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[T_Bone]

linky

As captured on an Israeli video documentary produced in 1998, a "Sesame Street"-like children's program called the "Children's Club" -- complete with puppet shows, songs, Mickey Mouse and other characters -- focused on inculcating intense hatred of Jews and a passion for engaging in and celebrating violence against them in a perpetual "jihad" until the day the Israeli flags come down from above "Palestinian land" and the Palestinian flag is raised.

Palestinian children throwing rocks at an Israeli military vehicle.

In one song on the "Children's Club," very young children are shown singing songs about wanting to become "suicide warriors" and to take up "a machine gun" to direct "violence, anger, anger, anger" against Israelis.

During the show, which features children aged 4-10, one young boy sings, "When I wander into Jerusalem, I will become a suicide bomber." Afterward, other children stand to call for "Jihad! Holy war to the end against the Zionist enemy."

In another segment, a boy who appears to be no more than 8 or 9 years old chants: "My patience has run out. All Arab existence cries for revenge" against the Jews in Israel.

The documentary also juxtaposes the children's programming with television news reporting, in which the news anchor - reflecting the same message the children are receiving -describes Palestinians as "noble, courageous" fighters, while describing Israel as "mean, fascist, racist, genocidal" and "Nazis."

Other "highlights" of the "Children's Club":

*Groups of children are gathered together, shouting for "Jihad against Israel."
*One girl, who appears to be in a Palestinian school classroom, sings of donning "battledress" to "attack the Zionists."
*A small girl chants the now-familiar ditty, "When I wander into Jerusalem, I will become a suicide bomber."
*An adult narrator reads material in a Palestinian school pamphlet: "I have raised my children for jihad and on the principle that they never give up on their land."
*One segment depicts a small boy on the street chanting, "Revolution until victory."
*Another boy is shown in class proclaiming, "We will settle our claims with stones and bullets."

In Palestinian school classrooms, the message is the same.

"It's very scary - it's a state-run educational system that teaches its children to be martyrs," said Meyrav Wurmser, Ph.D., an expert in Middle East politics who taught at the U.S. Naval Academy and Johns Hopkins. Wurmser is the author of the recently published book, "Schools of Ba'athism," in which she makes a comprehensive survey and analysis of Syrian school textbooks. What she found is identical to what goes on with the Palestinians, she says.

"In the Palestinian case, what we see is the cynical use of children, who are exposed to a state-run ideology that pushes them to their death, in the name of Palestinian nationalism," she says. "Children are taught to idealize death, to view it as a positive. In many cases, they are told that death is not death at all, but rather the beginning of a new life."

Wurmser is currently the executive director of The Middle East Media & Research Institute, or MEMRI, and has published extensively on the Middle East and Arab and Israeli politics.

How can children be sold on dying in battle?

"The state threatens children if they're not willing to commit jihad," says Wurmser, "and tells them they will be punished by God if they do not commit jihad. If they do commit jihad, they and their families will be benefited by the state. [Their families] are promised major financial benefits if they kill themselves in suicide attacks against Israel."

To get over the fear, explained Wurmser, "they are told by their teachers that they're not going to die at all. There is definitely an element of denial they are exposed to."

This is not to say that some parents won't object to having their children converted to terrorists, says Wurmser, "but in the more religious families, there is no sense of sorrow. We see Palestinian mothers who have lost children - especially parents from very fundamentalist Muslim backgrounds -- who are not upset at all, but who say their sons have brought great honor to their families." This is typical, she says, of "radical national Arab regimes who have adopted the Islamic line."

This shocking assessment was bolstered in an Oct. 27 Jerusalem Post editorial, in which writer Gerald M. Steinberg provided details of statements made by Palestinians to reporters after their children had been killed in fighting.

"Interviewed by journalists after [recent] tragedies, some of the parents of these young victims refer to their children as shaheeds (martyrs), whose lives were given willingly and proudly to the Palestinian cause in fighting the hated Zionist enemy," Steinberg said.

Palestinian man teaching children how to fire M-16 automatic assault rifles.

"In an unbelievably shocking scene, one mother boasted that she bore her son precisely for this purpose, and the father proudly claimed credit for providing the training. The parents will also receive a sizeable financial 'reward' from the Palestinian Authority," he said.

"For a people who count Abraham (or Ibrahim) among their ancestors, this willful child sacrifice violates the fundamental tenets of morality and ethics," said Steinberg. "The message of Abraham's non-sacrifice of Isaac was, and remains first and foremost, the absolute rejection of such practices."

