31-May-07: Two Children

One of last week's Qassam attacks on southern Israel quietly exacted a delayed and very expensive price several days ago. The report reached Israel's media this morning and as of this writing it's not reported in a single news channel outside the borders of this country.

In the town of Sderot, a bus transporting four special-needs children suffered a near-direct-hit from one of dozens of rockets fired into Israel by Pal-Arab terrorists. Shrapnel from the resulting explosion penetrated the vehicle and wounded all the children. One child, thirteen year-old wheelchair-bound Chai Shalom, who had cerebral palsy, was deaf and mute, and had congenital heart problems, suffered injuries from the bombing serious enough to require hospitalization.

Sadly, little Chai Shalom (Chai means "life" in Hebrew, and shalom is the Hebrew word for "peace") died of his injuries in Beer Sheva's Soroka Hospital.

And since balance is all the rage in the foreign media, here's another report from a different vantage point.

Tom Gross reports that a child with congenital heart complications - this one a newborn Gazan baby - was rushed to Israel on Sunday while Qassams whizzed overhead. An Israeli ambulance took the eight-day-old Pal-Arab infant from Gaza to the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv's suburbs. As Tom writes: "Unreported by the international media, Israeli ambulances transfer patients from the Gaza Strip to Israeli hospitals on an almost daily basis. According to Dr Dudi Mishali, head of the Department of Pediatric & Congenital Cardiothoracic Surgery at the hospital next to Tel Aviv, an average of three Palestinian babies with heart defects come to his department alone every week."

Mishali said "We have daily communications by phone and fax with doctors in Gaza. There is no heart surgeon in the Strip, so they transfer all of these children, and there are many, to be operated on here." The expenses are largely paid for by the hospital.

Dozens of British doctors are calling for the Israeli Medical Association to be expelled from the World Medical Association.

28-May-07: The Ongoing Tragedy of Dead Palestinian-Arab Children

Like many pro-Israel websites and blogs, we get a steady stream of anonymous crank-mail, hate-mail and weird-mail. Paraphrasing a recurring theme in these often-incoherent letters, we're asked "Hey, Arab children are dying at the hands of the Israelis so how come you people only ever write about Arabs attacking Israelis?". But in language a good deal less sanitized than this.

So for that handful of nameless mail writers, here's an opportunity to reflect on the tragedy unfolding in Palestinian-Arab society... the tragedy of two generations of that society's youth being manipulated and cajoled to literally commit suicide.



The unspeakable perversion is not a secret and there's no doubt who is doing it: their own "religious" "leaders", their own community elders and even their own parents. History has no parallel for this perversion.

Official Hamas TV began showing a new video clip for children this past Sunday. An analysis by
Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook of PMW has brought the video's existence to the attention of people like us who don't tune in each night to that particular channel. To call the clip sickening is to miss the point. This satanic work tells you most of what you need to know in order to understand why Arab hatred of Jews and of Israel has endured for decades and centuries.

Following a young Palestinian boy from childhood directly to martyrdom, it begins with him attending a mosque, reading from the Quran, then (in a logical progression that non-Moslems will find breathtakingly sick) holding a rifle with the Quran while imagining himself engaged in violent acts. A minute later, he's a mature Hamas fighter participating in battle against Israel. And right after that, he's dead. Because he's a Shahid, the choir sings “The pure blood will produce honor and glory”.

Pure blood.

Honor.

Glory.

The Hamas Palestinian regime wants Palestinian children to aspire to Shahada. Death by martyrdom is expected of children. “Honor and glory” and "Shahada is sweet" are messages that are specifically packaged for children on Hamas TV and on Fatah-controlled PA TV. Their schoolbooks do the same appalling thing - promote and glorify Shahada death among children.

