Kill ‘all’ Jews, Hamas TV host urges kids
Palestinian child told to punch Jews and ‘turn their faces into tomatoes in order to liberate Palestine’
A children’s show on Al-Aqsa TV, the official Hamas-run television channel broadcasting from Gaza, broadcast a segment calling for the mass killing of Jews.
In a clip of the kids’ TV show “The Pioneers of Tomorrow,” broadcast on May 2 and uploaded Thursday by the MEMRI media watchdog, the host of the program, a young girl in a hijab, interviews two very young children, one of whom says she hopes to be a police officer like her uncle Ahmad.
The host asks what policemen do, and, after establishing that they catch criminals, adds that “they shoot Jews, right?” and stresses to her young guest that “you want to be like him.”
“I will shoot the Jews!” the little child says.
“All of them?” the host asks.
“Yes,” the girl says
“Good,” the host answers.
In a previous segment, a co-host of the show, an anthropomorphic bee character, talks on the phone with a child in the West Bank Jenin refugee camp, and encourages him, if Jews come into the camp, to “punch them” and “turn their faces into tomatoes in order to liberate Palestine.”
The bee also tells the child caller to “beat them up” and to “pick up a stone, and when the Jews come, take it and throw it.”
The “Pioneers of Tomorrow,” a children’s program with a Sesame Street -like format of live actors interacting with puppets and humans in animal costumes, has repeatedly come under fire for violent anti-Semitic and anti-Western themes, often presented to children as young as 3 or 4.
In one segment extensively reported on in Western and Hebrew media, a Mickey Mouse-like character, who relentlessly espouses the beliefs of militant, radical Islam, is eventually beaten to death by Israeli soldiers after he attempts to liberate Tel Aviv. Other animal characters on the show have met a similar fate.