Mick Hartley

Jonathan Myers in Fathom – 7 October and the Miseducation of the Palestinian Child:

Palestinian Media Watch has drawn attention to how the environment of Gaza and West Bank children contains dozens of schools, sports events, and summer camps, bearing the names of terrorists. Streets and recreational areas are named after suicide bombers. On street hoardings and the walls of community centres are posters or graphic images of martyrs; usually terrorists killed by Israeli forces. Dead or alive, all these named individuals are held up as role models. Similar glorification of terrorists and their violence occurs in movies. In 2009, Hamas released Emad Akel, a feature film written by Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar and former Interior Minister Fathi Hamad that celebrated the life of a Hamas terrorist killed by the IDF in 1993….

This othering of the Jew is supported through the curricula of Gaza and West Bank schools run by UNWRA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) and Hamas. IMPACT-se (Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education) has found basic subjects are perverted for that purpose. In Physics, Newton’s Second Law is demonstrated by asking children to calculate the forces effecting the trajectory of a stone fired from a slingshot at an IDF soldier. Math is taught by asking children to add the number of martyrs of the First Intifada to those of the Second. And maps erase the State of Israel, portraying the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea as Palestine; where Israel should be is the label ‘Zionist occupation.’ Despite criticism from organisations like IMPACT-se, it’s evidently immensely important for the Palestinian leadership that this distorted education continues. As PA Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyah has stressed in relation to international agency funding, if money is withheld because of what is in their textbooks, he’d rather take money from electricity and water than change textbooks.

Worth a read in full.

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle said, ‘Give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man.’ Good character, he meant, is laid down through social learning in the early years. Likewise, brutalise a child and any moral compass, any conscience, they might have developed is destroyed. In time, the abused becomes the abuser and the stage is set for 7 October.