Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: Preoccupied

Showing posts with label Preoccupied. Show all posts

Thursday, July 06, 2023

Israeli Hospitals Perform Genocide On Arab Bacteria

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Haifa, July 6 - Human rights activists accused the Jewish State today of exterminating indigenous groups, in particular the microfauna that populate the interior of Arab bodies, with the death toll exceeding more than a billion lives per day, the activists allege.

Doctors Without Borders, B'tselem, Human Rights Watch, and several smaller groups made the claims yesterday and today in a coordinated campaign to raise awareness of the day-in, day-out massacres of Arab bacteria and other microorganisms by Israeli health care workers by various brutal means: antibiotics, antiseptics, anti-fungal agents, and external detergent materials such as anti-microbial soaps.

"The daily mass killing can only be described as a genocide," stated Btselem spokesman Aretha Meisin. "The indigenous microbiome of this land, dating all the way back to prehistoric times, faces daily killing on the order of tens of billions, maybe hundreds of billions, per week - all at the hand of Israel's 'health care' system, which pursues the extermination of Arab microorganisms at a rate that can only be called ruthless."

"The fact that it's medical personnel," added Human Rights Watch Israel-Palestine specialist Omar Shakir, "makes it all the more heinous. These people assert their supposed supremacy and superiority over vast swaths of biota and condemn them to chemically-induced death, with an efficiency and death toll that would put the Nazis to shame. The Nazis also poisoned their victims in the gas chambers, but they didn't kill nearly as many."

"It's not only in the clinical setting where such cruelty is manifest," observed Doctors Without Borders activist Louis Posterieur. "Israel has a plethora of government-funded facilities constantly pioneering more efficient ways to perpetrate this ongoing genocide. the Weizmann Institute of Science. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with Hadassah Hospital. That's just the most prominent ones. Every hospital in the country has laboratories for determining what substances will do the best job of killing most indigenous Arab microbes in the shortest time - while leaving Jewish bodies, often belonging to illegal settlers, healthy in the end."

The activists also accused major international players of bankrolling and benefiting from the lethal research, and even rewarding it with prestigious prizes and grants. They called on governing bodies of scientific and medical organizations to sanction Israeli institutions and official organs of government, plus whomever else in Israel, just in case, to prevent further genocide.

Some of the activists compared the ongoing genocide to Zionist activities a century ago to drain swampland around the country, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of millions of Arab mosquitoes and of billions of innocent malaria pathogens.

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School Raises Record Amount By Giving Parents Choice To Donate Instead Of Attending Year-End Production (PreOccupied Territory)

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Jerusalem, June 29 - A local principal made waves in the primary education field last week by leveraging the reluctance and hassle involved in wasting an entire evening on amateurish performances and hackneyed speeches to mark the conclusion of the academic term each June: in lieu of spending time at the two- to-three-hour event on a weeknight, listening to faculty and staff drone on and on and watching the children put on skits or dances that would humiliate beached whales, the institution accepted 300-shekel contributions from each family - and brought in more money than at any other fundraiser in the school's twenty-year existence.

Devorah Friedman, headmaster of Merhavim Elementary School, responded to private feedback from numerous parents by offering the pay-instead-of-attend option for both the celebratory gathering involving grades 1-5 and the more elaborate graduation ceremony for the sixth grade. Friedman reported that near-unanimous parental choice of donating instead of attending resulted in tens of thousands of shekels flowing into the school coffers, the largest total of private donations from any of the school's many efforts to raise money.

"We've had institutional and governmental assistance in larger amounts, certainly," she acknowledged. "But none of our community-based initiatives earned nearly this much. Of the approximately eight hundred families with children at our school, seven hundred sixty decided to donate. The few exceptions were all first-time parents of first-graders. Even the parents of the sixth-graders, every last one, including the two families for whom it's their last child, opted to pay instead of attending."

"We've been able to save more money, beyond that, on the costs of the productions themselves," she elaborated. "All the extracurricular preparation time, the materials, the refreshments, the costumes, et cetera - so we ended up with more than the donation amounts as well."

Parents explained that they had had enough of the end-of-year ceremonies and accompanying plays, dances, songs, and speeches already in previous years, and did not need to blow a valuable, not to mention beautiful, June evening in Jerusalem attending yet another such performance.