"O heroes... Do not talk yourselves into flight. Your enemies seek life while you seek death. These drops of blood that gush from your bodies will be transformed tomorrow into blazing red meteors that will fall down upon the heads of your enemies." [Reading and Texts Part II, Grade 8 (2002), p. 16]



The following is an excerpt from the new clip (view it here) on Hamas TV:

"We have come!
Machine-gun and Quran in our hands,
We’ve grown and so has the right,
In the eyes of the wronged,
We swore to retrieve the land,
The pure blood will produce honor and glory.
[Al-Aqsa TV, May 27, 2007]

PMW points out that between March and May this year, Hamas TV has been regularly broadcasting a video dramatization of a four-year-old girl, the daughter of an actual suicide bomber, singing to her dead mother and promising to follow in her footsteps. The video clip (see it here) ends with the child picking explosives from her mother's drawer.



Another video shown on Fatah's Palestinian Authority TV hundreds of times between 2001 and 2004, depicts a young boy leaving a farewell letter to his parents as he goes off to seek Shahada, describing the death he aspires as "sweet." This PA clip is fiendishly designed to offset a child's natural fear of death, by depicting Shahada as heroic and tranquil.

From 2000 to 2003, PA TV broadcast a music video depicting the delightful Shahid paradise of Muhammad Al-Dura who, Pal-Arabs assert, died in crossfire as a result of Israeli actions. The child actor is shown flying a kite, frolicking on the beach and at an amusement park. The clip (see it here) opens with an invitation to other children from Al-Dura to aspire to Shahada: "I am waving to you not in parting, but to say follow me."

PA TV frequently shows a clip with two 11-year-old Palestinian girls talking about Shahada. They explain that "all Palestinian children" view Shahada as more worthwhile than living because of its promised grand after-life.

And to flesh out the picture, Little Green Footballs posted a video tonight depicting children in Gaza performing a “play” in which they dress up as suicide bombers and terrorists to the evident pleasure of a crowd of doting parents. It's here.

So... for those curious to know whether the Pal-Arabs have some achievement to match Israel's long list of patents, inventions, medical breakthroughs, prizes, awards, humanitarian achievements, foreign aid, creative music, hospitals, medical care, agriculture etc etc... you have your answer. The world's leading producer of death-cults for men, women and children, in living colour, right across the fence from here.

Now, what was that question again about death tolls among Pal-Arab juveniles?

27-May-07: Sunday Morning Death by Missile

A Palestinian terror attack on southern Israel today took the life of the father of a three year-old girl. His name is Oshri Oz. He was 36 and he worked for a Sderot-based construction company called Peretz Bonei HaNegev. His wife is pregnant. Oz's car was hit directly by one of a volley of 4 Qassam missiles. Another person was injured and several others had to be treated for shock. School children waiting for buses to take them to their first day of classes outside of Qassam missile range panicked on hearing the incoming rocket alert.

25-May-07: Facing Daily Rocket Attacks, What's To Be Done?

Some straight-talking advice from one of Israel's senior military strategists. How to deal with the life-sapping absurdity of daily rocket attacks into civilian towns, homes and schools by a determined, unrestrained and hate-driven enemy.

Don't fear world's wrath
Drastic measures needed in order to curb rocket attacks on Sderot
Giora Eiland (Eiland is a retired IDF major-general and former head of Israel's National Security Council)
Published 24th May 2007

Prior to any important discussion regarding our handling of the Qassam rocket fire from Gaza, three key assumptions should be made.

• The Qassam rocket fire cannot be halted by means of an aerial operation only.
• Without changing the situation along the Philadelphi Route, Hamas will continue to boost its military force.
• The reality in Sderot is unbearable. This assumption is not as obvious as it may sound. Until recently the Israeli government regarded the continuation of the current situation there as the better option. Apparently, this attitude has changed. If the rocket fire cannot be stopped remotely or from the air, how can it be stopped?

There are two ways of achieving this. Both options have a common thread: Exercising a political option prior to a military operation and reaching an understanding with the US regarding the question of the "day after," or "how pressure will be lifted after a military operation and in exchange for what ." Such pressure would not only be painful for the Palestinians.

