Here’s a clip from MEMRI, translated into English, showing a kindergarten class graduating in Gaza. Instead of diplomas, they get toy Kalashnikovs and show off their military skills.
Click on the screenshot to go to the 7-minute video. How can kids brought up like this, getting their toy rifles at graduation and wearing miniature military uniforms, do anything but want to kill?
There are even kids putting mock explosives under toy tanks. As the song from South Pacific goes,
You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught!
Good old Hamas in the Gaza strip
I remember on “The Conversation” Australian website an article by a Western white academic saying just prior to the election of a Hamas government in Egypt that Hamas was a force for moderate Islam!
In the beginning (1987), the Israeli government actually promoted and contributed funds to Hamas, supposedly to weaken the PLO. It was portraying itself as an organization to improve the daily lives of Gazans, but it was part of the Muslim Brotherhood. By 1989, it had kidnapped and murdered two Israeli soldiers. It went downhill from there.
I had completely forgotten – Thanks!
If this is an example of “moderate” Islam, I’d hate to see an example of “radical” Islam!
Jimmy “Peanut” Carter’s favorite peacefully moderate Islamist democratically-elected group of Islamo-supremacists.
If anyone wonders how religion becomes what it is. It is a long term brain washing.
What is graduating from Kindergarten? Is there really such a thing? Must be a big decision whether to get a job or come back for first grade.
*laughing out loud*
Where I live, we have kindergarten graduation ceremonies. The children sing and answer simple questions at a scene in front of an audience of parents. They receive certificates and graduation presents, for which parents arrange beforehand. The present is typically a set of pens and pencils, like the one described in Winnie the Pooh, because it is “academic”, not too expensive and is useful even if you have more than one.
“If anyone wonders how religion becomes what it is. It is a long term brain washing.”
Agreed. Aside from the blatant militarism, it reminded me a lot of “Jesus Camp”.
I can’t even stomach it. We psychologists have been utterly negligent in ignoring this type of child abuse. Yet, it will ripple out and have repercussions for all of us: the Sesame Street episodes (aimed at 6 year old children) that encourages the killing of Jews,the video games where you chase an orthodox Jew to knife him, the summer camps that teach how to behead a Jew, etc. Psychological research shows that prejudice for one groups co-varies with prejudice for other groups. Yet, most of us psychologists ignore this murderous mind-control upbringing and focus instead on the immensely crucial child rearing issues of first world problems — whether “time-outs” can negatively impact our relationships with our children. Shame on us.
“Sesame Street episodes (aimed at 6 year old children) that encourages the killing of Jews…”
I think it is important to make clear that the show in question may bear similarities to “Sesame Street” and may in part be based on it but, as far as I am aware, the makers of “Sesame Street” have nothing to do with it and have never promoted or endorsed violence against Jews of any other ethnic or religious group.
I’m reminded of what one German said in the mid-thirties, when Hitler’s youth-training programs really kicked off: “We’re lost: he’s got the children…..”
Sickness happens in a lot of places:
“NRA Tells Parents To Keep Guns In Kids’ Rooms For Safety [from home invasions]” http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/05/31/3782497/nra-kids-shooting/
I thought of that song as soon as I saw the headline.
Me too. I’ve always thought it expresses the traditional Jesuit claim beautifully.
And I thought FGM videos were disturbing.
The brainwashing of children is just wrong, whatever the cause. I knew this sort of thing happened, but actually seeing it is so much worse.
Then there’s the argument, “We love everybody but you’re forcing us to kill you.” It’s justifying every Israeli argument not to accept a two state solution.
I do not think the Israelis would act the way they do if they were met with mass sit ins and other forms of non-violent protest, and the Palestinians proved they could be a trusted to be a peaceful neighbour.
I recently saw a documentary that followed some Israeli soldiers during their invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Some of the soldiers spent the night holed up in a kindergarten classroom and one of them pointed out the drawings on the walls. Five year olds drew pictures of Jihad and killing Jews. The soldier remarked that his own kid was drawing pictures of birds and Elmo. The effect this has on children is horrible. Those kids are now 40 years old and probably have their own kids, if they have survived this long.
It just blows me away that anyone thinks teaching this stuff to children can ever be justified. If I was living in Palestine, I’d want to shield my (putative) children from what was going on around them for as long as possible.
