Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: humor

Showing posts with label humor. Show all posts

Friday, June 06, 2025

Solomon Admits 'Futility Of Futilities' Punchier But Less Evocative Than 'Knesset Bloviation' (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Jerusalem, June 6 - The author of a profound, dark Biblical philosophical work admitted today that he made painful compromises in the composition of his signature work, chief among them a choice of wording that, while necessary to preserve readability and poetic rhythm, fails to convey the full force of uselessness that could have been carried instead by invoking people speechifying in Israel's parliament.

King Solomon, one of whose masterpieces includes the book of Ecclesiastes, with its famous refrain, "All is futility" - rendered in more archaic translations as "vanity" - lamented the necessity he felt in writing the book to sacrifice evocative depth for the sake of readability. Specifically, he pointed to the opening rhetorical salvo, havel havalim, "Futility of futilities," as an excellent, alliterative, memorable phrase that nevertheless falls short in evocative force compared to the imagery Solomon aimed to use, but "Knesset bloviations of Knesset bloviations" rolls off the tongue or quill with a distinct lack of smoothness.

"It's a shame," the king reflected. "All growth and creation in this world involve sacrifice and pain. You would know that if you studied my book, which extensively explores the phenomenon."

He then turned circumspect. "I should have expected things not to turn out perfect," he acknowledged. "Considering the focus of this book is an extended reflection on how nothing good ever lasts, and that even good things go unappreciated, so just relish the quotidian, precious little things if you want joy, however fleeting it may be, well - expecting a different outcome calls to mind someone foolish enough to keep electing corrupt narcissists to Knesset and then expressing disgust at the results."

The futility of politics gets no specific or deep treatment in Ecclesiastes, but Solomon's father David had his own documented encounter with politics complex enough for insanity to become relevant: when fleeing King Saul, David sought refuge in the Philistine city-state of Gath - when the Philistines had no affection for any Israelites, let alone the very man who had given them so much trouble in battle. David therefore drooled and wrote nonsense on the walls, prompting King Akhish to lambaste his men: "Do I lack lunatics that you bring this one to me as well?!"

"I couldn't be that explicitly sardonic in a hoity-toity philosophical work," he conceded. "Certainly not one that I composed with divine inspiration. A prophet chastising the people can get vicious and sarcastic. Not me. But I can point to a few legislators who could give the prophets a lesson or two on that kind of rhetoric."

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Trump Criticism Of Industry Full Of Jews Puts Anti-Trump Antisemites In Bind (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Washington, May 29 - Jew-hating opponents of the sitting US President have found themselves facing a dilemma over the last several weeks, activists acknowledged today, now that the chief executive has chosen as a target the film industry, a bastion symbolic to them of the very people they purport to exert malignant control over that industry, placing those Jew-haters on the same side of an issue as the hated president.

Advocates of conspiracy theories that allege Jewish domination of Hollywood who also despise Donald Trump must now decide which of those enemies they see as more dangerous: whether to seize the opportunity to speak up in defense of an industry that actually pushes the progressive agenda effectively, or to exploit Trump's criticism to score points against the Jews.

The activists gave token acknowledgement to the existence of a third possibility: to say nothing. Staying quiet, however, has never represented a serious course of action in their behavior.

"Structurally, it's a familiar dilemma for anyone who dislikes Trump," explained Whoopi Goldberg, who by her own admission changed her birth name Caryn Elaine Johnson to sound more Jewish as a way to, she thought, give her better entrée in the entertainment industry. "He often gets us on the left to reflexively yell our opposition to whatever he's pushing, and that's gotten us in to some uncomfortable places: defending criminals, rapists, and violent thugs just because Trump doesn't like them. Voters see that, and we're unable to take advantage of his unpopularity because our reactions make us look like the crazy ones."

"Well, I'm not so sure about what to do now," Goldberg continued. "On one hand, it looks like there's a rising tide of legitimacy for opposition to Jews, which doesn't happen every decade in America. On the other, we've talked up the existential fascist threat of Trump so much that to suddenly agree with him seems not only jarringly out of character; it makes us look like hypocrites. I mean, that's par for the course in our line of work, but it's just more glaring this time."

The challenge, explained podcaster Hasan Piker, lies in the pattern: Trump has a knack for zeroing in on "eighty-twenty" issues, issues firmly in the American electorate's consensus, and taking a proud stance on the side of the eighty percent - and the Democrats and Democratic Party allies follow their knee-jerk reaction: characterizing as evil and destructive whatever the hated Trump supports, establishing them by default in the minority and keeping their poll numbers even lower than Trump's abysmal ratings.

