Hamas's Web School for Suicide Bombers Part I

 

by Yohanan Manor and Ido Mizrahi

 

1^st part of 2

 

Radical Islam

 

All states use education as a medium to encourage responsible behavior in their children, at least in part to develop a law-abiding, civic-minded citizenry. Authoritarian regimes have a history of distorting this trust, often turning schools into places of indoctrination for a state or religious ideology. The Palestinians have, for some time now, created an educational system exemplifying this indoctrinational approach: Their textbooks deny Jewish and Israeli legitimacy within historic Palestine, demonize Jews and Israelis, discourage compromise or negotiated peace, and glorify violent struggle to achieve what are often termed "Palestinian aspirations." Since coming to power through elections in early 2006 and following its military coup in Gaza in June 2007, Hamas has continued this path of indoctrination, utilizing its popular children's website, Al-Fateh.

After a series of clashes, predating Hamas's parliamentary win in 2006 but intensifying thereafter, Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in a swift but brutal campaign, which lasted little more than a week (June 7-15, 2007).[1] Hamas now controls the Gaza Strip, and the Palestinian Authority (PA) retains almost no standing, except perhaps in the field of education: All the schools in the strip—the very small number of private schools, the public schools, and those run by the United Nations Works and Refugee Agency (UNRWA)—follow the official PA school curriculum and use the corresponding textbooks.

This may be surprising in view of the cardinal importance Hamas attributes to the education of children and youth as a means of achieving its ideological and political goals. Article 15 of the Hamas charter states:

It is necessary that scientists, educators, and teachers, information and media people, as well as the educated masses, especially the youth and sheikhs of the Islamic movements, should take part in the operation of awakening. It is important that basic changes be made in school curriculum to cleanse it of the traces of ideological invasion that affected it as a result of the Orientalists and missionaries who infiltrated the region following the defeat of the Crusaders at the hands of Salah al Din (Saladin).[2]

Despite this, Hamas has yet to introduce its own school curriculum. Perhaps this is due in part to a concern for Palestinian unity; perhaps it is merely a desire to avoid the heavy expense such revisions would necessitate. Most likely this results from Hamas's recognition that continued implementation of the official PA curriculum is the only way currently that allows internationally recognized matriculation examinations to proceed and for diplomas to be awarded. In 2009 for example, practical steps were taken by Hamas to ensure that the examinations would take place at exactly the same time in both Gaza and the West Bank.[3]

But if Hamas is apparently content at this time to rely on PA-sanctioned curricula, it nonetheless resorts to other methods in order to leave its imprint on Gazan education. Firstly, it sees to it that the teachers employed throughout the strip impart its ideological and political views alongside the official pedagogical and educational approaches.[4] One way to get a good idea of the substance of those views is by turning to Al-Fateh, Hamas's web-based magazine for children and youth.[5]

 

Its Master's Voice

Al-Fateh (Al-Fatih) website went online in September 2002. Its name is indicative of its ideological ambition. Al-Fateh (the conqueror) is not related to the Fatah party, Hamas's Palestinian rival; the apparent link is purely fortuitous and only linguistic. Fatah is an invented word. It starts with an acronym from the initial letters in Harakat Tahrir Filastin, the Movement for the Liberation of Palestine, HTF or Hataf. It seemed ill-omened that Hataf can be read as hatf or death in Arabic letters where only the consonants are shown. Fatah's founders decided to write the initial letters backwards, as FTH or Fatah, which can also be read as fath or "conquest, victory" when the vowels are changed.

Although Hamas has denied any connection to Al-Fateh, there is evidence to the contrary. Al-Fateh's Internet server (located in Russia) also hosts the Palestine Gallery,[6] the photo portal website for Hamas's online Palestinian Information Center (PIC).[7] The Arabic portal of the PIC contains a number of links to Hamas-affiliated websites, including that of Hamas's military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades and Al-Fateh, showing Hamas's intent to refer readers to sites whose content supports its ideology. Hamas's public rejection of ownership may be useful in preventing host countries from shutting down the servers as was done to the site of the Qassam Brigades in 2008.[8]

In spite of the denial, the web magazine's ideological affiliation with Hamas is evident when one considers the content and messages conveyed on the site. It identifies itself exclusively with both the ideology and activities of Hamas, including military actions that deliberately target civilians.

