Farfur

Is this singing mouse just a Hamas puppet?
TV figure accused of inciting murder; Israel demands that show is pulled

Farfur seems entirely innocent: he looks like Mickey Mouse, speaks in a squeaky voice and his name means “Butterfly” in Arabic. But the fuzzy-faced rodent — the star of a Palestinian children’s show, broadcast on Hamas-controlled television — is pitting Israel and Hamas against each other on a new battlefield: satellite television.

Why do the Palestinians hate their children so much they would abuse them in such a manner?

The Israeli Foreign Ministry has ordered Hamas to withdraw Farfur’s show, Tomorrow’s Pioneers, on the ground that it is being used to “indoctrinate Palestinian children to violence, hatred and murder”, according to their statement.

I’m sure if Hamas took Israel’s demands seriously, the homicide bombers would have stopped killing themselves and innocent people a long time ago.

The perpetually smiling puppet, which routinely urges Palestinian children to support armed resistance, sang in one recent episode: “We will destroy the throne of the tyrants, we will pour the fire of death on them.” In another, Farfur admits to cheating in his exams because “the Jews destroyed my house”, and that he could not find his schoolbooks, buried in the rubble.

Hamas refuses to ban Farfur. “This programme tries to relay noble Islamic concepts to the children by teaching them about life from our point of view,” according to Fathi Hamad, the chairman of al-Aqsa TV in Gaza City.

What is so noble about teaching children to hate and kill?

Some secular Palestinians object to its message. Mustafa Barghouti, the Palestinian Information Minister, who hails from the secular Third Way movement, has appeared several times as a guest on the station. Last week, however, he said that Farfur’s show had crossed the line. “It reflects a mistaken approach to the Palestinian struggle for independence and should be suspended to allow for a review,” he said, but he conceded that the Palestinian Government had no jurisdiction over private stations.

There are secular Palestinians? Where have they been while their fellows are slaughtering men, women and children?

Hazem al-Sharawi, Hamas TV’s West Bank manager, said that al-Aqsa had no intention of turning back: “We don’t incite. We present facts. We can’t cut off our children from the reality they live every day.

Don’t ‘incite’ eh? Ya could have seriously fooled me. All we see on the TV from them is incitement. Teaching children to be suicide bombers, to destroy anything you don’t agree with is far from a noble cause.

“We need to launch a counter-offensive. We have to stop preaching to ourselves and start broadcasting to the whole world,” he said.

What the world does NOT need is more hatred. I would suggest pulling the plug on such broadcasts.