Option A: Capturing areas in the Gaza Strip, particularly the Philadelphi Route - while not sufficing with capturing the Route, which is too narrow to protect, and widening it. The implication of this would be the destruction of hundreds of homes in Rafah and thousands of homeless people. This will create an international outcry and spark the ire of the Egyptians – which is a good thing! Israel would insist that it would withdraw its troops only if and when a satisfactory security arrangement is hammered out. Such a settlement is possible and Israel should reach an agreement on it with the US prior to an operation. Similarly, action should be taken in several other areas as well.

Option B: Israel announces that as far as it is concerned Gaza is a political entity (separate from the West Bank) which is ruled pragmatically and formally by Hamas. As this entity is in a state of war with Israel, Israel would have to take three measures:

• Immediately close off border crossings between Israel and Gaza (as Gaza is open to Egypt, supplies to and from Gaza could be transferred through there.)
• Announce that in several months Israel would cease to supply water, electricity and fuel.
• Since Gaza is an enemy state in a state of war with Israel, every governing institution in Gaza and the infrastructure serving the belligerent effort against us, including roads and bridges, should be targeted

Such Israeli activity would threaten the future of the Palestinian state – and this is positive. The international arena will undoubtedly protest even more strongly and will want to reinstate the old status quo. Israel would agree only if conditions are right, conditions that must be hammered out with the US first.

The continuation of tactical assaults on Hamas rocket launchers is not the solution as it allows Hamas to exploit its relative advantage. This doesn't mean that that the entire Gaza Strip must be taken. One of the drastic measures, as outlined here, can be adopted. And yes, there is no choice but to take a political risk, to anger several players and to force them to take action as well.

The world isn't perturbed by what's going on in Sderot and as long as this situation persists, we shall be called upon to "exercise restraint," and the problems will remain ours alone.

The world isn't perturbed. Nor are the journalists or their editors or photographers. But we are.

25-May-07: The Chaos of Gaza and What It Teaches Us

We closed our previous posting with a rhetorical question: "Does anyone still remember the reasons we were given for supporting a Pal-Arab re-conquest of the Gaza Strip greenhouses two summers ago?"

(The photos posted above show the tragic progression of the famous greenhouses of Gaza from cornucopia of prosperity under Israel pre-2005 to desolate launching pad for Palestinian hate today.)

Israel's pre-eminent opinion columnist, Ze'ev Schiff, writing in today's Haaretz, turns the rhetorical question into a true enquiry: Does anyone remember, he asks, and is anyone interested in truly understanding, what there is to learn about the abandonment by Israel of the Jewish communities in the Gaza Strip and the lessons that have followed?

Well, Schiff doesn't exactly ask it that way. But if he had, we would have agreed wholeheartedly with the question. He makes some powerful "emperor-is-naked" points. Here are some extracts from his essay "If that's how they act in Gaza".

The armed Palestinian organizations in the Gaza Strip are demonstrating once again what has become a norm among the Palestinians - that the agreements to which their leaders commit have no value. It's enough just to listen to Palestinian citizens complaining about how the cease-fire agreements there have no meaning. Agreements are made and signed, and immediately violated. In this latest round of violence, the warring parties have already decided on a cease-fire five times. Each time, within hours, they were back to killing each other and injuring bystanders in the process. If this is how they behave among themselves, why should they be any more scrupulous in abiding by agreements with outside elements such as Israel, Jordan, Lebanon or Egypt? This is an important lesson that Israel must learn from the recent events in Gaza.

The whole piece makes for a compelling, depressing analysis. Let those who say "Israel should" and "Israel must" read this before they open their frequently-ill-informed, dangerous mouths with Pollyannish suggestions that encourage national suicide via the express track.

22-May-07: Home-Made? What Sort of Home?

