Palestine's equivalent of PBS' Sesame Street, called Tarashibo, promotes massacres and bloodshed, a popular culture expert says.
Itamar Marcus, director of the Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli think tank, showed extensive video footage at Penn Tuesday evening in an attempt to demonstrate that Palestinian children are brainwashed by so-called "hate education."
"Demonization of the Jews is horrifically prevalent," Marcus said.
He added that he has spent the last nine years trying to decipher "what Palestinians were saying to their children in Arabic" because the sports, popular television soap operas, cultural and music video shows that he had monitored are a serious indicator of true beliefs and future events.
Speaking in Steinberg-Dietrich Hall at the invitation of the Middle East Forum Club, Marcus added that naming youth summer camps and sports tournaments after young suicide attackers such as the 17-year-old Ayyat Al Akhras has made such people "powerful role models" for young Palestinians.
Palestinian society is conditioned to promote the belief that shahadat, or dying for the cause of liberation from the infidels, should be celebrated rather than mourned, Marcus said.
He said that popular music videos depict shahadat as an honor in which the dead are rewarded with paradise in the afterlife.
Marcus showed an interview in which a mother said her son's death was not a "mourning but a joyous wedding with the 72 virgins awaiting her son in paradise."
"Mothers wish their children shahadat. Shahadat is alive, not dead," Marcus said.
He added that posters are also made to "proudly" announce that children are killed in a freedom struggle.
An 11-year-old girl called shahadat a "beautiful duty," another video showed.
According to Marcus, anti-Israel prejudice is deep-rooted in Palestinian children.
There was not a "single example of a textbook map which had Israel" on it, he said.
Marcus showed televised videos of eminent academics denying the existence of Israel to reinforce his argument. He said songs have also been written claiming Israeli cities are part of Palestinian territory.
Marcus said the charter of Hamas -- an organization which the United States labels a terrorist organization and which is now a prominent political force in the Palestinian territories -- claims that "renouncing any part of Palestine would imply renouncing religion. ... Jews do not have a right to live."
Marcus also showed clips of popular Muslim religious leaders calling Jews "a virus like AIDS."
Marcus repeatedly said that the claims were not "authentic Islam, but just how Palestinians present it."
College sophomore Joshua Diskin, who attended the event, said that "the danger of hate education was accurately portrayed" by this presentation.
College freshman Jon Friedman, however, sounded a more cautious note.
"When coming to things like this, you need to keep a more questioning mind," he said.
