POISONING PALESTINE’S FUTURE

In one of the world’s most sexually repressive societies, young men are literally dying to get laid.

What Palestinian kids see while your kids are watching Barney.

This is the second of a three-part series. Read the first installment here.

In Palestine, Sesame Street-style programs glorify suicide bombings, beatify terrorists and demonize Jews. A children’s show on official Palestinian Authority TV has pre-teens reciting a poem that includes: “The blood of the Martyrs flows in my veins… My sword is drawn and won’t return to the sheath… the Dark-Eyed [Virgins] yearn for me… I have not sold my homelands, and have not given up my assault rifle, Today I carry my shrouds … With blood we have woven the shrouds… O homeland, our souls are a gift for you”

Cub Scouts-style camps train kids to stab and shoot Jews. Elementary school storybooks teach hatred the way North American textbooks teach kids to share and to value diversity. The parks and soccer fields where Palestinian children play are named for older brothers and sisters who have blown themselves up amid Israeli civilians.

Muhammad Al-Dura was a Palestinian youngster killed while being shielded by his father in a famous case that epitomized the violence of the Second Intifada. In fact, like most chapters and verses of the Palestinian scripture, there is speculation that the entire thing was fabricated, that the kid never died, and that the entire scene was a “Pallywood” production — another falsified drama concocted to go viral and depict Israeli “criminality” to the world. 

The truth in the case is sketchy, but here is what’s not: Palestinian leaders, media and popular culture venerated the boy, depicting the young Palestinian in heaven, flying a kite in the sunshine, accompanied by the message: “I’m waving to you, not to say goodbye, but to say, ‘Come follow me.’”

This is the sort of message young Palestinians are fed, along with a constant encouragement to kill, a blatant incitement that the perpetrators don’t even bother to disguise from the Western world, knowing perhaps that we’ll ignore it (or reward it) anyway.

Palestinians are raised to see blowing up Israeli civilians as a legitimate and pragmatic tool, rewarded on earth with immortality in the form of hero-worship officially sanctioned by Palestinian leaders who name schools, playgrounds and sports arenas after suicide bombers, plaster their faces on any vertical space, broadcast their heroic final video message and congratulate their parents. The otherworldly rewards are no less attractive. Promises of 72 celestial virgins as recompense for a successful “martyrdom” are not figurative rewards but taken literally by horny young Palestinians. One terrorist who survived awoke in hospital and started putting the moves on his Israeli nurses, believing that his mission had been “successful” and that they were his rightful reward.

In one of the world’s most sexually repressive societies, young men are literally dying to get laid.

Incitement to genocide and the veneration of violence and its perpetrators are endemic in Palestinian society at every level, in popular culture, from leading political figures, in sermons from religious leaders and among proud parents whose children have self-detonated.

Nowhere is the violence and genocidal indoctrination more comprehensive and thorough than throughout the Palestinian education system. Supplementing the concerted societal program to raise children to kill and be killed is an educational curriculum that purposefully sows hatred and encourages murder and self-destruction. And it’s funded by the United Nations and the taxpayer dollars of Western countries.

As early as 1969, a United Nations-appointed expert committee examining textbooks used in UN schools cited the promotion of violence for recommending that 79 of 127 Palestinian textbooks should be banned or their content modified.[i] (See: The War of Return, by Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf, page 126, a book you really should read. Or see what the EU said this year. Or just Google “Palestinian incitement.”)

The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se), an NGO that employs international standards on peace and tolerance as derived from UNESCO declarations and resolutions to determine compliance, analyzed Palestinian public school textbooks in the 2019–2020 academic year.

[T]he main findings of our reports analyzing the new Palestinian curriculum showed them to be more radical than those previously published, with a clear deterioration in content meeting UNESCO standards.

There is a systematic insertion of violence, martyrdom and jihad across all grades and subjects in a more extensive and sophisticated manner, embracing a full spectrum of extreme nationalist ideas and Islamist ideologies that extend even into the teaching of mathematics and science, including: physics, chemistry and biology.

The history of the peace process and any evidence of cooperation between Israel and Palestine in the 1990s, which had been in previous iterations, have been eliminated in the latest texts.

Also new to the latest Palestinian curriculum: previous reference in textbooks to a historical Jewish presence has now been erased. Instead, Jewish history and heritage are repeatedly portrayed as forgeries; Jewish holy places are represented as Muslim areas usurped by the Zionists.

Lessons in the textbooks make a connection to the violent early Islamic period, fostering in students an emotional religious commitment to the current “national struggle.” The rewards of paradise are clearly elucidated, including the usual promise of virgin brides. Those who pursue personal success and careers are portrayed as cowards. Subliminal messaging is evident, using images of conflicts as tools for teaching math and science.

