Suicide Street

When is Cartoon Network going to start showing these wonderful Palestinian kids programs?

A man-sized talking rabbit appeared on television in Gaza on Friday to denounce Danish newspapers over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad that offended Muslims.

The latest in a line of cartoon-inspired characters that take the message of the Hamas Islamist movement to Palestinian children, the actor in the Bugs Bunny-style outfit also railed against "Zionist filth" and Israel's control of Jerusalem.

The Friday show "Tomorrow's Pioneers" on Hamas's al-Aqsa channel has become a weekend fixture for pre-teens since shortly before the Islamists seized control of the Gaza Strip last year.

A Mickey Mouse-type creation provoked outcry in Israel and was condemned elsewhere as inciting hatred among the young. The mouse, eventually shown being beaten to death by an Israeli, was followed by a talking bee and, now, by Assud the rabbit.

But wait, what happened to the bee? You guessed it. Another martyr of the wicked Jews.

Assud's return from "the diaspora" followed the death of his brother, Nahoul the Bee, on the show. Nahoul was depicted as dying because he could not get to a hospital in Egypt for surgery. Assud states, "We are all ready to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of our homeland. We will sacrifice our souls and everything we own for the homeland"; program host Saraa Barhoum concurs. He also vows to "get rid of the Jews and eat them up."

See for yourself.

"I, Assud, Will Get Rid of the Jews, Allah Willing, and I Will Eat Them Up"

Saraa Barhoum [to girl in the audience]: "Is there anything you want to share with us?"

Girl: "Arnoub ['Rabbit']?"

Saraa Barhoum "His name is Assud ['Lion']."

Girl: "How come you are called Assud, even though you look like a rabbit?"

Assud: "Because a rabbit is not good. He's a coward. But I, Assud, will get rid of the Jews, Allah willing, and I will eat them up, Allah willing, right?"

Saraa Barhoum: "Allah willing."

My guess? They lost the lion costume in the stampede into Egypt after they blew down the fence. But they had a rabbit costume handy. Back to Reuters:

Though some parents are uneasy about the show's message it has proved popular with children, not only in Hamas-controlled Gaza but also in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. One girl called Rasha said she was phoning in from Bethlehem, near Jerusalem:

"Who has sabotaged the world if not the Zionist plans?" she sang down the line to the studio in Gaza. Dancing and singing along, Assud the rabbit chimed in: "They have bombarded us."

PBS ought to pick this up. "Suicide Street." Start with the same theme song, just change the words:

"Sunny day,
Blowin' the Jews away,
On my way
With plastic explosives under my sheet;
Can you tell me how to get
How to get to Suicide Street?"

The Week's Biggest Tragedy And Challenge

[Posted by reader_iam]

Is, of course, in Gaza. Also the most important, for the most people, the most nations, and in terms of the most implications, in so many ways, now and into the future.

I can only complain just so teensy-tiny much, because it's not like you could tell that from what I've blogged, either.

Still. You all have been watching and reading steadily, and, at least in the case of the latter, many sources, sought after diligently and in the spirit of depth and breadth (no matter the effort that requires), right?

Better to be clueless with (at least some) knowledge, than clueful with only ideology, of whatever flavor.

Hell on Earth

[posted by Callimachus]

All week long the image of Palestinian babies drowning in a foaming flood of human waste has been galling at me. Nobody should die like that. Nobody should live like that. War is hell. Merciful wars are short ones. Leaders who deliberately prolong a warfor generations, so that people are born, grow up, and die in it, build Hell on earth. While the Palestinian kleptocracy builds mansions for itself outside Jerusalem, in Gaza, babies drown in rivers of shit.

Pastor Jeff speaks for me on this one:

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians live in unrelenting misery and squalor, kept there by their "leaders" as useful symbols of Israeli injustice and oppression. Their lives are defined by poverty, corruption, hateful propaganda, and violence. And when the Palestinians have an opportunity to actually improve living conditions for their own people, they take pipes sold to them by the Israelis for a sewage system and make rockets to kill more Jews.

As a result of Palestinians firing those rockets at Israel, there's no metal to for sewage pipes, and even if there were, the fighting makes it impossible to build one. So the human waste piles up in gigantic collection pits. The poor Palestinians, driven by their need, undermine the foundations of the cesspits to sell material to construction companies and then literally drown in their own waste.

Is there any more perfect picture of the situation in the Middle East?

"Palestinians need to adopt the Holocaust" [Updated]

[Posted by reader_iam]

Update at bottom.

