07-Oct-19: How hard is it to produce 12 year old knife-attackers?

We don''t claim to be 100% sure but a social media post [here]

suggests this is the stabber described in our post.

The world-class treatment he's getting is courtesy of

Shaarei Zedek Medical Center and the government of Israel

With a current news item in mind, here's some insight into how the Palestinian Authority's policy of child weaponization works.

We wrote here a week and a half ago ["27-Sep-19: Weaponized Palestinian Arab children and more Arab-on-Israel stabbings"] about an on-duty female member of the Israel Police being injured in the course of a frenzied stabbing attack launched by a Palestinian Arab boy of thirteen. We were wrong: he was twelve. And it's evident he didn't intend to inflict mild trauma. He was very likely intent on killing.

The boy apppeared in court yesterday.

12-year-old indicted for Jerusalem attack in which officer was lightly injured | Boy charged with terror offenses for attempting to stab police officers in Old City last month; female officer was lightly hurt when barrier fell on her hand during scuffle | Times of Israel | 6 October 2019 | The Jerusalem district attorney on Sunday indicted a 12-year-old boy under terror laws for the attempted stabbing of a policewoman in Jerusalem’s Old City last month.
According to the indictment, on September 26, the day of the attack, the minor attended prayers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount. At the conclusion of prayers, he allegedly walked up to a group of female officers at the Temple Mount’s Chain Gate, above the Western Wall area, pulled out a knife and attempted to stab the officers. During the ensuing scuffle, a female officer, age 34, was lightly injured when a security barrier fell on her hand. According to the indictment, a staff member of the Waqf, the Muslim trust that oversees the site, tried to catch the boy and keep the police from him.
The boy was overpowered at the scene and arrested.
The boy is accused of committing an act of terror in which he unlawfully attempted to injure a person with a knife for religious and national motive. Prosecutors asked that the boy remain detained until the end of legal proceedings.

There's no indication whether the Waqf worker who tried to prevent the police from taking the stabber into custody will face criminal or terror charges. If he's not, that's disturbing.

Here's some of the background that put the boy in the photo above into, first, an Israeli hospital bed and then Israel's juvenile criminal justice system where he's now fated to spend some of what should have been his best years.

First, let's understand the meaning of Waqf, an Arabic term defined [Wikipedia] as "confinement and prohibition" or causing a thing to stop or stand still. In the legal sense, it is said to mean the detention of a specific thing for purposes of "charity of poors [sic] or other good objects".

The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan imposed a waqf on Jerusalem after the invasion by its British-led army, and the subsequent two-decade long massively-destructive conquest and occupation, of the West Bank and East Jerusalem in the wake of the 1948 Israeli War of Independence.

After East Jerusalem was liberated in the course of the June 1967 Six-Day War, Israel - for pragmatic reasons related to its desire for neighborly relations and respect for Muslim sensibilities - allowed the waqf to re-assert its authority over the Temple Mount, which happens to be Judaism's holiest site.

Jordan's King Abdullah II "currently supplies all of the funding needed to operate the waqf." But as a recent analysis of changes in its structure shows, ["New Waqf Council Managing the Temple Mount", JCPA - Nadav Shragai, Lenny Ben-David | February 28, 2019], the Waqf is poised to do more harm:

The main, most dramatic change in the composition of the Waqf... was the joining of Sheikh Akram Sabri, currently chairman of the Supreme Muslim Council and former Mufti of Jerusalem. Sabri is now identified with the Muslim Brotherhood’s “the northern faction of the Islamic Movement” in Israel, and he follows the orders of Turkey and its President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Some also believe that he is close to Hamas. At the beginning of the second intifada, Sabri identified with suicide bombings, and he is known for his extreme pronouncements against Israel... Other new members of the Jordanian Waqf, who Jordan agreed to allow into the new council after it was expanded from 11 members to 18 are mainly affiliated with Fatah and the Palestinian Authority... Until the establishment of the new Waqf, most of its members were pro-Jordanian. Its new composition expresses a united front [among] the Palestinian Authority, Fatah, and people like Sheikh Akram Sabri – and anyone who fears for Jordan’s future status on the Temple Mount. It is a joint coalition against the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel.