"All the schools should do this," gushed Daniel Zvuloni, parent of a sixth-grader and third-grader. "I don't care that it's essentially extortion: give us hundreds of shekels or we'll force you to attend these tedious events. I gave double this year, I was so grateful for the freedom. I even asked if there's a way to prepay not to attend anything for the next three years, and I'm going to suggest the same policy to my older kids' schools."

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Report: Opponents Violating Norms Makes It OK For You To Be An Ass Too (PreOccupied Territory)

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Tel Aviv, June 22 - A new study confirms what many had assumed or intuited for years, namely that unsavory, unethical, impolite, and, sometimes, illegal behavior on the part of people on the other side of the political aisle from you justifies your adoption of the same or worse behaviors in response.

Writing in the journal He Started It, a team of researchers from the University of Racetothegutter in Cellar, Germany, published an article detailing their discovery that when anyone prominent in a political camp, however loosely defined, violates norms that until than many had assumed govern the rhetoric and actions of political expression, that violation gives a moral, interpersonal, and ethical imprimatur for those in the opposing political camp to engage in either those violations themselves, in service of their political cause, or, preferably, to engage in different and more egregious violations of norms.

"We found that while norms are supposed to be a good thing," the authors wrote, "in fact they only serve a good purpose if other people, in particular the people with whom you disagree, adhere to them. Norms serve no real purpose once even a single high-profile - or, let's be honest, low-to-medium profile, if you dig long enough - figure on the other side disregards them. Once that happens, poof, the norm is gone, but it was important until that moment. Now, with the norm gone, you are free to be a jackass with hemorrhoids. It's science."

The norms, the article explained, can feature in the realms of political protest, politicians' conduct in their official capacities, adherence to unstated or customary rules in legislative proceedings, etiquette, vocabulary, and debate, among others.

The writers acknowledge their puzzlement at an important fact that remains unexplained. "It appears that the original violators of the norms nevertheless expect their opponents not to violate the same norms," they wrote.

They theorize that the initial violation of norms took place in a unique or special context that justifies that violation, a justification that their opponents willfully fail to admit pertains only to the original norms violation and could never justify those opponents' violations of the norms, which of course are still sacred.

Thus, only your side may ignore, dismiss, or justify such phenomena as riots, looting, trespassing, vandalism, or assault in the pursuit of political goals or ideologies that you favor, or that your allies favor, but if the other side does anything similar, that only shows how uncivilized and wrong they must be.

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Hot-Dog-Suit-Wearing Biden Vows To Investigate US Funding Source For Antisemitic Palestinian Curricula (PreOccupied Territory)

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Washington, June 15 - The President of the United States donned a frankfurter costume today and declared his administration's determination to figure out who continually provides hundreds of millions of dollars to an organization that exists to keep millions of Palestinians stateless, radicalized, opposed to coexistence with Israel, and raised generation after generation to view violence as the only proper solution to their plight.

"We're all trying to find the guy who did this," vowed Joseph R. Biden to all those present in the Oval Office for an update meeting on his decision to fund the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, which provides employment, food, education, and social services for the descendants of Arabs who fled, mostly before Jewish fighter showed up, the British Mandate of Palestine when the establishment of a Jewish state there was imminent. Repeated studies have found that the organization uses educational public awareness materials that deny the Jewish connection to the Land of Israel, deny Jewish origins in the land, foment violence, and cultivate a zero-sum view of the conflict with Israel as resolvable only through total destruction of the Jewish State.

"As soon as we have any leads, we will be sure to let the American people know," assured Biden. "I personally guarantee that not one more cent of American taxpayer dollars will go toward incitement."

UNRWA uses a different definition of "refugee" from the other UN body - the High Commission for Refugees - that handles all other refugees from violent conflicts around the world, and it gives those "Palestine Refugees" different treatment from standard refugee treatment: the UN strives to resettle refugees in other countries where they attain citizenship and start over, whereas Palestine Refugees are kept in perpetual statelessness, often facing Apartheid in their host countries, until "resolution" of their situation. Refugees are no longer refugees once the UN resettles them; Palestine Refugees cannot be removed from the rosters. Refugees cannot, except under rare circumstances, bequeath refugee status to their offspring; Palestine Refugees and all their descendants in perpetuity gain that status at birth - meaning that each year, the number of Palestine Refugees continues to balloon.

