JERUSALEM – A Palestinian Authority television program showed young children reciting poems encouraging violence on two separate occasions in January, the NGO Palestinian Media Watch reported over the weekend.
One of the poems called for the murder of Israelis “as we slaughtered them in your streets, Beirut.” The poem also urged Palestinians to seek death, emphasizing that if you are a member of Fatah – Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s party – your “blood is food for the revolution.”
One of the poems, recited by a boy, reads:
Today, O our West Bank, our Gaza, raise your voice
O our land, the time has still not passed
As we expelled them from Gaza and Sderot
As we slaughtered them in your streets, Beirut
For you, Yasser Arafat, for you we shall die
After the night comes the light of day, and the fig leave will be removed…
Tomorrow we will take our vengeance, and their leader will be carried in a coffin
We, Fatah, are a storm, and our blood is food for the revolution…
PA TV host: Bravo, Muhammad, thank you, thank you, thank you!
[Official PA TV, The Best Home, Jan. 6, 2017]
On the same program, a girl and boy recited a poem together celebrating the escalation from the violence of “rocks” to the violence of automatic rifles:
We want to speak openly, with no hesitation and with no fear
World, hear and see, my rock has turned into an AK-47 [assault rifle],
Your words are true, Yasser Arafat
O mountain, the wind will not move you.
[Official PA TV, The Best Home, Jan. 20, 2017]
The recitations aired on “The Best Home” are part of a campaign of incitement to violence by the PA that continues in Arabic even as Abbas and other Palestinian officials pledge – in English – to combat extremism at home.
Most recently, the focus of incitement has been the Trump administration’s promise to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.