Gaza Summer Camp, a Time for Fun? - by Stephen M. Flatow

Young boys in Gaza go through military training, running obstacle courses and crawling under barbed wire with what appears to be live fire overhead, in addition to “campers” field-stripping rifles while blindfolded. (BTW, no members of JVP or IfNotNow have applied to undermine the program YH)

Stephen M. Flatow..
JNS.org..
12 August '19..

Many parents of my age remember striving to be able to send their children to summer camp. Now, as grandparents, we see our own children doing the same. I believed then, as I do now, that summer camp is a time when children make new friendships—many of which last into their adult years—grow emotionally and learn what we call “people skills.”

Somewhere in the boxes that accumulated over the years in our basement are videotapes of our five children at summer camp. We see our kids in various activities—playing baseball and basketball, jumping into the pool, holding the rabbits in the “nature shack,” and, the mother of all activities, “color war.”

Color war is a good kind of war; it’s bloodless, unless you bang your nose during a hotly contested rebound under a basketball hoop, and perhaps the most fun part of it is watching your child sing his or her heart out in the song competition. In the end, one team won, the other lost, and the war came to an end. You hope your child comes away with the lesson that competition requires teamwork, and that, in turn, builds character.

Videos have now emerged of children at summer camp practicing for war of a different sort. For instance, from Turkey there’s a video that has gone viral of a teacher prompting a group of young girls in a camp setting by shouting the word yahudiye—Turkish for “to the Jew,” which results in the children responding by raising their fists and shouting “death.”

The video is seemingly so disturbing within Turkey that a member of its parliament has demanded an explanation from the government as to how this could have happened.

Perhaps more chilling than the Turkish episode are the video scenes coming out of Gaza’s summer camps. No basketball contests or visits to the nature shack. No, instead we are treated to young boys going through military training, running obstacle courses and crawling under barbed wire with what appears to be live fire overhead. We are also shown images of these “campers” field-stripping rifles while blindfolded. This is done in all armies to simulate nighttime fighting conditions.


i24

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Summer Camp 2013 - Mostly Terrorist, But a Variety of Flavors

Meir Amit ITIC..
17 June '13..

Overview

1. As in years past, summer camps are held in the Gaza Strip. Most of them are run by Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and operate for more than 100,000 Gazan children and adolescents. Some of the camps are also run by Islamic organizations, women's associations and UNRWA. The campers participate in social activities and receive radical Islamist indoctrination and semi-military training.

2. For Hamas the camps are an important venue for indoctrinating Gazan youth with radical Islamist ideology. Their objective is to foster a cadre of future Hamas supporters and operatives for its military-terrorist wing and its organizational and administrative institutions. The campers learn the themes of "the liberation of Palestine," jihad and "resistance" [i.e., terrorism], the destruction of the State of Israel, the so-called "right of return" and other facets of the movement's anti-Israeli Islamist ideology.

3. Indoctrinating Gazan youth in its summer camps is one aspect of Hamas' broader educational concept of preparing the next generation of Hamas operatives in the de-facto Hamas administration's educational institutions throughout the Gaza Strip. During the 2012-2013 school year Hamas instituted a new curriculum in its schools called Al-Futuwwa, within which tens of thousands of youths receive theoretical and practical military training during their studies.[1]

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They know pictures can be worth a 1,000 words, but fail to understand what their eyes are seeing

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
16 June '13..

Memo to the editors of The Telegraph (UK):

You published the photo below as part of a collection of images entitled "Palestine's young jihadi summer camp" this past Thursday. (It's still online.)

But there's something odd about it that is immediately noticeable to those of us who follow the perverted manipulation of young Palestinian Arabs that is a constant in the life of the Gaza Strip and its terrorist overlords.

The caption you wrote for this photo is

The rescue mission of fallen comrade is stagedPicture: AFP

You can see those words in the closeup we screen-captured just now:

Perhaps your captions editor was having a wishful thinking day. Or maybe the people who match images to Middle East Conflict stories at your news site are just clueless. If so, they're in good company.

What the picture above, along with the other photos appearing with it in photo essay credited to a Gaza-based freelance photographer called Abdel Rahim Khatib, actually depicts is a full-blown summer military camp for little children and teenagers run by the radical terrorist organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It prepares them for killing, kidnapping and other Islamist values.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook.

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Guardian glosses over military training in Gaza camps

Just Journalism
30 July '10

Today’s Guardian reports on the array of summer camps on offer to the children of Gaza, namely those organised by UNRWA, Islamic Jihad and Hamas.

In ‘Playing politics: summer camp for Gaza's children,’ Middle East correspondent Harriet Sherwood makes clear the differences between the programme provided by the United Nations, which aims ‘to give the children a sense of fun and normality’ and ‘keep them away from troubles and politics’ and those run by the militant organisations, which teach that ‘Anyone who makes concessions on Palestine is making concessions on the Qur'an.’

The journalist includes quotes from a camp organiser, saying, ‘We believe in the right of resistance and we are against peace negotiations’ and explains that the camps ‘are seen by militant organisations as an opportunity to influence a generation of children’.

However, the article then euphemistically states that militants intend to ‘inculcate a duty to resist the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land’. This underplays the fact that these camps have been used to train children on how to conduct terrorist attacks against Israelis. Even when describing the militant activities in the camp, Sherwood does not explicitly discuss this controversial issue.

For example, she includes ‘military-style marching and exercises’ and ‘shooting as a sport’ among the activities the Palestinian children engage in, but she makes no comment on the implications, when there is plenty of evidence to suggest that this training leads directly to violence.

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