No kidding!

TELLY VISION

I'm not sure how many readers know about Al Aqsa's television programme Tomorrow's Pioneers, but having watched some of the episodes through blogs and on Youtube.com, it certainly deserves column space.

On the face of it, the programme looks like any other show for children. Colourful paper cutouts serve as the studio backdrop, there's this adorable little girl, her head neatly covered by a scarf, who serves as an anchor along with Farfur, an anti-Israeli, Mickey Mouse look-alike who is often seen prancing around, swinging his hands in the air while young callers (the majority of them, at least in the episodes that I watched, weren't over 12 years old) sing and talk into their phones.

So far, so good. But turn on the volume and simply hear the chit-chat and you know that the organisers behind the show (Palestinian Media Watch, in this case) are serving a dangerous concoction of blasphemous dialogues, inane scenes and ludicrous exchanges between characters on the sets and the young callers.

I caught some portions of the very first episode that was aired on April 16, 2007 which was an absolute shocker. It was an exchange between Saraa (the young anchor) and a 13-year-old caller who wanted to sing a song on the theme of "surrender".

She began singing till Saraa interrupted her, "No, don't sing such a song. We don't surrender to the enemy. We fight back." The subsequent episodes (which I managed to view on Youtube) had another discussion between the kid anchor and the Mickey Mouse clone which began somewhat like this: Farfur: "We, tomorrow's pioneers, will restore to this nation its glory, we will liberate Iraq, and we will liberate the Muslim countries, invaded by murderers." To which Saraa replied: "Yes, we will resist and protect against the Zionist occupation."

Tomorrow's Pioneers, with its controversial script being the programme's mainstay, despite its "perverse intentions" (as most critics are describing it), is critical especially to the times that we are witnessing today. With television reaching almost everyone in different corners of the world, the medium (if one goes even by this programme) ironically has the power to control the minds of audiences to quite a large extent.

Consider this verdict given by a three-year-old girl on one of the episodes of Tomorrow's Pioneers that was aired recently: "We don't like the Jews," she said firmly, "because they are dogs. We will fight them."

The problem, according to me, isn't really with what the girl says (one wonders if she even understands the implications of what she's saying) "" what's disturbing is that someone is obviously prompting her to mouth such statements. So in that sense, it's a programme that's targetted obviously not at children but at adults who are probably shutting their shops and stopping all their other work to catch the episodes of this programme.

Following global criticism from all quarters (Walt Disney's daughter, Diane Disney Miller, called the programme "pure evil... going against the grain of humanity"), the character of Farfur was wiped out in a grisly murder act (an episode shows the cartoon character getting killed by an actor who poses as an Israeli) only to be exchanged by another animated character, Nahool the bee, who encourages viewers to "take the path of martyrdom, the path of the Jihad warriors".

Who said television was sweet and simple?

abhilashaojha@gmail.com