The weaponization of Palestinian Arab children by the kleptocratic/geriatric Mahmoud Abbas regime that rules them is the result of several concurrent strategies that have been implemented for years by now:

• Large long-term monthly payments to prisoners and the families of dead terrorists by the Palestinian Authority, funded from a deficit budget that is replenished via foreign aid grants to the PA. These Pay-to-Slay payments as they are comminly termed grow with the seriousness of the terror offense. 
• Overt, explicit incitement to more acts of terror by the Palestinian Authority and by terror groups
• The recruiting and training of children to engage in conflict: Special mention to the United Nations UNRWA people responsible these past seven decades for nurturing, preserving, perpetuating and legitimizing the violent discontent of Palestinian Arab schookl children.
• The systematic glorification of Arab-on-Israeli violence throughout Palestinian Arab society
• The deliberate, ideology-driven abandonment of weaponized Palestinian Arab children by the numerous child-protection agencies that raise billions each year on the profoundly dishonest premise that, like DCI Palestine, they are "committed to securing a just and viable future for Palestinian children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory".

With all these in place, getting to the results they want are not that challenging.

Israel attracts serious criticism for its treatment of child offenders. In large measure, this is dishonest, politically-spun and based on poorly understood data. For instance, as a respected human rights organization based in Israel reported in February 2018 [NGO Monitor] in an essay that contradicts some of what "everyone knows" about Israel's "failures":

• Some 90,000 children aged between 10 and 17 were arrested in England and Wales between April 2015 and March 2016, an average of about 7,500 per month. Adjust these numbers for population and you can make this highly relevant comparison - that minors are arrested in England and Wales (where armed conflict is not currently a major feature of life) 5.5 times more often than Palestinian Arab minors living in the so-called West Bank are.
• In data covering the years since since 2013 (a period of considerable Arab-on-Israeli violence and the massive Arab promotion of terror), the number of Palestinian Arab minors arrested annually in areas under Israeli control was between 800 and 1,000. 
• Of these arrested, how many were subjected to prosecution? About 450-505. Thus on average, in a population of roughly a million minors (quoting Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics data), fewer than 85 such minors are arrested each month and fewer than half of those are prosecuted.
• And this: International law and Article 66 of the Fourth Geneva Convention mandates that Israel must establish military courts as part of its obligation to “take all the measures in [its] power to restore, and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety.” Moreover, Israel's law and enforcement practices meet all the requirements of “due process,” the Convention on the Rights of the Child and Article 68 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The rules of evidence applied by the Military Courts are the same as the rules of evidence applied in the Israeli domestic criminal justice system.

These are not points that the chorus of child-weaponizers and their foreign-government-funders, backers and advocates want us to know.

Nor do they advertise the single most important take-away we can think of: that, given Pal Arab society's massive ongoing investment, it is dead easy to weaponize pre-teen Palestinian Arab boys and girls and turn them into killers.

22-Dec-15: A knife-wielding Palestinian Arab child and her two arrests

Not the girl with the two arrests. This is a video grab from a Pal Arab 
video that has recently went viral in their circles, depicting a passionate 
toddler explaining what she wishes her people would do 
to the Jews [Source: Palestinian Media Watch clip  - here]

Another little-noticed skirmish in the war of the children:

Police officers in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem Old City on Monday arrested an East Jerusalem teenage girl found in possession of a knife, on suspicion she was planning to carry out a stabbing attack. This was the second time in two weeks the 15-year-old had been detained for carrying a knife, the police said in a statement. The teenager “raised the suspicions” of police officers in the Jewish Quarter, who called for her to halt. The police initially reported that the knife had been found in the 15-year-old’s purse, but later clarified that it had, in fact, been hidden in her sleeve. As a result, they brought the teen in for questioning.
When officers checked the girl’s information, they found that she had been arrested two weeks before, under the same suspicion. The girl, who was not named, was released a few days after her first arrest, when she claimed the knife in her bag was purchased for use in her family’s home. However, police now believe that she was preparing to attack Jewish Israelis. “The way she took out the knife today — and other pieces of information that have been collected — increase the suspicion, and it appears as though the officers prevented the injury of innocent civilians today, thanks to their awareness and sensitivity to aberrations,” the Israel Police said in a statement Monday evening.

As we noted here a couple of times in the last week ["14-Dec-15: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?" and "19-Dec-15: Saturday afternoon terror-knifings in Ra'anana"], stabbing attacks on Israelis, a feature of Arab/Jewish co-existence for more than a century, have phenomenal support among today's Palestinian Arab public. They are actively promoted and encouraged (this video for instance) via the Arabic social media, with predictable results.

