Teaching hate is a crime against humanity

In a previous post I wrote that teaching children to hate is a crime against humanity and that

It transforms the child into a vehicle for the children of hate - bigotry, intolerance, cruelty, and violence. These can only serve to make the world a more miserable place. Hate begets more hate, and that child is likely to in turn become the target of someone else's hate.

Sadly, it appears that Hamas is determined to make the world a more miserable place for children. It was in the news last week that Hamas has been using a Mickey Mouse look alike character to teach children to become jihadists who will fight for Islamic dominion. The AP reported:

Hamas militants have enlisted a figure bearing a strong resemblance to Mickey Mouse to broadcast their message of Islamic domination and armed resistance to their most impressionable audience — children.

A giant black-and-white rodent — named "Farfour," or "butterfly," but unmistakably a rip-off of the Disney character — does his high-pitched preaching against the U.S. and Israel on a children's show each Friday on Al-Aqsa TV, a station run by Hamas. The militant group, sworn to Israel's destruction, shares power in the Palestinian government.

"You and I are laying the foundation for a world led by Islamists," Farfour squeaked on a recent episode of the show, which is calledTomorrow's Pioneers.

"We will return the Islamic community to its former greatness, and liberate Jerusalem, God willing, liberate Iraq, God willing, and liberate all the countries of the Muslims invaded by the murderers."

This is so despicable that I find it hard to know what to say. Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of Holocaust studies at Emory University, points out that this tactic is similar to tacits employed by the Nazis to enculcate hatred of Jews in German youths.

To make someone else a prisoner of your hate, to brainwash a child into becoming a tool to execute your own hate ... it's so heinous that ... its just so damn infuriating. I don't know what to say, other than to reiterate what I said before:

It's just so terribly frustrating and disheartening to see children taught to hate other children. Those children are not the enemy of each other - their enemy is hate. They should be working together to put an end to hate. I'm reminded of another great speaker, Martin Luther King, maybe we can airdrop these words on the Middle East

In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline.

Or perhaps we can hurry up and get an Arabic verision of Children of Men (plot spoilers contained in link) released.

What Hamas is encouraging is a cycle of perpetual hate and persecution ... where the innocents on all sides become "collateral damage" to their fanatical cause. And to take a child and sabotage his/her mind with that hate ... it is an evil beyond description.