- Aug 10, 2001
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Gaza City -- Six days a week, kindergarten teacher Samira Ali El Hassain tells her class of 30 5-year-old boys and girls what makes the world go round.
"Here is how an egg becomes a chicken," she says to a student. "Here is how to draw a circle," she tells another.
Hassain then quizzes the class about a previous, more serious lesson. "Who are the Jews?" she asks.
The children know the answer by heart: "The enemy!" they reply in unison.
"And what should we do to them?" Hassain asks in a voice that is as casual as when she discussed chickens and eggs.
"Kill them!" the children cry out.
Hassain works at a school run by Al-Mujamma Al-Islami (the Islamic Association), an Islamic charity group created in 1973 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder and spiritual leader of the militant group Hamas. Such schools represent about 10 percent of Gaza kindergarten classes and are the only ones to teach such vitriol.
Signs that extol violence are found everywhere these days in the streets of Gaza City, the capital of the Palestinian-dominated Gaza Strip.
On the walls, graffiti calls on residents to "kill the Jews" and "die like shahid (martyrs)" -- the men and women who have died trying to kill Israelis. Instructions on how to become a shahid are spray-painted, along with photos of weapons, exploding buses and portraits of men wrapped in explosives.
And if that isn't enough to convince Gaza's children -- many of whom spend their days roaming the dusty streets, playing in sandbag barricades, shooting toy assault rifles and throwing stones at each other -- hatred of Israelis is part of their kindergarten lesson plan.
...Back in Gaza, however, the kids at the Al-Mujamma Al-Islami kindergarten class started a new game last week called "martyr's funeral."
"One of them pretended to be a martyr, while the others lifted him up and pretended that they were burying him," said Showish. "We tell them that the shahid are very good people, our heroes. We tell them that they must grow up and do the same."
Khitam Ajrami, an expectant mother, says she will tell her unborn child the same thing.
In the cool shade of her stripped-down home in the Jebaliya refugee camp, a mile north of Gaza City, 20-year-old Ajrami mulls over the words she will tell the child she expects to bear in two months. Last month, her husband, Najib, was shot to death by Israeli soldiers when he tried to blow himself up at the Jewish settlement of Dugit in Gaza.
"I will tell the baby that his father died a martyr," Ajrami said, smiling shyly from under her green-and-yellow scarf. "I will teach him to love our country, to know that the Jews occupy our land, that we are right, and the Jews are wrong. I will teach the baby to hate Israel.
"If the occupation continues, I will teach my child to do what his father has done."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/04/25/MN53534.DTL
"Here is how an egg becomes a chicken," she says to a student. "Here is how to draw a circle," she tells another.
Hassain then quizzes the class about a previous, more serious lesson. "Who are the Jews?" she asks.
The children know the answer by heart: "The enemy!" they reply in unison.
"And what should we do to them?" Hassain asks in a voice that is as casual as when she discussed chickens and eggs.
"Kill them!" the children cry out.
Hassain works at a school run by Al-Mujamma Al-Islami (the Islamic Association), an Islamic charity group created in 1973 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder and spiritual leader of the militant group Hamas. Such schools represent about 10 percent of Gaza kindergarten classes and are the only ones to teach such vitriol.
Signs that extol violence are found everywhere these days in the streets of Gaza City, the capital of the Palestinian-dominated Gaza Strip.
On the walls, graffiti calls on residents to "kill the Jews" and "die like shahid (martyrs)" -- the men and women who have died trying to kill Israelis. Instructions on how to become a shahid are spray-painted, along with photos of weapons, exploding buses and portraits of men wrapped in explosives.
And if that isn't enough to convince Gaza's children -- many of whom spend their days roaming the dusty streets, playing in sandbag barricades, shooting toy assault rifles and throwing stones at each other -- hatred of Israelis is part of their kindergarten lesson plan.
...Back in Gaza, however, the kids at the Al-Mujamma Al-Islami kindergarten class started a new game last week called "martyr's funeral."
"One of them pretended to be a martyr, while the others lifted him up and pretended that they were burying him," said Showish. "We tell them that the shahid are very good people, our heroes. We tell them that they must grow up and do the same."
Khitam Ajrami, an expectant mother, says she will tell her unborn child the same thing.
In the cool shade of her stripped-down home in the Jebaliya refugee camp, a mile north of Gaza City, 20-year-old Ajrami mulls over the words she will tell the child she expects to bear in two months. Last month, her husband, Najib, was shot to death by Israeli soldiers when he tried to blow himself up at the Jewish settlement of Dugit in Gaza.
"I will tell the baby that his father died a martyr," Ajrami said, smiling shyly from under her green-and-yellow scarf. "I will teach him to love our country, to know that the Jews occupy our land, that we are right, and the Jews are wrong. I will teach the baby to hate Israel.
"If the occupation continues, I will teach my child to do what his father has done."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/04/25/MN53534.DTL
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