See also "15-Dec-15: Hear about the stabbing in the heart of Jerusalem this afternoon?" and "26-Nov-15: Peering into the darkness, seeing pre-teen children groomed to be ready to die so they can kill" and "23-Nov-15: Central Jerusalem's shuk - two slashers attack and are stopped". 

No less significant than the stabbings themselves is the utter absence of a response to these sickening illustrations of systemic, society-wide Palestinian Arab child abuse from the well-funded global child-protection and children's rights industries. It's a failure worth pondering as the likes of UNICEF, Defence for Children International, UNESCO, Child Rights International Network, Save the Children and (if you happen to be a government) UNRWA, come to us with their hands open, requesting donations to allow them to keep doing what they do and fail to do.

04-Dec-15: Two more knifers are shot dead by their intended victims. One is fifteen. Does anyone care?

Hebron rock-throwing youths in November: Who's next? [Image Source]

It's a sunny, chilly Friday morning here, the shortest Friday of the year with the Sabbath starting here in Jerusalem at 3:59 in the afternoon.

Very early this morning, a little after midnight, two young Palestinian Arab men - actually one was a boy - launched a knifing attack on IDF service personnel manning the Jilber post in Hebron's historic Tel Rumeida Jewish quarter. They managed to sink their blades into a 20-year-old soldier's face, injuring him lightly according to the Ynet account.

His IDF colleagues at the post responded with shots and killing the two attackers. The soldier was rushed to Sharei Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem for emergency treatment.

Ma'an, the Palestinian Arab news source we often quote because it owes its existence to European government money (thereby reflecting on the low threshold European governments apply to acceptable return-on-investment when it comes to advancing the Palestinian Arab cause), puts its customary spin on events. Its report starts with

Israeli forces shot and killed two Palestinian teenagers in Hebron overnight Friday... 

making clear where the emphasis needs to be: on yet another case of death-by-Israeli. It continues

after an alleged stabbing attack on an Israeli soldier, Israel's army and locals said.

That's almost certainly untrue. If Ma'an is quoting the Israeli account, then the IDF certainly did not use the word "alleged". But "alleged" is a fixture in Ma'an's reporting on the terrorism directed against Israelis. Its editors seem to be addicted to the useful term; it allows them to pay lip-service to the facts while casting doubt on how factual they are. Perfect.

It's an especially effective strategy when - as has been the case on almost every day of attacks for the past two months - the attackers are children, below voting age (imagining for a moment that voting is a regular activity in Palestinian Arab society - and it certainly is not). This morning's attackers have never voted, and now certainly never will. Dead as of this morning, they are both being elevated to the ranks of PA martyrs (the posters may already be hanging in the alleys and markets).

They are cousins, says Ma'an. quoting Palestinian Arab sources who say their identities are:

Taher Faysal Fannoun, 19, a student at Hebron University, and Faysal Abd al-Minem Fannoun, 15.

(For the record, at least one other Arab news source says the 19 year old was 17. And it gives the 15 year old's name as Mustafa Fadel Fannoun, The Iranian government mouthpiece, PressTV, identifies them as Teher Faisal Funun, 22, and Abdul-Monem Funun, 15.)

It's more than likely they belong to the same clan as Mahmoud Fannoun, described [here] as the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which operates from a stronghold in nearby D'heisheh. The PFLP claimed credit a year ago for the savage murder (again, by knives and axes) of five unsuspecting Jewish worshipers at prayer in a Har Nof, Jerusalem, synagogue. They also claimed to have carried out a shooting attack on a car-full of Israelis, injuring four, near the community of Shvut Rachel in June 2015. There's room to think they are trying to put themselves back on the bloodshed-by-terror map after being somewhat quiet for two decades.

Palestinian Arab culture, and the Mahmoud Abbas regime in particular, trumpet the involvement of children among the stabbing/shooting/ramming Pal Arab dead as a matter worthy of celebration (literally). They are what they are, no outside influence is going to bring them to recognize the horror of the systematic child abuse raging in their ranks, and their masses are totally at peace with it. It's an ongoing tragedy about which we have written several times. The fact that it keeps costing lives, almost daily at this point, should not be lulling people on the outside into accepting this horrifying reality. And the numbers are not small: one Arab source says that of the 112 Palestinian Arabs killed by Israeli fire since October 1 (understandably without explaining what those dead people were doing in their last moments of life), 26 are children. From our informal record keeping, every one of those Arab children was killed with a knife or other killing implement in his or in her hand.