"It's the Jews' fault this is happening, obviously," realized Piker.

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Israeli Supreme Court Orders Government To Cede Seat On Judge-Selection Committee To Hamas (PreOccupied Teritory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Jerusalem, May 25 - Israel's highest judicial body continued its arrogation of powers today by instructing Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to replace his administration's representative on the panel that votes in new justices to that judicial body with one from the Islamist group that controls most of the Gaza Strip, because the group needs representation in choosing candidates to serve on the body that now de facto governs both Israel and Gaza.

The Supreme Court ordered the change today in response to a petition from The Movement for Quality Governance, which pointed out that, given that the Palestinians living under the dictatorial Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip do not have functional representation even in their own government, and that, given the paternalistic, racism-of-low-expectations approach of the ideology governing the Court for the last thirty years, it is only fair to put Hamas on the committee that selects judges for the Supreme Court, which, unlike lower courts, rules on cases affecting Israel's conduct of war and its administration of areas under military control.

Analysts also see the move as a swipe at the Netanyahu government, which attempted in 2023 to overhaul the judicial system to limit the purview of the Supreme Court, which, in the view of many conservatives, had gradually arrogated for itself powers that formally belong to the legislature and the executive. Critics of the Netanyahu reform package saw a threat to the independence of the judiciary. Now the government will have once less voice and vote on the selection committee, which the judicial establishment already controls in effect: the majority of its slots are allotted to protégées of the sitting justices in the Israel Bar Association, or to the justices themselves.

Practical hurdles remain: logistical, legal, procedural, and security issues all stand in the way of implementing the ruling. MQG representatives have already asked the Court for clarification on the requirement that a Hamas delegate sit on the committee, considering those hurdles, and proposed that, at least as a temporary measure, the Bar Association or MQG itself provide the missing delegate, lest the government try to maintain its hold on the committee seat until a suitable Hamas member can be brought in.

Other complications include how the Hamas representative will be selected, given the lack of democratic norms under Hamas rule and in Hamas's own ranks. On that point, the MQG proposal leaves it to the Court's discretion, but suggests selecting from among Hamas personnel already in Israeli custody, if only for convenience.

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Gaza Is An Open-Air Prison. How Dare You Suggest Anyone Leave! by Mehdi Hasan (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Gaza Is An Open-Air Prison. How Dare You Suggest Anyone Leave!

by Mehdi Hasan

Doha, May 16 - The images out of Jabaliya, Khan Yunis, Rafah, and Shuja'iyyah are horrific. Israel has brutally destroyed all the grandeur and rich life in the place everyone was calling the world's largest concentration camp - and now they and Trump think the Palestinians there should go somewhere else? Ridiculous and evil.

There is nowhere as beautiful as their homeland! How dare you encourage them to leave a place they claim to want to be in only temporarily because they're refugees from what's now Israel! Look at the paradise Israel destroyed, the one my fellow Qatar-backed voices deemed an open-air prison out of which Gazans broke out on October 7? Please, be consistent.

All open-air prisons get free electricity, international humanitarian aid, and infusions of Qatari cash. Well, I also get infusions of Qatari cash, but that just goes to show it's not a particularly remarkable phenomenon.

Encouraging Gaza residents to leave smacks of ethnic cleansing. Not like when Israel took all of its Jews out of Gaza in 2005 by force. That we call something else, because they didn't belong there. As opposed to the Palestinians who are there because they left other parts of Palestine, which means they don't belong in Gaza, either, for whom it would qualify as ethnic cleansing.

Also not like what Palestinians have declared they aim to do to the Jews everywhere in historic Palestine. Ethnic cleansing is something only happens to non-Jews. The Jews displaced from the Etzion Bloc of kibbutzim, or from Jerusalem's old city, in 1948, don't count. Or the ones expelled from Arab countries over the ensuing decades. But I digress.

They're starving in Gaza! Genocide! Humanitarian disaster! And we must KEEP them there.

Did I mention the genocide? By agreement with the Emir, I have to use the term in reference to Israel and Gaza at least four times a day. Hasn't been much of a problem keeping that provision of the contract. Definitely running a surplus. But I have to show His Excellency that I care, beyond mere adherence to the terms of the agreement.

Genocide genocide genocide genocide!

STOP TALKING ABOUT GETTING PALESTINIANS AWAY FROM A GENOCIDE, YOU MONSTERS.