The future return of Palestinians into Israel proper (beyond the 1949 demarcation line) is dramatically increased in these new textbooks. A violent reference to the fate of Jews living in Israel appears in a poem which calls to “annihilate the remnants of the foreigners” after “eliminating the usurper.”

Terrorist attacks are depicted as legitimate acts of national resistance, which may not be surprising. But the specific examples are particularly notable, because they tend not to be case studies where the Palestinian perpetrators are in any way sympathetic, but rather feature the grisliest of terror operations, including two PLO hijackings and the Munich Olympics massacre, in which Palestinian terrorists murdered 11 members of Israel’s Olympic team, including one who was castrated in front of his bound fellow hostages. Toning down the horrors, apparently, isn’t necessary to do the deed. The ghastlier the better.

Children at every grade level are exposed to lyrical poetry that glorifies violence and encourages “martyrdom.” “Martyrs are bright and brilliant like candles,” children are taught. Fifth graders study a piece titled “Hooray for the Heroes,” with lines including:

Heroes have a great place in every nation; they are the ones who sacrificed their souls and their money. … We are proud of them, we sing with their wonders, and study their march, and give their names to our children; we put their names on our streets and squares and the cultural places. We spray our gatherings with the perfume of their memory, and each of us wishes to be like them. They have decorated the pages of history. They taught people that drinking the cup of bitterness with glory is much sweeter than a pleasant long life accompanied by humiliation. Indeed, they created an illustrious history to the nation. They are the heroes.

The report continues: “Children are encouraged to die ‘with glory’ and see these heroes as their role models: ‘each of us wishes to be like them.’ … The list of Palestinian heroes includes no scientists, no doctors, no engineers, no singers, no athletes, nor any artists.”

Throughout history, societies have indoctrinated children with propaganda in the guise of education, but the Palestinian textbooks demonstrate an expertise that may exceed the not insignificant accomplishments of the greatest totalitarian regimes of the past and present. Hatred, othering and glorification of violence are interwoven into every subject. Among a litany of similar examples, the analysis notes:

A reading exercise with the letter “h”(hāʾ, ه) for first graders includes the word shahid

(martyr) at the center with other words such as hujum (attack) and harab (run away).

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Violence is inserted into science and math exercises: calculus is taught by counting the number of martyrs in Palestinian uprisings. A photograph of a funeral is placed next to the question.

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Ali was absent from school as a result of an injury to his spine, which led to his paralysis. He played with a suspicious object — one of the remnants of the Zionist aggression … Which parts of Ali were damaged? And why? What is the significance of the spinal cord to the body? What are the likely effects of spinal cord damage on the body?

By contrast, a 2020 analysis of Israeli government textbooks indicates a markedly different approach.

[R]ecent studies of the Israeli curriculum have noted the positive change in the depiction of the Palestinian “other,” and agree that overt racism and de-humanization have generally disappeared from Israeli state-approved textbooks since the 1990s. … Israeli textbooks recognize Palestinian national identity, and to some extent the Palestinian point of view on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and their suffering as a result of that conflict. However, previous studies indicate that the Israeli curricula includes some elements of self-victimization — fostering a historic narrative in which the Jewish Israeli side is the victim of the conflict and the Arab side is the aggressor — a perception that can be harmful to any current or future peace process.

There are many ways to wage war. Nothing guarantees permanent conflict and intransigence like indoctrinating in children an extreme hatred of the other.

When we hear the litany of complaints about perceived Israeli actions or policies that create a “barrier to peace,” you will note that every one — refugees, borders, settlements — is a theoretically resolvable issue that diplomats could discuss and possibly alleviate.

Here is what is not so easily remedied: Three generations and counting of people taught by their educators, political leaders, religious figures, TV shows, popular culture, parents and every facet of society to loathe the Jewish enemy, to reject compromise of any kind, and to value death as a martyr over a life of constructive fulfilment and self-actualization.

If Palestinians began today teaching their kids to prepare to live in peace and coexistence, we might have peace in a generation or two.

That’s on them.

Here’s what’s on us …

Worldwide, activists by the tens of thousands march on streets in London, Toronto and San Francisco egging on this sort of hatred, rewarding Palestinian intransigence, encouraging more of the same violent hatred.

Not only is the behavior of overseas among the reasons Palestinians are dying. This rewarding of “martyrdom” and incitement ensures Palestinians will continue dying for years or decades to come.

Nice job freeing Palestine.

Read Part 3 here.