The other day David blogged about recent children's television programming in "Palestine" which uses a Mickey Mouse lookalike to preach armed Islamic conquest of Jerusalem and annihilation of Jews:
Saraa: Sanabel, what will you do for the sake of the Al-Aqsa Mosque? How will you sacrifice your soul for the sake of Al-Aqsa? What will you do?
Sanabel: I will shoot.
Farfour (Mickey Mouse lookalike): Sanabel, what should we do if we want to liberate...
Sanabel: We want to fight.
Farfour: We got that. What else?
Saraa: We want to...
Sanabel: We will annihilate the Jews.
Saraa: We are defending Al-Aqsa with our souls and our blood, aren't we, Sanabel?
Sanabel: I will commit martyrdom.
Here's the video clip, #1442 in MEMRI's long, long series on hateful, inaccurate, and otherwise untrustworthy media coming out of the Middle East.
Pamela has more on terrorist Mickey here.
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When such uncompromising and unapologetic, anti-Zionist and antisemitic media gain currency -- and nearly always without a peep of protest from the professional litterateurs -- this is as good an occasion as any to post on the internet an opinion piece Jorge Luis Borges (left) wrote 70 years ago from the relatively calm cultural outpost of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Borges -- "who valued books and solitude above all things" (as opposed to, say, tenure or fame) -- took the time to put his foot down on a life and death cultural matter.
It would still be a few years before Borges, like the mother continent itself, would go completely blind. Still, David blogging now about "Mauschwitz" is like Borges writing then about "A Pedagogy of Hatred": it's not so much the blind leading the blind as a voice trying to speak to the deaf and dumb....
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"A Pedagogy of Hatred"
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Displays of hatred are even more obscene and denigrating than exhibitionism. I defy pornographers to show me a picture more vile than any of the twenty-two illustrations that comprise the children's book Trau keinem Fuchs auf greuner Hied und keinem Jud bei seinem Eid [Don't Trust Any Fox From a Heath or Any Jew on his Oath] whose fourth edition now infests Bavaria. It was first published a year ago, in 1936, and has already sold 51,000 copies. Its goal is to instill in the children of the Third Reich a distrust and animosity toward Jews. Verse (we know the mnemonic virtues of rhyme) and color engravings (we know how effective images are) collaborate in this veritable textbook of hatred.
Take any page, for example, from page 5. Here I find, not without justifiable bewilderment, this didactic poem -- "The German is a proud man who knows how to work and struggle. Jews detest him because he is so handsome and enterprising" -- followed by an equally informative and explicit quatrain: "Here's the Jew, recognizable to all, the biggest scoundrel in the whole kingdom. He thinks he's wonderful, and he's horrible." The engravings are more astute: the German is a Scandinavian, eighteen-year-old athlete, plainly portrayed as a worker; the Jew is a dark Turk, obese and middle-aged. Another sophistic feature is that the German is clean-shaven and the Jew, while bald, is very hairy. (It is well known that German Jews are Ashkenazim, copper-haired Slavs. In this book they are presented as dark half-breeds so that they'll appear to be the exact opposite of the blond beasts. Their attributes also include the permanent use of a fez, a rolled cigar, and ruby rings.
Another engraving shows a lecherous dwarf trying to seduce a young German lady with a necklace. In another, the father reprimands his daughter for accepting the gifts and promises of Solly Rosenfeld, who certainly will not make her his wife. Another depicts the foul body odor and shoddy negligence of Jewish butchers. (How could this be, with all the precautions they take to make meat kosher?) Another, the disadvantages of being swindled by a lawyer, who solicits from his clients a constant flow of flour, fresh eggs, and veal cutlets. After a year of this, the clients have lost their case but the Jewish lawyer "weighs two hundred and forty pounds." Yet another depicts the opportune expulsion of Jewish professors s a relief for the children. "We want a German teacher," shout the enthusiastic pupils, "a joyful teacher who knows how to play with us and maintain order and discipline. We want a German teacher who will teach us common sense." It is difficult not to share such aspiration.
What can one say about such a book? Personally I am outraged, less for Israel's sake than for Germany's, less for the offended community than for the offensive nation. I don't know if the world can do without German civilization, but I do know that its corruption by the teachings of hatred is a crime.
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["A Pedagogy of Hatred" was copied verbatim from Borges's Selected Non-Fictions (Eliot Weinberger, ed.), a collection which won the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Suzanne Jill Levine translated this piece. The illustrations are copied from the link to Trau keinem Fuchs.]