But how to explain that not a single one of the many, very well-funded children's-rights industry organizations active in the Palestinian Arab territories or Jordan (where a vast number of Pal Arabs live) has ever, as far as we can tell, drawn attention to the blood lust that Pal Arab society focuses on its own children? (We're of course ignoring for the moment the barbarism they reserve for us and ours.)

To name (once again) just some of the silent co-conspirators: 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, UNRWA,

How long before the next Palestinian Arab child is shot dead trying to murder an Israeli? 

15-Jan-14: When a society praises itself for turning its children into human bombs, whose problem is that?

This image appears on the website of the Hamas Ministry of the Interior.
They want you to know their children are being raised to kill and be killed.
So whose problem is that? [Image Source]

This is not an analysis of today's news about Hamas. 

The ghoulish industry of death the Islamists have assembled since slaughtering their Fatah opponents and taking control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 is well-known to anyone willing to peer into the cesspool.

No, this is a posting about those many polite international organizations, those major governments of Europe and the Americas, those global humanitarians, those statespeople and moral leaders who will again today, as they have till now, avert their gaze from the obvious child abuse on a huge scale and - in the most genteel of fashions - proceed to ignore the self-cultivated barbarism that has become daily life in places like Gaza.

No self-respecting observer can claim to be unaware that the leadership cadre of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are deliberately establishing a death cult. The reports are explicit; the photographic evidence is well-publicized and ubiquitous; the savages have never made a secret of the sickening abuse of children in which they engage. On the contrary, they want everyone to know. 

And so do we.

Here's an extract from a news report by Elhanan Miller ["13,000 teens complete Hamas training camps to emulate ‘suicide martyrs’"] and posted on the Times of Israel site several hours ago:

• The Hamas government in Gaza celebrated the graduation on Monday of paramilitary camps geared at training high-school children “to follow in the footsteps of the suicide martyrs.” The camps, titled “the pioneers of liberation,” are run by Hamas’s ministries of education and interior. 
• Some 13,000 students in grades 10-12 participated in the one-week training camps this year, compared to 5,000 last year when the program was launched...
• The corps of instructors consists mainly of active members of Hamas’s security forces, and the curriculum includes weapons training, first aid, self defense, marching exercises and “security awareness” classes on identifying Israeli spies.
• Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, Interior Minister Fathi Hammad and Education Minister Usama Mzeini attended the graduation ceremony on Monday, each delivering fiery speeches stressing the importance of military training in developing a new generation of Palestinian combatants.
• “Beware this generation,” Haniyeh said, addressing Israel. “This is a generation which knows no fear. It is the generation of the missile, the tunnel and the suicide operations.”
• Hammad, the interior minister, said the training was in preparation for the coming war with Israel. “This generation is a sapling from God on earth. It will harvest the enemies of God and be the pride of all nations,” he said.

The article ends with an eleventh-grade boy declaiming:

We are the pioneers of liberation. We are coming to purify you from the Zionists...

Children trained to see themselves as being in the purification business learn too late that in reality they have been reprogrammed, repurposed, rewired to become human bombs. 

That is what the grotesque men of Hamas have wrought. Professing to be advancing their version of religious values, those men have induced children who ought to be acquiring the skills that will bring them a good and productive life to instead become adept at slaughtering and being slaughtered.

And there's this: all the Islamist martial music and military imagery cannot conceal the ugly reality that a Hamas attack has almost invariably meant hitting unarmed children (first), women and men. The massacre at a pizza shop in the center of Jerusalem in which our daughter Malki was murdered along with many others is the paradigm. It exemplifies what the Hamas brand of 'combatants' is trained to do.

As for Hamas launching an assault on a fighting force of armed Israelis, when did that ever happen?

As we said, none of this is news. Certain parts of the mainstream media have delicately poked at these stories from time to time. Activist supporters of the case for Israel, we among them here on this blog, have addressed it often. Our posts, for instance, have included (among many others):

• 8-Oct-13: Children and their indispensable role in the conflict
• 3-Jul-13: Educating the next generation: an early-summer reflection on asymmetry
• 18-Jun-13: They want their children to become killers and they say why. The rest of us are left with questions
• 17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns

The real story is not the military-style training and the pledges by children to die for the values of those hideous, terror-addicted Hamas insiders. It's this: where is the outrage of the civilized world? 

