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Updates from AIJAC Palestinian Media and Incitement May 16,
2001 Here is yet more material on ongoing incitement in the Palestinian media, especially that directed at children. First is a report on Palestinian incitement, especially on television, by Ha'aretz's Nadav Shragai. Following this is a summary of a recent NBC report on Palestinian efforts to incite children put out by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), a Washington-based thinktank. It is interesting that over the past two weeks, two of the strongest advocates Oslo peace process both cited insufficient efforts to confront Palestinian incitement as an important reason for its collapse. Statements to this effect were made both Israeli FM Shimon Peres, in his address to the American Jewish Committee on May 2, and by the chief American negotiator for the Middle East, Ambassador Dennis Ross, during his address in Melbourne, on May 8. The roots of Palestinian hatred By Nadav Shragai Ha’aretz, Sunday, May 13, 2001 The media last week spared the public the close-up photographs of the battered bodies of the two children from the settlement of Tekoa, and that was the right decision. Whoever perpetrated the crime did not stop with killing; the bodies were abused in a way that is beyond the human imagination. Once more it is apparent that a fierce hatred underlies this atrocity and others like it, such as the lynching of the two soldiers in Ramallah last October, or the more recent murder of the infant girl Shalhevet Pas, from the Jewish settlement in Hebron, by a Palestinian sharpshooter who locked his gunsight on the baby girl's head and fired. The Palestinians were not born as Jew-haters. Hatred is an acquired trait, and the Palestinian establishment has been cultivating it for years. True, it accompanied the Jewish-Palestinian conflict from its inception, but even after the signing of the Oslo accords no one uprooted it. The Israeli media "discovered" this fact of life at a relatively late stage. The official textbooks of the Palestinian Authority are filled to overflowing with incitement and hatred for Jews, as are the Palestinian media, both the official stations and the ostensibly private ones. Last month a survey by the Palestinian Research Institute (the Jerusalem Centre for Media and Communications) found that 73.7 percent of the residents of the areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority support suicide terrorist attacks against Israel. That mass of support did not arise out of nowhere. For years already, Itamar Marcus and his staff from a private Israeli body that monitors the Palestinian media, have been collecting clips that deal with violence against Israel and against the IDF (Israel Defense Forces). Last summer the number of such broadcasts increased by the hundreds, and during the period of peak violence there were instances when they accounted for about 90 percent of the volume of all broadcasts. It was not long ago that Al-Hayat al-Jadida, a daily paper published in the Gaza Strip, reported that a clip entitled "My mother shall not be humiliated" had been chosen as the best of these clips. In that clip, the camera moved slowly toward a house of which only a pile of rubble remains, on which a woman is sitting and crying. Her son wipes away the tears with his hand and then jumps up and runs with his friends to initiate clashes with Israeli soldiers. The clip shows a ship carrying Jewish immigrants to Israel, a tent camp of Palestinian refugees, and David Ben-Gurion delivering a speech. An Israeli flag is seen waving, with the word "Israel" inside the Star of David. The boy throws a stone and breaks some glass. For a moment the seven-branched menorah appears and then immediately vanishes. The message is clear: Israel will be made to disappear by means of violence. Afterward Israeli troops murder an Arab who is working in his vineyard. More shots of refugees, then Ariel Sharon on the Temple Mount, processions of Palestinian children, songs of the militant Hezbollah organization, Israeli tanks and a photograph of Mohammed al-Dura, the Palestinian boy who died in his father's arms in an exchange of gunfire between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians. This whole sequence is accompanied by shots of the weeping mother scouring the streets in search of her son, as children sing out forcefully: "I have responded to your call, O mother... Who caused the tears that flow from your eyes. My mother shall not be humiliated." The clip that came in second, the paper reported, was called "Future," by the Iraqi singer Khazem al-Sahar. It tells of two Palestinian lovers who are trying to meet. They are separated by a barbed-wire fence. They reach the border and gaze at one another across the fence. The young woman, consumed by love, decides to cross, but Israeli soldiers aim their rifles at the centre of her back and shoot her. In the final scene the soldiers notice the young man by his beloved's grave. He runs, and they shoot him in the back too. Thus he is finally united with his beloved. The message: Israeli soldiers shoot young lovers in the back. In the past seven months, Palestinian television has carried a steady