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Itamar Marcus, founding director of Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), spoke to a May 22nd Middle East Forum Webinar (video) in an interview with Ashley Perry, adviser to the Middle East Forum Israel office and former senior Israeli government adviser, about “how the Palestinian Authority (PA) turn[s] good children into terrorists.” The following is a summary of Marcus’s comments:
PA indoctrination of Palestinian children takes place in a culture where 70 percent to 80 percent of Palestinian Arabs support terrorism. The PA, which disseminates its ideology of Jew-hatred to every member of its society, is particularly effective in raising the next generation of terrorists by feeding its children a steady diet of poisonous messages year-round. Fatah’s entire ideology is found in the Waed magazine, which is distributed in schools and summer camps to children from ages six to fifteen.
The PA’s five key messages conveyed to Palestinian children from cradle to an early grave are: (1) denial of Israel’s right to exist and its destruction, (2) expulsion of the Jews from Palestine, (3) the right to commit terror, (4) martyrdom for Allah, and (5) martyrs’ reward in paradise. The PA’s version of history justifies rejection of the UN’s 1947 partition resolution by claiming the land belonged to the Palestinian people “for thousands of years.” Teaching Palestinian children that the UN “gives rights to our land” to “foreigners who did not know Palestine, did not live in it, neither they nor their fathers and forefathers” is a revisionist version of history that has been voiced by PA president Mahmoud Abbas at the UN. By framing the narrative through a lens of “replacement ideology,” “everything that happened to the Jews, they say happened to them.”
By framing the narrative through a lens of “replacement ideology,” “everything that happened to the Jews, they say happened to them.”
By demonizing Israel as “thieves” of Palestinian culture – from its currency to its food and, ultimately, its land – the PA reinforces the message that the “Palestinian goal is to liberate Palestine that was stolen.” The example of Algeria under French colonialism is taught to “assure” the children that Jews will also disappear from the land. The approach to achieving the goal of liberating Palestine from the Jews is teaching the children they have a “right” to “wage armed struggle” against all of Israel. Additionally, “role modeling,” i.e., naming thirty-one schools after Dalal Mughrabi, a suicide bomber who murdered thirty-seven civilians in a 1978 bus hijacking in Israel, reinforces the ideal that becoming a “martyr” is an honorable goal and “the right thing to do.”
A deadly consequence of the steady drumbeat of PA messaging is the raising of Palestinian children to die while committing acts of terror. During the summer of 2022, a picture of a hundred ten-to-twelve-year-old Palestinian children holding AK-47 assault rifles aloft in exultation appeared on the official Fatah government’s Facebook page of one of its summer camps. In 2023, twenty-one of the Palestinian terrorists who waged attacks against Israelis with either rifles or Molotov cocktails and who were then killed were between the ages of fourteen and seventeen.
Palestinian youths are motivated by the belief that sacrificing themselves is the greatest “honor.” The teens programmed to commit murder are “good kids,” many of whom are “outstanding” students, “but they wanted to be killed.” Fatah’s Facebook page teaches “their 300,000 followers that children have no value in themselves” and are nothing more than “ammunition.” Fatah summer camp slogans taught to six-and seven-year-olds include “We will die, and Palestine will live.”
Palestinian parents that are party to the PA’s death cult repeat the messaging at the funerals of their children who are sent out “for the sole purpose of dying.” Parents conditioned by religious leaders who broadcast the reward of “dark-eyed virgins” awaiting their martyred children are interviewed on PA television with a wedding music soundtrack to the filmed funeral procession. Teens raised in “strict Muslim Palestinian society” who likely never dated “want to be a martyr and to get married.”
When Marcus met with Hillary Clinton in 2007 and presented her with the evidence exposing the PA, it elicited her warning that “Palestinians are profoundly poisoning the minds of their children.” The warning was ignored by the international community and “today we’re seeing the fruits of that.” PMW works with a few Palestinian media watchers, one who was an “expert in English” and had his “wow moment” when he realized “his whole life had been a lie.” There are more like him, but they fear for their lives if they “tell the world that they really want peace with Israelis.” PMW is creating a website “by Palestinians for Palestinians,” where they can talk, with their identities obscured, about the PA’s problems and “how their children deserve a better world.”
Israel, by allowing the PA to continue generating its terror pipeline, is part of the problem. “Israel goes after terrorists, but they don’t go after the people who send the terrorists.” The Israeli government thinks in terms of “short-term benefit[s],” and even though PMW has persuaded many European parliaments to cut funding to the PA, they report that Israel asks them to continue the funding. Israel would rather deal with a known enemy than risk what would happen if it jailed the PA leadership for its promotion of terror. This “terrible mistake” has been ongoing since the Oslo Accords “farce” began in 1995. If Israel persists in its refusal to “deal with the leadership,” the emerging Palestinian Arab generation will continue its murderous rampage until it is interrupted and stopped.
Among PMW’s successes is the Taylor Force Act, adopted in 2016, which honors the memory of Taylor Force, a former U.S. Army officer murdered by Hamas. Funding was cut off to the PA over its “pay for slay” program after Congress reintroduced the Taylor Force Martyr Payment Prevention Act of 2021 and again in 2023. These congressional actions were intended to deter foreign banks from making martyr payments by restricting banks’ access to the U.S. financial system if such payments were made.
Fatah should be declared a terrorist organization, and then a new leadership has to be created from other people.
Therefore, every month, Israel deducts from taxes collected for the PA the amount the PA spends on its “pay to slay system.” This policy has been “effective in one thing: we’ve convinced the international community that the Palestinian Authority is a terrorist supporting organization that isn’t worthy of getting international funding. That’s what we’ve convinced them. And that’s critical because that has taken the pressure off of Israel.”
While the PA remains vested in its public relations campaign, PMW is aiming to “shame them internationally” along with the governments that fund them. PMW introduced a resolution to members of Congress and seven European parliaments urging them to “declare the PA child abusers for killing their own children.”
The success of the Taylor Force Act is that, even though the international community continues to claim that Israel has no right to Judea, Samaria, or Jerusalem, “no one is pressuring us anymore for withdrawals.” Nonetheless, the Act has not stopped the PA from continuing to pay its terrorists. The PA send their children to die “for political purposes” so that Israel can be blamed for their deaths. “Fatah should be declared a terrorist organization, and then a new leadership has to be created from other people. And anyone who [is] going to be involved in terror [must] be rejected.”
