The Muppets Try To Make Friends In Ramallah

nytimes.com:

This season's episodes of "Shara'a Simsim," the Palestinian version of the global "Sesame Street" franchise, were filmed in a satellite campus of Al-Quds University, a ramshackle four-story concrete structure that houses the school's media department and a small local television station. The building sits in an upscale neighborhood on the outskirts of the West Bank city of Ramallah, not far from the edge of the Israeli settlement Psagot. Like many structures on the West Bank, the Al-Quds building seems to be simultaneously under construction and decaying into a ruin. Some walls are pocked with bullet holes, from when the Israeli Army occupied the building for 19 days in 2001, during the second intifada. In another life, the building was a hotel, and the balconies out front where TV crews and students take smoking breaks overlook the crumbling shell of its swimming pool.

Read the whole story: nytimes.com

Comments

[MosheDayanHero]

Is Farfel is coming out of retirement to greet the Western infidels?

[Two Cents]

I *very much* respect the producers of "Sesame Street" and wish them success in Ramallah (and everywhere else in the world :o).

[TheLonelyGod]

Better than "Tomorrow's Pioneers" by a long shot.

[Ventoi]

"Some houses are brick and some houses are stick...

but wherever you go...

you will hear someone say...

Come over to my house...come over to play"

Dr. Seus books.


I get the cowering under the table...
I get the fighter jet analogy...
I am happy to see the white dove...
I don't know if they could not make the dove happier...
if they could not leave the violence to the streets...
and represent it without showing the blood..

when the children are older...
someone can draw the inferences

let them be children as children

I am glad the inferences had to wait.

[Khirad]

Me too. It starts with the young. Some are probably only too familiar with such scenes. Let them have some semblance of a childhood. I wish this project more success.

[jajenkins]

I disagree.

Gaza's children spent last Christmas being bombarded with missiles and chemical weapons. Their schools were destroyed. Last year, a number of Gazans drowned in sewage during the night when their treatment plant gave out during an Israeli rationing of the electricity supply and rivers of s--t literally ran down the street.

When you are living in a large open-air prison, with no clean water, bombs falling on you and your neighbours are drowning in faeces, learning to count to twelve in Spanish (Sesame Street's contribution to my own personal education during my cossetted childhood in Edmonton) isn't going to cut it.

The programme has to speak to the children's experiences. If it doesn't, they have no reason to watch. Escapism is for children who don't live under a sky that could explode around them at any moment.

[Ventoi]

Oscar.

I may be able to get back and look at this now.