Jew-hatred hits home

Editorial

School administrators were shocked. Two teachers were suspended. The principal promised that incitement of violence and hatred would not be tolerated at her school.

Yet the questions remain. How did a Canadian child – news reports do not state the student's age, but Ottawa's Abraar Islamic school is kindergarten to Grade 8 – conceive of a story in which he and a classmate join forces with a young Sheik Ahmed Yassin to ambush and murder Jews with an M16? And how did a teacher, in a facility approved by the Ontario Ministry of Education, think it was appropriate to write approving, encouraging comments in the margins of this blood-soaked fantasy?

The story raced across the wires last week and quick action was taken by the school's administration. But this story isn't close to being over. Not only is a substantial investigation required by the Ontario education ministry, but larger societal questions have been raised – questions we have, for the most part, been able to ignore for several years.

The child's eight-page report, written in Arabic, featured a cover page decorated with a burning star of David, a machine gun and a depiction of the Palestinian flag atop Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock. According to a translation published in the Ottawa Citizen newspaper, the report featured the author and a friend avenging the death of Yassin, the terrorist leader of Hamas, whom Israeli forces killed a year ago.

"Without thinking, Ahmed took his M16 machine-gun and threw the bombs, and he showered the Jews; this resulted in the killing of the soldiers," the student wrote. "Salah said: 'You killed them all.' Ahmed answered: 'Praise be to God.' "

The story concludes: "We promise God and the heroes of Al-Aksa that we will continue the path, we will continue in spite of the difficulties and the hardships until the victory or the martyrdom, we will not surrender; we will fight for the sake of God until the end."

In response, the teacher marking the report wrote, "God bless you, your efforts are good.... The end will be soon when God unites us all in Jerusalem to pray there."

The school's principal responded appropriately by suspending the teacher.
"Encouraging or inciting hatred is strictly prohibited at our school," the principal told the Citizen. "We will take all measures to investigate this matter and ensure that it does not reoccur."

But children do not conceive of this sort of violence in a vacuum. What is most significant, perhaps, is the similarity of this report to stories on the curriculum of murder that is not only condoned, but acts as a core program across the Arab world, including in Palestinian Authority schools, which are funded in part by Canadian tax dollars. As horrific as these messages of violence are, they do not emerge unbidden from the minds of children. They are planted there – not by frustration and humiliation caused by Israeli "atrocities," as many apologists for Islamist violence insist – but by the deliberate and institutionalized incitement of governments, religious leaders and educational institutions.

This sort of bloody imagery and incitement to kill Jews – rarely dubbed "Israelis," by the way; almost always termed "Jews" or "Zionists" – is omnipresent in schools throughout the Arab world – and has been for three generations. Serious observers of the Middle East conflict know that this incitement – not Israeli actions – are the primary cause of the violence that continues in the Middle East. That Canadian observers were stunned by the Ottawa revelations demonstrates our remoteness and ignorance of this incitement, despite reams of evidence that has been available for years.

As "shocked and appalled" as Canadian Jewish leaders and other human rights activists claimed to be by last week's developments, the shock aspect rang a bit hollow. Most aware observers knew that, in a globally wired world, the Jew-hatred that passes for education, entertainment, news, weather and sports throughout the Arab world would arrive on our shores eventually, either through the Internet, through satellite television or, more ominously, through a perversion of a Canadian child's right to an education. The glorification of martyrdom, a staple of life for Palestinian youth, appears in the Ottawa essay, as does the rhetorical confluence of "Israelis" and "Jews."

Canadians have routinely accepted our own fantasy version of Middle East events: one that depicts Israeli policies as the sole motivation for Islamist martyrdom and mass murder. Now that the real source of anti-Israel violence – the destruction of young Islamic minds – has reached our own education system, will Canadians reassess our biased and simplistic approach? Or will we continue to overlook systematic indoctrination as a sad, but always understandable, side-effect of Israeli "atrocities"?

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