Sure, but we’re not nearly at the stage where one can examine a DNA sample and say “Ding! Palestinian!” A weapon designed to target Palestinians wouldn’t get all of them and could easily target large segments of the Jewish population, plus random members of the surrounding population and, indeed, persons worldwide.
Frankly, it’d be easier to just use conventional weapons to engage in good ol’ wholesale slaughter or, as I’ve suggested numerous times, teach every Palestinian woman to read, which hopefully improve their standards of living and reduce their birth rates.
I’m way out of my depth re molecular differences in Israeli & Palestinian diets and how this might relate to pathogens, but I’d suspect the diets of Israeli Jews (many of whom aren’t all that observant dietary wise) and Palestinians, are a lot more similar than dissimilar in any meaningful way.
That would explain why the mostestest orthodox rabbis living are pissed about the popularity of falafel stands in Israel (look it up your own damned selves). A little modification of the chickpea genome and everybody who eats them is dead.
Of course, that is nothing like what the OP describes, which was probably originally an April Fools joke that only he didn’t get. I mean, dude, you’ve been here five years AND paying for it for two and you STILL don’t have a clue? Here’s a buck. Buy one.
But all you’d need would be one critical difference. Sure, you’d probably spend years looking for it in the solitude of your island volcano laboratory, but if you want to take over the world, you’ve got to do the grunt work.
That’s what I love about this board…even when we’ve piled on for 40-something posts, we can still act indignant, surprised even, at the level of paranoid suspicion on the internet.
Let’s get over it and find a GD thread worth shouting over, hm?
Without even getting into the whole “Are Jews an ethnic group, a religion, or both?” can of worms, we can safely say that the Holocaust was an act of genocide:
In other news, Israel also has a long standing program designed to place closet-monsters and under-the-bed-monsters in every single Palestinian home. This massive monster attack is a clear violation of the 4th Geneva Convention.
Well, there was a short story published in Asimov’s back in 1999 (and reprinted in Year’s Best SF 5, which is where I first read it.) “Written in Blood” by Chris Lawson. Basically, the idea is that a scientist came up with a way to encode the entire Koran in the white blood cells using a specific crib sheet. It is mentioned, though nothing of the sort ever happens, that this could be the marker needed to actually make an “ethno-bomb” (though in this case it would target anyone who had had it done.)
IIRC South Africa at one point was trying to make a bioweapon targeted at blacks, but gave up. David Drake wrote a novel where such a bioweapon was a central plot point; don’t recall the title. Wing Commander IV ( I think that’s the one ) had a programmable bioweapon that could be used for for that IIRC, among other things.
A more practical near term version is to simply vaccinate your own people, release the virus upon the folk you don’t like, and ignore the plight of third parties.
This reminds me a little too much of the recent accusation against Israel, during this aborted Israel/Hezbollah war, that they had a horrible new weapon that killed Muslims and turned their bodies black.
Here is the article I read, complete with a video taken from German television (with English subtitles, rather poor): Little Green Footballs
And all this goes to prove is that you can’t believe everything you read in print these days. Especially when it’s accusing Israel and Jews of horrific and improbable war crimes. C’mon, at least get Germans to analyze it for you first.
Well what would you expect?! The Jews are also killing Palestinian children so they can harvest their eyes and other organs. or something… Didn’t they also put something in the water to render them infertile? Remarkable unsuccessful with that though.
Now what on Earth made Wired print such a foolish article? I haven’t read so much from them, but it never occurred to me they would try to one up the National Enquirer.