18-Jun-13: They want their children to become killers and they say why. The rest of us are left with questions

Child receives training in use of high-powered rifle. Scene from a PIJ death-cult summer camp
underway today in the Gaza Strip [Image Source]

On Sunday, we posted here about a huge summer camp being run in the terrorist-infested Gaza Strip. See "16-Jun-13: At The Telegraph (UK), they know about pictures being worth 1,000 words. They just fail to understand what their eyes are seeing"

Anyone who gives a moment's thought to the unquestionably-pathological things the Gazans are doing to their own children is going to emerge with some troubling questions. Here's one.

Do they realize that exposing little children from the age of six to the dark and sickening arts of how to kill like a terrorist is going to blight their society for generations to come?

If social organizations or child protection agencies anywhere in the Arab world are protesting the annual resurgence of Gaza's death-cult education camps, then they are doing an outstanding job of keeping their anger, criticism and dismay out of the headlines. We keep looking, and we find no sign at all that the organizers - the Hamas-controlled government under whose nose this is happening, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad which does the actual running of the camps - have attracted a single discouraging word in the Arabic language. (Please, critics - correct us... if you can.) Why is this?

Are UNICEF, Defence for Children International, UNESCO, Child Rights International Network, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Washington-based Jerusalem Fund, the Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights, Save the Children Sweden, Arab Council for Childhood Development and so many other child-focused NGOs silent for a reason? If there is a reason, let them say it. If it's acceptable to them that six year old Gazan children, or for that matter 16 year olds

are given AK47s that are bigger than some of the children holding them [Daily Mail UK]

then let them drop the charade and admit they have no problem with it.

And if by chance they are as outraged as we are by the sickening sight of children being shown how to kill innocent civilians across the other side of the fence, then let them speak out as vociferously as they do when they blame Israel for this or another "war crime" or "atrocity". If they don't, why not?

Palestinian Islamic Jihad, whose camp we are discussing,  has a spokesperson who appeared a month ago on the Al-Monitor site ["Palestinian Islamic Jihad: Iran Supplies All Weapons in Gaza"] being frank and open:

Daoud Shihab, the media spokesman for the PIJ, does not hide that Iran is the movement’s main supporter. While noting that there are other parties [who support the PIJ], he said, "All of the weapons in Gaza are provided by Iran, be they weapons intended for the Hamas movement or for the PIJ. Perhaps Hamas even has more Iranian weapons than us; and everyone knows that Iran is financing us.” Shihab said that “the PIJ is a resistance movement, and while there are many parties in the Arab and Muslim world offering support for the resistance, the largest share of this financial and military support is coming from Iran.” [Al-Monitor, May 13, 2013]

So those weapons in those photos we reproduced from The Telegraph and the Daily Mail? They all come from the newly moderate Iranian overlords of the Gaza terror industry, and let there be no further doubt of that.

Shihab is no less forthright in an Arabic language interview earlier this week about why he and the PIJ men run the death-cult camps for children. He says it's about

an open struggle for the defense of our people and our land recovery... We cultivate a culture of belonging to Islam and Palestine and Islamic Jihad through our programs and activities [Sama News - translated to English]

Obviously meaning the Israelis, he refers to attempts by the enemy to "eliminate our existence, and crimes of ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem and elsewhere", carefully sidestepping the massive enlargement of Palestinian Arab numbers in the past two generations. Then, getting more detailed, he invokes three hugely symbolic Palestinian Arab victim figures, all of them children:

Who was it that targeted our children? Who arrests them? Who infringes on their rights? Who prevents them from going to school? Who killed Ayman Hijo and Muhammad Al Durah? Who slaughtered the family of Huda Ghaliya?

Shihab's questions are, naturally, rhetorical. His readers assume he means Israel. But what do we know about those children? What part do they play in that culture he just mentioned?

Ayman Hijo, a baby in her mother's arms, was killed near her home in the Khan Yunis section of the Gaza Strip in May 2001. Thousands of inflamed mourners attended her funeral. A NYTimes report wrote that

Palestinian militants lobbed six mortar shells at a Jewish settlement, Neve Dekalim... Khan Yunis residents freely acknowledged that their neighborhood... on the militarized border separating the refugee camp from the Israeli settlement a mile west... was used by roving mortar squads... [NYT]

Responding immediately to the massive mortar attack

Israeli tanks pounded the area... The tanks appear to have been aiming at an empty municipal market, across the street from the Hijo house... ''Children and babies should not be involved in this terrible war,'' said Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, saying he felt great sorrow at the death but blaming it on Palestinian provocation.  [NYT]

Ayman Hijo's name is sometimes mentioned when people advocating the Palestinian Arab position speak of deliberate murder by Israelis of the other side's children. In this case, the Israeli fire came in response to a lethal attack mounted (as happens today) from the heart of a residential section of Gaza. Israel's prime minister was among the first to publicly express sorrow at the human loss. IDF personnel were hauled over the coals (whether justly or not). If you were looking for a classic case of the cold-blooded, deliberate targeting of infants, would this be the case you chose?

Muhammad Al Durah is the child in the astonishingly effective video clip recorded by a Gazan freelancer on September 20, 2000. It depicted events - mainly a shooting - that were neither seen nor recorded by any other of the numerous video professionals standing at the site that afternoon. It was distributed globally by government-controlled France2 that same day, and rapidly evolved into a blood libel of historical proportions. A comprehensive and careful analysis is available, for those ready to look beyond the lethal narrative propounded by much of the world's mainstream news channels for the past 13 years, at the Al Durah Project website. 

A Haaretz columnist wrote about the evident hoax last month that "We have much more urgent matters to deal with than fighting another battle over a dead boy". But, as we saw above, the men with the guns at Palestinian Islamic Jihad hold the exact opposite view.

Huda Ghaliya is a girl whose family was (certainly) wiped out by explosives on a Gaza Strip beach on June 9, 2006. Prof. Richard Landes created a probing and incisive 7-minute video analysis of the tragedy here. He argues persuasively (in our view) that this is another classic lethal narrative, calculated to incite hatred of Israelis and heavy-handedly evoking pity and horror, even while the evidence points to conclusions very different from those offered up by the Palestinian Arabs who promote it. In a word, Pallywood.

Whether or not Muhammad and Ayman were killed by a deliberate (but if so, then a hugely unsuccessful) Israeli scheme to eliminate Palestinian Arab children, and irrespective of whether Huda's family were massacred because Israel wants to put an end to Palestinian Arab family beach picnics, we're left with this:

How much hatred must you possess in order to turn your own children into angry, hate-filled killers whose highest aspiration in life is to inflict the greatest imaginable pain and damage on their enemy's demonized civilian population? 

If that's not the question on your mind after reading this, go to the top of the page and please start again.