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Words are powerful - Thoughts shape - Ideas have consequences

Sean Gannon
Journalist - Irish & Israeli Affairs

Middle East Camera Fodder

On April 1st Palestinian Media Watch reported the airing on Palestinian TV of a new Hamas propaganda video inciting Palestinian children to terrorism against Israel. Focusing on the late Hamas leader, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, it featured uniformed children in military poses whom it promised would be the ‘thousand Yassins’ of tomorrow. It came just days after the release of another Hamas video which portrayed the daughter of suicide bomber, Reem al-Riyashi, singing of her ambition to follow in her mother’s “blessed” footsteps; al-Riyashi, Hamas’s first female suicide bomber, murdered four Israelis at the Erez crossing in January 2004.

This is not the first time that Hamas has targeted minors with anti-Israel incitement. In March 2006, its children’s website, al-fateh.net, published material glorifying suicide terrorism including a poem proclaiming jihad as the eternal path and shahadah (martyrdom) as “the new life,” and a story about Suad, a young Palestinian girl who leads “Zionist soldiers” to a bomb in the knowledge that she too will be killed. She dies “smiling, lying on the grass, because she died as a martyr for Palestine.” Another feature honored Naseem Ja’abari, the Be’er Sheva suicide bomber who murdered 16 people in August 2004. The previous month, Hamas’s junior magazine published a series of stories about Basaal, a Palestinian child who speaks of his fervent desire to “sacrifice [himself] for Allah … by attacking the evil Zionists that stole [his] Dear Land.”

However, the incitement of Palestinian children to commit terrorist crimes is not an Islamist innovation. Hamas’s Sheik Hassan Yousef may have spoken of his aim to “grow [martyrs] from kindergarten through college” but it was the so-called secularists of Fatah who succeeded in transforming Arafat’s child rock-throwers, his much-vaunted “generals of the stones,” into fully-fledged members of the Palestinian terrorist machine. While Israel was teaching its children to admire young people such as Noam Apter who died in the act of saving innocent lives, Fatah was filling the pantheon of Palestinian child heroes with those like Ayyat al-Akhras and Issa Badir who died in the act of taking them. Schoolbooks presented the destruction of Israel as a religious duty and exhorted pupils to become the “shahids of tomorrow” (Arafat himself encouraged children to follow the example of Faris Odeh, who at 14 staged his own ‘martyrdom,’ telling them that such a death was “the greatest message” they could send the world). Programs aired on official Palestinian TV also glorified shahadah while PA-run summer camps trained children in the use of weapons.

This daily indoctrination bestowed upon suicide terrorists the cult status reserved for pop stars and sporting heroes in other youth cultures. Indeed pendants engraved with their images were prized possessions throughout Arafat’s terrorist war, particularly in Nablus where 50% of the city’s children reportedly wore them. Also popular were collectible ‘martyr’ cards, six million of which were sold in just two years. Coupled with the naked incitement of political and religious leaders (for instance, the PA Mufti of Jerusalem declared that “the younger the martyr, the greater and more I respect him”), it is little wonder that so many children were willing to kill or be killed for ‘Palestine.’

Why did the Palestinian Authority cultivate this mentality of martyrdom amongst its children? The answer partly lies in the tragic case of 12 year-old Mohammed al-Dura, shot dead at the Netzarim Junction just days into the second intifada. His killing, for which the IDF rashly took responsibility, single-handedly transformed the situation, mobilizing world opinion behind the Palestinians then widely blamed for the collapse of Camp David, and casting Israel in the role of regional villain. While Arafat realized that he could not secure a military victory, he knew that he could win the equally important propaganda war and ‘martyred’ children represented the most formidable weapon in his anti-Israel arsenal. For, as the London Times pointed out in this context, “dead kids make great TV.”

So Palestinian TV not only continuously aired footage of al-Dura’s horrible death (spliced with fictitious images of an Israeli sniper taking aim and firing at him) but, in an effort to provoke similar situations to win the world’s sympathy, took to screening his afterlife as well. In a five-minute film produced by the PA Ministry of Information and Culture and repeatedly run on TV, the well-known entertainer, Aida, sang of “the sweetness of the fragrance of the earth, its thirst quenched by the gush of blood flowing from a youthful body” while an actor playing the dead boy was shown enjoying the delights of the paradise he has earned through shahadah and beckoning the viewers to “follow him” there. With three separate polls finding that 70-80% of Palestinian children expressed a desire to follow al-Dura, it is unsurprising that so many shared his miserable fate as camera fodder.

Hamas took full advantage of this situation in the pursuit of its own genocidal goals. For while Israel’s elimination of Salah Shehadah frustrated its plans to recruit properly trained children into specialist military units, Hamas used minors in numerous terrorist attacks. In April 2002, for instance, it sent Ismail Ibrahim Nada (12), Wael Ghazi Hamaran (13) and Yusef Zakout (14) on a suicidal assault against the Jewish community of Netzarim in the course of which all three were shot dead. Another Hamas operative, Ahmed Salmi (16), was killed during an attempted attack on Dugit a few days earlier. Then in May, a 16 year-old youth from the Askar refugee camp near Nablus arrested on his way to carry out a terrorist attack, told Israeli security forces that Hamas had recruited him at 14.

One year later, Ahmad 'Issam Muhammad Judeh (16) was killed on a reconnaissance mission in Beit Hanoun. Three months after that Khamis Ghazi Gerwan (17) was shot as he attempted a suicide bombing in Ariel. High-school classmates Nabil Massoud and Mahmoud Salem were just 17 when, in March 2004, they exploded themselves killing 10 in Ashdod. Hamas sent all to their deaths. And given its stated mission “to raise an ideological generation that loves death like our enemies love life and will not abandon the way of jihad and shahadah as long as one inch of our holy land is in the hands of the Jews,” they will not be the last to die in its name.

The Palestinians claim that all their dead children were innocent victims abroad, victims of a callous and brutal regime for which human life is dispensable in the pursuit of its aims. And this is actually true. But the regime in question is not the State of Israel as they would have the world believe but their own Palestinian Authority.

Will this societal child sacrifice ever end? Only when, to paraphrase ex-Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, the Palestinians learn to love their children more than they hate Israel, when a child commands more respect in life than in death. This latest Hamas video demonstrates that this is farther away than ever.

© Sean Gannon 2007 Reprinted with Permission

Seán Gannon graduated in history from University College Dublin and works as a freelance writer and researcher on Irish and Israeli affairs, publishing mainly in Ireland, Britain and Israel. He is currently preparing a book on Ireland's relationship with the state of Israel since 1948. He is a prominent advocate for Israel, being a featured writer with the Israel Hasbara Committee and chairman of the Irish Friends of Israel, a media response group which endeavors to correct the bias and error in the reporting of the Middle East conflict in Ireland.