year old Dalal Al-Mughrabi was one of a Palestinian gang that shot an American tourist then hijacked an Israeli bus, murdering 38 people including 13 children. Exactly 33 years later, on 11 March 2011 five members of the Fogel Family, including three young children were murdered as they slept in their Itamar home. Two Palestinian youths from the nearby village of Awarta have been indicted for the murder and have allegedly confessed to them.
Awarta village council chief Qais Awwad, responding to the charges against 17 year old Hakim Awad and 18 year old Anjam Awad insisted "They're children; it isn't possible that they committed this awful act."
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas went even further, reflecting that the murders were "a despicable, immoral, and inhuman act. A human being is not capable of something like that. Scenes like these - the murder of infants and children and a woman slaughtered - cause any person endowed with humanity to hurt and to cry."
But if it turns out that the ‘children’, one a labourer, the other still in high school, were indeed responsible for these sickening murders, this would be only the latest attack by a Palestinian against vulnerable non-combatants simply because the victims were Jewish.
The only real background given to this awful story was that the Fogels lived in an ‘illegal settlement’, implying that it was their own fault that they were murdered in their beds.
Yet there is another factor that creates a climate in which normalizes such a crime, and that is the indoctrination of children by the Palestinian Authority to hate Israel and Jews through agencies such as PA media and schools.
Since the 1960s researchers have studied possible links between watching violence on TV and aggressive behaviour. Results suggest that, combined with other social factors, steady exposure to TV violence could affect not only immediate behaviour, but also attitudes to violence in young viewers.
More recently, studies on media violence and computer games went further, suggesting a causal link between simulations of violent behaviour in play and actual behaviour of vulnerable children and young people.
Most parents do not need peer-reviewed papers to tell them that their children should not be fed on a diet of race hatred and glorification of suicide in schools and on TV. Yet this is exactly what has been happening to Palestinian children for decades and much of it has happened at our expense.
Only the evening before Fogel family were slaughtered, Palestinian Authority TV broadcast a programme honouring former employee Ahlam Tamimi.
Tamimi, who helped suicide bomber Iz-Aldin Shuheil Al-Masri murder 15 Israeli men, women and children at the Sbarro pizza parlour in Jerusalem in 2001, is now in an Israeli jail, a product – arguably a victim - of Palestinian education.
Tamimi remains proud of what she did: the Palestinian Authority are proud of her achievement too. That’s why she was awarded a certificate of merit and broadcast a programme was broadcast in her honour.
So with this example before them we should not be surprised if, within hours of the programme, two Palestinian lads did slit the throats of 3 children, shooting their mother and slashing their father to death?
When Palestinian young people try to explode bombs at checkpoints or in Israel they are only emulating the deeds of those who are honoured by Palestinian leaders.
Organizations such as Memri and Palestinian Media Watch do sterling work exposing the brainwashing of Palestinian children, by making PalestinianTV indoctrination available. This includes advertisements aimed at children and children’s programmes. Children are rewarded for saying that Israeli cities - such as Jaffa and Haifa - are ‘Palestinian’ and encouraged to believe a Palestine that ‘Palestine’ will replace Israel if only they will shed enough blood.
Advertisements demonize Israelis and promise an entertaining future in Paradise with dark eyed virgins.
Israel and its Jewish inhabitants who are presented in stereotypes resonant of Der Sturmer as child murderers and insects. Articles denying the Holocaust are published in the Palestinian press.
”Why aren’t we shown this on the news?” asked one 13 year old after viewing some of this material. Why not indeed?
Most people are unaware of the extent of Palestinian incitement and exploitation of children simply because journalists and NGOs do not report it. But an exception occurred in 2006 when Channel 4 explored how Israeli and Palestinian education affects students in Gary Cohen’s ‘Judah and Mohammed’.
Filmed in an Israeli and a Palestinian school, Cohen’s film shows stereotyping and racial prejudice amongst both Israeli and Palestinian High School students. The teachers’ responses differed wildly.
Palestinian student Mohammed's prejudices were affirmed by his teachers at every stage. For instance the Headmaster welcomes Mohammed after his arrest and week-long detention in an Israeli prison for stone throwing and Mohammed is rewarded with a star part in an assembly where he plays a boy ‘martyred’ in an attack on Israeli soldiers.