The website expresses the same religio-political positions that Hamas takes in its charter, including the doctrine that the entire land of historic Palestine is waqf (an Islamic endowment) and that its liberation by violent jihad is a religious duty.[9] Pride of place is given to Sheikh Ahmad Yassin,[10] the founder of Hamas. The site repeatedly quotes the words of the movement's leaders and extols the members of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades. Except for a few references to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, no other Palestinian movements or leaders are mentioned. It jubilantly reported Hamas's victory in the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council elections[11] and repeatedly commemorates Hamas martyrs (shahids/shuhada'), publishing their last wills and testaments.[12]

In an analysis of 159 issues published between September 2002 and October 2009, four major themes recur: hatred and contempt for the West, annihilation of Israel and its Jewish inhabitants, demonization of the Jews, and a cynical form of indoctrination that aims to turn children into future suicide bombers.[13]

Hatred and Scorn for the West

Al-Fateh depicts the West as decadent and inferior to the Islamic world, both from a scientific and a moral perspective. Many scientific discoveries achieved by the West are claimed to be of Islamic origin. Thus, Christopher Columbus was not the first to discover America, which "he reached hundreds of years after the Arabs and Muslims."[14] The "legend" that Sir Isaac Newton discovered gravity is but a ruse to hide the fact that the idea was of Arabic provenance.[15] Other scientific "firsts" appropriated without acknowledgment by the West include the knowledge that the world is not flat and the discovery of electricity.

Ideas of human equality and social justice, whose roots extend from the Bible through the Magna Carta through the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, emerged according to Al-Fateh in reality in Mecca in the seventh century. While Western nations have time after time violated their own proclamations concerning human rights, Al-Fateh states that the emergence of Islam in Mecca brought

equality between the slave and his master, between the rich and the poor, the young and the old, the man and the woman, the Arab and the non-Arab … And from these roots grew a strong Islamic society which has no oppressor or oppressed, and in which no man can steal the rights of the other.[16]

The West is regarded as a source of decadence, corruption, and cheap values that should be avoided—from "Western imperialist clothing" to television programs.[17] The site also warns against celebrating Western holidays, which are alleged to provide an opportunity for Westerners to scorn Muslims:

the West looks at us … disdainfully and derisively, with a glance full of arrogance … They have the right to do so, because we have celebrated their [holidays] while they have not even thought to celebrate ours … because we have distanced ourselves from our ideal values and clung to their decadent values.[18]

In this somewhat difficult passage, Al-Fateh uses the status of women to illustrate the inferiority of Western values:

Many Orientalists accuse Islam of failing to grant the woman what it grants the man. We do not see this phenomenon in reality, but from reading history books we find something interesting: Century after century, we see that the nations of the West exploit and deny their basic human rights more than any other nation. The meaning of freedom has changed for the European woman and become entwined with the concepts of loss, escape, and disintegration … [so that] suicide has become the only option for those despairing and falling in perdition.[19]

The West is further the enemy of Islam both because of its "severe attacks in beloved Palestine, in Iraq, in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, in Chechnya and in the Balkans, in India and in Kashmir"[20] and its "subjugation" of Muslim peoples:

We are currently subjugated by the Jews, the Americans, and the British who occupy our holy land of Palestine, in Iraq, and in many Arab and Muslim states … It is [incumbent] upon us, the lion cubs of Arabism and Islam, to be prepared to fight those abject people and to liberate our country from occupation.[21]

The website provides the obligatory references to Western imperialism and the crimes of the Crusaders:

The savage and backward feudal kings of Europe came at the head of huge armies as invaders and occupiers and seized many Arab cities on the Syrian coast.[22]

See the crime that Britain has brought upon us: Britain conquered Palestine in a Crusader spirit, as articulated by their commander, General Allenby, who, after the conquest of Jerusalem in 1917, said: "Today the Crusades have ended."[23]

This last, unsubstantiated quotation is taken directly from article 15 of the Hamas charter although it is a matter of controversy whether Viscount Allenby ever uttered such a comment.

