Hamas’s TV Bunny: Jews, Not Carrots
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
The creators of children’s television often focus their attention on improving their audience’s reading skills. Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV station, however, seems concerned with teaching its younger viewers how to spell destruction. A new video shows a human being-sized rabbit named Assud who learns that his brother, a bee, has died after being denied passage to Egypt for medical treatment. In a venomous lilt, the rabbit tells a little girl, “I, Assud, will finish off the Jews and eat them!”
Assud the Rabbit is a new character on the kids show “Tomorow’s Pioneers,” which broadcasts from Gaza and is spread by satellite throughout the Middle East. The show, according to translations by the Middle East Media Research Institute, meshes a saga of stuffed animals with lectures about key elements in Hamas ideology — the right of return, the re-conquest of Jerusalem and martyrdom in the name of Allah.
Recently, an Al-Aqsa video of Farfur, a Hamas mouse reminiscent of Mickey Mouse, was spread around the Internet. After the station met worldwide condemnation, Farfur was killed off the show and the mouse’s little fans were told that he was beaten to death by an Israeli interrogator.
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