PALESTINIANS CYNICALLY EXPLOIT KIDS IN ARAFAT'S 'CHILDREN'S CRUSADE'
Thursday,October 26,2000
By ROD DREHER

THE Children's Crusade of 1212 is remembered today as one of history's cruelest and most absurd examples of how adults will sacrifice children's lives on the altar of religious fervor and political ambition. That year, inspired by alleged child visionaries, two armies of children set out from Europe in an attempt to retake the Holy Land from the Muslims. Tens of thousands of French and German families allowed their little boys (and some little girls) to set out for Palestine, convinced God would lead the innocents to triumph in the righteous cause. Even the pope told them to go home, to no avail. Most died of disease, hunger or drowning at sea. The few survivors were taken prisoner by the Muslims and sold into slavery. Today, we find it unthinkable that parents would put their children at this kind of risk. Not so the Palestinians, who with a medieval sense of the value of their kids' lives, and a 21st-century sense of public relations, send their young out daily to provoke Israeli guns. Often these boys function as a rock-throwing shield behind which stand grown men - profiles in courage, all right - throwing Molotov cocktails and firing rifles. When deaths inevitably result, the Palestinians claim the dead kids as innocent martyrs, dispatched gloriously to heaven by the Zionist infidel's bullets. And each child's body, when shown on TV throughout the Arab world and the West, is a formidable propaganda weapon. "The impression one gets by seeing the way the Palestinians are presenting it to the international community is that Israeli soldiers are going around looking for children and shooting them," says Alan Baker, an international lawyer who serves as legal adviser to the Israeli foreign ministry. Absurd, says Baker, a top Israeli peace negotiator who helped draft the rules of engagement for Israeli soldiers. Israeli soldiers are only authorized to use lethal force in life-threatening situations. But when children are deliberately sent into a war zone for the purpose of acting as shock troops, inevitably some will die. The grown-ups who run Palestinian society don't seem to care that international law and common decency demand that children not be used as combatants in war. "I told the Palestinians we were negotiating with that no matter how justified they thought their cause was, for God's sake, please keep their children home," Baker says. But the destruction of Israel has been drilled into the kids' heads at home and at school. The Oslo Agreements called for both sides to prepare their people psychologically for peace, in particular schoolchildren through textbooks. But textbooks used in Palestinian Authority schools in the post-Oslo period have not even included Israel on maps. An Ariel Center for Policy Research analysis on contemporary Palestinian schoolbooks concluded that: "Israel is systematically demonized, delegitimized and dehumanized, and the texts selected to educate the children leave no doubt as to the total rejection of the Jews and of Israel, now and in the future." With a poisonous ration of holy war and hate force-fed to children by adults, the wonder is not that these kids hit the streets prepared to kill and die in Yasser Arafat's Children's Crusade.