Screen shot of two children of PA TV reciting poem referring to Jews as “barbaric monkeys” and “wretched pigs.” Photo: Youtube/PMW.

Palestinians have been stabbing random Israelis for weeks, and on cue, dozens of foreign commentators have been trotting out the usual “root causes” arguments to explain the Palestinians’ actions: Israeli settlements, the Palestinians’ collective despair, the Netanyahu government’s policies, provocative actions by “Jewish extremists,” etc.

Then again, we could just as well blame Farfour.

Farfour — a bellicose and excitable Mickey Mouse clone with a whiny voice — was a costumed character on a popular Palestinian children’s educational program, “Tomorrow’s Pioneers,” on Hamas-run Al-Aqsa TV.

Farfour wasn’t content with some innocent horseplay to entertain the kiddos. Instead, the creepy rodent taught Palestinian children about the glories of jihad. In one episode he exhorted “tomorrow’s pioneers” (i.e. future jihadists) to liberate “all of Palestine” (i.e. the land of Israel) from the Jewish usurpers. “Beloved Palestine taught us to be soldiers of Allah,” a young boy sang as Farfour cheered. “Oh Jerusalem it’s the time of death and we will fight a war.”

During a subsequent episode, Farfour — who liked to rhapsodize about the AK-47 assault rifle to Palestinian children — came to an untimely death “at the hands of the criminals, the murderers of innocent children.” They were Israelis, yes.

Farfour was replaced by equally spiteful characters who carried on demonizing Israelis: Nahoul the bee and Assoud the rabbit. Assoud threatened to “finish off the Jews and eat them” before he, too, wound up murdered by the Jews. On his deathbed he urged Palestinian children to avenge him by “liberating” Haifa and Tel Aviv.

Were the Palestinian stabbers Ahmed and Hassan Manasra, 13 and 15 respectively, fans of Farfour and his friends? In any event, Al Aqsa TV‘s mascots would no doubt have been supportive of these Palestinian cousins, who recently stabbed two Israelis in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Pisgat Ze’ev. One of them was a 13-year-old boy who was out on a ride on his bicycle and barely survived. The boy was knifed simply for being a Jew.

“I went there to stab Jews,” Ahmed, who was hit by a car while fleeing the scene, told Israeli police. Hassan was shot dead when, with a knife in hand, he tried to charge an Israeli policeman in an incident captured on CCTV cameras.

The two cousins’ juvenile murder spree is hardly an isolated case. Many of the Palestinian terrorists have been in their teens. They’ve come of age in a social milieu where many Palestinians’ entire identity continues to be defined by their opposition to the Jewish State. In schools, in mosques, in public broadcasts, and at home, Palestinian children are told incessantly that they’re the only rightful inheritors of all the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean, and that their divinely mandated mission is to drive the Zionist usurpers back into the sea in a river of blood. The Jews, they’re told, are genocidal interlopers in Palestine with no legitimate historical and moral claims to any inch of it.

It’s this toxic hand-me-down brew of jihadism, denialism and self-imposed victimhood that has poisoned the minds of many young Palestinians. Thus, just as their elders have been for decades, so too many Palestinian youths are eager to murder Israeli Jews, while other Palestinians, young and old, cheer them on. Here’s how a Palestinian teenager, who looked to be around 14, responded the other day when asked by a TV reporter how he felt about the recent stabbings of Israelis. “It makes me happy that someone from my people, from Palestine, went to stab Jews,” the boy explained. “We taught the Jews a lesson!”

They certainly did. This is what that lesson is: yet another generation of Palestinians has been brainwashed into a murderous hatred of Jews.