or Powell's or me• • •
"Mike and Jon, Jon and Mike—I've known them both for years, and, clearly, one of them is very funny. As for the other: truly one of the great hangers-on of our time."—Steve Bodow, head writer, The Daily Show
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"Who can really judge what's funny? If humor is a subjective medium, then can there be something that is really and truly hilarious? Me. This book."—Daniel Handler, author, Adverbs, and personal representative of Lemony Snicket
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"The good news: I thought Our Kampf was consistently hilarious. The bad news: I’m the guy who wrote Monkeybone."—Sam Hamm, screenwriter, Batman, Batman Returns, and Homecoming
January 09, 2009
Text Of Security Council Resolution On Gaza
By: John Caruso
In case you haven't read the Security Council resolution on Gaza yet, Jews Sans Frontieres has obtained a copy:
The Security Council,Recalling that Israel reiterated its commitment to not build gas chambers and not burn Palestinians in ovens
Recalling that Israel is a country governed by white people elected with lots of money, has a stock exchange and a healthy derivatives market, and has a really nice beach
Calculating that the replacement cost of a Palestinian is about 1:35 compared to the replacement cost of an Israeli in Purchasing Power Parity
Emphasizing that Israelis have many rich American friends
Noting that Hamas has the guttural sound H in its name that we find hard to pronounce
Expressing that Palestinian demands for self-determination are annoying
[...]
Now that is some high-quality satire. The rest is just as funny in the same oh-god-no-I-shouldn't-be-laughing-about-this kind of way, and you should go read it right now.
— John Caruso
Posted at January 9, 2009 05:47 PMNot unlike Dennis Perrin's Jan. 7 post, "Frontline Laffs." Gotta laugh to keep from cryin'.
Posted by: Mike H. at January 9, 2009 06:42 PMI hate to be the humorless guy around here, but I'm pretty sure the words burn, ovens, and gas chambers are entries in the Great Dictionary of the Satirically Challenged, 2nd ed. Those guys surely can do better than that.
burn
ovens
gas chambers
Laugh? Thought I'd die.
Posted by: donescobar at January 9, 2009 10:47 PMI'd think it was clear that the point of that particular line wasn't to belittle the holocaust but rather to mock Israel's "restraint"—meaning that although Israel has penned Gazans into an enormous open-air concentration camp with an already-shattered infrastructure, cut off food, water, medicine, and electricity, subjected them to psychological torture and degradation (for decades), and has now started killing off these subhumans at a higher rate than usual, they've at least stopped short of holocaust-style mass murder. If anyone's belittling the holocaust, it's Israel, not JSF.
(The author of the posting was a Romanian Jew who grew up in Israel, by the way...which I believe is part of why the phrasing is shy of perfection, Bernard.)
Going beyond that one solitary line, the overall point of the article was to ridicule Security Council resolutions (and the UN's usual "evenhanded" approach to Israel's crimes against the Palestinians), and as someone who's read many, many of them, it was dead on.
