Shell-shocked children who are drawn into the cult of the martyr

The bombing, shelling and shooting will stop one day. The electricity and water will be restored. And the windows of the Mousa family's flat, every one of them blown out by Israeli air force strikes on the Palestinian president's palace next door, will be replaced.

But the trauma of the four Mousa children, aged three to nine years old, will not so easily be erased. For nearly two weeks now they have endured a constant barrage of shells from navy ships they can see through the plastic now covering the windows of their seafront flat in Gaza city, as well as the air force strikes on buildings nearby.

"The children scream and cry when there's shelling. It goes on all night," said their father, Raed, 35. "Every night, all night. The building shakes. We moved into the kitchen and sleep there. It's the safest place in the house. But my children are very scared, their faces turn yellow. The sound of the guns is very loud. We try to keep them busy playing and with their toys."

Their mother, Ahlan, is pregnant. "I look at them at night when they are sleeping and they are dreaming bad dreams. Safud [aged four] jumps from her bed screaming and crying," she said. "All the time they are shelling. It's terrifying. I don't know what to tell the children. I say the sound is loud but it is still far away. But I can see they are afraid and that makes me afraid."

That trauma may last a lifetime, with devastating consequences for Palestinian society, according to psychologists who have studied the impact of two decades of bloody conflict in the Gaza strip on children who have grown up under army watchtowers, dodging bullets, seeing classmates shot as they sat at the next desk, watching tanks and bulldozers destroy thousands of homes.

Even after the Israelis pulled Jewish settlers out of Gaza in 2005, children and their parents have had to endure regular rocket attacks and punishing sonic booms when Israeli jets broke the sound barrier over the territory. Now there is the bombing and fighting that has left more than 600 Palestinians dead in less than a fortnight.

Gaza's leading child psychiatrist, Dr Abdel Aziz Mousa Thabet, who has studied the effects of violence and trauma on children for 20 years, said about 65% of young people in the enclave suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.

"There are many other traumatic symptoms, like headaches and abdominal pain and vomiting. There's an inability to concentrate, panic, anxiety, irritability," he said. "I've observed much change in the children. They are more anxious, more fearful. Children are panicky because of the explosions. Children want to leave. You hear it. They feel there is no hope, that the world can't do anything for them and they can't do anything for themselves."

Thabet says the impact of trauma on older children combines with other experiences to push them to extremes.

The image of Mohammed al-Dura, the 12-year-old Gaza boy shot dead as his father vainly tried to protect him from Israeli gunfire at the beginning of the second intifada, is seared on the Palestinian consciousness. To many Palestinian adults it symbolises Israeli indifference to the lives of their children. But psychologists say that to many children its principal impact is to see a father who cannot protect his son.

With that - and humiliations such as Israeli soldiers beating Palestinian men in front of their children - has come a collapse in respect for the regular systems of authority.

The perpetual killing has also drawn many children into the cult of the "martyr" and led them to expect an early death.

Thabet said the traumatising of children was having a profound effect on Gaza's future. The children he studied in the early 1990s are now adults.

"They become fighters. I warned about this 15 years ago, that in 15 years these traumatised children will be more aggressive, they will want to fight, there will be more violence in the community. You saw it in the factional fighting in Gaza in 2007," he said.

"So now we will have another generation of more aggressive behaviour. They will go to more extremes because they have no future. This is a problem. I've been warning people of this but nobody was listening. It's a cycle of aggression.

"Children see their parents killed in front of them. What do you expect?"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/07/gaza-palestine-israel-children-psychology

The responsibility lies on hamas or those that freely elected hamas on their promises to drive israel into the sea.

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...or those that freely elected hamas...

I think I've heard this reasoning before... Wasn't this the reasoning al-Qaeda supposedly used for carrying out 9/11? That because the American people elected the American government, therefore it was justified in attacking them?

You do take your ideas from the strangest of places sprint..  ;D

Abu - so what is it like, to be granted freedom of speech here, while you and other muslims deny it resolutely wherever you can ??