Besides, you can't just move more than two million people. Unless they're Jews being banished from Palestine, because all seven and a half million must leave. If they don't want to leave, they can live as an underclass under Islamic supremacy, or die.

This is the humane attitude to the situation.

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Dwindling Holocaust Survivor Population Forces Charities To Find Alternative Guilting Techniques (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Jerusalem, May 8 - Israelis who lived through Nazi persecution number in the low six figures at most, statistics indicate, which places fundraising efforts for various welfare projects in jeopardy, as those organizations must begin pivoting away from tugging heartstrings to solicit money by recruiting such aged people in their publicity materials as more and more of them die off or become otherwise incapacitated.

Depending on the definition used by the statisticians in question, somewhere between 115,000 and 140,000 Holocaust survivors live in Israel - with all but a handful of the very oldest having lived through Nazi-controlled Europe or North Africa as children or adolescents. The shrinking demographic can provide fewer and fewer paid or volunteer candidates each year to look poor, lonely, and receiving insufficient care so that the organization producing the fundraising promotion can guilt Israelis into choosing that charity over others. The phenomenon has received increased attention at nonprofit powwows over the last three decades.

Soon, analysts predict, the fundraising models will cease to shame people into thinking their own stinginess might contribute to the substandard living conditions of Holocaust survivors, and charity organizations will be forced to cobble together causes with less general appeal in order to meet their fundraising goals.

"The Shoah remains the only truly universal trauma that can be milked in this way," acknowledged Ronit Hermann, a resource development consultant with Shatil, the NGO-capacity-building arm of the New Israel Fund. "For decades, it's been something of a cash cow. But as it gets harder and harder to find survivors able and willing to serve in this mascot capacity, organizations must identify and develop alternatives - none of which, unfortunately, have the same unifying solidarity underlying them that made Shoah business so effective."

"October seventh certainly resonates in terms of trauma," she explained, "but it's still too raw and looks too exploitative this close in. It'll be a good few years before 'Nova survivor' or 'October seventh survivor' becomes a thing in general charity fundraising work. In the meantime, organizations must fall back on the standbys of distressed children and overwrought, staged scenes of struggle, to get the desired emotional response."

In some political circles, however, the alarm bells mean little. A spokesman for Human Rights Watch assured a journalist that if the group's work succeeds, a second Holocaust will take place soon enough, with the only question becoming whether there will be anyone around afterwards to fundraise off of it.

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Israel To Force Released Prisoners To Thank Them For Screening Of Last 3 Star Wars Films (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Ofer Prison, May 1 - Taking a page from the Hamas public relations playbook, the next exchange of incarcerated Palestinians as part any upcoming hostage deal will feature a public ceremony in which the soon-to-be-free men will, with armed guards standing over them, voice gratitude for the times that their jailers sat them in front of repeated showings of the final trilogy of the Skywalker family saga. The report came from sources within Israel's Ministry of Defense.

According to the officials, the move comes as a response to the Islamist terrorist movement that governs the Gaza Strip, which held degrading "thank you" events starring Israeli hostages forced to make groveling statements to their "hosts" and given parting "gifts."

"It had to be something just as harsh, perhaps harsher, but not strictly defined as a war crime," explained one official. "What Hamas did was without question a crime against humanity and a war crime, but the international community doesn't care what Hamas does. We, for better or for worse, have to maintain a higher standard than our enemies do. Our legal department spent months developing a retaliatory method that matches the sadism of the original act without falling afoul of any statutes in the Laws Of Armed Conflict and the Geneva Conventions."

Hamas representatives and human rights activists decried the reports. "Anything less than immediate Israeli acquiescence to complete domination and enslavement to Islamist Palestinians is a war crime," explained Human Rights Watch Director Federico Borello.

Amnesty International confirmed the assessment. "The fact of the actual showings of those atrocities to the prisoners may be appalling, but that's not going to change what we say except in the details," admitted Agnes Callamard.

Sources within Hamas echoed that characterization but also hinted at a softened position on the remaining Israeli hostages still in its hands. "Our brothers behind Zionist bars are suffering," lamented Mousa Abu Marzouk. "We must take the necessary steps to spare them from further suffering, however much we have urged them to persevere in the face of challenges. 'The Rise of Skywalker' alone could break a stronger man than I. There's no telling what having to sit through both of the other sequels will do to our heroes, let alone if they are forced to watch them repeatedly."

The Ministry of Defense sources also disclosed that as a backup plan, the inmates could be forced to watch the 1980's sitcom Small Wonder.

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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

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