WATCH: PA official praises toddler son for wanting to kill ‘Zionists’
Tawfiq Tirawi recounts that he heard his 2-year-old singing: ‘Daddy, buy me a machine gun and a rifle, so that I will defeat Israel and the Zionists’
A senior Palestinian Authority official praised his two-year-old son for expressing his desire to kill “Zionists” in a children’s song lauding martyrdom.
In an interview on a PA television station, Fatah’s Central Committee member Tawfiq Tirawi proudly recounted how his toddler son sang “Escort the Martyr to his wedding.”
“Today his mother told me that he sang: ‘Daddy, buy me a machine gun and a rifle, so that I will defeat Israel and the Zionists,'” Tirawi said, boasting that his son was “not yet three!”
While Tirawi admitted that his toddler did not know the the meaning of the song, he said such sentiments were a natural expression of Palestinian nationalism.
“The Palestinian by nature and education feels a sense of belonging to the land and the homeland,” he explained.
The interview, broadcast last month, was translated by on Friday Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), an Israel-based watchdog that monitors Palestinian outlets for anti-Israel sentiment or anti-Semitism.
Tirawi has on several occasions voiced skepticism that negotiations could ever result in a Palestinian state, and has advocated for an armed Palestinian resistance against Israel.
In 2014, Tirawi dismissed Palestinian attacks on Israelis as “nothing but a reaction to the recent crimes of the occupation and the settlers in occupied Jerusalem and across the nation.”
“Negotiations will bring us nothing … we, all Palestinian factions, must return to the cycle of action. When we will do this, many things will change,” he told the Lebanese news channel Al-Mayadeen in January.
Tirawi said that Palestinians were pushed into negotiations with Israel by a consensus of Western and Arab states who insisted on diplomacy, leaving the Palestinian leadership no option but to agree.
“The big explosion in Palestine is coming. All of Israel’s actions have placed the Palestinian public under immense pressure. They have no choice but to explode in the face of the occupation,” he said.
He has also previously accused Israel of poisoning the late Palestinian Authority president Yasser Arafat, and vowed to bring the Jewish state to justice for its crime before an international court.