You know there is some schmuck out there saying that the Israelis have forced these people to behave this way….
Just check out the usual suspect in the comments on this post on my site: http://www.heatherhastie.com/the-cutting-tradition-a-film-about-fgm/
He refers exactly to this video and his comments are beyond belief, including accusing Jerry of anti-Muslim animus for posting it.
surprise, surprise. The regressive inverse universe. May ceiling Cat give you strength to put up with it.
Shame. I didn’t really have time to read/weigh neither here nor on your site, so I missed all the fun. At least you argued well; I admire your ability to keep writing as I’ve been really negligent because I seem not to be able to fit everything in.
Well since you have a proper job to do, along with the home Big Project plus some other stuff to deal with, I think we can forgive you!
😳🤗
“Cultural evolution” comes to mind along with echoes of what I’ll term “cultural epigenetics” The parents of those poor children were quite likely raised in a similar fashion and those parents are the ones who survived to reproductive maturity. I presume there is some short term fitness advantage to adopting such a hateful life view but, hopefully, like a new virus that is so virulent as to ultimately kill all of its potential hosts, this too shall pass.
Yeah maybe. Perhaps this is one we can blame colonialism for – afaik Palestinians didn’t have kindergarten graduation ceremonies before the US came along. They’ve only started happening fairly recently in New Zealand because of US influence.
You all scoff, but if one of these kids had gotten into the enclosure with Harambe they would have kicked his @ss. :p
What cute kids. Almost all young children look beautiful and pure-hearted, but not so many adults. I remember a video of Palestinian pre-teen boys and a few adult women celebrating some attack on Israeli civilians in the early 2000s. The adults were repulsive, pig-faced. But the children, though they were also celebrating a mass murder, looked nice. They were still too young to truly realize the event. But they would grow and become the same. As a Serbian writer put it, after age 30 you get the face you deserve. I am usually too consumed by anger against Palestinian terror supporters to feel any sympathy to them; but this video makes me sad. Generation after generation, as children grow, their souls are destroyed in droves by the toxic legacy of the previous doomed generation. Like those Venezuelan villages where maybe half of residents carry the allele for Huntington’s chorea.
there’s a quite extraordinary degree of pressure for conformity in the religion – and too much of it is the exact opposite of the kind of social justice regressive leftists imagine the non western world runs by.
“Almost all young children look beautiful and pure-hearted, but not so many adults.”
If they didn’t trigger our basic instinct to protect cute things, we’d get sick of kids VERY quickly. 😉 Don’t fall into the trap of thinking kid = good. Plenty of kids are utterly terrible people – their saving grace is they are young enough, and will likely change enough, that they may be redeemable.
Indeed, most kids are horrible, as a moment’s consideration of what you, and everybody you knew, were like when you were a child.
Ha ha! I said similar from remembering my own childhood. One thing I brought from childhood is that adults have no friggin’ idea what’s going on in a child’s head most of the time. I think people tend to forget that children are humans too. They may not have fully developed brains, but they still think in the same way and have life experiences like anyone else.
There’s a good reason why infants learn to smile so quickly. You get a ridiculous maternal reaction to that damn smile.
I never considered myself to be good with kids before I started working in health care. Im an extremely emotional person (meaning, I truly love people I meet), but I’m not at all affectionate (I rarely show all those emotions and I’m unable to do baby talk).
When I started working with sick kids however, I realised how easily they can make you care for them.
It works both ways however (which is why I find this kindergarten graduation so horrific), a child is easily manipulated by adults.
Before I started examining kids on my own as a full doctor, I was dreading it. I would hear the other doctor’s patients screaming and running around and I thought it would be a headache. But examining kids is quite easy. Infants are even easier. The only time the infants I examined were crying, were in situations where an adult would weep as well (generally when they had a temperature of 40 Celsius, were vomiting and had a rash over their entire bodies). Adults are gods to a young child, and if you show them you’re a benevolent and careful God, they will follow you.
These kids in Gaza are being manipulated by the adults that are supposed to keep them safe. It’s a tragedy.
When I worked in government, my cubicle was on the other side of the wall of a room where children received vaccines. The kids who freaked out and cried the most were the ones where the parents were being over placating instead of treating the shot in a more matter-of-fact way. The nurses confirmed this with me, saying that it was the parents that always made the kids get upset. I’m sure the parents were trying to be supportive and kind, but their approach made the kid think, “Oh my god, my parent is being overly kind so this must be really bad!”