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. It's inconceivable that they are unaware of this horror.

We especially want to know what UNRWA plans to do about the Hamas death-cultism. With an enormous footprint in the Gaza Strip, this has to become UNRWA's issue. Its website, the front end of the perpetual global UNRWA fund-raising, asserts this lofty set of aspirations:

We are committed to fostering the human development of Palestine refugees by helping them to: Acquire knowledge and skills; Lead long and healthy lives; Achieve decent standards of living; Enjoy human rights to the fullest possible extent. [UNRWA | Our priorities]

Given the self-imposed realities of Hamas ruled, we need to know how acceptable it is to them that six year old Gazan children (or for that matter 16 year olds) are given training in the lethal use of AK47s that are bigger than some of the children holding them [see Daily Mail UK]. Let them drop the charade and admit they have no problem with it, if that's the reality. We know the Palestinian Arab Islamists have no problem with this at all.

If, by chance, there are some civilized critics of Israel's various actions and policies who 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? Who is going to save these children? It certainly is not going to be Hamas and their co-conspirators.

8-Oct-13: Children and their indispensable role in the conflict

The Commentator

In a series of events that have gotten almost no media attention outside our own land, two Palestinian Arab brothers, Alaa and Fares Adawi, aged 25 and 26, residents of El Bireh (population about forty thousand) a few kilometers north of Jerusalem, were apprehended last night by IDF soldiers.

The men are being charged with involvement in the near-fatal attack on a nine-year old child, Noam Glick, in the nearby Jewish community of Psagot. JTA reports that the two men live "several hundred yards from the girl’s home" and that "the IDF found a knife smeared with blood from the victim... near the scene of the attack".

Noam was attacked on Saturday night after Psagot's protective fence had been breached earlier in the day. The little girl suffered injuries to the neck and after emergency care at Jerusalem's Shaarei Zedek Medical Center is, thank Heavens, recovering well. The community of some 320 families was obliged by the authorities to remain in security lock-down until dawn on Sunday morning while searches for the perpetrators continued. A report in Algemeiner says Psagot has known no previous attack of this nature.

There's considerable attention being paid in the media to which Arab figures did and did not condemn that attack on a 9-year-old child playing in her family's yard. Mahmoud Abbas, president of the PA and head of the Fatah terrorist organization, is said to have failed to condemn or criticize it, but then mentioned it in a technically negative way in a meeting with Israeli parliamentarians yesterday ("We oppose, on principle, aggression against anyone..." etc.). Jibril Rajoub, an especially loathsome public figure in Palestinian Arab affairs about whom we have had cause to write several times (on May 9, 2013, and on July 26, 2012 among others), did condemn and in fact pointed to those who in his view are responsible: he meant the Israelis (naturally). An official Facebook page of the Fatah terrorist organization praised the attacker and predicted, or perhaps more accurately hoped, he or she would soon strike again. 

The pro-Israel media's concern about condemnations and whether or not they were made misses the point. Noam, thankfully, will live to talk about her oh-so-close encounter with the lethal hatefulness of the Palestinian Arab terrorists. 

Others (we include ourselves in that category) have been much less fortunate. 

We know that those mealy-mouthed "condemnations" mechanically trotted out by public figures in the Arab world and in many parts of the media in the wake of some (though certainly not all) terrorist attacks are, for the most part, shabby camouflage, mere lies. To see them as the true, sincere views of the people expressing them is folly, given what we know about the culture in which lethally toxic, personal terrorism is actively nurtured as a worthy and heroic pursuit. 

And we know a lot, even if serious observers and the mainstream media choose to politely (and disingenuously) look the other way so as not to see.

There's no need to look further than the officially sanctioned summer camps of the two Palestinian Arab statelets - those of Abbas' PA and of the Moslem Brotherhood's Hamas - to see the naked hypocrisy that underlies the empty expressions of sympathy for terror's victims and the condemnation of the terrorists themselves. We have talked about this here many times including:

• 3-Jul-13: Educating the next generation: an early-summer reflection on asymmetry
• 18-Jun-13: They want their children to become killers and they say why. The rest of us are left with questions
• 17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns

Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas and Jibril Rajoub notwithstanding, we say it's self-deluding to think that the fatal grip terrorism has had on three generations of Palestinian Arab juveniles is the work of the Palestinian Arabs alone. They are aided and abetted by the silence and/or the active enabling encouragement of multiple high profile international agencies. 