[Glaucus]

Yeah, it's pretty sad, but that's the sort of thing you'll see when living under occupation. I know children were used against the Americans in Vietnam and against the Nazis throughout Europe. What you're seeing here is people doing what they can to resist their occupiers, and in the case of Palestine it's 100% of the population. Remember, it's the Palestinians who are holed up in their homes while Israeli tanks roam the streets, and not the other way around. I would say it's perfectly normal for those who are living under occupation - regardless of age - to hate their occupiers. I'm sure children living under the holocost didn't need to be told to hate the Nazis when those children watched those very same Nazis kill their fathers and mothers.

To be honest, I'm not sure what you're trying to say T_Bone.

- Mike

[Wilse]

That's a pretty sad reflection of how bad things are over there.

[aside]I heard someone on the radio the other day saying that
Israeli parents who moved into settlements on occupied territories
should be locked up for putting their children in harm's way[/aside]

[FluffyMcDeath]

@ T_Bone

Palestinian children are at risk just because they live on land that Israel wants Jews to live on. Back in the 40's there was no Osrael, just Jews and Arabs living together. Since then, Jews have killed and harassed and driven Arabs away from land they have occupied for generations so that they could build a Jewish state which is a racist ideal identical in substance to the Aryan groups that want to create a white homeland in the US by driving out and killing all the "chinks and pakis and ******s" that want to "push us into the sea" or (yikes) "dilute our racial purity".

5 Reasons to Stop US Military Aid to Israel

1 Israel Is Illegally Occupying Palestine

Under UN Resolution 242, Israel is required by international law to withdraw from all the territories occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem. The United Nation's General Assembly has repeatedly condemned Israel's occupation of the territories as illegal (see UN resolutions 338, 1397, and 1402, among others). Israel's continued occupation of Palestine, sanctioned and maintained by the US, is one of the most serious obstructions to a just and lasting peace in the Middle East.

2 Israel Systematically Violates the Human Rights of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories


Each day, Israeli security forces in the West Bank and Gaza violate articles of the 4th Geneva Convention on Human Rights, an agreement that governs wartime rules of engagement and to which Israel is a signatory. Palestinian homes and agriculture fields are routinely demolished to make way for illegal Israeli settlements. Israeli soldiers regularly arrest and detain--often for years-- Palestinians without due process. According to Amnesty International, members of the Israeli security forces regularly use torture and prolonged incommunicado detention against Palestinians.

3 Israel is an Apartheid State

Israel has developed an elaborate system of racial discrimination, embedded in its legal system, rivaling Apartheid South Africa's laws.

These laws include the Law of Entry, the Law of Return, the Citizenship Law, the Military Service Law, and a host of legally sanctioned, discriminatory rabbinical rulings. Palestinians are denied various welfare benefits, access to many jobs, and the leasing of homes and land controlled by government bodies.

Electricity, sewerage, and roads are provided free to Israeli households, whereas many Palestinian communities in Israel, and especially in the Occupied Territories, have existed for decades without adequate services.

Laws governing land ownership such as the Law of Acquisition of Absentee Property and the Law for Acquisition of Land blatantly discriminate against Palestinians. Indeed, land ownership in Palestine is more unjust than it ever wasin South Africa; at the height of apartheid, black people nominally `controlled' 13 percent of the land, whereas in Israel the Palestinians control only 2 percent of the land.

Blockades which allow settlers free movement but restrict Palestinians have lost 100,000 workers their jobs. The Israeli government issues identification cards and car number-plates, color coded, which restrict travel for non-Jews. Palestinians in the West Bank are routinely prevented from travelling to the Gaza Strip because they have to travel through `Israeli' territory.

No significant industry has been permitted to develop in the West Bank or Gaza. Consequently, Palestinians are concentrated in the lowest paying jobs and form a super-exploited labour force for Israeli capital. The occupied territories import 93% of goods but export a mere 7% of what they produce.

Palestinian exports to Western Europe are banned so as not to compete with Israeli exports. Ninety percent of Palestinian workers must travel to Jewish towns for employment.

4 US Military Aid to Israel Violates US Law


The US Arms Export Control Act (AECA) strictly forbids the government from giving military assistance to any country that violates internationally recognized human rights. The State Department's 2001 human rights report states: "Israeli security units often used excessive force against Palestinian demonstrators including live fire ... impeded the provision of medical assistance to Palestinian civilians by their strict enforcement of internal closures, which reportedly contributed to at least 32 deaths. Israeli security forces harassed and abused Palestinian pedestrians and drivers who were attempting to pass through the more than 130 Israeli- controlled checkpoints ..." Under the AECA, "the President is required to report to Congress promptly upon the receipt of information that a substantial violation of AECA may have occurred."