Yes, I have very strong childhood memories so I remember other kids, and even myself, being horrible. When we are kids, we pretty much don’t have our empathy fully intact in our developing brains. I think this is part of the reason why children make such vicious soldiers. Shame on the adults who exploit this!
On a lighter note, I did realize, early on, that personalities were pretty much set. Kids who were jerks, remained adult jerks & nice kids remained nice adults (given everything else in their environment remained constant anyway).
I’m pretty sure that, in recalling my own relatively gentle, childhood, I was probably still capable of murdering someone who crossed me. Yes, many children are adorable to look at, but their thought processes are no longer very penetrable to us. But this form of brainwashing is serious child abuse. Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be jihadists.
I’m reminded of what a soldier who served in the Balkans said: “These places RUN on revenge; kill someone, even accidentally, in a village, and you don’t dare go back there for a hundred years, minimum. Ma and Pa go out and work in the fields every day, while Grandma tells the kids stories about their great-great-great-great, etc. grandfather who was murdered by the evil Turks in 1427.”
You are right. We are programmed to find kids cute, so that not to throw our own ones into the ditch on day 2 after birth. Kids are indeed not good. Actually, they are unbearable to anyone other than their parents and the people paid to endure them.
I meant that they are not bad.
Well, I still can’t quite agree – some kids ARE bad. Whether they’re bad because they’re spoiled, because their parents are simply terrible in other ways, because they’re little sociopaths who haven’t grown up yet, or for whatever reason, some kids are absolutely terrible people. We have to teach children, even good children, manners and social rules for a reason – they aren’t born with them.
This in no way excuses those who program children into being bad people, or who brainwash them into being religious fanatics (the latter just being a subset of the former, really). But I do wonder at which point the person stops being a brainwashed child we feel sorry for and becomes an adult fanatic that is our enemy. 14? 16? 18?
This is the annoying part of being a determinist – you can’t just say “they chose to be assholes”.
I largely agree with this comment of yours. I am not a determinist, and for me, the turning point is the moment when the person is no longer in any serious danger. When my country was a communist dictatorship, I did not resist and of course did not blame others for not resisting. But when democracy came and everyone was free to vote, I was shocked to see that hundreds of thousands chose to vote for the successor of the communist party.
I also acknowledge the impact of brainwashing, even when the victim is already adult and could recover from it. So I actually have a little sympathy to the Palestinians (requiring a high-powered microscope to be detected) but zero sympathy to their Western supporters, to the International Solidarity Movement, the “divesting” students and so on. Before dying, Rachel Corrie wrote that Westerners are indifferent to deaths of Palestinians but would be moved and outraged if she gets killed. Some may indeed feel this way, but I do not.
To apply my above post a bit more to the topic at hand… when looking at the situation in Palestine, deciding guilt gets tricky.
According to Wikipedia, 34% of the West Bank’s population is under 14, 44% of the Gaza Strip’s. Not 8% of the West Bank’s population is over 55, not 3% of the Gaza Strip’s over 65. These are very young populations, most of whom have likely grown up under the sort of propaganda and training the video in the OP shows – and their parents probably did too. They likely have limited exposure to other viewpoints, if any.
So my question is: how old do the kids in the video above have to get before I stop feeling sorry for them and how they’re being brainwashed and I’m allowed to just consider them bad guys who believe evil things and need to be stopped?
The real problem is that they ARE bad guys who believe evil things and need to be stopped – but they are ALSO people who have been largely brainwashed into that position. It’s just odd to me that child soldiers stop getting our sympathy a few years down the line.
I wrote in another comment that I retain some sympathy even to adult Palestinians, but it is minuscule. Anyway, this sympathy does not change my opinion that they need to be stopped. An insane person may not be a bad guy, but if he goes on a rampage and threatens others, he needs to be stopped, by lethal force if necessary.
Your data about Palestinian demographics are very scary.
Reblogged this on The Logical Place.
Somewhat related: John Horgan is banging his drum about the deep theory of war at his SciAm column — he was set off by Obama’s remarks at Hiroshima.
Why do people (regressive leftists) continually make excuses for Muslims? They tell us that Muslims are normal peace-loving people and are above criticism. Except the data says that they are not.
