If you missed it yesterday, our post on a Hamas television show featuring a puppet that stabs President Bush to death is an excellent introduction to the New York Times' report on Hamas' effort to instill hatred in the children of Gaza:

Since Hamas took over Gaza last June, routing Fatah, Hamas sermons and media reports preaching violence and hatred have become more pervasive, extreme and sophisticated, on the model of Hezbollah and its television station Al Manar, in Lebanon.

[One] children’s program, “Tomorrow’s Pioneers,” has become infamous for its puppet characters — a kind of Mickey Mouse, a bee and a rabbit — who speak, like Assud the rabbit, of conquering the Jews to the young hostess, Saraa Barhoum, 11. “We will liberate Al Aksa mosque from the Zionists’ filth,” Assud said recently. “We will liberate Jaffa and Acre,” cities now in Israel proper. “We will liberate the whole homeland.”

The mouse, Farfour, was murdered by an Israeli interrogator and replaced by Nahoul, the bee, who died “a martyr’s death” from lack of health care because of Gaza’s closed borders. He has been supplanted by Assud, the rabbit, who vows “to get rid of the Jews, God willing, and I will eat them up, God willing.”

It's sick stuff, and the Times commendably pulls no punches in describing it. The paper says that the Palestinian Authority is considerably more moderate than Hamas, while acknowledging that the PA "also causes some concern" because "its textbooks, for example, rarely recognize the state of Israel." Putting aside the question of how much more "moderate" Abbas's Palestinian Authority actually is, it is nice to see a media organ as liberal as the Times taking an unflinching look at Hamas.

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