Sprintcyclist wrote on Jan 8^th, 2009 at 9:44am:

Abu - so what is it like, to be granted freedom of speech here, while you and other muslims deny it resolutely wherever you can ??

Arabs living in Israel under Israeli rule, have more rights and more freedoms than any Arabs anywhere living under Arabic rule.

Calanen, Have you forgotten your rules of debate? (which you love dredging up from wiki each time someone else breaks them)...

Instead of pointing to what Israel does which is so great, how about addressing the criticisms of what they're doing that's horribly wrong?

Yes retaliation is terrible...  gee...  i wonder what provoked it?

Calanen wrote on Jan 8^th, 2009 at 9:46am:

Sprintcyclist wrote on Jan 8th, 2009 at 9:44am: Abu - so what is it like, to be granted freedom of speech here, while you and other muslims deny it resolutely wherever you can ?? Arabs living in Israel under Israeli rule, have more rights and more freedoms than any Arabs anywhere living under Arabic rule.

lol..really?

So arabs in Israel are better off then arabs in Morocco or Tunisia?

Of course....after all, having your home bulldozed and reoccupied is a right that we all aspire to have.

This is another zionist lie which can easily be dismissed when the facts are looked at objectively.

Grendel wrote on Jan 8^th, 2009 at 9:58am:

Yes retaliation is terrible...  gee...  i wonder what provoked it?

60 years of Israeli persecution and oppression.

rotflmao...

No use debating history and facts with you I guess...  soooo...  the tragedy is that children are caught up in a conflict not of their making...  but in years to come because they are taught to hate and brought up in ignorance they will perpetuate the situation just like their parents and their parents parents etc, etc, etc....

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because they are taught to hate and brought up in ignorance they will perpetuate the situation

That's right, they have been brought up to hate, but not the way you mistakingly believe. The "Pioneers of Tomorrow" is nothing compared to the image of watching your mother, brother, sister, classmate, baby cousin etc. blown to smithereens in front of your eyes. Or the memory of fleeing your home as it's bulldozed when you're all of about 6 years old, and your crippled grandfather is still trapped inside (all true events). These are the lessons that teach Palestinian children to hate, and they don't come from Hamas TV, they experience the cold hard and painful realities of them personally, many before they even learn to understand propaganda. I know this is quite hard for you to fathom, as you time and again flat out REFUSE to consider the gravity of their situation... but I still hold hope one day it might sink in... a little.

puhlease no western or should I say SANE country indoctrinates its children to hatred like the Islamic states and in particular palestinians.

Its sickening.  and sick,

Grendel wrote on Jan 8^th, 2009 at 10:15pm:

puhlease no western or should I say SANE country indoctrinates its children to hatred like the Islamic states and in particular palestinians. Its sickening.  and sick,

actually I'd argue that australians and americans (at least) are indoctrinated to hate muslims

but that's just conspiracy right?

anti-semitism

"semite refers not to race but to linguistics. but anti-semite refers specifically to hostility towards jews, and not to other semites. it was coined by jew-hater wilhelm marr in 1873 to make their beliefs sound more scientific and less based on religious hatred of jews and to replace the cruder term juden-hass (jew-hatred)."

The term Semite refers broadly to speakers of a language group which includes both Arabs and Jews. However, the term antisemitism refers specifically to attitudes held towards Jews.

The word antisemitic (antisemitisch in German) was probably first used in 1860 by the Austrian Jewish scholar Moritz Steinschneider in the phrase "antisemitic prejudices" (German: "antisemitische Vorurteile").[7] Steinschneider used this phrase to characterize Ernest Renan's ideas about how "Semitic races" were inferior to "Aryan races." These pseudo-scientific theories concerning race, civilization, and "progress" had become quite widespread in Europe in the second half of the 19th century, especially as Prussian nationalistic historian Heinrich von Treitschke did much to promote this form of racism. In Treitschke's writings Semitic was synonymous with Jewish, in contrast to its usage by Renan and others.