"When it comes to killing people, the homemade Qassam rocket may be one of the most inefficient weapons ever invented."
WSJ 18th May 2007

President Harry S. Truman famously said that when he heard people say they knew only what they read in the newspapers, he pitied them.

Shirel Feldman died last night (Monday) in the small and battered Israeli community of Sderot. She was walking in one of the town's shopping areas in the early evening when an inbound Qassam rocket fired from Gaza crashed into a parked vehicle (see pictures at right), spraying her with shrapnel. She died of her severe injuries a few hours later. It's a certainty that her name and even the barest details of her identity will never make it to anyone's newspapers or Internet screens outside of this country and beyond the community of people who care about the ongoing barbarity being perpetrated by the Haniyeh/Abbas regime.

Something odd and deeply disturbing characterizes the way media outlets all over the world are reporting the events taking place in the south of Israel. It's always been the case, from 2004 when the barrages of rockets into Israeli communities bordering Gaza began, that the dangers of Qassam attacks have been explicitly minimized in the news media.

A nice Malaysian example here explains that the Qassams are "generally regarded as unreliable, limited in their use, and rarely hit their targets. Most of them land in open fields, and many do not explode. Very little damage is ever reported and injuries are usually described as slight or moderate."

We expressed our concern about this sort of misleading, agenda-driven nonsense in an earlier posting here in January 2007. To our friends in Kuala Lumpur, we might perhaps point out that most terrorist bombers do little damage and fail to explode. Some unfortunately do not. A small problem for Malaysians. Not so small for the rest of us.

But as we have personally learned, it doesn't much matter if press reporters get the story right or entirely wrong. When you yourself are in the news, just another statistic or footnote, and bad things are done to you, the bad is real.

So irrespective of whether the Qassam is inefficient or crude, it exacts a very real and very painful permanent toll in terror and death. Some instances to ponder...

June 28, 2004 The first fatal Qassam rocket attack on Sderot - a Hamas rocket crashes into a nursery school (Hamas openly claims credit for the attack and the deaths). The victims are Afik Ohion Zehavi, aged 4, and Mordechai Yosephus, a man of 49. Seven other people are wounded. (Pal-Arabs have no problem whatever attacking schools. They do it to their own.)

September 29, 2004 A Qassam fired from Gaza by Hamas - which openly claims responsibility - crashes into a residential building on the eve of the Sukkot holiday. The victims are two toddlers: Dorit Inso, 2 and Yuval Abeva, 4. Thirty other people suffer injuries.

January 21, 2005 A teenage girl, Ayala Haya Abukasis, 17, dies from wounds sustained during another Qassam rocket attack on Sderot.

July 14, 2005 Dana Galkovitch, a 22-year-old Israeli woman, is killed in a Qassam attack in the Netiv Ha'asara kibbutz, just north of the Gaza Strip.

September 24, 2005 Five Israelis are injured when Palestinian terrorists launch some 30 rockets on Israeli communities from the Gaza Strip.

February 3, 2006 A Qassam rocket strikes a family's house in the western Negev village of Kibbutz Karmiya, injuring four people, including a 7-month-old baby.

March 28, 2006 A Qassam rocket kills two Israeli-Arab shepherds, Salam Ziadin and his son Khalid, age 16, at Kibbutz Nachal Oz. (First reports of their deaths attributed them to an Israeli shell. At a later stage, Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the "achievement".)

June 11, 2006 Three people are injured, one critically when a Qassam lands next to Sapir Academic College on the edge of Sderot. 14 Qassams are fired throughout this day including one which makes a direct hit on an apartment building.

Nov. 11, 2006 - Faina Slutzker, 57, is killed when a rocket hits the street where she is walking, near the home of Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz.

Nov. 21, 2006 - Yaakov Yaakobov, 43, a fork-lift operator is killed when a Qassam strikes the "Off Tov" poultry plant in Sderot.

