Awful stuff, I agree. It’s reprehensible that anyone would want to exacerbate the hatred and misunderstanding that plagues this conflict.


OTOH, I’ve read dozens if not hundreds of accounts since 9/11 about the prevalence of racist, anti-semtic propaganda being taught and broadcast in the Arab world. I would therefore think that the most newsworthy fact of the article you cite was the one in the seventh paragraph: “Such schools represent about 10 percent of Gaza kindergarten classes and are the only ones to teach such vitriol.” The article could have just as easily have been about the Gaza schools that teach children about Israel’s perspective, and about the need to live in peace, as described toward the end of the article.


But that’s not the real point, is it? The point of the article is to reinforce the image of Palestinians or Arabs generally as brainwashed with hatred from childhood, by implication difficult if not impossible to redeem, and therefore unworthy of the political rights enjoyed by their oppressors. Note how it lumps together the glorification of terrorist with “children playing in sandbag barricades,” certainly a bizarre practice by children growing up under foreign military occupation, explainable only by racist indoctrination. In the most general sense, articles like these serve to dehumanize Palestinians and reinforce the notion that actors beyond the control of the U.S. and Israel bear primary responsibility for the turmoil in the Middle East.


On a darker side they tend to legitimate arguments like this one, by Emanual A. Winston, in USA Today, 2/22/02, p. 14A:


"Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, like Syria and Iran, has taught the children of several generations to hate Israel so much that when they grow up they will commit ritual suicide for Islam and kill Jews. Arafat has thus programmed the ongoing genocide of his own young people as well as those of Israel.


Regrettably, there is no ready solution for deprogramming the Arab culture that has taught its youth to hate and kill with such ferocity that nothing, including a state of their own, will change their minds or cure their murderous behavior."


Winston therefore advocates the forced expulsion of all Palestinians from Palestine, mass ethnic cleansing. Another alternative, proposed by "conservative" columnist Robert W. Tracinski, is permanent dictatorship: “Israel needs to replace the Palestinian Authority with a permanent occupation, an Israeli colonial administration charged with the task of civilizing a people made barbarous by decades of terrorist leadership. This occupation should remove terror indoctrination from Palestinian schools . . . .” (http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0402/tracinski.html).


Note how I could just as easily spin an argument about ingrained racism by Israelis by citing the remarks of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, “the founder and spiritual leader of Shas, the third largest political party in Israel,” pictures of whom “appear in stores and Sephardic schools around [Israel], and whose “eager disciples listen attentively to his weekly sermons, which are also broadcast by satellite to followers around the world.” Israel Insider, 4/12/01. “In his weekly sermon prior to the start of Passover, Yosef said, "It is forbidden to be merciful to [the Arabs], you must give them missiles, with relish - annihilate them. Evil ones, damnable ones. May the Holy Name visit retribution on the Arabs' heads, and cause their seed to be lost, and annihilate them, and cause them to be vanquished and cause them to be cast from the world." Id. You could also cite the hero-worship by lunatic racists accorded Dr. Baruch Goldstein, the cold-blooded murderer of 19 Palestinian worshipers, and many other examples from the Arab-hating fringe that serve as fodder for the propaganda you condemn.


But if I made such an argument without pointing out the prevalence of racist hatred on both sides, I’d only be destructively reinforcing it on one side, and therefore spreading disinformation and propaganda instead of making a contribution toward understanding. These are the basic differences between a propganda system and a vigorously free press.