My neighbour, the neo-Nazi, Jew hatin’, fag hatin’, wife beatin’ motherfucker is not welcome in my house and nobody bats an eyelid when I say this.
But if I’m not welcoming to my Muslim neighbour, who harbours the same prejudices, then I’m somehow an Islamophobe or a bigot.
Amirite?
Yes, people called me bigot when I said that it is Muslims who are bigoted against other people – I specified the true Muslims who really believe in Allah and Mohamed and the Koran, not those who just happen to be born in a Muslim community.
Well, we have a book saying that I am the vilest creature on Earth because I am an unbeliever, but even if I convert to Islam, I’ll still be second-class because I am female, and my husband will be entitled to beat me, and if I get raped I’ll be liable for adultery unless I can produce 4 male Muslim witnesses to confirm that it has indeed been a rape. Then we have people saying that this book is the word of God and is literally true and they believe every letter of it. And I am requested to say that, as long as they do not actually bomb or shoot me, they are nice people. I don’t think so.
I’m glad they had a bubble machine to lighten the mood.
Interestingly, they appear to be all boys.
Here’s the girls version.
Bubbles produced to martial music!
I’m speechless.
I remember during WW2 being taught similar things about the Japanese. Now, seventy-some years later, with two delightful Japanese daughters-in-law and two wonderful Japanese granddaughters, I’ve changed. But I wonder if these children will ever have an opportunity to change, or if they will continue to hate because they were taught to do so? A damned shame.
They ruined the childhood of little ones………….
Which can be dangerous in future!
The toy guns seem to be mock ups of M-16s, not AK-47s (Kalashnikovs). Hamas must no longer be getting its guns from Russian or former Soviet bloc sources.
I’m sure there are sources of small arms made around the world that fall into the hands of Hamas. Kalashnikovs are typically the favoured small arm for children because they are easy to carry and sadly, many Western countries supply arms like this in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, etc.
You may find this talk by Samantha Nutt interesting. I saw her speak in person giving this same talk at her and my alma mater. It’s staggering the amount of small arms out there and who is supplying them.
The reaction of some of the left combined with this kind of video always make me think of an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer called “Lie to me.”
At one point she says, “What I see is that, right after the sun goes down, Spike and all of his friends are gonna be pigging out at the All-You-Can-Eat Moron Bar.” Substitute defenestration for pigging out, and it’s no longer a crazy work of speculative fiction.
http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.611822
“For me, personally, Arabs are something I can’t look at and can’t stand,” a 10th-grade girl from a high school in the central part of Israel says in abominable Hebrew. “I am tremendously racist. I come from a racist home. If I get the chance in the army to shoot one of them, I won’t think twice. I’m ready to kill someone with my hands, and it’s an Arab. In my education I learned that … their education is to be terrorists, and there is no belief in them. I live in an area of Arabs, and every day I see these Ishmaelites, who pass by the [bus] station and whistle. I wish them death.”
The student’s comments appear in a chapter devoted to ethnicity and racism among youth from a forthcoming book, “Scenes from School Life” (in Hebrew) by Idan Yaron and Yoram Harpaz. The book is based on anthropological observations made by Dr. Yaron, a sociologist, over the course of three years in a six-year, secular high school in the Israeli heartland – “the most average school we could find,” says Harpaz, a professor of education.
The book is nothing short of a page-turner, especially now, following the overt displays of racism and hatred of the Other that have been revealed in the country in the past month or so. Maybe “revealed” isn’t the right word, as it suggests surprise at the intensity of the phenomenon. But Yaron’s descriptions of what he saw at the school show that such hatred is a basic everyday element among youth, and a key component of their identity. Yaron portrays the hatred without rose-colored glasses or any attempt to present it as a sign of social “unity.” What he observed is unfiltered hatred.
See also: http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/20060718_israeli_girls_lebanon_bound_rockets
I can’t see the Haaretz article (paywall) but I deplore hatred of ethnic groups as a whole, and if Israelis are racists, they’re horrible. On the other hand, I get the sense here that you’re saying that what is in that article shows that Israel is just as bad as Palestine in “othering.” Are you meaning to imply that there’s a moral equivalence between what you say above and the deliberately inculcated state-sponsored drive to kill as instantiated by that graduation video and the numerous state-sponsored hate messages on Palestinian (and Arab) state media? I notice you didn’t say a word about the video.