Discussing Prez Bush’s “roadmap to peace,” the United Arab Emirate’s “Gulf News” characteristically lamented that the Palestinians are oppressed because the Israelis have taken away their lack of freedom of movement while omitting the obvious context regarding the Palestinian’s passion for blowing up unarmed civilians. To illustrate their take on the Israelis they referred to the following joke:
Three Palestinian men are held at a military checkpoint. When the soldier asks the first one where he is from, he responds, “Nablus”, and the soldier orders him to stand to the side and hold his shirt up. The second one responds, “Jenin”, and is also ordered to stand to the side with his shirt up. The third one responds, “Ramallah”, to which the soldier says: “Here, hold my gun while I question these two.” ;j
Why would someone from Ramallah be considered less threatening than Nablus or Jenin? I don’t get it. Offhand it seems asinine. Any help?
Ramallah is widely held to be a hotbed of Palestinian “quasi-sympathizers” who, according to the Zionist handlers, believe in a diverse, unified, integrated West Bank. Also, it’s a town under a pretty serious lockdown by Israeli forces. (All aggressive Ramallahans have been detained or – gulp – killed outright. Similar to the ghettos in Europe under Hitler, only in this case, anyone who’s left standing is a friend of the Israelis.)
Punchline: The soldier would gladly hand his own gun to a guy from Ramallah while he beat all hell out of the other two.
Ramallah has been under lockdown since 1996, so news is hard to come by via the Web. I have hard news from back then from New York Times, Le Monde and Manchester Guardian Weekly. In short, Ramallah has been systematically sanitized.
First I must thank you for the explanation of the joke. Second, I must question the strangely limited scope of your Hitler/Israel comparison.
There may be some strong superficial simularities between the Jewish ghettos under Hitler and the Palestinians under the Israelis but aren’t you leaving out whale of a lot of contradictory context? Like for example, isn’t the reason the Jewish ghetto situation under Hitler was the way it was was because Hitler just had a real bug up his posterior and basically wanted to kill all the Jews whereas the Israelis have the Palestinians bottled up because they don’t like having their unarmed civilians killed by Palestinian terrorists? Your not accusing the Israelis of trying to exterminate the Palestinians, are you?
I’m not much of a fan of either the Israelis or the Palestinians but to treat the two situations as if they are equivalent is kinda out there even if it is a popular notion throughout much of the world.
By the by, I should mention that I’ll be leaving for vacation in just a few so if someone sez anything to respectfully argue with me or rebuke me and I don’t respond it’s probably because I haven’t seen it.