These include 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 several other child-focused NGOs. 

The silence of those bodies in the face of the decades of abuse of Palestinian Arab children, nurtured and prodded into becoming gunmen, stabbers, human shields and the hurlers of firebombs and explosives, makes them irrefutably complicit. It matters not one tiny bit whether they choose to condemn the outcomes or to ignore them.

Over at the website of The Commentator, its chief editor Robin Shepherd has expressed bluntly how the crown jewel of the UK's foreign policy (referring to that incomparably vast and rich media empire known as the BBC) fits into this grotesquerie. His short essay, published yesterday afternoon in the wake of the attempted murder of little Noam Glick, is entitled "It's not BBC bias against Israel; it's hate".

From an earlier blog post

If a 9 year old Palestinian girl had been shot by Israel, and the government had gloried in it, this would be headline news, worldwide. The BBC is shameless in its bigotry
Some readers may have little daughters of nine, younger or older. Regardless, you have the capacity for empathy? Palestinian children count just as much as any other. They suffer under the currents of history, in our view mainly due to their own leaders.
But no matter, a child is child. Unless she's an Israeli Jew, the BBC and most of the Western media appears to believe. We will keep this brief, but it is truly shocking and disgusting. As we reported here, a nine year old girl was shot by a Palestinian sniper while the supposedly "moderate" Palestinian Authority circulated on Facebook a celebration of the would-be child murderer, thus:
"The sniper of Palestine was here. He saluted Hebron, and rested in El-Bireh. He left the signature of [real] men in different parts of the homeland. He saluted and left, and moved on to a different place, with a new signature, as he tells the stories of those who love the homeland." If Israel had sent a sniper to kill a little Palestinian girl that on its own would have been major international news. If the Israeli Cabinet had gloried in it, this would have been top news for days or weeks on end. A UN resolution would not have been out of the question. BBC headline? Not at all. Since she's a 9 year old Israeli Jew, no-one cares. The BBC isn't biased. It's possessed with hate. And since they know this story - from us and others - there can really be no other conclusion than that. Or do you have a better explanation? Journalistic integrity just ain't one of them... [The Commentator, October 7, 2013]

Golda Meir, a legendary figure in Israel's first four decades, famously articulated the blend of deep regret and utter determination that Israelis feel when confronting the realities of the society that continues to evolve so disturbingly on the other side of our fence. Speaking to the National Press Club in Washington nearly sixty years ago, she said: "Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us." Most Israelis understand that we are not only not there yet; it's highly doubtful we are even on that road.

Golda also said - less famously, but no less incisively: "Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself." That's an idea that continues to inspire us.

29-Apr-13: Hamas demonstrates importance of solid education. Stand by for vigorous response from Amnesty, UNICEF et al

Palestinian child demonstrates military training provided to him and his peers by Hamas 'education' ministry in Gaza City, January 2013. Photo: AP Photo/Adel Hana

Three months ago on this site, we wrote about a new chapter in the use and abuse of Palestinian children at the hands of the thugocracy that runs one of the two Palestinian Arab statelets: "24-Jan-13: Sacrificing the lives of an entire generation of adolescents on their altar of hatred, the thugs of Hamas boast of plans to create a children's army".

Now the UK's The Telegraph newspaper (and Canada's National Post as well) has a report and pictures of what the education ministry (that's the expression they use so don't blame us for abusing the English language) of the Hamas regime in Gaza is doing to thousands of its children.

Hamas teaches Palestinian schoolboys how to fire Kalashnikovs 

Palestinian schoolboys are learning how to fire Kalashnikovs, throw grenades and plant improvised explosive devices as part of a programme run by Hamas's education ministry.
Telegraph (UK) | Phoebe Greenwood, Gaza City 28 Apr 2013 

