Wednesday, July 05, 2006
The absurd and the tragic
So much of what is happening in the Middle East is so absurd that if it were not so tragic it would be funny. One thing that amazed me as we traveled through the West Bank was the dark sense of humor that our Palestinian friends have maintained through all of their tragedy. Maybe humor is the way out of this impasse. Do we need to laugh at what is going on? Some seem to be able to do that. When the Israeli Defense Forces bulldozed two toilets that had been built for homeless Palestinians by American relief agencies, I couldn’t understand the military importance of this venture. However, a Palestinian blogger opined that perhaps the reason for the destruction was that the noises coming from the toilets sounded like bombs going off. Recently the Israeli Air Force bombed an electrical power plant in Gaza. The military significance of this adventure was also not clear to me as all it did was make life miserable for 1.4 mm Palestinians in the sweltering Middle East summer. In this land of the absurd it has come to light that the plant was owned by a U.S. company and was insured by an agency of the U.S. government. (If you think that this is too absurd to be true, click here) So it appears that Americans will pay to build the plant, pay to blow it up, and then pay to rebuild it. At the risk of repeating myself, isn’t there a better way to waste taxpayer money? I am really trying to see the humor in all this. As one of my friends pointed out that rather than get angry, a better way to change our government’s policies is just to laugh at them and make them the butt of our jokes. Ha ha ha.
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1 comment:
By toilet do you mean outhouse? Which refugee camp did that happen in? Was a report made to the UN? Sanitary areas to defecate are important to health, and destroying those may violate human rights. So please do delve into the toilets that a bulldozer scouted out in the desert (were they in homes or not? you claimed they were for homeless Palestinians)...
The power plant was not bombed - 6 transformers that connect to it were destroyed. Things tend to move a lot slower when caught by electrical outages - particularly terrorists and their kidnapped prisoner of war. You don't understand that either because you're not an air force/army general or just because you've never had dealt with something like this in suburban-like-is-peachy America. Change one of those two things, and I'll be surprised if you still don't understand.
They chose to make their own lives miserable by 70% of them voting in a terrorist government which has done nothing for them but CONTINUE to steal money from their people, lead them into a humanitarian crisis (which was in effect BEFORE Israel engaged the Gaza Strip), and only incite violence/war.
That's how insurance works - it doesn't come out of your pocket buddy. Its $6 million which is a penny in the bucket, btw ;) A better way to waste money might be a war over oil in a place called Iraq.
heh :P
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