Leaders Encourage Palestinian Children to Murder Jews, Use Sing-Alongs

A high-ranking Palestinian official, Tawfiq Tirawi, praised his 2-year-old son on official PA TV on Oct. 27, 2015 for the toddler’s expressed desire to murder Jews.

According to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), an organization that monitors Arab communications media from the West Bank, Gaza Strip and eastern Jerusalem, Tirawi expressed “fatherly pride” about his son’s singing a song that romanticizes anti-Jewish violence. Tirawi proudly recounted his song singing, “Daddy, buy me a machine gun and a rifle, so that I will defeat Israel and the Zionists” and “escort the Martyr to his wedding” (referring to the Islamic belief that those killed while waging holy war marry 72 virgins in Paradise).

Tirawi is a member of the Fatah Central Committee and former head of the General Intelligence Service. In the latter post, he oversaw Palestinian Authority (PA) intelligence efforts in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria).

Due to his senior positions with the Fatah movement and the PA—both of which are frequently referred to as “moderate” by some media and policymakers—Tirawi has frequently been quoted by Western press. In a July 22, 2013 news brief which appeared in the Boston Globe, Tirawi was the Palestinian official cited in “Officials skeptical on Mideast peace,” who claimed that talks with Israel wouldn’t produce progress because “Israelis are not going to stop building in the settlements.”

Tirawi has been accused previously by the Israeli government of funding and supporting terrorist attacks against Israel while simultaneously responsible as a PA official for security cooperation between the PA and Israeli authorities. According to The Washington Times, he has previously admitted to a London-based Saudi-owned newspaper of ordering Palestinian Arabs assassinated for the “crime” of selling West Bank real estate to Jews in 1996 (“Israel ties end of siege to Palestinian’s arrest,” Sept. 26, 2002). However at the time Tirawi denied involvement in the murders, saying Israelis “want to harm the Palestinians’ reputation with these lies” (“Palestinian Officers Deny Taking Part in Slayings,” Los Angeles Times, June 3, 1997).

In its report on Tirawi’s comments, PMW notes the Palestinian children’s song in question has been used in the past. In 2006, PA state-run media broadcast a young girl singing it and in 2010, a young boy sang a variation of the song on a Hamas TV children’s show.

Tirawi’s proud recitation of his son’s singing is one of several recent examples of incitement to anti-Jewish violence broadcast on official PA media. On November 6, a young girl recited a poem on PA TV describing Israel as “Satan with a tail.” Upon completion of her recitation of the antisemitic poem, “Visa” by Hesham El-Gakh, the host of the children’s program told the young girl, “I really like this poem.”

“Visa” begins with the line, “When I was young I was taught that Arabness is my honor…and that our lands extend from one end to the other, and that our wars were for the Al-Aqsa Mosque.”

The PA’s long standing use of state media to incite anti-Jewish violence and to indoctrinate children to hate violates conditions set by the U.S. and others, since the Oslo process—the very process that led to the creation of the PA and the establishment of limited Palestinian self-rule in the mid-1990s. Since then, the U.S. government alone has committed over $4 billion in Palestinian aid. While U.S. assistance is prohibited from going directly to the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation (PBC), funds spent on other requirements enables the PA to use other revenue to fund its broadcasts.

“Independent” Palestinian news agencies—those that are allowed by authorities to operate provided they echo official lines, have also recently incited violence. As PMW notes, on November 18, the Wattan news agency “celebrated” the first-year anniversary of the Har Nof synagogue massacre, in which six Israeli were murdered, calling it a “heroic operation.”

In describing lessons that he learned in life, Holocaust survivor and acclaimed writer Elie Wiesel has written, “There are no sufficient literary, psychological, or historical answers to human tragedy, only moral ones.” If recent examples from Palestinian media offer any indication, Wiesel’s words are unlikely to be reflected by PA media any time soon.