That ballooning requires ballooning budgetary support, which in large part comes from the US - and Biden swore at today's meeting to identify and track down whichever national government, and whichever branch of that government in charge of foreign policy, keeps making the decision to provide the money that sustains the problematic UNRWA.

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Rabbinate: Wedding Without Chocolate Potentially Invalid (PreOccupied Territory)

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Jerusalem, June 8 - The Religious Council notified a local couple today that they might be required to undergo their marriage ceremony a second time to ensure its propriety, the bride and groom reported today, because at the gatherings before and following the original ceremony, not a single chocolate items appeared, not even at dessert, rendering the entire event moot.

Tehilla and Yosef Birnbaum held their wedding at the Ramat Rachel complex last week, with more than two hundred family and friends in attendance. The officiating Rabbi took pains beforehand to explain to each half of the couple the various elements of the proceedings and the requirements for ensuring they have force according to Jewish law: the value of the ring; the groom's ownership of the ring; each party's affirmation of understanding the contents of the marriage contract; the validity of the witnesses to the contract and to the ceremony itself; and numerous other details. He did not, however, stress the importance of chocolate in providing full validity to the marriage ceremony, operating under the assumption that anyone with a functioning brain knows how automatic the association between chocolate and celebration is.

A Rabbinate spokesman acknowledged that this case lacks precedent. "We've never encountered anything like this in institutional memory," stated Rabbi Hersh Iczaklatt. "While it's possible that chocolateless weddings have taken place under the auspices of the Chief Rabbinate, whether under Israeli, British, or possibly Ottoman rule, we have no explicit attestations to them, and cannot therefore assume their validity."

"Earlier sources are less than illuminating, but for different reasons," he continued. "We know chocolate only left the Americas and spread to the rest of the world about five centuries ago. Until chocolate became a standard confection or dessert item, and not merely the province of the wealthy, a wedding without chocolate posed no problem. But Jewish law is a practical system, a system of the experiential and the expectations that common experience produces. Once chocolate evolved into its ubiquitous role in celebration, it attained a status on par with all the other implied or expected elements of a transaction that go without saying: if they are lacking, we are concerned that one or both of the parties will feel defrauded, and the transaction is void."

"The initiation of the first stage of a Jewish marriage involves a transaction," he explained further, "in which the groom, through the medium of giving the bride an item of value - traditionally, a plain gold ring - assumes responsibility for her welfare, sustenance, and security. But both groom and bride must consent to the transaction for it to have validity, and thus, if there is an implied availability of chocolate associated with the wedding, an expectation created through several generations of chocolate's place of pride among standard celebration elements, then we might be required to assume its absence violates an implied condition of the transaction's - and thus the marriage's - validity."

Rabbi Iczaklatt lamented that, presumably owing to the shame of not wanting to provide chocolate, neither the caterer nor the couple will admit to failing to include chocolate, complicating the task of determining whether there could have been an element of consent to the standards violation.

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Violence Against Us Only Steels Our Resolve, But We Expect Israel To Be Cowed By Violence (PreOccupied Territory)

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Violence Against Us Only Steels Our Resolve, But We Expect Israel To Be Cowed By Violence

by Soubhi Al-Amad, Palestinian fighter

Jenin, June 1 - From Deir Yassin to Gaza, every time the Zionists wield their weapons against us, we use that as motivation to fight harder! On the other hand, the purpose of our attacks is to weaken Zionist morale, and that represents the only possible reaction to our operations.

It has ever been thus. Each time the enemy kills or injures one of us, we sublimate our rage into further resolve, never to be moved from our land, and never to cease our efforts to remove the usurper from all parts of it. The enemy, we expect to run from our violence, and the fact that they most often do not only means we must use more violence. Soon, inshallah, it will work and the foreign interloper will leave Palestine forever.

Of course violence will never force us to leave our homeland! It is our homeland! Not so for the Jews, whose homeland is... well, who cares! Not here, because we said so! Obviously they will leave if we fight them hard enough.

