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From Aesop’s Hare to Mr. Toad, children’s stories and fables have usually had the dual purpose of calming little kids down and teaching them something about cultural morality. The tortoise won the race thanks to his perseverance, Rumplestiltskin lost what should have been his because of his reckless bragging and the third little pig, who built out of brick, didn’t get eaten because he adapted to the modern industrial method of living or something. But children’s stories have come a long way since the days of yore.
Television and the internet have drastically reshaped the way that we sedate children. Whilst you probably shouldn’t give your four year-old child beer or whiskey you can turn on a television. Unlike the tortoise and the hare, television stories do not need to withstand the levels of retelling as Aesop’s Fables have. Instead, they are inherently disposable: used and replaced, over and over again. Without this, children’s entertainment would not be the lucrative industry that it is. It is a consequence that moral content is just not as important/marketable as pure entertainment (normally in the form of rapid movements and bright colours.) Additionally, parents do not have anywhere near the control over what their children learn about when watching television as they would were they reading books with them.
When it comes to the programs themselves, we take most as being innocuous and inoffensive. “They wouldn’t tell children bad things. That wouldn’t be allowed!” we think. And for the most part, I see no evidence to believe otherwise. The only possible person who might disagree is American uber-conservative Ann Coulter who accuses Sesame Street of promoting liberal hegemony and homosexuality. For the most part, we do not think about what these shows are teaching children. We take it for granted that they have messages within them. Praise of Blue Peter does not usually fall along the lines of “Oh yeah, I let Jimmy watch it because it really helps foster a liberal creative attitude within him.” Instead it just shuts him up and keeps him from stealing his sister’s dolls.
With this relationship to children’s programming it can come as a shock when we see programs that break from this formula of inoffensive niceness. One particular example that has caused understandable degrees of outrage in The US and Israel is Hamas TV’s “The Pioneers of Tomorrow”. The program was brought to the West’s attention two years ago by the Mossad-founded agency the Middle East Media Research Institute. The program itself, widely spread and translated for YouTube viewing pleasure is a truly bizarre mix of sketches and phone-ins to a live studio. There have been a string of main characters: Farfour, a Mickey Mouse look-a-like, who was murdered by Mossad for refusing to give them the key to Tel-Aviv. Nahoul the Bee who died when the Israeli blockade prevented him from getting to an Egyptian Hospital. And only last month Assud, aka the Jew Eating Rabbit, who died when the Al Aqsa TV station was hit in the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. The whole thing is a strange mix of the normal bright colours and comic voices of Western children’s entertainment but with more than an overtone of extreme anti-Westernism. I still struggle to see how it mixes with breakfast cereal on Saturday mornings.
Closer to home, but similar, is the BNP’s attempt at entertaining children; the YouTube sensation-in-waiting Billy Brit. Unlike The Pioneers of Tomorrow, this is less entertainment and more just an attempt to shove a message down the throat of the viewer. Billy is an eight year old British boy. Yet as it never even verges near entertainment, it is impossible to see it as anything other than a ginger puppet with an old man’s hand stuck up its arse. Billy tells us the story about they took away his ball because he was being a racist. Now he is “sick and tired of it all!” There is too much “political correctness this and racism that…. either you grown ups sort this country out, or us kids will!” Fortunately for planet Earth, no child will ever buy this bullshit. Even the plots of the episodes don’t make any sense. In episode two, Billy is captured by anti-fascists, who then turn out to be the BNP, and then they give him a magazine about how racism affects white people…however he is still tied up in cords. He then goes and forms a band which plays “The Reds Smell”. It is at this point that no one gives a fuck, and it is all left alone.
Whilst it is easy to get angry at both of these examples of ideological entertainment aimed at children, I don’t think there is much point. For a start it is impossible to gauge how children are actually going to react to this stuff without some kind of focus group research that no one is ever going to do. So instead it is better to take this as an opportunity to see the world from the side of those that we disagree with. In both cases they are not defending their positions, but explaining them. Whoever it was that had his hand up Billy’s butt clearly thinks that being a bigot is fine. However, this case is of little importance, namely because no one watches Billy. The Pioneers of Tomorrow on the other hand can be seen as a genuinely threatening programme aimed at inciting racial hatred. Yet, were I a Palestinian television producer whose job it was to explain to children what the hell was going in politics when bombs were falling everywhere, maybe putting adults in Mickey Mouse costumes would seem a good way to do it. And oddly, thanks to YouTube, the stories of Farfour are being told over and over again, and we are searching for morality within them. “And as the little mouse was punched to death in a sweaty office, he died happy knowing he did the best he could. The end.”
* Unfortunately since publishing this, the aforementioned Billy Brit videos have been taken down. It is a tragedy as far as we are concerned. However, there are some new ones where the little puppet recites nationalist poetry.