Singing. Dancing. Smiles all around. It could have been a festival spilling into the streets. But the boys in the photo above are celebrating the recent terrorist attack on America.
It seems unreal: How can someone, especially a child, rejoice over the deaths of up to 6,000 Americans? Experts say the answer is that they have learned to hate.
The children in these photos are Palestinian. Many Palestinians hate the U.S. because it is a friend of their enemy, Israel. And many Palestinian kids know someone who has been hurt or killed in the Israelis and the Palestinian people.
“The Palestinian youth tend to view this last year as Israel and America against them,” says Marc Rosenblum, who runs Americans for Peace Now, which sets up secret meetings between Israeli and Palestinian youth leaders to let them talk about their differences. “They would tell you that it’s the American-built Phantom jets that are dropping bombs and firing missiles at them.”
Hatred is found all over the world, including America. And when children hate, you can blame grown-ups, says Dr. Bennett Leventhal, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Chicago. If you look at news coverage of similar celebrations, Leventhal notes, you’ll find adults celebrating along with the youths–acting as role models for the kids. “Children learn to hate from their parents and from other adults in their lives.”
John Jochem, a clinical psychologist at Provena St. Therese Medical Center in Waukegan, agrees that role models are needed for hate to grow. “Think of how you learned anything, from brushing your teeth to riding a bicycle.”
Jochem says hate spreads through an us-versus-them attitude. “We say, ‘These people are different from me. That’s not me. And since it isn’t me, it’s bad. Because everything in my group is good.’ “
Hate also can be a two-way street. Because the suspected hijackers are Muslim, some people in the U.S. have sought revenge for the recent terrorist attacks by doing mean things to people of Arab descent or the Islamic faith. However, vengeful people are forgetting that everyone except Native Americans is a descendant of immigrants.
“It reminds me of when somebody gets mad at someone, so they kick the dog. They’re just looking for a target,” says Gail Sahar Zucker, a Palestinian-American and a psychology professor at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. “We have to learn to wait for justice and trust our government to do that. Otherwise more innocent people will be hurt.”
Besides, Leventhal adds: “Revenge is never the right thing to do. Attacking people who are innocent is just as bad as what the terrorists have done.”
Leena M., 17, and Sarah R., 17, both of Algonquin, have experienced hatred firsthand in the days since the bombings because of their religious and ethnic backgrounds.
Shortly after the attack, Leena, who is a Muslim, found two messages of hate in her e-mail inbox. “I just read the subjects and deleted them,” she says.
The words were so devastating that she couldn’t bring herself to repeat them. “One had very negative remarks about Islam as a religion, and the other one was anti-Arab,” Leena explains.
Leena was born in the U.S., and her family is from Pakistan. She says her friends at Jacobs High School have been a big help in the last two weeks.
“They keep on asking if my family is OK,” she says. “I really do appreciate it. It shows a lot of understanding and that they care.”
Sarah says most people don’t know she’s of Arab heritage because “I don’t look like it,” so she has heard some kids carelessly say things like “all Arabs should leave.”
“It hurts,” says Sarah, whose dad is from Bahrain, a nation in the Persian Gulf area.
But that hasn’t stopped her from leading Jacobs’ disaster relief effort. Students are raising money for the Red Cross in Operation NYDC. They collected $4,300 at a recent football game.
Sarah says the main emotion of people in the Middle East is sorrow about the attack. “I have relatives in Qatar I’ve been in contact with, and they’re just as sad as anybody else here in the U.S.”
Brian Schoonover, who teaches senior psychology at Loyola Academy in Wilmette, says his students have been asking tough questions since the attacks. One of them is, if people hate, can they change?
“Some of my students said obviously not,” he says. “One student said, ‘My grandfather fought in World War II, and he hates the Japanese.’ But we also talked about how people can change. … Someone they respect a lot can influence them to change. So if you show people in your life what it’s like to be respectful and kind, that could help change the heart of anyone who’s hateful.”
