Cultivating Hate In Children
On the same day that Arafat finally condemned the terrorism against Israel, his wife, who lives in Paris, granted an interview with an Arabic-language magazine, Al Majalla, wherein she endorsed suicide attacks as legitimate resistance against Israeli occupation.
My eye caught the following feature article that Mary Kelly, former editor of Egypt Today magazine and who lived in Cairo for 8 years, reported to the Herald Tribune: “…children, still in their school uniforms, were seen laughing and changing as they half-marched, half skipped along the sunny road in Cairo, toting knapsacks and book bags.”
The account continued: “One might have thought it was an ater-school field trip if it were not for the boys in the center displaying a Palestinian flag…In the evenings, Egyptian family members swapped stories of their children participating in such demonstrations. Over dinner at home with one family in a working-class neighborhood of Cairo, Fatma, 10, told me how an older boy at school rallied her classmates on the playground during recess. Their rhyme was addressed to Ala Mubarak, son of President Hosni Mubarak, “We sang ‘Ala, Ala, tell your father the Americans will not help you!”
Unicef has called for an end to the Israeli-palestinian violence for the sake of the children…against a backdrop of rising anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism in the Arab world, children are getting powerful messages about who their enemies are. In Egypt, TV is showing virtually nonstop news coverage of the crisis and nationalistic, pro-Palestinian programming. Old footage of Palestinian children being shot and throwing stones at Israeli soldiers roll in slow motion with melodramatic music playing in the background (we saw it on the TV in the hotel)…A political solution…won’t erase these mental images…and America gave the green light, the adults say over and over again.
A UNICEF rep in the West Bank said on CNN that ‘it will be a question of one, two, even three generations.'”
Tags: African Continent, Cairo, Egypt, Expats, Middle East, Terrorism, World Watching And Politics
Zoe
Leave a Reply