The Palestine Media Center, "an independent official institution established in November 2001 . . . under the direct supervision of PLO Executive Committee Member Mr. Yasser Abed Rabbo," according to its "about" blurb, has this mind-boggling piece of baseless propaganda prominently displayed on its website.
PNA: Incitement in Palestinian Textbooks ‘a Myth’
‘Israeli Children Are Taught to Hate Arabs, Trained to Kill Them’
The impressive part isn't so much the idiotic denials of anti-Israel and antisemitic incitement in the face of incontrovertible evidence and findings by responsible researchers from all over the globe. It's more the ridiculous photos (two of them) of (supposedly) Israeli children holding guns -- one of them with the assistance of a man wearing an actual kippa. What we have here is sort of a pathetic attempt to mimic an LGF exposé. It fails.
Adding absurdity to insult, the piece recycles a worn-out old piece of non-news from 2002 about Israeli children sending letters to soldiers asking them "to disregard rules and regulations and to kill as many Arabs as possible." This thing was circulating back when I started blogging, and I addressed it in my first post, with the help of Tal G. and Stephan Sharkansky, who checked out the original Yediot Achronot article about these letters (in Hebrew only) and published their own responses. Long story short, there were a few dozen nasty anti-Arab letters from kids at two state religious schools and the story created a flurry of "corrective" action designed to repair what was aptly termed "a failure of education." This, of course, isn't ever mentioned when these letters are trotted out as evidence that Israelis educate their children to hate Arabs -- an accusation that couldn't be much farther from the truth.
The PMC article is instructive. It's yet another example of the classic palestinian boomerang maneuver -- attempting to deflect criticism through denial and "back atcha." It's also a very good indication of just how prepared the current palestinian leadership is (not) to admit its mistakes, change its course and prepare its people to live in peace with the State of Israel.