May 16, 2007 Over thirty Qassams are launched into Sderot, seriously wounding one woman. The attacks come after at least 15 Palestinian Arabs are killed by other Palestinian Arabs during an internal Hamas -vs- Fatah feud in the Gaza strip (calculated, as we pointed out, to provoke an Israeli intervention which might then unite the blood-minded warring factions).

Does anyone still remember the reasons we were given for supporting a Pal-Arab re-conquest of the Gaza Strip greenhouses two summers ago?

18-May-07: Sick, in the Medical Sense of the Word

We're indebted to our friend David Frankfurter for this insightful comment on a little-reported disgrace this week (the background is here).

David's Letter from Israel blog is always worth reading. Here's what he posted yesterday:

Clean bill of health? It is rare that one of the so-called "human rights" NGOs that support Palestinian terror are openly exposed. Watchdog NGO Monitor has reported the tendency of Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders) "members [to] exploit this NGO for political goals including unsupported attacks on Israel in contradiction to the pledge to maintain independence from political powers." Of particular concern to NGO Monitor is the specialist's diagnosis: Israeli actions degrade Palestinian health care. Of course, Palestinian violence and terror that make the protective actions necessary do not form part of the medical record. It seems that the mental and physical health of Israeli civilians does not even get an appointment.
Today, Albawaba Middle East news service reports: Medecins sans Frontieres has been infected by the terror virus.
Palestinian charged with plan to kill Olmert
17-05-2007 , 09:12 GMT
A Palestinian man was charged Thursday in Jerusalem District Court with gathering intelligence as part of a plan to assassinate Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Masa'b Bashir, a 25-year-old resident of Dir el-Balah in the Gaza Strip, has a valid entry permit into Israel due to his work with the organization "Doctors without Borders," the Tel Aviv-based Haaretz newspaper reported. The planning for the assassination was conducted at the initial level only, and did not become operational, the report added. Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) activists in Dir el-Balah allegedly recruited Bashir, and dispatched him to gather intelligence on the security arrangements at the Prime Minister's Residence in Jerusalem. He visited the site several times, and informed his PFLP handlers that the tight security would not permit the successful assassination of Olmert. At a later stage, the PFLP decided to kill an Israeli working in archeological excavations in East Jerusalem. As part of that plan, Bashir allegedly underwent training in martial arts and firing a handgun.
Instead of their ongoing negative prognosis, Medicines sans Frontiers would be better giving a second opinion on the free medical treatment Israeli hospitals and doctors so frequently provide our Palestinian Arab neighbours.

To David's comments we would add these:

1. Anyone with a sick child in this country, and who who regularly visits Israeli paediatric wards -- and that unfortunately includes the writers of this blog -- knows what the foreign reporters and visiting politicians never seem to know: that the number of Arab families seeking and getting the best possible medical care in the entire region are greatly over-represented in those wards, far out of proportion to their numbers in Israeli society. Whom does this bother? No-one, certainly not Israelis. In Jerusalem, where our youngest child has needed prolonged hospital care almost all her life, we can report from personal knowledge that in the children's wards you will routinely see close to half or more than half of the patients, and the same proportion of families and visitors, drawn from the Arab segments of Israeli society. So what? So what does this tell you about the "genocidal" designs of Israeli against Arabs in general and Pal-Arabs in particular?

2. For people wanting to let MSF know how they feel, knowing that a MSF doctor is an active Jew-hating terrorist, here are some contact details.

Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders)
Rue de Lausanne 78 (CP 116)
1211Geneva 21 Switzerland
Tel: +41 (22) 849.84.00
Fax: +41 (22) 849.84.04
office-gva@geneva.msf.org

Media contacts:
Aymeric Péguillan (fr/en/es)
Tél: +41 (0) 22 849 84 87 Mobile: +41 (0) 79 784 57 32
Email: aymeric.peguillan@geneva.msf.org

Aurélie Grémaud (fr/en)
Tél: +41 (0) 22 849 84 49 Mobile: 00 33 6 62 87 27 48
Email: aurelie.gremaud@geneva.msf.org

Raphael Weber (de/en/fr)
Tel. + 41 (0) 44 385 94 41 Mobile: +41 (0) 79 206 46 58
E-mail: raphael.weber@geneva.msf.org

16-May-07: Report Card

Here's what the Hamas government of the Palestinian Arabs did today.

