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The Palestinian Authority tells children that a coldblooded killer should inspire them to learn to read.
By: JNS.org/Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik, Palestinian Media Watch
On Oct. 13, 2015, Palestinian terrorists Baha Alyan and Bilal Ghanem boarded a bus in Jerusalem and attacked passengers with a gun and a knife, murdering three people. Alyan was shot and killed by an Israeli security guard, while Ghanem was wounded and later imprisoned.
Before deciding to become a terrorist and murder Israelis, Baha Alyan once organized a “human reading chain” in Jerusalem.
Despite Alyan being a murderer—or perhaps precisely because Alyan became a murderer of Israelis—the Palestinian Authority is now using him as a role model to encourage reading.
In the company of Mahmoud Alyan, the father of terrorist Baha Alyan, P.A. Minister of Culture Ehab Bessaiso launched the “National Reading Day events” earlier this year.
Referring to terrorist Alyan’s reading chain in 2014, the P.A. minister said that because “martyrs and prisoners” had been among the initiators of that chain, the P.A. Ministry of Culture has declared March 16 National Reading Day “out of loyalty to their memory and the Palestinian national struggle, and out of our absolute belief that culture is resistance.”
In his speech, the murderer’s father said his son would have appreciated the events, declaring, “If he [Baha] was here for a moment, perhaps he would be happy and smile, but he would say that Palestine is reading, and when Palestine reads, victory is certainly near. This is Baha’s message and the message of the martyrs.”
In the Qalqilya and Tulkarem districts, two “human reading chains” were established in “honor of” terrorist murderer Alyan. The chains were called “Baha Is an Idea” and “The Idea Will Not Die.” While the official purpose of the reading chains was to encourage Palestinians to read, the slogan, however, could easily be understood to refer to the “idea” of becoming a “martyr” by murdering Israelis the way Alyan did.
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