Young Palestinians aren’t interested in Pokemon any more; instead they idolize mass murderers.

Saleh has six of the passport-sized medallions engraved with images of the local heroes — gunmen and suicide bombers killed in attacks on Israelis. Some boys have many more. If you’re a teen boy in Balata without one hanging around your neck, you are distinctly behind the times.

“I used to have half a bag full of Pokemon stickers but I threw them all away,” said Saleh, sitting in the house of his cousin, Jihad, a recent suicide bomber whose picture is becoming hot property among teenage boys in Balata. “For me they’re not important these days.”

Here’s one of the adults who sells this death porn to children:

“In the old days they [the boys] used to collect pictures to make them happy, like “Titanic” pictures,” said Hameez, 57, a shopkeeper in Balata who sells medallions of the martyrs for a shekel (about 22 cents) apiece. “In this situation kids are deprived of their childhood needs. They should be in amusement parks. It’s worse than sad. … As long as there is no solution to the problem they will keep their minds on martyrs and martyrdom. If peace prevails, they’ll go back to the playgrounds.”

Not a single iota of morality or insight here; Hameez the death merchant seems to think they can just turn this kind of death worship on and off at will. “Give us peace and a generation of brainwashed violent monsters will magically change back into normal fun-loving children!”

And it doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that peddling this filth to children might be slightly detrimental to the cause of peace.

In Nablus, adjacent to Balata, one store is producing deluxe medallions, using a computer scanner and a laser engraver to transfer images of the dead gunmen onto plastic that sell for eight shekels — about $1.80. Boys save up all their money to buy one. Essam Kanazeh, 29, and his partner Sameh Taktuk, 35, bought the engraver a year ago to make sports plaques. “We discovered that it would work for martyrs’ necklaces and now most of the work, if not all, is the work on the necklaces,” Kanazeh said.

Their first order was early this year for 1,000 images of Raed Karmi, a leader of the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades from Tulkarem assassinated by Israel in retaliation for militia attacks. The trend spread rapidly.

Raed Karmi: a man who kidnapped and slaughtered civilians, a cold-blooded serial killer. Hero to Palestinians.

Oh… and in case you’re still not convinced that Islam is a religion of peace:

Kanazeh said he believes the necklaces have religious resonance with the Muslim practice of rolling printed Koranic verses into scrolls for lockets around the neck.

(Via Michele.)