For Once

[posted with Callimachus]

I'm on the side of corporate Disney.

The Daily News revealed this week that Hamas' Al-Aqsa TV station began running the new children's series in April. Called "Tomorrow's Pioneers", it features the life-size clone of Mickey Mouse named "Farfur".

Farfur speaks in a squeaky voice and wears a tuxedo with tails and a red bow tie. He tells youngsters to drink their milk and pray, but also sings about kids arming themselves with AK-47s and striving for world domination "under Islamic leadership".

UPI (yes, it still exists) has more:

"We will win, Bush!" Farfur sang on one show. "We will win, Condoleezza. We will win, Olmert. We will win, Sharon!"

He finished by joking, "Ah, Sharon is dead." Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has been in a coma for months.

Farfur reminds children to drink milk and to pray daily. But he also suggests that they have more difficult religious duties.

"I remind you that Al-Aqsa and the prisoners are a responsibility on our shoulders, and Allah will ask us on Resurrection Day what we gave for their sake," he said, referring to the Al-Aqsa Mosqe in Jerusalem and Palestinian prisoners in Israel.

Farfur's sidekick, a little girl named Saraa, also instructs children in their religious and political duty, the group said. Children call in to recite poems, like one girl named Rafah who concluded, "We who do not know fear, we are the predators of the forest."

And according to the ANI story:

They sing songs with lyrics like "We will destroy the chair of the despots, so they will taste the flame of death." A child named Rafah was recently praised for calling in to sing about an AK-47.

That's just goofy.