stream of such clips (after a period of relative calm). In the last two months alone, a hadith (the oral law, sometimes attributed to Mohammed himself) calling for the killing of Jews has been issued three times: "The Day of Judgment will not come until you do battle against the Jews, until the last Jew hides behind a stone and a tree, and the stone and tree shall say: Muslim, servant of God, leave a Jew behind me, kill him." When the Al-Aqsa Intifada broke out, some preachers called for the slaughter of the Jews. Since then there have also been prayers for the annihilation of the Jews, and the Palestinians also learned that anyone who concedes Haifa, Lod and Ashkelon is "a revolting criminal who is doomed to go to hell." The messages are consistent and they are voiced both by clerics and by members of the political leadership. Their gist is the demonisation of the Jews, non-recognition of their legitimacy as a nation, and blood libels of the worst kind. On Palestinian television the official clerics of the Palestinian Authority declare that the confrontation with Israel is the eternal religious war of Islam against the Jews. The hatred the Palestinians bear for us, some Jews will be sorry to learn, does not stem solely from territorial reasons. The preachers portray the hatred for the Jews as the will of Allah, the Jews as the enemies of Allah and the religious obligation to kill Jews as the decree of Allah. All the agreements that have been signed with Israel, the preachers emphasize (just as Arafat did when he talked about the agreement Mohammed signed with the Jews) are temporary and are signed in the wake of a current favourable balance of forces. In Israel, public opinion does battle against the agents of hatred among us and spews out most of them. In the areas of the Palestinian Authority, hatred has become commonplace, its religious and national motivations rooted far more deeply than the relatively young roots of the settlements in both Gush Etzion and Kfar Sava. © copyright 2001 Ha'aretz. All Rights Reserved Child Abuse We believed that eventually an American journalist would actually see what he was looking at. We hope Martin Fletcher of NBC Nightly News is the start of a trend; here is part of his report from Gaza on Tuesday 8 May. MARTIN FLETCHER: "The Palestinians are calling on the youngest to join the battle, and using a stunning tactic: commercials on Palestinian TV asking children, "Drop your toys. Pick up rocks." [Video shows a child dropping his toy and young boys throwing stones.] Even using actors to recreate the most famous image of the uprising, one that shocked the world: 12-year-old Mohammed al-Dura dying in his father's arms, caught in a hail of Israeli bullets. (Ed. Note: there is substantial evidence that PA bullets killed al-Dura.) The commercial shows Mohammed in paradise, urging other children to quote, "Follow him." [The scene of al-Dura slumped against his father shifts to an image of the boy running through a sunlit field in "paradise" where he then greets other boys who sit together in the green grass.] At Mohammed's school in Gaza today, the daily prayer and a call to arms. "Are you afraid?" the teacher shouts "No," they answer. And then, "We ask Allah to destroy the Jews." [The scene is of rows of children in a schoolyard shouting in unison.] Mohammed's desk is now a shrine. [Image of Al-Dura's former classroom, which contains a shrine set on a student desk with his photograph, a PLO flag and flowers.] The teacher asks, "Where is Mohammed?" The children answer, "Paradise!" FLETCHER: 'Paradise.' And in English class, they learned a new phrase today. TEACHER: "The Israeli army killed our friend. Shame on them!" CHILDREN (in unison): "Shame on them!" FLETCHER: Already, young boys are learning how to fight. Summer camp teaches how to resist the Israelis. But now they are being taught not to fear death. [Images of young boys in military training, crawling under barbed wire and other drills] The greatest glory, they are told, is to be a martyr. Martin Fletcher, NBC News, Gaza." But what does it mean to teach children not to fear death? A coalition of American paediatricians, DOCS (Doctors Opposed to Child Sacrifice) says that official PA encouragement of children to participate in violence against Israel is "societal child abuse." DOCS founder Dr. Pejman Salimpour said, "Adults, governments, and media outlets that encourage young children to participate in violence to further their own political agenda are practising a form of societal child abuse..." The Jerusalem Post reports that DOCS called on the PA to halt broadcasts that glorify martyrdom. Dr. Salimpour and Mr. Fletcher deserve thanks for pointing out what should have been obvious since Arafat launched the latest war on Israel: children who should have been protected have been cynically and abusively manipulated, robbed not only of their childhoods, but of their humanity, and sometimes of their lives. And by extension, it will become impossible for them to ever find a way to accept the legitimacy of Israel, or of Jews living in the Middle East, ensuring that the conflict runs at least one more generation. JINSA
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Copyright
© AIJAC 2001 |
