Watch what they teach the children

If you had any doubts about what Hamas and Islamic Jihad are all about, just observe what they applaud at graduation ceremonies for kindergartners in Gaza. Ruthie Blum has the report. It's chilling.

This month, an Islamic Jihad kindergarten displayed for parents how well its 5- and 6-year-olds had absorbed what they were taught during the year. At their graduation ceremony, the little ones put on a performance that made the adults enormously proud.

The show included a series of skits depicting Israeli soldiers as evil torturers of innocent Palestinians. A number of the children were in a cage, representing an Israeli prison, with their hands cuffed behind their backs. Others were dressed in makeshift IDF uniforms — with kippot on their heads — carrying various kinds of weapons. One child playing an Israeli soldier shoved the head of another child, playing a tortured Palestinian, into a bucket of water. Meanwhile, the children recited anti-Israel slogans and expressed their desire to become martyrs.

The principal of the kindergarten explained the impetus behind the show. "We have to educate children at the earliest stages of their lives to love the resistance, Palestine and Jerusalem, so that they know what Palestine is, why it is important, and who its enemies are, so they know what their role is in the future."

One child announced: “When I grow up, I want to blow myself up among the Zionists and kill them in a suicide bombing on a bus." How happy that must have made his parents and the principal.

Other Palestinian children are taught to recite that they wish to hold machine guns when they grow up.

Think of the evil of teaching children who are little more than toddlers that they should grow up to murder and be martyrs. These are the people to whom Israelis are urged to make concessions. Do you seriously believe that there is any desire for true compromise among such people? Don't fool yourselves.