Madam, - Contrary to the statement in This Week They Said (May) regarding the Mickey Mouse character on Palestinian TV, this show has not been taken off the air. The Hamas-run Al-Aqsa TV broadcasts the show every Friday. The latest episode shows Farfour, the Mickey Mouse character, crying in class when he is discovered to have cheated in a test. He then gives the excuse that the Jews have demolished his home, making it impossible for him to find his notebooks.
The programme goes well beyond encouraging children to fight Israel. The soft-voiced presenter intervenes to tell the children what a wonderful world it will be for the Jews and Christians when they come under Islamic rule. This is to happen not only in all of former Palestine - no talk of two-state solutions here! - but in Al-Andalus (Spain and Portugal) also. This modest statement of aims compares with a previous episode when the children were told that the entire world will one day be ruled by Islam.
Such indoctrination is mild compared with other instances of child abuse in the Palestinian media such as the showing of five-year-olds dressed in suicide bomb vests and the teaching of hatred of Jews as "apes and pigs" cursed by Allah. And this promoted by a regime which many in the EU are clamouring to have officially recognised, something which the Norwegian government has already done! - Yours, etc,
DERMOT MELEADY,
Clontarf,
Dublin 3.