The war against the Jews

Melanie Phillips

The New York Times has published a piece by its former Jerusalem bureau chief, Steve Erlanger, detailing the incitement against the Jews routinely promoted by Hamas. Most disgusting — and most ominous — is the way in which Palestinian children are taught from the cradle to hate and to murder Jews:

Another children’s program, ‘Tomorrow’s Pioneers,’ has become infamous for its puppet characters — a kind of Mickey Mouse, a bee and a rabbit — who speak, like Assud the rabbit, of conquering the Jews to the young hostess, Saraa Barhoum, 11. ‘We will liberate Al Aksa mosque from the Zionists’ filth,’ Assud said recently. ‘We will liberate Jaffa and Acre,’ cities now in Israel proper. ‘We will liberate the whole homeland.’
The mouse, Farfour, was murdered by an Israeli interrogator and replaced by Nahoul, the bee, who died ‘a martyr’s death’ from lack of health care because of Gaza’s closed borders. He has been supplanted by Assud, the rabbit, who vows ‘to get rid of the Jews, God willing, and I will eat them up, God willing.’

When Assud first made his appearance, he said to Saraa: ‘We are all martyrdom-seekers, are we not, Saraa?’ She responded: ‘Of course we are. We are all ready to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of our homeland. We will sacrifice our souls and everything we own for the homeland.'

This Nazi-style indoctrination in hatred of the Jews and incitement to murder, fired by the rocket fuel of purportedly divine authority to produce mass genocidal hysteria, is the real cause of the Middle East impasse. And before anyone leaps up to say that the west still (just about, but don’t count on it) regards Hamas as beyond the pale, the so-called ‘moderates’ of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority— even though they are now generally more careful not to use such openly anti-Jewish language —also continue to promote and support violence, terror and the destruction of Israel through their media. As the US Middle East reporting monitor CAMERA reports:

On March 14, 2008, the Palestinian Authority controlled newspaper, Al Hayat-Al Jadida, described the terrorist who massacred eight yeshiva students in Jerusalem on March as a ‘groom,’ and called his burial a ‘wedding celebration.’ PMW [Palestinian Media Watch] reported: ‘The story in Mahmoud Abbas’ Al Hayat-Al Jadida goes on to evoke the neighborhood Jabal Mukbar's “week of anticipation . . . preparing themselves for the wedding procession.” The term ‘wedding’ is the expression commonly used in PA society, and in schoolbooks as well, to describe the death of Shahids – Martyrs for Allah…
A new music video began to appear on PA-controlled television in October 2007 promising the ‘liberation’ of cities within Israel – in other words, the destruction of Israel. The lyrics include:

From Jerusalem and Acre and from Haifa and Jericho and Gaza and Ramallah

From Bethlehem and Jaffa and Be'er Sheva and Ramle
And from Nablus to the Galilee, and from Tiberias to Hebron

The message of this PA music video is identical to that of Hamas’ Assud the rabbit, mentioned above.

While Roz Rothstein, international director of StandWithUs, reveals these images of war on display in the PA-controlled West Bank town of Dheisheh.
Yet such continuous incitement scarcely figures in the deliberations of a western world (aided by a dysfunctional Israeli government) determined to force Israel into a ‘compromise’ with those who would destroy it. Which brings us back to Steve Erlanger of the New York Times. For as CAMERA so sharply observes, as of last month Erlanger moved on from Jerusalem to run the NYT’s Paris bureau. But in his entire four-year posting in Israel, he barely mentioned the Palestinian Arab incitement against Israel and the Jews. It was only when he had safely left the region altogether that he suddenly discovered that

In Gaza, Hamas’s Insults to Jews Complicate Peace.

And the refusal of the western media to report them complicate it even further.
The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London,