Cathy Y points to a thought-provoking article about Khaled Kasab Mahameed. Mahameed is an Israeli Arab lawyer who established the Arab Institute for the Holocaust Research and Education in Nazareth and has been sharply criticized by Arabs and Jews. Recently, he was invited to speak at Iran's Holocaust (Denial) Convention, but then was refused a visa.

From the Forward article:

“I remember since I was 6, my father always said we are paying for the horrors of the Holocaust.”

His parents were internal refugees, Israeli Arabs who fled from the village of Ilajoun. He was born in Umm al-Fahm, not far away. “My father lived in Ilajoun until age 17, then the state was created and they were expelled to Umm al-Fahm,” he said, adding that his family lost 40,000 dunams of land, or about 10,000 acres. “The kibbutzim took it.”

Mahameed sees a symbolism in his life. He senses that teaching his people about the Holocaust is his calling.

“We are 13 children, and I am number six,” he said. “Like 6 million.” He paused, then added: “Not by chance I was born on the sixth of May, the day the Nazis were defeated. I come to defeat the remains of the teachings of the Nazis. I also want to neutralize the feeling of persecution among the Jews.”

Almost counter-intuitively, Mahameed argues that the Palestinians cannot win by talking of Israeli atrocities, but rather by acknowledging the atrocities perpetuated against the Jews.

“Palestinians talk about Israelis killing 1,000 or 2,000 in Sabra and Shatila,” he said, referring to a massacre that happened under Israeli watch after the 1982 Lebanon War. “But the Israelis have 6 million. I say, Palestinians need to adopt the Holocaust. The result of adopting the Holocaust is that then they don’t need to be violent against the Jews. That’s the power of the Holocaust. So let’s bring information to the Palestinians about the Holocaust.”

But he also believes that Jews need to make an effort: “I also request from the Jews to overcome the Holocaust. Yes, it was a horror, but why let Hitler continue to dictate our lives?”

Mahameed isn't alone in his attitude, as it happens. This ynet.com article focuses on a couple of men with similar views, including an Iranian.

"How do we benefit from Holocaust denial?" Iranian reformist Abbas Abadi wrote in an article published in an Iranian newspaper.

"Does this denial contribute to the lack of legitimacy for Israel's crimes against the Palestinians? Doesn’t this denial only contribute to the interest of Hitler and the Nazis?

"Even if I were a Palestinian, there is no better way to confront Israel's crimes than condemning the Holocaust and taking every opportunity to mention it. I don’t remember that in all the years that passed (before Ahmadinejad's rule) an Iranian official denied the Holocaust, as the Iranians did not need to deny the Holocaust in order to condemn Israel's crimes."

Voices of hope, or mere spitting in the wind?

Updated: I ended up too wrapped in holiday stuff to do any more separate posts this afternoon, so I'm just going to throw a couple of links out for your consideration and, perhaps, dot-connecting:

Britains Are Nazis, Too
Jews far more likely to be victims of faith hatred than Muslims (referring to England and Wales).

Right of Return

[posted by Callimachus]

The national borders were re-drawn arbitrarily, by men from other nations who would not have to endure the consequences. Nobody consulted the people who had lived in these small farms and villages for a thousand years. But suddenly their land was someone else's.

Now some of the refugees want back what was stolen from them.

A group of Germans kicked out of Poland after World War II want restitution for lost property, arguing in a complaint that their human rights were violated when Eastern Europe's boundaries were redrawn and they were driven from their homes.

... The Prussian Claims Society complaint filed with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg in November stems from territorial rearrangements reached after the war by the victorious Allies — the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union — at the 1945 Potsdam conference.

The Potsdam agreement gave large parts of eastern Germany to Poland, and the Germans living there were forced to leave. Large parts of eastern Poland ultimately went to the Soviet Union.

"The expulsion of the German population, according to some international legal experts, amounted to genocide, or at least to crimes against humanity with the purpose of dispossessing them of property without any compensation," the Prussian Claims Society said Friday.

Unlike a certain other people with a similar claim of long standing, the Prussians get no sympathy anywhere in Europe. All the Euro-elites seem to agree that this is just embarrassing and they wish it would go away. But no one in the AP's story gives a reason better than that offered by Polish President Lech Kaczynski, who I think is being perfectly honest here: The legal move would "initiate some very dangerous processes."

Not because it's right. Not because it's wrong. Not because it's just. But because it could get ugly.