If you want to defeat your enemy, you must understand the way he thinks. Our enemy fails to understand that the harder he hits us, the stronger we stand against him. Whereas the harder we hit our enemy, the more it demoralizes him. This is why we are on the cusp of winning, of driving the accursed Jew invaders out of Palestine, any day now. Only six million to go! Such poetry in that number.

Each time we strike at the heart of the enemy - with rockets, roadside bombs, knives, bullets, cars, grenades, or anything else at our disposal, we drive home the point that he does not belong here, and he fears for his existence! Thus the constant talk of their "Holocaust." Look how scared they are! Just a few more attacks and they will all pack up and leave!

We, obviously, would not react that way, knowing this is our homeland, and will stay here through thick and thin. Except for the millions of refugees from 1948 and 1967, which we must ignore, and the thousands who try to leave every year, for greener pastures, plus the ones in refugee camps who jump at every opportunity to gain citizenship in their host countries rather than wait for glorious return to Palestine.

We are so close. Just keep attacking the Jews, and they will go elsewhere! It has always been thus.

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Raspberries Pointedly Omitted From Biblical List Of Fruits Gracing Promised Land (PreOccupied Territory)

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Plains of Moab, May 18 - In deciding which types of produce to invoke in praising the Land of Canaan before the imminent entry of the Israelites, Moses specifically decided not to mention members of the Rubus Idaeobatus subgenus, which he characterized as repulsive, the prophet acknowledged today.

Part of Moses's farewell address to the people, contained in the developing book of Deuteronomy, touted the land promised to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as "A land of wheat, barley, grapevines, fig trees, and pomegranate trees; a land of the oil-olive tree and of honey," the last term of which referred not to the product of the beehive, but of dates. Pointedly, however, Moses refused to mention raspberries, a fruit he finds unremarkable at best, and nauseating at worst.

"Verily, I left out that abomination," he confirmed in an interview following today's portion of the address. "The accursed raspberry may well grow in the land the Lord vowed to grant to the offspring of the Fathers. As doth the mosquito, but we sing not the praises of that foul beast, for similar reasons."

The Man of God admitted that he had requested of the Almighty approval for a passage, however short, denouncing the execrable raspberry in terms analogous to those barring incest, usury, theft, and judicial corruption, among other offenses. "He turned me down," recalled the greatest prophet. "Not the first time. I beseeched him five hundred fifteen times to be allowed into the land after the incident with the rock and the hitting, to no avail. Have to get used to rejection after almost a hundred twenty years."

"I am not overly sour," he continued, "unlike the foul raspberry, which maketh one recoil from its acridity even as it cloyeth the teeth with its repulsive stickiness. Cleave unto the Lord, but not with this monstrosity's adhesive properties. The Lord created all manner of flora and fauna with purposes other than human consumption, such as the coelacanth and the raspberry. Cursed is the man who treateth the raspberry as food."

The people were no longer present to declare, "Amen," having retired to their tents for the evening.

Moses noted that although the Lord has barred him from explicit invocation of his distaste for raspberries, the Almighty has not, technically, prohibited His prophet from conveying to his successor Joshua, under the Deuteronomical table, an admonition to wipe out all raspberries from the land once the people begin its conquest, not leaving a single bush alive.

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Our Lame Response To Zionist Aggression Will Come At A Time And Place Of Our Choosing by Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PreOccupied Territory)

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Gaza City, May 11 - The brutal crimes of the Zionists will not go unanswered. Their cowardly targeting of our personnel and their families this past week deserves retaliation for which the enemy will not be prepared: we will follow our own timing and considerations when we offer our pathetic, underwhelming justice.

We will avenge the deaths of the martyrs Khalil Bahitini, Tarek Azaldin, and Jahed Ahman at a time we choose, in a manner that we determine, which will of course have no effect on anything except maybe scare some people and, who knows break some windows? Hit a rocky hillside?

We must how the enemy that his evil provocation will not go unanswered. Our answer will come at our discretion, on our timetable, not when the enemy expects and not when so-called "rules" or precedents dictate. Our answer, in the form of inaccurate rockets, abortive shootings, ineffective bombs, or impotent stabbing attempts, will hit them when they have become complacent, no longer anticipating such a bold display of weakness.

