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Summer Camp, Hamas-Style

In 2014, over 100,000 Gazan children attended summer camps run by the terror organization. These camps, in the words of one high-ranking Hamas official, “are designed to prepare a generation that carries the Quran and the rifle.” Riley Clafton describes what that entails:

This summer, Muhammad Nofal’s ten-year-old son will be participating in all of the typical Gaza summer-camp activities: scouting, beach games, media lessons, military training sessions, and introductory programs on this year’s theme, the “Jerusalem intifada.” Other campers will spend their summer like twelve-year-old Musaab, learning to crawl beneath barbed wire and wield assault rifles in simulated attacks on Israeli military outposts.

Worse still are the camps run by Palestinian Islamic Jihad. True, there are other options, but they are problematic as well:

Summer camps organized by the UN Relief Works Association (UNRWA) offer a popular alternative to those of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. . . . Hundreds of thousands of young Palestinians turn out to participate in such activities as swimming, painting, pottery, theater, dance, sports, lessons on life skills, and museum excursions.

[Although] UNRWA does not provide military training, the organization implicitly contributes to incitement, and its summer camps are no exception. . . . [T]he staff teaches young Palestinians that “Jews are the wolf” and “with God’s help and our own strength we will wage war. And with education and jihad we will return to our homes!”

Read more at Tower

More about: Gaza, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Politics & Current Affairs, UNRWA

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic