American kids may have grown up with Mr. Rogers telling them, “You are special just the way you are,” but for a child in Gaza there was Farfour—a plushy, genocidal TV mouse screaming “Kill! Kill! Kill!”
Farfour, a costumed Mickey Mouse knockoff, was co-host of a kid’s program called “Tomorrow’s Pioneers” which aired on Hamas-affiliated television station Al-Aqsa TV from April 2007 to October 2009.
For anyone wondering how the ideologically-crazed fanatical fighters of Hamas came to be, the show offers some answers.
Billed as educational programming to teach Islamic values to schoolchildren — much like a “Sesame Street” or “Barney & Friends” for the Middle East — “Tomorrow’s Pioneers” was a colorful, sing-song blood orgy celebrating Jew hatred and martyrdom.
The kids who grew up watching it are now fighting age men — like those who carried out the October 7 massacre of nearly 1,200 Israelis and abducted 251 hostages.
On the show, Farfour promised the kids of Gaza that together they’d oversee Islamic world domination and liberate Jerusalem from the “murderers.” He mimicked grenade-throwing and shooting an AK-47.
Mia Bloom, professor of communication and Middle East studies at Georgia State University, remembers “Tomorrow’s Pioneers” well from her research into terror tactics.
“It’s a constant stream of horrific propaganda that is almost impossible for a child to break out of. And so the kids grow up thinking that every Israeli should be killed because every Israeli is bad and evil,” she told the Post.
The show’s co-host, Gaza child star Saraa Barhoum — around ten years old when the show first aired and the daughter of a university professor mother and a Hamas spokesman father — said in a 2007 interview she wanted to be either a doctor or a martyr when she grew up.
She also launched a singing career, recording pop songs with lyrics like, “raise your sail for the sailors, and let your lighthouse illuminate the sea of blood.”
“There’s a concept in criminology called a deviant peer. If I’m a recruiter—if I’m trying to get kids—I’m not going to use a 75-year-old man. I’m going to use a cool kid who’s maybe a few years older,” Bloom says.
“Unfortunately, it’s a common thing that happens within the child abuse space.”
Disney, notorious for swooping in on copyright infringement, was aware of Farfour’s Mickey Mouse likeness but chose to remain silent. They didn’t have to for long: the network murdered Farfour on air during the first season. In the scene, the terror Mouse is being interrogated by IDF soldiers who beat him to death after he refuses to hand over documents.
“[Hamas’s] argument would be: ‘These kids are already traumatized — this kid doesn’t have a house, lost a sibling — the trauma is already there and the trauma is all around them.’
“By traumatizing the children through the ‘Pioneers’ show, Hamas basically controlled the narrative and they could direct the trauma, instead of having this vague generalized trauma across society,” Bloom, author of the book “Small Arms: Children and Terrorism” said.
On the show, Farfour was replaced by a bloodthirsty bumblebee with a squeaky voice named Nahoul, who preached to the kiddos: “We will liberate Al-Aqsa from the filth of the criminal Jews,” referring to the fictional town where the characters lived, and “revenge upon the enemies of God, the murderers of the prophets.”
In season two, Nahoul gets sick. The Israeli authorities won’t issue him a travel permit to receive medical treatment in Egypt and he dies. Nahoul is replaced by his rabbit brother, Assoud, a mangy Bugs Bunny knockoff, who tells the tykes at home in one episode: “A rabbit is a term for a bad person and coward. And I, Assoud, will finish off the Jews and eat them.”
In another episode Assoud is tempted by Satan to steal money from his father and sentenced to have his hand cut off, “as the Prophet Mohammed commanded.” Assoud later dies in an Israeli strike and is replaced by a bear.
In another episode, children were invited into the studio to tell the hosts of their wish to die as martyrs, and then sing a song about it.
“This kind of layered trauma that you’re deliberately exposing young Palestinian children to was not just a form of child abuse, but a long-term manipulation,” Bloom says.
“It relates to October 7th. To have those resources and instead of making things better, you’ve just made things so much worse.”
While little information is publicly known about the estimated 3,000 Hamas fighters who conducted the Oct. 7 slaughter, ages 16-35 are considered “fighting age” for men—meaning many of those combatants grew up watching their favorite plushy woodland creatures get executed by Jews on afterschool television.
“It’s not just the ‘Pioneers’ TV show. It was amplified and reinforced by the textbooks that the children would read in school that demonized Jews and basically referred to Jews as apes and pigs and other dirty animals,” Bloom says.
A 2008 analysis of Palestinian schoolbooks found a passage comparing Jews to “invading snakes.” In popular media, a late 1990s Palestinian magazine article explained that Jews are the actual sons of apes and, due to the shame felt by this, the “Jewish ape Darwin” invented the theory of evolution and applied it to all humans.
Bloom, who has studied genocide, extremist movements, and child soldiers across the world, says it reminds her of the Taliban and ISIS—both of whom held public beheadings and required children of the community to attend.
“It’s not exactly the same because killing Farfour was fake. But it’s this idea of exposing children to obscene levels of violence. And it creates a preparedness to justify violence and to choose violence over other options.”