We will watch the enemy cower in fear as our missiles miss their targets. We will read of hundreds of thousands of Zionist usurpers trudging in annoyance to shelters as Iron Dome downs any missile that would hit a populated area. The minor inconvenience we will cause will avenge the deaths of our holy martyrs, and will finally free Palestine!

That last part might take some time.

But we have patience, patience the enemy does not have. The enemy rushed to kill our martyrs, not like our long game strategy, which relies on the accumulation of dead children we have placed in harm's way to fight the cognitive war against the Zionists. We can pick our moment. Our day and hour to wreak vengeance, our wispy, flimsy vengeance.

The cause of Palestine will always rally the Islamic world to our side. Except for the growing number of countries normalizing with the Zionist entity. Obviously not those. But the others! The ones who will normalize sooner or later. Our cause is universal and pan-Arab! This is why we get funding only from non-Arab Iran. it is why we are ever-closer to realizing the dream of a free Palestine. You wouldn't know it from looking at a map, or data on the defense and economic robustness of the Zionist entity, contrasted with the despicable, self-inflicted misery of Palestinians, but it is ever-closer!

Just like our useless revenge. Allahu Akbar!

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Arab MK Tried To Smuggle Chocolate Wafer To Hunger Striking Terrorist (PreOccupied Territory)

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Jerusalem, May 4 - An legislator whose supporters seek the dissolution of Israel as a Jewish state boasted today that before Palestinian Islamic Jihad figure Khader Adnan died this past Tuesday in an Israeli prison hospital, the lawmaker made an attempt to sneak into the detainee's possession a snack known for its status among Palestinians as not counting if eaten during a declared hunger strike.

MK Walid Taha of the Balad Party told confidants Thursday that on one of several visits, he sought to provide the hunger-striking Adnan with a supply of Tortit - a green-wrapped, chocolate-coated wafer that rise to prominence when a cell camera captured a Palestinian terrorist, Marwan Barghouti, surreptitiously devouring one during a hunger strike he had declared in 2017. Advocates rose to Barghouti's defense at the time, refusing to concede that he had violated his commitment - and thus generating precedent for other hunger-striking Palestinian prisoners to adopt similar behavior.

In the end, Taha, recalled, he decided at the last minute not to deliver the wafers because he remained unsure whether the adamant Islamist Adnan would accept Israeli products. "I know Palestinians themselves love Israeli products and buy them all the time," he acknowledged, "but a public figure like Khaled - it wouldn't do to have that awkwardness in the air. So I settled for only encouraging him verbally to continue to kill himself for Palestine."

Adnan died while awaiting trial for incitement to terrorism and membership in a terrorist group. His activities before imprisonment included calling on Palestinians to become suicide bombers against Israeli civilians, and promoting an ideology that demands submission to Islam on pain of death. Taha took advantage of his parliamentary immunity to conduct the visits.

Other Palestine advocates expressed puzzlement that Adnan did not himself resort to the Tortit gambit. "It's possible he really was prepared to die," conceded Omar Shakir of Human Rights Watch. "Weird, but plausible. Also not consistent with every other aspect of Palestine activism, which has always prioritized image and rhetoric over integrity. Palestinian leaders are expected to encourage others to suffer and die while the leadership lives large and takes no personal risks. So excuse my surprise."

Taha declined to say what he did with the Tortit, since no Israelis, even the hundreds of thousands below the poverty line, will admit to eating the mediocre-at-best snack. Experts surmised that Prison Services purchases the bulk of Tortit production from its manufacturer, Elite.

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Zionist Colonialists In Palestine Take Land For Home Country Of... Poland? Russia? Hungary? ...Morocco? (PreOccupied Territory)

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B'er Sheva, April 27 - The foreign transplants exploiting the land of Palestine on behalf of the regimes from which they or their ancestors hail continue to rape the land of its resources and persecute the native population for purposes of extracting everything they can for the benefit of those home countries, which is what colonialists do, except that hold on a moment, this part of the paragraph is supposed to complete the thought that Israeli Jews are part of a colonial outpost for their ancestral countries, but that means Israel is a colony of Russia, Poland, maybe Germany? Half of Israel's Jews have ancestry that spent centuries in the Islamic world, so maybe Iran? Algeria? Help a reporter out here. The Czech Republic?

Pro-Palestine activists continued this week, in the shadow of Israel's seventy-fifth Independence Day, to describe the establishment of a sovereign Jewish entity in the land that Jews have claimed as their home despite ancient exile as yet another manifestation of Western imperialism with indigenous people of color as the victims, all as part of an oppressive enterprise to take advantage of the people and resources of Palestine for hold on, this is making less and less sense. The mighty kingdom of Rumania? Tzarist Russia? the politically-nonexistent Poland of the nineteenth century, partitioned by Russia, Prussia, and Austria, from which tens of thousands of Jews emigrated to Palestine during the first decades of the Zionist movement?

Anyway, the activists leveled their familiar accusations at Israel for constituting a foreign entity sucking the goodness out of the land for the sake of the foreign home country where they really belong, which presumably means Iraq? Yemen? The reporter did not get a chance to follow up with the activists by the filing deadline, and therefore a coherent answer, if any, will occur only in the next day's edition of this publication, at the earliest. Tunisia? Kurdistan? Turkey?

Turkey makes a little bit of sense, at least, analysts say, considering that Ottoman Turks controlled Palestine for more than four hundred years until the British ousted them in 1917, but modern political Zionism began when the Turks were still in control, and no "Palestinian" Arabs, or at least no anti-Zionists, at the time, called those migrants "colonists." Maybe the Hapsburgs? Romanovs? Hohenzollerns?

Sophists of various sorts have attempted as well to expand the use of the term "colonialism" to cover influence by foreign powers of minimal representation among the colonist demographic, such as the US, but no coherent description has emerged as to how that differs from any dynamic of international relations, regardless of the ancestry of the people running the country.

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Gozer Begs Enlil Not To Be Sent As Marshmallow Man To Israel On Lag BaOmer (PreOccupied Territory)

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Nippur, Sumeria, April 20 - A Mesopotamian deity known as "The Destructor" beseeched his superior in the pantheon to remain away from the Jewish State despite a mission tasking him with a visit there this coming May 8-9, having discovered what happens across the country to the constituent material of the god's "Traveler" form on the corresponding Hebrew date every year.

Supernal witnesses described a fearful, contrite, yet determined Gozer the Gozerian pleading his case again today before Enlil, who sits atop the Sumerian divine assemblage. Gozer assumed his Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man form for the encounter, to drive home the danger to him at time when every open space in Israel is expected to feature multiple bonfires, some large enough to reduce the god's entire physical essence to gooey, caramelized deliciousness.

"My Lord," implored Gozer, "I must importune His Divine Supremacy to reschedule the visit to the of the land of Canaan. His Excellency no doubt can see that the inhabitants of that barbaric locale have a festival during which it has become customary to build enormous fires and roast marshmallows. Venturing into such an environment on that day will pose a serious hazard to the success of my mission, and I humbly request to postpone or suspend it until the flames subside."

Gozer referred to the festival of Lag BaOmer, the thirty-third day of the Omer period from Passover to Shavuot. Scattered ancient and medieval Jewish sources discuss the significance of the day; over the centuries it has evolved into a celebration, using fire as a sign of spiritual and intellectual illumination, of the reestablishment of Torah education following the devastation of losing an entire generation of scholars during the second century CE.

Without the religious overtones, secular Israelis have embraced Lag BaOmer as a cultural phenomenon and an expression of pride at the final show of robust Jewish military prowess and resistance - the Bar Kokhba Revolt - before the reassertion of Jewish sovereignty in the land in the twentieth century, and therefore more in line with Zionist sensibilities regarding independence, assertive national pride, and self-defense that they contrasted with the "typical" Diaspora submissiveness of Jews in the intervening millennia.

Enlil appeared unmoved by Gozer's petition. "You show unbecoming weakness," the elder god declared. "If you cannot complete this mission, I will assign it to someone more worthy. Summon 'Uggatg'bhina, the god of cheesecake, and tell him I expect him to visit Canaan on the twenty-sixth of May!"

