Training Palestinian Kids to be Suicide Bombers

Yesterday I read Walter Russell Mead's new essay at Foreign Affairs, "Change They Can Believe In: To Make Israel Safe, Give Palestinians Their Due."

I thought about writing a post on it earlier, but held off. I respect Walter Russell Mead, and I didn't feel like tearing down his essay for its disastrous moral equivalence. It's not as though he doesn't raise considerable questions of historical injustice facing the Palestinian diaspora. I'm more concerned with his legitimation of Palestian demands for the "right of return" (which are really demographic plans for the destruction of the Jewish state), and particularly the article's troubling omission of Palestinian jihad, which is a greater threat to peace than anything eminating from Tel Aviv.

Mead's essay is also noteworthy for its Obama-worship: The coming Obama administration has an historic opportunity "to improve the chances for peace and to align the United States with key Palestinian aspirations without moving away from or against Israel."

Move away from Israel?

Come on ... if the Obama administration really does align itself with "Palestinian aspirations" it would be essentially endorsing terrorism, since for Palestinian society jihad against Israel and the United States has become the defining element of the terrorists' "solution" to Middle East peace process since Yasir Arafat's renunciation of the Clinton administration's plan for a comprehensive peace in the early 1990s.

I'm returning to the Middle East peace process after reading Harold Evans' article at U.S. News, "Palestinians Training Kids to be Suicide Bombers: Teaching Children Murder and a Warped, Dangerous History":

Even when times are very bad, we take solace, irrespective of creed, in the hope symbolized by the Christmas story of birth and renewal. We indulge children and proclaim a season of peace and goodwill. Alas, this Christmas is darkened by a Bethlehem story that is not about peace, but about killing; not about how children may fufill their promise, but about how they should glory in their own extinction. There are no wise men on this horizon.

The Bethlehem that the New Testament tells us is the birthplace of Jesus is also the center of Palestinian culture and the headquarters of the Governorate of the Palestinian Authority. The Bush administration believed and hoped that the PA chairman, Mahmoud Abbas, cared enough about his people to make a decent peace with Israel, leading to a new, independent state of Palestine. Abbas has shattered those hopes. Worse, he and his associates are ensuring that the next generation of Palestinians will be incapable of making peace. They will be paralyzed by the hate and fear that they have been taught in their schoolrooms and by the national television controlled by the PA.

The extent of this corruption of children's minds was vividly exposed last week by the investigative journalist Gerald Posner, who produced a Web documentary (hosted by thedailybeast.com) based on videos culled from television by Palestinian Media Watch. It is deeply shocking to observe children being programmed for terrorism through the exaltation of suicide bombers as heroes. "Martyrdom is bliss," a child hostess says, referring to a 14-year-old suicide killer. The clips show incessant indoctrination that Islam wants the death of adults and children for Allah and will reward those who achieve Shahada, which Palestinian Media Watch equates with death for Allah. "I have let my land drink my blood, and I have loved the way of Shahada," intones a young boy.

Children being taught murder by rote is child abuse, a mental deformation more damaging than physical injury. Equally disgusting is the demonization of Jews based on a phony history of the Holocaust. Remember the Holocaust, in which the Nazis killed 6 million Jews? Well, take a look at the scene from a PA Fatah "educational video" in which children acting and singing about history recite: "They [Israel] are the ones who did the Holocaust, their knife cuts to the length and width of our flesh. They opened the ovens for us to bake human beings. ... When an oven stops burning, they light 100 [more]." A body called the National Committee for Defense of Children from the Holocaust organized an exhibit, one feature of which, according to al-Ayyam, one of the largest Palestinian newspapers, is "an oven and inside it small [Palestinian] children are being burned. The picture speaks for itself."

This endlessly fraudulent education has had devastating effects on the prospects for peace. The world may have been appalled this year when students studying in a Jerusalem library were shot to death by a Palestinian terrorist, but the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research reports that 84 percent of Palestinians approved.

Evans suggests that Hillary Clinton, Obama's incoming Secretary of State, can start the administration's Middle East agenda by demanding an end to the indoctrination and incitement to killing.

This aspect of a movement toward a "comprehensive settlement" is not mentioned in Walter Russell Mead's essay at Foreign Affairs.