We are coming up on the 18th anniversary of the death of Farfour the mouse. And he is strangely more relevant to us now than he ever was in
by Seth Mandel
There was a revealing moment at a congressional hearing on anti-Semitism in elementary-school curricula about a year ago. Rep. Kevin Kiley, a Republican from California, asked Enikia Ford Morthel, the superintendent of the Berkeley Unified School District, about a Berkeley lesson that states: “for some Palestinians, ‘From the River to the Sea’ is a call for freedom and peace.”
Morthel defended the lesson, to which Kiley very reasonably responded: “You put this on a slide in the classroom and then students go around in the halls saying it. I don’t think there’s anything surprising about that.”
Quite so. Children in America are being taught to repeat genocidal slogans about Jews.
A couple of months ago, I wrote about another such moment—this one at a state hearing involving the infamous Massachusetts Teachers Association and various anti-Semitic lesson plans. One was a grade-school workbook for kids in kindergarten and first grade called Handala’s Return, which featured on its front page a map of Israel and Gaza and the West Bank all labeled “Palestine.” Israel did not exist in this lesson plan. Handala explains that “Zionists” took her family’s home by force and won’t let her back even though she has the key. The students are then asked to draw their own home and key, presumably to imagine their own sadness were the Jews to come and take their home away.
At the end of the workbook—again, designed for children about five or six years old—is a page titled “Help Handala Free Palestine.” The students are instructed to write on the page what they will do, specifically, to “raise funds for the children of Palestine” and what they will chant at a “Palestine protest.”
There have been endless examples, documented here and elsewhere, of anti-Semitism in American grade-school lesson plans, but I chose these two because they specifically shine a light on the fact that young children here are being drafted as child soldiers into “the Palestinian struggle.” They are not simply taught bad things about Jews; they are taught to act on them from a very young age.
Will American children get their own Farfour, too? Inevitably. America’s Farfour-ward slide is well under way.
Billed as educational programming to teach Islamic values to schoolchildren, “Tomorrow’s Pioneers” was a colorful, sing-song blood orgy cele
By: Chadwick Moore
Published: Aug 13, 2025
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.
[ Farfour, a homicidal Mickey Mouse ripoff who advocated martyrdom and Islamic world domination, was murdered on air by IDF soldiers in a skit. ]
[ Criminologists have identified the tactic of using “the deviant peer” to recruit children into abusive situations. ]
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.
[ Nahoul, a killer bee, preached to the school kids: “We will liberate Al-Aqsa from the filth of the criminal Jews,” referring to the fictional town where the characters lived. ]
[ Co-host Saraa Barhoum chats with Assoud the bunny, who promises kids, “I will finish off the Jews and eat them.” ]
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 10 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.
[ 11-year-old co-host Saraa Barhoum, who said she wished to be a doctor or a martyr when she grew up, stands outside the Al-Aqsa studio headquarters with producer Hazem Sharawi in 2007. ]
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.’
[ “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,” Middle East expert Bloom says. ]
[ The messages of “Tomorrow’s Pioneers” were reinforced relentlessly in Gaza society, through textbooks, news programs, and magazines. ]
[ Western children’s shows like “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” emphasize teaching tolerance and understanding, while children in 2000s Gaza were taught that Jews are descended from pigs. ]
“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 one episode, Palestinian children joined in for a sing along in-studio welcoming their own death. ]
[ Farfour was the first “Tomorrow’s Pioneers” co-host to be murdered on air. Each of his replacements were killed on screen by Israelis. ]
[ A still from Tomorrow’s Pioneers showing Assoud the bunny and his young co-host. ]
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.”
[ Farfour the jihadi mouse told Hamas children “We will liberate Al-Aqsa,” referring to the mosque in Jerusalem. ]
[ On Oct. 7, 2003 roughly 3,000 Hamas terrorists attacked various points in Israel, killing 1,200 civilians. Many would have grown up watching “Tomorrow’s Pioneers.” ]
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.”
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Although "Tomorrow’s Pioneers" appears to be off the air, it's indicative of what Hamas and Gaza as a whole are. And you can't just blame Hamas either. Don't forget: it's parents who were turning it on and sitting their children down in front of it.
The article presents the "apes and pigs" thing as if it was a uniquely "Palestinian" position. However, it's not.
https://quranx.com/5.59-60
Say, "O People of the Scripture, do you resent us except [for the fact] that we have believed in Allah and what was revealed to us and what was revealed before and because most of you are defiantly disobedient?"
Say, "Shall I inform you of [what is] worse than that as penalty from Allah? [It is that of] those whom Allah has cursed and with whom He became angry and made of them apes and pigs and slaves of Taghut. Those are worse in position and further astray from the sound way."