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Peaceful Israeli Demonstrations Confuse Palestinians (PreOccupied Territory)

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Tel Aviv, March 30 - Weeks of protests against the Israeli government's proposal to overhaul the country's judicial system have left their neighbors baffled, especially the ones under the rule of Fatah and Hamas, with specific lack of comprehension regarding the absence or near-absence of violence at the numerous well-attended rallies.

Palestinians across the political and demographic spectrum voiced their bewilderment today after repeated, vehement demonstrations against the proposal resulted yesterday in Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu announcing the postponement of the process until at least June, with negotiations to take place in the interim over what changes, if any, to make to the plan. The lack of vehicular assaults, stabbings, Molotov cocktails, shootings, firebomb balloons, stones, bricks, and other features of Palestinian protests has left that group wondering how the Israeli protesters managed to achieve results without resorting to any of those familiar tactics.

"Am I missing something?" wondered Nimr Halabi of Nablus. "With no violent unrest, there's no hope for change. That's just how I know it works. Our entire society is based on that assumption. So I think what's really happening is either it's all a big show and it's all fake, with the Jews manipulating everyone into thinking that's what happened, without violence, or, and I think this one's a little more likely, the Jews control all the media, and the media simply didn't show the violence that we know had to happen, because without violence there's no political change. There was political change, ergo, violence preceded it, and probably happens afterwards, too, but the Zionist-controlled media won't show it."

"There are usually individual clips that come out even with the Jewish control though," argued Fatima Qawasme of Hebron. "And I don't mean the ones that come from other places that our supporters relabel as 'Palestine' to make Israel look evil. I mean there's no such thing as one hundred percent media control, or we'd never know that there's Jewish control of the media. But there's nothing in this case. It's scary to think, if what we're seeing is the whole story, that change is possible without killing people - that change is possible without killing some Jews. That would undermine everything we live and die for here."

Palestinian leaders in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank took pains to assure the Palestinian public that in their case, any change of leadership would require violence, and would lead to violence in the aftermath of any such change.

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Palestinian History Museum: Roman Conquest Bad, Arab Conquest Good (PreOccupied Territory)

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Ramallah, March 23 - Staff at an institution dedicated to displaying indigenous artifacts of the Arab people of this part of the Levant struggled again today to articulate the difference in tone the exhibits take toward two different periods in which a colonizing foreign entity swept through the land and imposed hegemony on its inhabitants, with periods prior to the seventh century and after the nineteenth portrayed in frightful terms, while those in between are characterized in neutral, benign, or glorious terms, a discrepancy that curators and docents have grappled with unsuccessfully since the venue opened to guests several years ago.

The Palestinian History Museum in the de facto Palestinian capital has long faced an uphill campaign to collect and present artifacts consistent with the premise of Palestinian Arab indigeneity. Spokesmen for the institution have at various times accused Zionists of destroying or fabricating evidence, only to become stymied in the face of Arab pronouncements from previous ages that assume as a matter of fact, for example, that Jews were sovereign here long before Arabs imposing Islam arrived in the first half of the eighth century CE. A prominent instance of the phenomenon involves a guide to the Haram al-Sharif - the compound housing the Dome of Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque - by the Islamic Waqf itself - stating the established fact that the site held both ancient Jewish temples.

"The Islamic expansion into Palestine brought peace and prosperity," the staff and exhibit notes insist, with similar effusive treatment of Seljuk, Mameluk, Ottoman, and other brutal conquests by repressive rulers under the banner of Islam. "Byzantine corruption and repression caused untold suffering," on the other hand, depicts a population in torment under regimes that followed anything but Islam, with special venom reserved for Jews reasserting their claim to the land.

Museum officials changed the subject when visitors asked, in the context of their insistence that Palestinians have lived in the land since long before Judaism existed, about the pride with which so many Palestinians boast of their Arabian Bedouin heritage and ancestry, their nomadic ancestors having migrated into the land in the last several centuries. "You misunderstand," they argued, but preferred to point to shiny new artifacts rather than clarify the misunderstanding.

"Look, we just got this in," they rushed to interject. "It's a collection of arrowheads from the Seleucid campaign in the mid-second-century BCE."

"Whom were they fighting?" asked a visitor.

"Next exhibit!" the docent yelled. "We really have to get through, we're running out of time."

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