This is a cross post by Edmund Standing
‘Bristol school sends postcards to Gaza’, reports the Viva Palestina website:
Students at the City Academy School in Bristol have been writing POSTCARDS TO GAZA. On Monday 30 th November, they were handed to the convoy which will deliver them to a school in Gaza. The youngsters also donated boxes of stationery together with sacks of cuddly toys.
Dr Ray Priest , Principal says: “ Our young people, of all faiths, have been enthusiastic about the Viva Palestina convoy right from the start. We all feel that no children anywhere should suffer like those in Gaza, Palestine. ”
Who else might have been ‘enthusiastic about the Viva Palestina convoy right from the start’?
Well, here’s what happened last time:
As George Galloway handed money to Hamas he stated: ‘This is not charity. This is not charity. This is not charity. This is politics’.
And what is Hamas’s record like when it comes to education?
If you’re a toddler or a primary aged child, Hamas teaches you Islamic supremacism, jihad, and the virtues of becoming a child soldier:
If you’re a teacher and you don’t toe the Hamas line, don’t expect any job security. From August 2008:
The ruling Hamas movement has replaced hundreds of striking teachers with its own supporters, purging Gaza’s education system of its political rivals and deepening its control of the coastal territory.
The labour strife has disrupted the public school system at the start of the academic year and added to the misery in Gaza, which has suffered from international isolation and Israeli economic sanctions since Hamas violently seized power last year.
During the takeover, Hamas routed forces loyal to the rival Fatah movement. The local teachers’ union, one of the last remaining Fatah strongholds in Gaza, called its strike this week to protest the transfers of dozens of educators to new schools. It said Hamas forced the transfers to give its supporters key posts in the education system.
Hamas denied this, but then installed hundreds of new teachers almost immediately after the strike began.
“Anybody who left their job will not be allowed to return,” said the Hamas education minister, Mohammed Askoul.
“They have become irrelevant and cannot be trusted anymore as educators.” He estimated 2,000 teachers have been replaced. About 9,000 teachers work in Gaza’s public schools.
The move ensures Gaza’s education system will now be stacked with Hamas loyalists. While the group has said it would not impose its strict Islamic views on society, its control of the classrooms is likely to change the tone of instruction and create more sympathy for the group’s ideology among the territory’s 250,000 public school students.
A year later, Hamas made it very clear what they don’t want children to be learning about:
Hamas condemned the United Nations Sunday, saying it planned to teach Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip about the Holocaust… Branding the Nazi genocide of the Jews “a lie invented by the Zionists,” the Islamist movement which runs the Gaza Strip wrote in an open letter to a senior U.N. official that he should withdraw plans for a new history book in U.N. schools.
Hamas teaches jihad, Islamic supremacism, and anti-Semitism to children, and encourages them to become child soldiers and suicide bombers. It fires teachers and replaces them with its own supporters, and wants to stop Palestinian children from knowing about the Holocaust, which it calls a ‘lie’.
The last time Viva Palestina rolled into town, Galloway handed money to Hamas.
No British school should be supporting this organisation.