Echoes Through The Ages

Children are taught by their parents, to appreciate their cultural and traditional backgrounds. It's part of the introduction to children by their parents to the particular society in which they originally were born into, even when that family and those children live elsewhere in the world, far beyond their origins, and the children have been born elsewhere, in an entirely other society.

There is a strong pull to identify with one's origins, and to pass on to one's children an understanding of those origins.

People who share an ancient lineage, one which has been well documented through various sources such as a compilation of sacred writings with a historical background, and through secular historical record-keeping, maintain a pride in their heritage, and exercise a wish to ensure it is brought into the future by their offspring.

Each culture, each ethnic heritage, passes on to the future generations what the elders have themselves been taught, complementing the cycle of remembrance.

For the Jews, there are festivals of commemoration of special events, one of which is the Passover tradition of recalling the servitude of ancient Israelites within the land of Egypt, and their passing out of the land of the Pharaoh who kept them as slave labour. With the divine assistance of a servant of Yahweh who anointed Moses to the task of deliverance of his people.

Through the traditions of the ceremony of remembrance that is the Passover Seder, children are encouraged to take part. They are taught about the plagues that God visited upon Pharaoh to force him to relent and permit the Israelites to leave Egypt and embark upon their journey across the Sinai desert, to find their promised land of Israel.

From enslavement to the freedom of a tribe released to pay due homage to the god of their deliverance. Among the plagues sent down to Egypt so persuasively was the death of the first-born in every household, ensuring a great hue and cry would erupt, and the Israelites whose powerful god could so command life and death, be obeyed.

Jewish children are taught about their heritage in just such exposures to the fabled past. But they are taught this ancient history so that they may know their place in history, to respect the trials and tribulations their ancient peoples endured over the millennia, and managed, nonetheless, to survive and to prosper, even into the 20th Century when the bleak prospect of genocide reared its ghastly head in the crematoria of Nazi-controlled Europe.

These children are taught to appreciate life, even while they bear the memoried anguish of historical victimhood.

In a similar way are children within the Palestinian Territories taught a more recent history.

Whereas the history taught Jewish children had its genesis in biblical times, that taught Palestinian Arab children in the Middle East is a story of more recent vintage, but one that the Palestinians view as a blight upon their history and their future, representing the dark days of displacement from what they claim is their rightful homeland; the entire geography of 20th Century Palestine.

Through television programs and school textbooks Palestinian children from the primary grades onward are taught to hate and fear Israel and Israelis. They are taught that Israel took Palestinian land through force of arms, and violently disrupted Palestinian society, viciously uprooting their grandparents, their parents, from their traditional homeland.

They are taught that a day will come in the not-too-distant future when Israel will be forced to abandon its status as a nation of Jews, and the Palestinians will return in force, to recapture that which is theirs. They are taught the beauty of martyrdom, the purpose of their allegiance to the Koran, the Holy Prophet and Allah.

They are steadily inculcated with a cult of victimhood and revenge. They are taught to welcome their future within their society as holy warriors against the evil empire of Jews. This is obviously not a celebration of the past, it is a painstakingly produced theatre of vengeance.

In lieu of teaching children of events impacting upon them deleteriously, but without a due explanation of causality and a well-rounded picture of the situation in discussion, these vulnerable children are groomed as future terrorists against a legitimate government, and against a neighbouring population with whom they should be living alongside in some semblance of peace and acceptance.

And that relentless inculcation of hatred of those being held responsible for displacing them from what is believed to be their legitimate ownership of the land, will most certainly ensure that future generations will remain as obdurately involved with terror acts against Israel as is the current generation.

Itself well groomed by their forbears, by their neighbouring Arab states in conformance with an overall earlier plan, now long since abandoned by most of those same Arab states. And this scenario is the representation of the "moderate" Fatah-led Palestinian Authority.

Not too much different in quality of content and purpose than that of Islamist Hamas, now governing the Gaza Strip, and whose vigorous depiction of Jews as criminal usurpers and mass murderers of Arab children doesn't really set them too far apart from Fatah.

In a recent statement by a Hamas MP (Lebanon) and cleric, Yunis Al-Astal, mention is made of Western Crusaders having "planted the brothers of apes and pigs in Palestine in order to prevent the reawakening of Islam." He goes further, to expound: "I believe that our children, or our grandchildren, will inherit our jihad and our sacrifices, and, Allah willing, the commanders of the [Islamic] conquest will come from among them.

"Today, we instill these good tidings in their souls - and by means of the mosques and the Koran books, and the history of our Prophet, his companions and the great leaders, we prepare them for the mission of saving humanity from the hellfire at whose brink they stand." Lest it not be fully understood that the West - with its despicable secular governance, its degraded religions, its decadent social values - intent on conquering Islam has become the enemy of humanity.

The stark contrast between those world views; that of the Jews; the determination to take their collective place as a nation among nations, as a UN- and world-legitimized country representing a haven for Jews worldwide, to live in peace and harmony with their neighbours, and to risk everything for that right.

And that of die-hard fundamentalist Islamists whose fetish of death and clinging to righteous vengeance for their perceived victimhood, remains intent on victimizing the most vulnerable among their own, the children whom they groom as martyrs to the "just cause" of Islam.