• They continued fighting their fratricidal civil war against the gunmen of Fatah while agreeing to the sixth ceasefire in the past three days. It began at 8 o'clock this evening and ended a few seconds later.
  
• Hamas "liberation" forces continued their rocket barrage against Israel's western Negev. Some 30 Qassam rockets have been fired into Israel so far today.
• Some of those Qassams were deliberately fired into Sderot, the Israeli town unlucky enough to be within firing distance of Hamas emplacements. A 60-year-old Israeli woman was severely injured in her home which took a direct hit.
• Their Qassams led to four other Israelis being treated for shock.
• One Qassam struck a cluster of Israeli homes in Sderot, causing damage to several buildings. This is the complex where the Yaakobov family lives. Yaakov Yaakobov was killed by a Qassam rocket in November 2006.
• A Hamas Qassam rocket struck Sderot this evening and knocked out power throughout the town.
• Another Qassam rocket struck a home next door to the home of Israel's minister of defence who lives in Sderot. There was property damage but thankfully no injuries. A nearby basketball court was destroyed.
• Note that Hamas openly claimed credit today for the Qassam rocket attacks. It announced that they will continue to be fired into Israel. An Israeli report confirms what we wrote this morning, quoting Palestinian sources who say "Hamas is trying to provoke a fight with Israel in the hopes that an Israeli military response would calm the Fatah-Hamas fighting by uniting the two against a common enemy". So what else is new?
  
• But at the same time, Hamas issued an official statement blaming the entire mess on (as if you didn't know) on Israel, as well as the international community and the Arab states.
  
• Hamas also expressed severe contrition today for the unmitigated disaster it has bought upon the heads of its society, its children, its economy and its culture. Not.
  
• Oh, and to round off a week of genuine achievements, yesterday Hamas gunmen launched a heroic attack against a Jeep-ful of their enemies. Except that it was not their enemies but in fact their own gunmen (this we are not making up), five of whom went straight to their seventy-two virgins.

In Gaza today, there are no supplies of blood; people are being arrested or shot for the way they look (says The Times of London in an article entitled "I heard the screams of women and children"); business is at a standstill while freshly smuggled Arab weapons are fired at Arab targets; children, women and geriatrics (including incredibly naive "human shields") are being wounded and killed in the cross-fire between the selfless heroes of Fatah and their Hamas counterparts.

Carnage. Anarchy. Unlimited bloodshed. Dead women and children everywhere. The Times puts it graphically and clearly: "The random use of weapons and explosives is out of control... the elite, the politicians, sit with the Egyptian mediators at night and then come out with statements about a truce, and in the morning we see the opposite has occurred. These people are not controlling anything."

Meanwhile the Pal-Arabs find enough energy left over, as they have for several generations, to keep pouring their barrages of death into Israeli towns and homes. Not disputed territory, not military camps, not industrial complexes.

In other words, business as usual. This ongoing war.

16-May-07: Barrages

Another day of muddled mainstream reporting that obscures more than it explains.

The BBC leads its Middle East coverage today with a somewhat laconic report that "Sporadic gunfire has continued in the Gaza Strip, despite a third ceasefire". In its customary tit-for-tat, "cycle of violence" manner, the BBC report mentions in passing that "14 people were killed" among the Palestinian Arabs, while "Four Israelis were injured, one seriously, by a rocket fired into the town of Sderot, near the Gaza Strip."

