Mickey Mouse teaching the Palestinian children to hate

I sent my old school-mate and friend Harold (he's Jewish) the following photo of two Israeli girls signing artillery shells, noting that the Americans used to sign "To Adolf with love" on bombs, or similar, during WW2.


I often wondered what this practice of signing warplanes or bombs said about the Yanks, when I saw pictures of this practice in photos from WW2. I feel sure the US probably repeated the practice in wars over Kuwait/Afghanistan/Iraq.

Harold reckoned that the two girls would not have easy access to an Air Force base, and that self-propelled artillery pieces could have been parked on these kids' doorsteps - many Israeli towns and villages being quite close to various borders. He thought that this photo dated from the last Lebanese War with Hizbullah, as the name of the gentleman to whom the kids are sending regards is/was a Hizbullah leader. The kids up north were showered with hundreds of missiles in a few short days and spent long hours cooped up in bomb shelters.

Not having a name for it, I called the practice "hate-signing". It was - and probably still is - a useful practice for soldiers, because it accelerates a necessary military conditioning process - the process of abstraction and dehumanisation of the enemy. The more one can separate any feeling of common identity with the enemy as fellow human beings, the more one can engage in abstraction, and thus the easier it is to dissociate from the enemy, and the easier it is to kill them without compunction - they are not really "human" after all. That is one reason why the current form of automated warfare is so effective. Pressing a button and seeing the ensuing destruction of night-vision blobs on a computer screen is easy - a bit like a computer game - and not at all like standing face-to-face with, and killing a fellow human being by your own direct and deliberate action.

I think hate-signing must do something inside the heads of those children, and I suspect that it may not necessarily be a good something. My mother would probably have reckoned that this sort of thing was stooping to the level of an unworthy opponent - which, as she pointed out to me as a child, intrinsically detracts from one's own self-integrity and higher principles. We know that Muslims condition their children from as early as the age of 6 to learn by rote to hate "unbelievers" - especially Jews - as being less than human in Allah's eye. Is that any good reason for emulating the enemy by conditioning one's own children similarly?
Even if it were "necessary", I would still have real concerns about it - it goes against the principle of respect for life.

Harold didn't disagree, with me. He reckoned that this was probably one way some misguided adults were trying to relieve the tension for these kids. He did not condone this behaviour, but - probably to give it some balance - he thought it was a little less insidious than the Hamas videos of 3 year-olds being conditioned to want to be suicide bombers, and Mickey Mouse characters on Palestinian pre-school TV programmes encouraging them to do so, as the heartwarming YouTube video clip below shows:

An incredible breath of fresh air for Palestine

H.G.Wells once wrote about our state of being "prisoned from the cradle to the grave", in the story "The History of Mr.Polly":

But when a man has once broken through the paper walls of everyday circumstance, those unsubstantial walls that hold so many of us securely prisoned from the cradle to the grave, he has made a discovery. If the world does not please you, you can change it. Determine to alter it at any price, and you can change it altogether. You may change it to something sinister and angry, to something appalling, but it may be you will change it to something brighter, something more agreeable, and at the worst something much more interesting. There is only one sort of man who is absolutely to blame for his own misery, and that is the man who finds life dull and dreary. There are no circumstances in the world that determined action cannot alter, unless, perhaps, they are the walls of a prison cell, and even those will dissolve and change, I am told, into the infirmary compartment, at any rate, for the man who can fast with resolution. I give these things as facts and information, and with no moral intimations. And Mr. Polly lying awake at nights, with a renewed indigestion, with Miriam sleeping sonorously beside him and a general air of inevitableness about his situation, saw through it, understood there was no inevitable any more, and escaped his former despair.

So, now read this:
To my Arab brothers: The War with Israel Is Over - and they won. Now let's finally move forward
By Youssef M. Ibrahim
From: JewishWorldReview.com
With Israel entering its fourth week of an incursion into the same Gaza Strip it voluntarily evacuated a few months ago, a sense of reality among Arabs is spreading through commentary by Arab pundits, letters to the editor, and political talk shows on Arabic-language TV networks. The new views are stunning both in their maturity and in their realism. The best way I can think of to convey them is in the form of a letter to the Palestinian Arabs from their Arab friends:

Dear Palestinian Arab brethren:
The war with Israel is over.

You have lost. Surrender and negotiate to secure a future for your children.
We, your Arab brothers, may say until we are blue in the face that we stand by you, but the wise among you and most of us know that we are moving on, away from the tired old idea of the Palestinian Arab cause and the "eternal struggle" with Israel.

Dear friends, you and your leaders have wasted three generations trying to fight for Palestine, but the truth is the Palestine you could have had in 1948 is much bigger than the one you could have had in 1967, which in turn is much bigger than what you may have to settle for now or in another 10 years. Struggle means less land and more misery and utter loneliness.

At the moment, brothers, you would be lucky to secure a semblance of a state in that Gaza Strip into which you have all crowded, and a small part of the West Bank of the Jordan. It isn't going to get better. Time is running out even for this much land, so here are some facts, figures, and sound advice, friends.
You hold keys, which you drag out for television interviews, to houses that do not exist or are inhabited by Israelis who have no intention of leaving Jaffa, Haifa, Tel Aviv, or West Jerusalem. You shoot old guns at modern Israeli tanks and American-made fighter jets, doing virtually no harm to Israel while bringing the wrath of its mighty army down upon you. You fire ridiculously inept Kassam rockets that cause little destruction and delude yourselves into thinking this is a war of liberation. Your government, your social institutions, your schools, and your economy are all in ruins.

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Your young people are growing up illiterate, ill, and bent on rites of death and suicide, while you, in effect, are living on the kindness of foreigners, including America and the United Nations. Every day your officials must beg for your daily bread, dependent on relief trucks that carry food and medicine into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, while your criminal Muslim fundamentalist Hamas government continues to fan the flames of a war it can neither fight nor hope to win.

In other words, brothers, you are down, out, and alone in a burnt-out landscape that is shrinking by the day.

What kind of struggle is this? Is it worth waging at all? More important, what kind of miserable future does it portend for your children, the fourth or fifth generation of the Arab world's have-nots?

We, your Arab brothers, have moved on.

Those of us who have oil money are busy accumulating wealth and building housing, luxury developments, state-of-the-art universities and schools, and new highways and byways. Those of us who share borders with Israel, such as Egypt and Jordan, have signed a peace treaty with it and are not going to war for you any time soon. Those of us who are far away, in places like North Africa and Iraq, frankly could not care less about what happens to you.

Only Syria continues to feed your fantasies that someday it will join you in liberating Palestine, even though a huge chunk of its territory, the entire Golan Heights, was taken by Israel in 1967 and annexed. The Syrians, my friends, will gladly fight down to the last Palestinian Arab.

Before you got stuck with this Hamas crowd, another cheating, conniving, leader of yours, Yasser Arafat, sold you a rotten bill of goods — more pain, greater corruption, and millions stolen by his relatives — while your children played in the sewers of Gaza.

The war is over. Why not let a new future begin?
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and in the media consider "must reading." Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
Youssef M. Ibrahim, a former New York Times Middle East Correspondent and Wall Street Journal Energy Editor for 25 years, is a freelance writer based in New York City and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Comment by clicking here.