The scheme has been criticised by Palestinian human rights groups, who point out that Hamas has previously banned sport from the school curriculum on the grounds that there is not enough time for it.
Hamas authorities introduced the 'Futuwwa', or youth programme into the state curriculum last September for 37,000 Palestinian boys aged between 15 and 17, conceiving it as a scheme intended to initiate a new generation of Palestinian men in the struggle against Israel.
Izzadine Mohamed, 17, was among the students who attended the weekly school classes, which covered first aid, basic fire fighting skills and how to fire a Kalashnikov rifle. He was also one of 5,000 boys across Gaza who also signed up for an optional two-week camp held at a Hamas military base. "I was excited to learn the right way to use a weapon," said Mr Mohamed. "It's important because of the occupation. I feel stronger and more confident with the knowledge, which I could use against the occupier."
At the two-week camp, the boys spent their time dressed in a military-style uniform of black t-shirts and black jeans, and were trained by officers with the Hamas National Guard and militants with Hamas' armed wing, the al-Qassam Brigades.
Mr Mohamed said that as well karate and other street-fighting techniques, they were taught how to throw hand grenades, and how also how to protect themselves if one exploded nearby – "drop flat on the ground next to the grenade, it explodes outwards".
Hamas has denied that live weaponry is used in the course or that militants are involved in the training. But Samar Zakout, of the Gaza-based human rights organisation Al Mezan, described it as "unbelievable" and likely to encourage Israel to see schools as targets during conflicts."They are trying to create a resistance culture, make our boys stronger to face Israel, but they shouldn't be doing it in schools. Maybe Israel will use this as a reason to bomb Gaza's schools in future," Mr Sakout said.
Mohamed Syam heads the education ministry in charge of the Futuwwa programme, which may be extended to girls' schools next year. "We are not conducting military training in our schools, we are providing information," he said. "The youth can join military wings of factions, they don't need military training at school."
Yet an article written in Arabic on the Hamas ministry of education website credits the al-Qassam Brigades for its contribution to the course and notes their attendance at a graduation ceremony, also attended by Mr Syam. A YouTube clip showing a military demonstration in a Gaza school also appears to contradict the Hamas official line.
Posted on April 5, the video shows a mock Israeli military post erected in a school playground, where Palestinian militants enact a mock battle during which a faux Israeli soldier is killed and another captured. A shoulder-held rocket launcher is then fired at the military post, the force of the blast leaving only a smoking metal frame and a billowing Israeli flag.
Mr Syam said the video, which he claimed not to have seen, was not representative of the new initiative, and that the training course was designed mainly to school Gaza's youth in discipline and respect. "The military aspect takes up only one per cent of the course," he said.
"On the other side, in the occupied territory, [Israelis] are teaching the youth to hate and to kill Arabs and are training their teenagers in the military."
Israeli teenagers are drafted into an obligatory three-year military service after graduating from secondary school. There is no official Palestinian army. A number of armed militant groups, listed as terrorist organisations in Israel and Britain, operate in the Gaza Strip and are responsible for firing rockets into Israel.

Had Phoebe Greenwood of the Telegraph done a tiny bit more journalistic research, she might have come away with some factual insights that go a step further than disingenuously parroting what the terrorists of Hamas feed Western journalists.

Instead of providing a soapbox for Syam, the Hamas 'education' ministry apologist and his hogwash ("not conducting military training in our schools, we are providing information... they don't need military training at school"), she could have searched open sources - such as our blog - to find what Syam's superior's superior said about this travesty in January:

Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh announced Thursday (January 2013) that the new military academy, the first of its kind in the Gaza Strip, would prepare the children for the "phase of liberating Palestine." He said that children in grades 7-9 could join the academy and graduate with a Diploma or Bachelor of Arts in military affairs... Haniyeh said that the new academy would educate and prepare children for the establishment of a Palestinian state "from the river to the sea"... [source]

Life Magazine, June 12, 1970

When we first wrote about this, we ended the post with these words:

Few things in life are as sickening as the manipulation and exploitation of children. Hamas has developed world-class specialization in the field, rivaled only by the ability of its terrorists in the killing of the other side's children. The murderer of our daughter was a Hamas agent. Now free and living an unhindered life of celebrity in the Arab world, she has repeatedly boasted publicly of the pride she and her peers take in such abominations... A number of international organizations are active against the use of children as soldiers... So which of these do we imagine is going to be the first to condemn Haniyeh and Hamas? 

Attention UNICEF, Amnesty, Terre des Hommes and International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. It's happening right under your collective noses. Don't claim afterwards you thought this was all about instilling "discipline and respect".

And, as the famous cover at right from Life magazine from more than 40 years ago reminds, don't pretend it's some sort of new phenomenon.