 

Annihilation of Israel and the Jews

For Al-Fateh, Israel is an illegitimate state since "greater Palestine" is an Arab, Islamic land. Thus, the Jews have no rights whatsoever in "Palestine"

where the Arab Canaanites have dwelt since ancient times, a long time before the arrival of the Jews in Palestine, and even when the Jews immigrated into Palestine, the Arab tribes were there until the arrival of Islam, which made Palestine an Arab Islamic land … and since that time to our day the Muslim Arabs have never left … and everything in it testifies to Palestine being Arab and Muslim, despite the arrogance of the Jews and the imperialism that helps the Jews occupy it.[24]

According to a number of modern Arab historians, the ancient Babylonians, Aramaeans, and Phoenicians were all Arabs who emigrated from the Arabian Peninsula.[25] This "Arabization" of the Canaanites is meant to portray the Israelites (and by extension, the Jews) as interlopers in the land and to transform the Arab Palestinians, the alleged Canaanite descendants, as the only legitimate and indigenous inhabitants. But as even partisan supporters of the Palestinian cause such as Rashid Khalidi have noted, Palestinian nationalism developed a historiography that "anachronistically read back into the history of Palestine over the past few centuries, and even millennia, a nationalist consciousness and identity that are in fact relatively modern," creating a "predilection for seeing in peoples such as the Canaanites, Jebusites, Amorites, and Philistines the lineal ancestors of the modern Palestinians."[26]

This denial of a Jewish connection to the land extends to the Kotel or Western Wall, a remnant of one of the supporting walls of Herod's Temple and the holiest, accessible site for Jewish prayer:

The Western Wall, a noble and honored Arab and Islamic remnant, [is] one of the walls of the Al-Aqsa Mosque … the most ancient Islamic site in Jerusalem. The occupying Jews claim that this wall is all that remains of their ancient temple, called Solomon's Temple. In actual fact, the Jews' claim is false, fake, and incorrect, and history and archeological research prove our statements. The ancient Jewish temple was completely destroyed by the Romans approximately 2000 years ago. All archeological researchers prove that this wall was built in the Umayyad period … the Western Wall of the Al-Aqsa Mosque is thus an Arab Islamic remnant and consequently has no connection at all to Solomon's Temple.[27]

Like other Palestinian educational literature, Al-Fateh website frequently depicts the map of the Middle East without Israel and instead shows only "Palestine." It avoids the phrase "the State of Israel," instead employing terms of derogation and condemnation, including the "Zionist entity," "the cursed state," the "state of the monstrous entity," the "criminal state," the "alleged entity," and the "thieving usurping entity."[28]

Not content with expunging any past connection to the land, Al-Fateh's hostility and contempt for Israel are intertwined with an expressed longing to annihilate it: "All Muslim children are the hope for the future, and by their hands, with God's help, the accursed Jewish state will be totally destroyed."[29] This uncompromising hatred is tied to a condemnation of the Jews reputedly uttered by Muhammad, echoed in turn in the Hamas charter:[30]

Palestine is an Islamic [religious] endowment [waqf]. It is the Muslims' primary problem, and its liberation is a personal religious duty for every Muslim. I recall the saying [hadith] uttered by God's Messenger [Muhammad]: "The Hour of Judgment will not arrive until you fight the Jews and kill them … and until the trees and the rocks will say: 'O Muslim, O servant of God, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him," except the salt bush [gharqad], for it is [one] of the Jews' trees.[31]

That this exhortation is not confined to the past or some theoretical clause in an organizational charter is made explicit in numerous Al-Fateh issues: "You will be in the ranks in the near future, the future in which we cleanse our holy land of the impurity of the Jews."[32] Israel's destruction and the violent liberation of Palestine are described as one and the same thing: "The way to the complete liberation of the land is through the muzzle of the gun."[33] Leaving nothing to chance, God Himself is called upon to accomplish the goal: "O God, you should deal with the aggressive Zionists, O God … kill them … and do not leave [even] one of them."[34] This destruction is aimed not only against Israel but against Jews generally: "Oh, our Aqsa [Mosque], we shall return; we are the soldiers of God's religion. We will rejoice at the victory and kill the Jews by the sword."[35]

It is not surprising then that Al-Fateh rejects any peace settlement, any negotiations that might lead to a settlement, and all past agreements concluded with Israel, echoing article 13 of the Hamas charter. In a column dedicated to Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the most prominent Palestinian leader in the 1930s and 1940s and a Nazi collaborator, Al-Fateh republishes his admonition for its student readers: "If you don't succeed in liberating Palestine, I am warning you not to conclude a peace agreement with the Jews, whatever the situation will be."[36] Turning to more contemporary leadership, the website quotes Abd al-Aziz Rantisi (1947-2004), Hamas's cofounder, one of its principal leaders in Gaza, and a staunch opponent of the Oslo accords, who referred to Palestinian anti-negotiation demonstrators as those who "left their homes in order to tell the negotiators: 'No to this ridiculous negotiation! Yes to continuing resistance. Yes to the gun!'"

 

Yohanan Manor is chairman of the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education.

Ido Mizrahi is research project coordinator at the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

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