Incitement within the Palestinian media and education system is certainly not a new phenomenon. Promoting hatred and brainwashing children into a cult of death worship, this shocking form of child abuse poisons young minds and destroys any prospects for peace in the future. The international media recently took up this challenge, highlighting the appalling Mickey Mouse lookalike who incites children and promotes Islamic domination on a Hamas-run TV station.
Why does the media ignore another equally abhorrent video, which is still running on Hamas TV? Why has it turned a blind eye to this latest appalling example of Hamas’s incitement of children into becoming terrorists and suicide bombers?
As documented by PMW, the four-year-old daughter of female suicide bomber Reem Riyashi sings to her dead mother and vows to follow in her footsteps. The video clip ends as the little girl picks up sticks of explosives from her mother’s drawer.
The Al Aqsa TV children’s program shows a child actress playing the daughter, watching Riyashi preparing the bomb and asking her mother, “Mommy, what are you carrying in your arms instead of me? A toy or a present for me?” She later sees a TV news story about her mother’s suicide mission and death, and realizes her mother had been carrying a bomb.
“Only now, I know what was more precious than us . . . ” she sings of the bomb.
Although she misses her mother, she vows to follow in her footsteps. The video ends as she opens her mother’s drawer and picks up the sticks of explosives her mother had left there.
Background:
Reem Riyashi killed four Israelis and wounded seven at the Erez crossing between Gaza and Israel in 2004. She gained the sympathy of the Israeli soldiers at the checkpoint by telling them that she had a metal plate in her leg that would trigger the metal detector. After she was taken to a room to be searched privately, she detonated the bomb hidden under her clothes.
It is absolutely unacceptable that the Hamas-led Palestinian government justifies such incitement and child abuse while demanding that the international community fund it with the money necessary for continuing such vile activities. It is imperative that this issue gains the coverage that it deserves.
Take action now – if you care about the welfare of children and their right to a fair and proper education, view the video, forward it to your contacts and demand that UNICEF’s office for the Palestinian Territories – [email protected] – acknowledge that this international body should be spending more of its time and money focusing on where the real abuse of Palestinian children is taking place.
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The above is an example of how the media is guilty of highlighting individual and sensationalist stories, such as the Hamas Mickey Mouse, while neglecting the bigger picture that has been part of the story for far longer. Calev Ben-David addresses this issue in the Jerusalem Post:
“And that’s not just because it’s easier for journalists to report from Jerusalem than from Damascus; it’s also because the international media has developed a mind-set that stories about Syria only count for much if somehow they’re directly connected to stories about Israel.
That’s a major misconception, one the international press should have learned to discard following the 9/11 attacks. Prior to that, the rise of al-Qaida didn’t get nearly the media attention it should have, barely a fraction of what was devoted to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s the same with most internal Arab-Islamic issues until they finally impact directly in some way on Israel or the West; indeed, how much serious reportage of Sunni-Shi’ite divisions was there prior to 9/11 and the subsequent American occupation of Iraq? Journalists often realize the importance of these stories and play catch-up on them only after it’s too late – sometimes even for themselves.”
