The Islamists of Gaza: Yet again preparing children to kill and be killed

15-Jan-14: When a society praises itself for turning its children into human bombs, whose problem is that?

This image appears on the website of the Hamas Ministry of the Interior.
They want you to know their children are being raised to kill and be killed.
So whose problem is that? [Image Source]

This is not an analysis of today's news about Hamas. The ghoulish industry of death the Islamists have assembled since slaughtering their Fatah opponents and taking control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 is well-known to anyone willing to peer into the cesspool.

No, this is a posting about those many polite international organizations, those major governments of Europe and the Americas, those global humanitarians, those statespeople and moral leaders who will again today, as they have till now, avert their gaze from the obvious child abuse on a huge scale and - in the most genteel of fashions - proceed to ignore the self-cultivated barbarism that has become daily life in places like Gaza.

No self-respecting observer can claim to be unaware that the leadership cadre of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are deliberately establishing a death cult. The reports are explicit; the photographic evidence is well-publicized and ubiquitous; the savages have never made a secret of the sickening abuse of children in which they engage. On the contrary, they want everyone to know. And so do we.

Here's an extract from a news report by Elhanan Miller ["13,000 teens complete Hamas training camps to emulate ‘suicide martyrs’"] and posted on the Times of Israel site several hours ago:

• The Hamas government in Gaza celebrated the graduation on Monday of paramilitary camps geared at training high-school children “to follow in the footsteps of the suicide martyrs.” The camps, titled “the pioneers of liberation,” are run by Hamas’s ministries of education and interior. 
• Some 13,000 students in grades 10-12 participated in the one-week training camps this year, compared to 5,000 last year when the program was launched...
• The corps of instructors consists mainly of active members of Hamas’s security forces, and the curriculum includes weapons training, first aid, self defense, marching exercises and “security awareness” classes on identifying Israeli spies.
• Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, Interior Minister Fathi Hammad and Education Minister Usama Mzeini attended the graduation ceremony on Monday, each delivering fiery speeches stressing the importance of military training in developing a new generation of Palestinian combatants.
• “Beware this generation,” Haniyeh said, addressing Israel. “This is a generation which knows no fear. It is the generation of the missile, the tunnel and the suicide operations.”
• Hammad, the interior minister, said the training was in preparation for the coming war with Israel. “This generation is a sapling from God on earth. It will harvest the enemies of God and be the pride of all nations,” he said.

The article ends with an eleventh-grade boy declaiming:

We are the pioneers of liberation. We are coming to purify you from the Zionists...

Children trained to see themselves as being in the purification business learn too late that in reality they have been reprogrammed, repurposed, rewired to become human bombs. 

That is what the grotesque men of Hamas have wrought. Professing to be advancing their version of religious values, those men have induced children who ought to be acquiring the skills that will bring them a good and productive life to instead become adept at slaughtering and being slaughtered.

And there's this: all the Islamist martial music and military imagery cannot conceal the ugly reality that a Hamas attack has almost invariably meant hitting unarmed children (first), women and men. The massacre at a pizza shop in the center of Jerusalem in which our daughter Malki was murdered along with many others is the paradigm. It exemplifies what the Hamas brand of 'combatants' is trained to do.

As for Hamas launching an assault on a fighting force of armed Israelis, when did that ever happen?

As we said, none of this is news. Certain parts of the mainstream media have delicately poked at these stories from time to time. Activist supporters of the case for Israel, we among them here on this blog, have addressed it often. Our posts, for instance, have included (among many others):

• 8-Oct-13: Children and their indispensable role in the conflict
• 3-Jul-13: Educating the next generation: an early-summer reflection on asymmetry
• 18-Jun-13: They want their children to become killers and they say why. The rest of us are left with questions
• 17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns

The real story is not the military-style training and the pledges by children to die for the values of those hideous, terror-addicted Hamas insiders. It's this: where is the outrage of the civilized world? 

Are UNICEF, Defence for Children International, UNESCO, Child Rights International Network, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Washington-based Jerusalem Fund, the Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights, Save the Children Sweden, Arab Council for Childhood Development and so many other child-focused NGOs silent for a reason? If there is a reason, let them say it. It's inconceivable that they are unaware of this horror.

We especially want to know what UNRWA plans to do about the Hamas death-cultism. With an enormous footprint in the Gaza Strip, this has to become UNRWA's issue. Its website, the front end of the perpetual global UNRWA fund-raising, asserts this lofty set of aspirations:

We are committed to fostering the human development of Palestine refugees by helping them to: Acquire knowledge and skills; Lead long and healthy lives; Achieve decent standards of living; Enjoy human rights to the fullest possible extent. [UNRWA | Our priorities]

Given the self-imposed realities of Hamas ruled, we need to know how acceptable it is to them that six year old Gazan children (or for that matter 16 year olds) are given training in the lethal use of AK47s that are bigger than some of the children holding them [see Daily Mail UK]. Let them drop the charade and admit they have no problem with it, if that's the reality. We know the Palestinian Arab Islamists have no problem with this at all.

If, by chance, there are some civilized critics of Israel's various actions and policies who are as outraged as we are by the sickening sight of children being shown how to kill innocent civilians across the other side of the fence, then let them speak out as vociferously as they do when they blame Israel for this or another "war crime" or "atrocity". 

If they don't, why not? Who is going to save these children? It certainly is not going to be Hamas and their co-conspirators.