In contrast Israeli teachers robustly challenge their students’ racist comments and their cynicism about the peace process in lively and open classroom debate.
Israeli student Judah empathises with Palestinian feelings of humiliation and disempowerment. There was no such empathy from Mohammad. How could there be when his teachers view their task as transmitting and reinforcing a sense of grievance and victimhood to their students?
For decades Palestinian teachers and textbooks have spread hatred of Israel in schools. The Palestinian Education Authority revised their EU funded textbooks after criticism that they delegitimised Israel and demonized Jewish people. However, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton protested against the racism and incitement to murder contained in the new ones.
The aid-funded textbooks still poison the minds of Palestinian children against Israel and its Jewish citizens. As Ms Clinton remarked, “These textbooks do not give Palestinian children an education; they give them an indoctrination.”
Palestinian children attend schools, sporting events and walk down streets named after terrorists including Rafah Hasan Salame and Salah Khalaf, leaders of the terrorist gang that held hostage and murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
That Palestinian children force-fed a diet of hatred against Israel and Jews, are ready to embrace martyrdom in the cause of destroying Israel is unsurprising in the face of Palestinian propaganda and incitement.
Why is the Palestinian Authority allowed to brainwash its children like this at our expense? What steps are the Government, European Parliament, UNRWA and NGOs taking to prevent Mahmoud Abbas from misusing aid money in this way?
Taxpayers have a right to be assured that the $millions of Aid poured into Palestinian coffers for education is being well spent. Our money must not be used to exploit children in the cause of Palestinian nationalism.
The Government must demand that Palestinian leaders stop this incitement of their children to violence as a prerequisite for further aid. It has gone on long enough.
Awarta village council chief Qais Awwad, responding to the charges against 17 year old Hakim Awad and 18 year old Anjam Awad insisted "They're children; it isn't possible that they committed this awful act."
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas went even further, reflecting that the murders were "a despicable, immoral, and inhuman act. A human being is not capable of something like that. Scenes like these - the murder of infants and children and a woman slaughtered - cause any person endowed with humanity to hurt and to cry."
But if it turns out that the ‘children’, one a labourer, the other still in high school, were indeed responsible for these sickening murders, this would be only the latest attack by a Palestinian against vulnerable non-combatants simply because the victims were Jewish.
The only real background given to this awful story was that the Fogels lived in an ‘illegal settlement’, implying that it was their own fault that they were murdered in their beds.
Yet there is another factor that creates a climate in which normalizes such a crime, and that is the indoctrination of children by the Palestinian Authority to hate Israel and Jews through agencies such as PA media and schools.
Since the 1960s researchers have studied possible links between watching violence on TV and aggressive behaviour. Results suggest that, combined with other social factors, steady exposure to TV violence could affect not only immediate behaviour, but also attitudes to violence in young viewers.
More recently, studies on media violence and computer games went further, suggesting a causal link between simulations of violent behaviour in play and actual behaviour of vulnerable children and young people.
Most parents do not need peer-reviewed papers to tell them that their children should not be fed on a diet of race hatred and glorification of suicide in schools and on TV. Yet this is exactly what has been happening to Palestinian children for decades and much of it has happened at our expense.
Only the evening before Fogel family were slaughtered, Palestinian Authority TV broadcast a programme honouring former employee Ahlam Tamimi.
Tamimi, who helped suicide bomber Iz-Aldin Shuheil Al-Masri murder 15 Israeli men, women and children at the Sbarro pizza parlour in Jerusalem in 2001, is now in an Israeli jail, a product – arguably a victim - of Palestinian education.
Tamimi remains proud of what she did: the Palestinian Authority are proud of her achievement too. That’s why she was awarded a certificate of merit and broadcast a programme was broadcast in her honour.
So with this example before them we should not be surprised if, within hours of the programme, two Palestinian lads did slit the throats of 3 children, shooting their mother and slashing their father to death?
When Palestinian young people try to explode bombs at checkpoints or in Israel they are only emulating the deeds of those who are honoured by Palestinian leaders.
Organizations such as Memri and Palestinian Media Watch do sterling work exposing the brainwashing of Palestinian children, by making PalestinianTV indoctrination available. This includes advertisements aimed at children and children’s programmes. Children are rewarded for saying that Israeli cities - such as Jaffa and Haifa - are ‘Palestinian’ and encouraged to believe a Palestine that ‘Palestine’ will replace Israel if only they will shed enough blood.