What in fact is going on in Gaza is an internal war among Arabs. 14 killed yesterday, dozens injured, by Arab gunmen of all political stripes. About 150 dead in the past few months in Gaza alone.

And in the traditional way of the Arab world, rather than deal with the fractiousness and self-inflicted dysfunctionality of their society, they turn to Israel. Let the dreaded Zionist enemy fulfill its historic scapegoat role - to unite the gunmen, the victims, the politicians and the religious rabble-rousers against a hated common enemy.

That's why Arab terrorists fired 21 Qassams into Israel yesterday; go here to read the details and don't waste time at the BBC since they chronically and deliberately fail to report the scope of Arab attacks on Israeli civilian life. Yesterday was no exception.

The terror attacks are motivated by hatred and the need to create a diversion from the catastrophic chaos that Pal-Arab leadership has perpetrated and perpetuated in the lives of their people.

What is happening in southern Israel is horrifying: far from the cameras and notepads of the reporting classes, one of yesterday's rockets made a direct hit on a home, injuring a mother and her son, age 4. More than twenty other Israelis in Sderot - a peaceful civilian town unfortunately located close to Palestinian Arab hell - were hospitalized yesterday for injuries and shock.

Reporting from this country, the BBC and so many other agenda-driven news sources manage to chronically and systematically ignore the evidence in front of their eyes. They persist in telling an ill-informed global audience that Palestinian terror is about liberation, self-determination, resistance, nation-building and other such self-serving nonsense.

Not today though. Today, the BBC slips into the unaccustomed role of telling it like it is - revealing what people who live in the neighbourhood have known for generations. Quote: "The BBC's Aleem Maqbool, in the West Bank town of Ramallah, says whatever the militants started fighting for, the killings are now in the name of revenge."

Good call, Maqbool. Do you perhaps see a pattern here?

13-May-07: On Unspeakable Depravity and its Defenders

Unlike most people, we have every reason to think hard about what it takes to turn a person into a human bomb.

The murder of our daughter at the hands of barbarian thugs, religious fanatics and foaming-at-the-mouth racist extremists is the hardest thing we have ever had to face in life. Whatever we thought we knew about human society, about people who espouse religious values different from ours, about the racism and xenophobic hatred that infects the societies bordering our country in all directions - all went a little way towards explaining the impossible-to-explain. But at the end, we are left with more questions than answers.

The little that we do understand about the ability of Hamas to persuade young Palestinian Arabs to die violently stems from the knowledge we have gotten about how Hamas and other dark forces in the Arab world educate their children. Education is at the black heart of this 'achievement'. No society in the history of mankind has done more to create a culture of self-destruction. Self-destruction... in the interests of destroying the lives of those they hate.

You can see -- if you are interested in seeing -- endless expressions of a poisonous racism, of religious intolerance and of mindless hatred in all aspects of the Palestinian Arab media and education system. It goes hand-in-hand with the broad-scale brainwashing of children, the creation of a death-worship cult, and child abuse on a scale that we in the more cultured parts of the world simply cannot grasp.

All of this would be tragic enough on its own. But what continues to appall us is the way this poisoning of an entire society's young minds is ignored and swept under the carpet. Or subtly supported and understood and quietly half-justified in Europe and elsewhere.

This is on our minds because events this week make clear that the whole appalling story of Palestinian Arab manipulation of their children is getting worse, much worse.

We wrote last week about the Mickey Mouse-lookalike who promotes Islamic domination to children on a Hamas-operated television station. For a short while afterwards, there were reports that some Hamas regime official or another had gone public with a statement that this sickening piece of government-sponsored madness was being pulled. Turns out the death-cult apparatchik spoke prematurely because it's going strong as of today. In fact, there's no sign that the pedophiles and child-slaughterers of Hamas have any intention of bringing it to an end. Why should they? It's achieving exactly what they want.

For the rest of us, it remains to wonder how Pal-Arabs and their apologists sleep at night.

