3-Jul-06: Marketing Suicide to Children

A Normal Rockwell classic

In Gaza yesterday, Israeli forces spot three gunmen approaching their position and fire on them; the three are killed and the bodies are then checked - with great care, based on bitter past experience. Two of them are found to be wrapped in explosive belts. They had been sent as human bombs.

The romance of Palestinian Arab society in particular, and Jihadists in general, with suicide and infanticide is in full force. The most unimaginable aspect of this is that the death of children is a principal goal - not of Israel but of Palestinian Arab parents and Palestinian Arab society. Difficult as this is to accept, there's plenty of evidence.

Earlier this week, with Israeli and Gazan forces in a hot shooting war with each other, official PA television, controlled by the 'moderate' Abbas, has chosen, after a three-year absence, to renew its campaign of advertorial-style, pro-suicide video clips. Their chief purpose is to encourage young children to become shaheeds - fighters happy to go to their violent deaths.

Haaretz reports today that government-controlled Palestinian TV is screening an overwrought, highly emotive short film about the Palestinian boy Mohammed al-Dura. The video depicts a child portraying al-Dura peacefully playing in heaven; "follow me" he calls to other children while the popular singer Aida croons in the background, describing how the earth longs for the deaths of children: "How pleasant is the smell of the earth whose thirst is quenched by blood pouring out of young bodies."

The very serious and disturbing doubts about what really happened to Mohammed and his father Jamal six years ago are the subject of numerous investigations; The Second Draft is a carefully documented and persuasive example. But irrespective of whether the boy al-Dura was shot by Israeli forces, murdered in cold blood by his own people, or alive and well today, it is the icon created by his image that has caused, and continues now to lead to, untold deaths on both sides of this ongoing war.

The film was earlier taken off the air by the Arafat government in 2003 in response to Palestinian Media Watch director Itamar Marcus showing it to a U.S. Senate hearing. Airing this video clip now has one clear purpose: to influence the behavior of young Palestinian Arab children, encouraging them to seek death as a means of inflicting pain on the despised Jews.

The appalling abuse of their own children is part of a consistent pattern of pathological, self-destructive behavior by Palestinian society over a period of years - and it works. Palestinian Media Watch points out that the Arafat regime's TV campaign succeeded, according to 3 separate opinion polls of Palestinian society, in persuading between 70 and 80 percent of Palestinian children to want to die as shaheeds. So to those who believe the Palestinian thugocracy has achieved nothing in its decades of leadership: technically not true. No other government in the history of civilized society comes close to the evil outcome the Palestinian Arabs have wrought with their own children.

Footnote: The BBC provides this background. Official broadcasting is run by the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation (PBC) which operates Voice of Palestine radio and Palestine TV. These outlets came under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian president in early 2006; the move was seen as an attempt to prevent the new Hamas-dominated government from exerting control over the official media.