Advertisements demonize Israelis and promise an entertaining future in Paradise with dark eyed virgins.
Israel and its Jewish inhabitants who are presented in stereotypes resonant of Der Sturmer as child murderers and insects. Articles denying the Holocaust are published in the Palestinian press.
”Why aren’t we shown this on the news?” asked one 13 year old after viewing some of this material. Why not indeed?
Most people are unaware of the extent of Palestinian incitement and exploitation of children simply because journalists and NGOs do not report it. But an exception occurred in 2006 when Channel 4 explored how Israeli and Palestinian education affects students in Gary Cohen’s ‘Judah and Mohammed’.
Filmed in an Israeli and a Palestinian school, Cohen’s film shows stereotyping and racial prejudice amongst both Israeli and Palestinian High School students. The teachers’ responses differed wildly.
Palestinian student Mohammed's prejudices were affirmed by his teachers at every stage. For instance the Headmaster welcomes Mohammed after his arrest and week-long detention in an Israeli prison for stone throwing and Mohammed is rewarded with a star part in an assembly where he plays a boy ‘martyred’ in an attack on Israeli soldiers.
In contrast Israeli teachers robustly challenge their students’ racist comments and their cynicism about the peace process in lively and open classroom debate.
Israeli student Judah empathises with Palestinian feelings of humiliation and disempowerment. There was no such empathy from Mohammad. How could there be when his teachers view their task as transmitting and reinforcing a sense of grievance and victimhood to their students?
For decades Palestinian teachers and textbooks have spread hatred of Israel in schools. The Palestinian Education Authority revised their EU funded textbooks after criticism that they delegitimised Israel and demonized Jewish people. However, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton protested against the racism and incitement to murder contained in the new ones.
The aid-funded textbooks still poison the minds of Palestinian children against Israel and its Jewish citizens. As Ms Clinton remarked, “These textbooks do not give Palestinian children an education; they give them an indoctrination.”
Palestinian children attend schools, sporting events and walk down streets named after terrorists including Rafah Hasan Salame and Salah Khalaf, leaders of the terrorist gang that held hostage and murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
That Palestinian children force-fed a diet of hatred against Israel and Jews, are ready to embrace martyrdom in the cause of destroying Israel is unsurprising in the face of Palestinian propaganda and incitement.
Why is the Palestinian Authority allowed to brainwash its children like this at our expense? What steps are the Government, European Parliament, UNRWA and NGOs taking to prevent Mahmoud Abbas from misusing aid money in this way?
Taxpayers have a right to be assured that the $millions of Aid poured into Palestinian coffers for education is being well spent. Our money must not be used to exploit children in the cause of Palestinian nationalism.
The Government must demand that Palestinian leaders stop this incitement of their children to violence as a prerequisite for further aid. It has gone on long enough.
COMMENTS
(4)
Penny says:
05 May 2011
We need many more articles like this. I raise the matter myself when the opportunity presents itself because the majority of the British public are not told about these very important underlying issues that continue to make the notion of peace in the region an absolute joke.
I wish those who claim to support the Palestinian people would seek their welfare instead of apparently urging them on 'from the river to the sea' and in the process perpetuating this indoctrination which, if it was happening to their children, would cause riots in the West and would be seen, quite rightly, as State child abuse.
Andy Gill says:
06 May 2011
Excellent article. Making Palestinian aid dependent on a complete cessation of racist propaganda and incitement should be a firm plank of government policy.
Roberta E. Dzubow says:
10 May 2011
The Arab/Islamic multi-million dollar marketing campaigns against Israel have gone on for many decades. They have a lazer-like focus: destroy Israel -deny it legitimacy in the public eye, attack it directly. The "education" of Arab/Islamic populations against Israel is non-stop. Much of the Western world has been co-opted by this drenching hatred - we need far more exposure to the truth. It is not Israel alone that is threated by those in a 7th century time warp. It is civilization.
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Great article! Anybody who thinks a peace agreement will actually work must be naive or uninformed of this indoctrination. The problem is, even with a peace agreement, hatred and prejudice can't be turned off like a light. Each young generation the Palestinians poison represents another generation that must pass before any settlement can be achieved.