In 1873 German journalist Wilhelm Marr published a pamphlet "The Victory of the Jewish Spirit over the Germanic Spirit. Observed from a non-religious perspective." ("Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum. Vom nicht confessionellen Standpunkt aus betrachtet.") in which he used the word "Semitismus" interchangeably with the word "Judentum" to denote both "Jewry" (the Jews as a collective) and "jewishness" (the quality of being Jewish,or the Jewish spirit). Although he did not use the word "Antisemitismus" in the pamphlet, the coining of the latter word followed naturally from the word "Semitismus", and indicated either opposition to the Jews as a people, or else oppositon to jewishness or the Jewish spirit, which he saw as infiltrating German culture.[8] In his next pamphlet, "The Way to Victory of the Germanic Spirit over the Jewish Spirit", published in 1880, Marr developed his ideas further and coined the related German word Antisemitismus - antisemitism, derived from the word "Semitismus" that he had earlier used.

The pamphlet became very popular, and in the same year he founded the "League of Antisemites" ("Antisemiten-Liga"), the first German organization committed specifically to combatting the alleged threat to Germany and German culture posed by the Jews and their influence, and advocating their forced removal from the country.

So far as can be ascertained, the word was first widely printed in 1881, when Marr published "Zwanglose Antisemitische Hefte," and Wilhelm Scherer used the term "Antisemiten" in the January issue of "Neue Freie Presse". The related word semitism was coined around 1885.

Despite the use of the prefix "anti," the terms Semitic and anti-Semitic are not directly opposed to each other (unlike similar-seeming terms such as anti-American or anti-Hellenic). To avoid the confusion of the misnomer, many scholars on the subject (such as Emil Fackenheim) now favor the unhyphenated antisemitism[9] in order to emphasize that the word should be read as a single unified term, not as a meaningful root word-prefix combination.

The term antisemitism has historically referred to prejudice against Jews alone, and this was the only use of the word for more than a century. It does not traditionally refer to prejudice against other people who speak Semitic languages (e.g. Arabs or Assyrians). Bernard Lewis, Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emeritus at Princeton University, says that "Antisemitism has never anywhere been concerned with anyone but Jews."[1] Yehuda Bauer also articulated this view in his writings and lectures: (the term) "Antisemitism, especially in its hyphenated spelling, is inane nonsense, because there is no Semitism that you can be anti to."[10][11] A similar point is made by Professor Shmuel Almog, of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who writes "So the hyphen, or rather its omission, conveys a message; if you hyphenate your 'anti-Semitism', you attach some credence to the very foundation on which the whole thing rests."[12


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism

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actually I'd argue that australians and americans (at least) are indoctrinated to hate muslims

Well if you would believe that then you are even more deluded than I imagined Gaybriel, that is the sort of victim mentality rot we hear from islamist apologists ad nauseum, but it just doen't ring true.

You confuse recognising a problem, Islam, and promoting hatred of people, muslims, it is not the same thing, and while you will no doubt point to the lunatic fringe, who most probably would hate jews, and blacks, and anyone else different from themselves, as an example of aussie promotion of muslim bashing, I would argue that they are so few and insignificant as to be the exception, not the rule.

mozzaok wrote on Jan 8^th, 2009 at 10:45pm:

Quote: actually I'd argue that australians and americans (at least) are indoctrinated to hate muslims Well if you would believe that then you are even more deluded than I imagined Gaybriel, that is the sort of victim mentality rot we hear from islamist apologists ad nauseum, but it just doen't ring true. You confuse recognising a problem, Islam, and promoting hatred of people, muslims, it is not the same thing, and while you will no doubt point to the lunatic fringe, who most probably would hate jews, and blacks, and anyone else different from themselves, as an example of aussie promotion of muslim bashing, I would argue that they are so few and insignificant as to be the exception, not the rule.

I believe that in order to go to war people have to be desensitised to their enemy. the enemy has to be demonised and dehumanised. otherwise the public won't get behind the war.

it's been common practice throughout history. do you really think it has stopped now?

Well child indoctrination in islam against the Jews does that in spades...

Grendel wrote on Jan 8^th, 2009 at 11:12pm:

Well child indoctrination in islam against the Jews does that in spades...

it's a damn shame

yes, it is a terrible thing.