"We are setting with you the cornerstone for world leadership under Islamic leadership," declares an actor on Hamas's Al-Aksa TV. "Yes, we, tomorrow's pioneers, will restore to this nation its glory, and we will liberate Al-Aksa, with Allah's will, and we will liberate Iraq, with Allah's will, and we will liberate the Muslim countries, invaded by murderers."
The message is not unfamiliar. It forms part of the official ideology of Hamas, is heard in mosques and seen on posters in the Palestinian street.
This time, however, it is delivered by a squeaking overgrown mouse with big ears, white gloves and a bow tie on the children's television show Tomorrow's Pioneers.
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The dissonance between the message of violence (children call into the show to sing songs about martyrdom) and the Mickey Mouse look-alike is only the latest instance of a decade-old trend in the Palestinian media, according to Palestinian Media Watch director Itamar Marcus.
Marcus made aliya from New York more than 30 years ago. His organization has been watching Palestinian media for more than a decade, seeking to convey to the West the vast gap between the Western perception of Palestinian society and how the Palestinians themselves describe their goals and aspirations. It's been quite a decade, according to the PMW records.
According to Marcus, the PMW has watched, catalogued and warned about a spiraling degeneration into religious extremism. And, he says, it all happened in public, ignored by the West because it didn't fit idealistic political plans.
Marcus believes he knows why peace is farther away today than in the past, and why Israeli hasbara is so weak in the face of international anti-Israel movements. Let the Palestinians' own voice be heard, he says to Israelis, and the truth of the collapse of the peace process will be revealed - and maybe, just maybe, also corrected.
Your reports often travel far and wide, but the most recent one on Tomorrow's Pioneers made a remarkable splash in the mainstream international media - Fox News, CNN, The Guardian, AP, hundreds of local papers in all sorts of languages, even an entry on Wikipedia. Why do you think this was so powerful?
The world often responds more to a striking messenger than to a striking message. Just a few weeks before the Hamas Mickey Mouse story, PMW publicized the fact that the speaker of the PA legislature called for the extermination of all Jews and Americans. It received press for a day and was forgotten. It's possible that if the Nazis had used a Mickey Mouse to tell their hate messages, the world would have listened and tens of millions of lives would have been saved. We are now trying to convince the world that Hamas Mouse is not the problem, but a symptom of a profound evil that needs urgent treatment.
The message is carried not only through the media, but through the education system. A recent report reveals Palestinian schoolbooks that are written by Fatah-appointed officials and call on children to take up a war for Islam. Is this discourse mainstream among the Palestinians?
This is unfortunately mainstream; it is what they believe. For years I haven't used the term incitement about their material, because when you think of incitement, you think everything is fine and incitement is the problem. What they're saying is not merely incitement. What they're saying is reflective of their beliefs and opinions and ideology.
We've noticed this shift over recent years in Palestinian society, from the focus on nationalism to greater focus on religion, with a Palestinian poll before the election of Hamas [in 2006] showing about 78 percent of Palestinians wanting Sharia [Islamic law].
What is driving this shift?
I think Israel had a great secularizing influence [on Palestinian society] before the PA. But under the PA, through its control of TV, education, culture, everything, there has been a tremendous Islamization effect. This radical Islam, this is very dangerous.
The PA was Islamist from the beginning?
[Former PA chairman Yasser] Arafat himself initiated this, but not because he was a religious person. To have the support of the people, he felt it was important to have religious backing. When the terror war started [in October 2000], it was Arafat who was using the Islamic terms jihad and shahada, dying for Allah. These are religious terms. He said "all of Palestine" - meaning Israel - "is holy wakf [Islamic trust]." He was using religion the way Machiavelli talks about using religion - to keep the people in line.
Unfortunately for Israel, the world and for the Palestinians as well, he was more successful than he wanted to be. They have truly, in great masses, adopted this ideology as their own. And this is reflected in the election victory of Hamas and in the polls.
Some have said the Palestinians are taking refuge from the failures of their society by turning to Islam. Do you agree?
There never was a secular Palestinian society in the sense of [what exists in] Israel or the West. Even under Arafat, Palestinians were religious. Polls showed that nearly all Palestinians believed in God and accepted the Koran as the word of God. They didn't have to learn a new Islam, just the [new] way Islam was being presented in Palestinian society. The establishment has not had to convince people to accept Islam - it just had to convince them that Islam demands Israel's destruction.
And Islam is everywhere. Every grade level has "Islamic education" schoolbooks. A number of times a day during regular TV programming, Palestinian TV stops - even in the middle of a sentence - for prayer. [During] the month of Ramadan, all programming was changed, and all day long you had religious programs.