What do they say to themselves as they watch the four-year-old daughter of now-deceased bomber-murderer-terrorist Reem Riyashi singing to her dead mother and vowing to follow in her footsteps? The latest Palestinian Media Watch bulletin records how that particular video clip ends with the little girl picking up sticks of explosives from her mother's drawer. What happens after that is left to the viewers' imaginations.

(It's helpful to know that 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.)

This sickening message is pumped out by official Pal-Arab television seven days a week.

There are always going to be people who are utterly confused about the two sides of this divide - the one that separates barbarism from civilization. The media are filled with them. The hate mail we get at this blog is evidence of plenty more befuddlement and moral myopia. But none of this changes the basic, inescapable reality that you are either for encouraging children to go out and commit murder or against it. And if you don't get that one right, you have a lot of explaining to do to yourself, your own children and to history.

6-May-07: It's Raining Death... Again

Yesterday (Saturday), one of the Hamas "government's" most prominent and consistently credible agents, politbureau chief Khaled Mashaal, declared to the utter astonishment of no one that the Hamas Palestinian Arab government intends to continue to bombard Israeli towns, houses and schools at every opportunity.

Demonstrating that when they threaten death the practitioners of terror absolutely mean it, Hamas operatives today (Sunday) fired five barrages of Qassam rockets into any Israeli residential areas that they can reach. A man standing near a gas station was severely injured, suffering shrapnel wounds all over his body; he's in hospital being treated for injuries. And the day's not over yet.

Yesterday, the day we honor as the Sabbath, they fired five more. An Israeli home took a direct hit.

What's particularly interesting about Mashaal vowing that the Palestinian Arab rocket fire will not stop is that Associated Press and other news sources continue, even today, to refer to a Palestinian Arab "cease fire". For them, we'll repeat what the politbureau thug said in Damascus 24 hours ago.

"I officially declare Hamas's rejection of this document or any American, European, Israeli or even Arab project that diminishes the Palestinian cause like this... The Zionist and American schemes to trigger Palestinian civil war will fail. Those who are bidding on an internal Palestinian explosion are living in an illusion. The only explosion will be in the face of the Zionists."

Unfortunately for Israelis living on undisputed Israeli land in proximity to the cesspools of the emerging Pal-Arab polity in Gaza, whenever the fratricidal Fatah -v- Hamas blood-letting reaches fever pitch, as it is this week, the rockets start to fly into the cottages, shops, factories and schools on our side of the border. (The ever-reliable Khaled Abu Toameh offers his against-the-stream analysis today under the headline "Boycott fueled Fatah-Hamas tensions".)

Fratricide, of course, being s-o-o-o boring, it's unreasonable to expect the mainstream media to report on this. Much more interesting to hammer away at the reports of unprovoked Israeli aggression.

A pity because there are some really interesting things being done by Hamas lately. For instance, Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook in PMW reported today that a squeaky-voiced Mickey Mouse look-alike named Farfur is the star of a weekly children’s program called Tomorrow’s Pioneers on official Hamas TV. Farfur and his co-host, a young girl named Saraa’, teach children about such things as the importance of the daily prayers and drinking milk, while taking every opportunity to indoctrinate young viewers with teachings of Islamic supremacy, hatred of Israel and the US and support of "resistance" – the Palestinian euphemism for terror. Children must pray in the mosque five times a day until there is “world leadership under Islamic leadership.” Soft-spoken Saraa’ explains that the nucleus of this world Islamic leadership will be from “all of Palestine,” i.e., including Israel. Farfur refers to Israel as “the oppressive invading Zionist occupation,” which the children must "resist." Though (or because) it's targeted at a very young audience, Saraa’ announces that after death, the children will have to answer to Allah for what they did or did not do for the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, and for Palestinian prisoners.

Amazing how many Europeans believe this is the way to build a democratic, peace-oriented future for the children of this region. Feh!