MISTER ROGERS IN A SUICIDE BOMB VEST

Warm and Fuzzy TV, Brought to You by Hamas. (NYT)
Mr. Sharawi, 27, wearing a long black leather coat with a hood over a green suit and tie, fixed with a pin, looks like a straight-and-narrow Sunday school teacher. In fact, he got his start working with children at his mosque while studying geology at Islamic University in Gaza. His hair is parted in the middle, his beard trimmed as neatly as a suburban lawn.

He said the head of Hamas’s radio station spotted him leading children’s games at his mosque and asked him to do a children’s radio show two years ago. The show has become so popular, his appearances at occasional Hamas-sponsored festivals draw as many as 10,000 children at a time.

Mr. Sharawi will not take visitors to see him do his radio broadcast because the studio’s location is a heavily guarded secret. In 2004, an Israeli Apache helicopter fired three rockets into the station’s previous studio not long after Mr. Sharawi and his colleagues had fled.

Everybody involved in the television station is worried about another attack, but Mr. Sharawi said he is ready to die if it comes. “The messengers don’t care if they lose their lives for the sake of revealing the message,” he said.

As he describes it, his television show, which begins in a few weeks, will teach children the basics of militant Palestinian politics...

TIMESWATCH THINKS THE NEW YORK TIMES IS SOFT ON HAMAS:

A Wednesday front-page feature story by Craig Smith from Gaza has the too-cute headline “Warm and Fuzzy TV, Brought to You by Hamas.” Smith visited the studio of a children’s show at a Palestinian TV station owned by Hamas, the anti-Israeli terrorist group responsible for scores of Israeli civilian deaths, including children.

Smith takes the light touch in his introduction: “Hey kids, it's Uncle Hazim time! Hazim Sharawi, whose stage name is Uncle Hazim, is a quiet, doe-eyed young man who has an easy way with children and will soon preside over a children's television show here on which he'll cavort with men in larger-than-life, fake-fur animal suits on the Gaza Strip's newest television station, Al Aksa TV. But Captain Kangaroo this is not. The station, named for Islam's third holiest site, is owned by Hamas, the people who helped make suicide bombing a household term.”

He continues: “The new station is part of the militant Palestinian group's strategy to broaden its role in Palestinian politics and society, much as Hezbollah did in Lebanon. The station began broadcasting terrestrially on Jan. 7, and Hamas is working on a satellite version that would give it an even wider reach, like Hezbollah's Al Manar TV, which is watched throughout the Arab world....It will eventually feature a sort of Islamic MTV, with Hamas-produced music videos using footage from the group's fights with Israeli troops. There will even be a talent search show, a distant echo of ‘American Idol.’”

After that PR for the network, Smith next flatters the host of the children’s show: “Mr. Sharawi, 27, wearing a long black leather coat with a hood over a green suit and tie, fixed with a pin, looks like a straight-and-narrow Sunday school teacher. In fact, he got his start working with children at his mosque while studying geology at Islamic University in Gaza. His hair is parted in the middle, his beard trimmed as neatly as a suburban lawn.”

One of the probing questions the Times asks of this Hamas propagandist? The names of his cartoon sidekicks. “Through it all, Mr. Sharawi will be accompanied by animal-costumed sidekicks to provide comic relief. Hamas will rent the Egyptian-made plush costumes -- a fox, a rabbit, a dog, a bear and a chicken, already gray and matted from wear -- from a production company run by a Hamas supporter who has just emerged from two years in Israeli jails. When asked if the animals will have names, Mr. Sharawi looked slightly nonplussed and said: ‘Bob. Bob the Fox, for example.’”

Only deep into the story does Smith indirectly address the rottenness of Hamas spreading its murderous anti-Israeli propaganda to children while killing Israeli children: “Fingering a string of bright green plastic prayer beads, a pale blue prayer rug lying on the chair beside him, he tries to reconcile Hamas's bloody attacks that kill innocent children with his role as mentor.”

CAMERA has more about the Times’ whitewashing of Hamas.