Hamas Jugend Palestinian Children, R.I.P. -- Rehabilitate Immediately Please

The next phase of the Mohammed al-Dura controversy is expected to be played out in a French court next month. The dubious authenticity of the iconic Mohammed al-Dura video tape seven years ago draws attention to the young age of many of the victims of the Middle East conflict. One such youth, Ahmed Bustam, is a 16-year-old Palestinian boy from Gaza who will probably die a violent death by the time he is 18. One day his name will appear in a story about Gazan youth who tried to plant a bomb on the fence between Gaza and Israel or in a story about a Kassam rocket crew killed by an Israeli missile before they could launch their volley from a teeming alleyway in Gaza.

Someone should be blamed and even brought to trial for Ahmed’s eventual death. Undeniably, Ahmed and thousands of Palestinian children like him are victims of an international war crime and violations of international law. Of course the international kangaroo courts generally blame Israel, but the real culprits who should be put in the dock are the late Yasser Arafat, his Palestinian Authority successors and the leadership of Hamas.

Ahmed Bustam’s name first appeared when he was interviewed in the Gazan neighborhood of Zeitoun by the Daily Telegraph (UK) on May 12, 2004 after six Israelis soldiers died when their armored personnel carrier hit a mine. Ahmed “gleefully recalled how he had approached the destroyed vehicle and removed the head of an Israeli soldier,” the Telegraph related. "People were running after me and we were kicking the head," he said. "We were spitting on it. When we heard a helicopter we started running. I carried the head of the Jew and ran away from the area and I took it to the people in the resistance."

Kicking a human head? What kind of kid plays soccer with a human head? The answer is clear: any Palestinian kid who grew up steeped in Hamas’ hateful propaganda, any Palestinian kid taught to kill, torture and maim by his school teachers, mosque preachers, summer camps, and kiddie television shows.

The pathological brainwashing of Palestinian children preceded Hamas’ takeover of Gaza. One month prior to the outbreak of the Al Aqsa Intifada in late September 2000, New York Times reporter John Burns saw the writing on the children’s wall. On August 2, the Times published Burns’ “Palestinian Summer Camp Offers the Games of War.” Burns described the 90 summer camps across the Palestinian territories – areas ceded by Israel to the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo Accords – where 25,000 teenagers were training in the use of firearms, the making of Molotov cocktails, the methods of kidnapping Israeli leaders, and conducting ambushes. But no alarm bells were set off in the United Nations or in the offices of the international human rights watchdogs.

The Palestinians discovered that they were onto something good: if teens could be trained to be killers without any international outcry, why not pre-teens? The Palestinian Authority and Hamas expanded their military training to six year olds! Today YouTube viewers can watch dozens of video clips of Palestinian kindergartens acting out attacks on Israelis with children in uniform and carrying toy guns, or of children extolling the acts of suicide bombers, or of Palestinian TV costumed characters torturing cats. "Since birth,” Sam Kiley wrote in the London Times seven years ago, “Palestinian children have been pumped full of religious fundamentalism which promises paradise for those who die for the cause of free Palestine... Approving or not, the Palestinian authorities have done nothing to stop children playing with their lives. Let's face it, dead kids make great telly." ("A Deadly Game" - Oct. 19, 2000)

In 2002, Yasser Arafat was asked by a Palestinian TV interviewer if he had a message to send to Palestinian children. His response: “The child who is grasping the stone facing the tank - is it not the greatest message to the world when the hero becomes a shahid [martyr]?” [PA TV, January 15, 2002]

An Ugly and Deadly Precedent

One has to go back 70 years to the Hitlerjugend, Hitler Youth, to find children steeped in such depravity. When Hitler took control over the German state the indoctrination of children in National Socialist ideology became an important objective. Speaking at the Reichsparteitag in 1935, Hitler declared, “He alone, who owns the youth, gains the Future!” The Hitlerjugend were indoctrinated in Nazi philosophies and hatred already in the 1930s. Thus by the time World War II broke out, and after years of training, they filled the ranks of the Gestapo and the SS. As explained by one SS commander, “Immature youths had to be transformed into men who lived according to the fundamentals of the SS as fanatic warriors, willing to sacrifice all and give no quarter.”

One such youth was Alfons Heck who joined the Hitlerjugend at the age of 9. "I belonged to Hitler body and soul,” he related. According to Heck’s own account, he and eight million other German Hitler Youth cared for nothing but to win the war or die for Germany and its leader. As a teen, he fought on the French front. When the war ended he was tried and sentenced to a month of hard labor, exhuming mass graves of French prisoners. He refused to believe the atrocities blamed on the Nazis. He admitted that it took 30 years to accept a sense of guilt for the Holocaust.

So pervasive was the Nazi ideology that Heck and millions of Germans were forced to undergo a process of denazification. Nazi officials and their doctrines and practices had to be uprooted from the all cultural, media, political, judicial, and economic institutions. The re-education plan – more like a detox program -- took years to finally cleanse the Nazi poison from the German body politic.

Ahmed Bustam and hundreds of Palestinian youth have been -- and are still being – poisoned, and in some cases fatally. The Oslo process and the “Roadmap” abysmally failed to change the culture of hate that suffuses the Palestinian world. The veteran American negotiator Dennis Ross once reviewed the failed negotiations and admitted that “no negotiation is likely to succeed if there is one environment at the negotiating table and another on the street."

In a 2002 interview, Condoleezza Rice was asked about the Palestinian glorification of suicide bombers. "What does that picture of a baby dressed as a suicide bomber say about the hopes of Palestinians for life with the Israeli people as good neighbors?” she responded. “You know, we've all, in our lives, had experiences with hatred. I certainly have in Birmingham, Alabama. And it all starts with recognizing that the other person is human and deserves a future. If you're going to send your babies and your teenagers to kill other teenagers, something has broken down in this concept of humanity."

[The indoctrination and martyrdom of Palestinian children should at least serve to shut up the Palestinians’ Lady Haw-Haw, Hanan Ashrawi, who took great umbrage when the Palestinian Authority was charged with using Palestinian children as cannon fodder. “"Not even animals would send their children into battle," she said in November 2000. Similarly, in an interview with the Jordan Times in early 2001, Ashrawi said: "The most blatantly racist slur is the Israeli theft of our humanity as parents. In an attempt to rob us of our most basic feelings for our children, we are accused of 'sending children out to die' for the sake of 'scoring media points'."]

How many Palestinian children – including the iconic Mohammed Dura – have died just so that the Palestinian movement could score points, even if it meant committed war crimes against their own children?

According to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Courts, the Palestinian recruitment and training of children are violations of international law. [“Conscripting or enlisting children under the age of fifteen years into the national armed forces or using them to participate actively in hostilities.”]

President Bush and Secretary of State Rice have come and gone from the Middle East, promising to press forward to achieve Middle East peace. But, unless far-reaching education-for-peace programs are launched and a comprehensive de-hamasization program is introduced by Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and prime minister Salam Fayyad, Bush’s initiative will do little more than earn frequent-flier miles for its advocates.

Resources:

Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace

Teach Kids Peace

Palestinian Media Watch

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