The US government is fully aware of the Israeli army's human rights violations, as the above quote from the State Department shows. The US government has eroded its own credibility as an impartial mediator by continuing to arm Israel without restriction and allowing these weapons to be used against civilian populations in violation of US law.


5 US Military Aid to Israel threatens US Security and Global Stability


US funding of Israel's human rights abuses fuels resentment towards the US. While the rest of the world strongly condemns Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories, our government provides the political, diplomatic and material means for the occupation to continue.

Such actions by the US government provoke anti-US sentiment throughout the world, ultimately jeopardizing the safety of people living in the US.

The US can build its own security only by gaining the trust and respect of the international community.

(lifted from http://www.stop-us-military-aid-to-israel.net/)

[FluffyMcDeath]

@T_Bone

You know, the Israeli's regularly put their kids in harms way.
It is compulsory to serve in the military, and the military is sent into the occupied territories where they are likely to be shot at as they are an army of repressive occupation. The Palestinians just stay at home and the Israelis come to them, to shoot them in the night, to shoot them in the day, to cut them off from the world and knock down their houses, to prevent them from getting across town in under 6 hours etc.

If Israeli soldiers stayed in Israel then perhaps Israel could count on world sympathy when their soldiers are attacked, but as an occupying force whith a rather bad human rights record, the Palestinians have as much right to attack Israeli soldiers as the Iraqis have to attack US soldiers as the French resistance had to attack German soldiers.

[T_Bone]

FluffyMcDeath wrote:
@T_Bone

You know, the Israeli's regularly put their kids in harms way.
It is compulsory to serve in the military [snip]

How come you're comparing grade-school Palestinians to Israeli Adults of legal age, and calling them both "kids"?

[FluffyMcDeath]

T_Bone wrote:

How come you're comparing grade-school Palestinians to Israeli Adults of legal age, and calling them both "kids"?

Go ask their mothers.

[Bobsonsirjonny]

FluffyMcDeath wrote:

Go ask their mothers.

Indeed. Isreal is a police state which forces its population into war.. It is an extremist state.. yet one that Dubya is leaving alone..

[Glaucus]

How come you're comparing grade-school Palestinians to Israeli Adults of legal age, and calling them both "kids"?

If that wasn't a good enough comparison, then what about what Wilse said about Jewish settlers bringing their kids to live right on the front line with the Palestinians militants? That's something I've always wondered. What would motivate a guy to move right in the middle of enemy territory? It would be no different from you moving your family to the center of Falluja and raising an American flag in your front lawn. Would you do that T_Bone? I think not, so why is it okay when Israelis do it???

- Mike

[Bodie]

T_Bone wrote:


Palestinian children throwing rocks at an Israeli military vehicle.

And then Israeli teenagers respond by firing Hellfire missiles. :-o

[T_Bone]

Glaucus wrote:

If that wasn't a good enough comparison, then what about what Wilse said about Jewish settlers bringing their kids to live right on the front line with the Palestinians militants? That's something I've always wondered. What would motivate a guy to move right in the middle of enemy territory? It would be no different from you moving your family to the center of Falluja and raising an American flag in your front lawn. Would you do that T_Bone? I think not, so why is it okay when Israelis do it???

- Mike

As the population of Israel increases, where do you propose they move, up? possibly down? As far as "moving on to the front line" every Palestinian outside of Jordan moved onto the front line, yet I see no Israeli expansion into Jordan.

[T_Bone]

Bodie wrote:

And then Israeli teenagers respond by firing Hellfire missiles. :-o

I'm afraid the analogy is doomed to fail. No matter how much you call Israeli's of legal age "teenagers", you arn't going to make them look like the Palestinian children of thumb-sucking blanket carrying age watching cartoons telling them it's their mission in life to wipe out the Israeli's.

[T_Bone]

FluffyMcDeath wrote:

Go ask their mothers.

Which mothers, the ones who have children for the express purpose of jihad, being raised on perverted cartoons? I'm afraid I'm not too interested in what they have to say, regardless of which nation they belong to.

Most civilised nations would remove children from homes with "mothers" like these.

[GadgetMaster]

@ T-Bone

Yeah blame the cornered cat for scratching the guy that's prodding it !!

[T_Bone]

GadgetMaster wrote:
@ T-Bone

Yeah blame the cornered cat for scratching the guy that's prodding it !!

Who's cornering the cornered cat? The israeli's or their parents who encourage them that they're not good enough for anything but as something to strap bombs to, telling them that's why they were brought into this world?

You don't see anything wrong with this type of parenting? How would you feel if your parents would mumble something akin to "Mission accomplished" upon hearing news of your death, and then collecting a check?


I suppose parents who sell their children into prostitution arn't guilty of anything either?