We are coming up on the 18th anniversary of the death of Farfour the mouse. And he is strangely more relevant to us now than he ever was in life.
Farfour was a demented Palestinian ripoff of Mickey Mouse, the main character (until his martyrdom) on the children’s show Tomorrow’s Pioneers, which aired on Hamas’s Gaza-based television station Al-Aqsa. When people say Palestinian children in Gaza have been reared on anti-Semitic brainwashing, they mean Farfour and his ilk.
The militant mouse met his maker in June 2007 when his dying grandfather (who was not a giant mouse, but a regular old Arab man) entrusted him with the key to Tel Aviv and claimed it was actually Palestinian land. Farfour felt the weight of his new responsibility “to liberate this land from the filth of the criminal, plundering Jews.” As you can probably guess, he was martyred at the hands of those “criminal, plundering Jews,” and the announcement was made by a young Palestinian girl.
This was, at the time, both semi-comical and horrifying. But the kind of anti-Jewish brainwashing that was done on children’s television and in elementary-school textbooks was the subject of bipartisan condemnation. Indeed, just a few months before Farfour’s untimely martyrdom, then-Sen. Hillary Clinton denounced such indoctrination of Palestinian children as nothing less than “a clear example of child abuse.”
At the time, it was still unthinkable that America would have this exact problem. Now it is undeniable that we do.
There was a revealing moment at a congressional hearing on anti-Semitism in elementary-school curricula about a year ago. Rep. Kevin Kiley, a Republican from California, asked Enikia Ford Morthel, the superintendent of the Berkeley Unified School District, about a Berkeley lesson that states: “for some Palestinians, ‘From the River to the Sea’ is a call for freedom and peace.”
Morthel defended the lesson, to which Kiley very reasonably responded: “You put this on a slide in the classroom and then students go around in the halls saying it. I don’t think there’s anything surprising about that.”
Quite so. Children in America are being taught to repeat genocidal slogans about Jews.
A couple of months ago, I wrote about another such moment—this one at a state hearing involving the infamous Massachusetts Teachers Association and various anti-Semitic lesson plans. One was a grade-school workbook for kids in kindergarten and first grade called Handala’s Return, which featured on its front page a map of Israel and Gaza and the West Bank all labeled “Palestine.” Israel did not exist in this lesson plan. Handala explains that “Zionists” took her family’s home by force and won’t let her back even though she has the key. The students are then asked to draw their own home and key, presumably to imagine their own sadness were the Jews to come and take their home away.
At the end of the workbook—again, designed for children about five or six years old—is a page titled “Help Handala Free Palestine.” The students are instructed to write on the page what they will do, specifically, to “raise funds for the children of Palestine” and what they will chant at a “Palestine protest.”
There have been endless examples, documented here and elsewhere, of anti-Semitism in American grade-school lesson plans, but I chose these two because they specifically shine a light on the fact that young children here are being drafted as child soldiers into “the Palestinian struggle.” They are not simply taught bad things about Jews; they are taught to act on them from a very young age.
Will American children get their own Farfour, too? Inevitably. America’s Farfour-ward slide is well under way.
Earlier this week, what has become one of the more infamous modern blood libels was circulated around the world when a UN humanitarian director told the BBC that 14,000 Gazan babies would die in the next 48 hours due to Israel’s withholding of aid. Eventually, the BBC and others issued corrections when it turned out that the study had been misread and the actual number of babies about to die from Israel’s blockade, as detailed in the report, was zero.
But of course it had been widely repeated before being retracted, and not just by media and politicians. Ms. Rachel, a massively popular children’s YouTube host often compared to Mister Rogers, made a video about the Big Lie that would have made Leni Riefenstahl proud. Holding her own newborn daughter, Ms. Rachel tearfully appealed to the viewers while a picture of a sickly Palestinian baby was put on screen at the same time.
The baby on screen appears to be a six-month-old girl named Siwar Ashour, the Independent points out. Siwar has an esophageal medical condition that makes it difficult for her to drink her mother’s breastmilk. Nonetheless, Ms. Rachel uses Siwar as an example of Israel’s evil child-murder scheme. Ms. Rachel, crying, implores viewers to “just look at her, and… think about a baby you love.”
She then says that “you can’t be about to let 14,000 kids starve, and we all know not to bomb and kill and starve children… please don’t kill so many children.”
Ms. Rachel has more than 13 million subscribers, and her show has gotten 9 billion views in the six years of its existence. This particular video, however, has been deleted from her Instagram page, now that we all know everything in it is a lie. But the damage is done. Farfour would be proud.
