March 20, 2009

Herrenvolk humor

I bet you noticed this article. The obscene jokes mentioned in it are listed at MondoWeiss.



On the right, shirt ordered by the demolition unit of the Regiment 13 from the Golani Brigade, depicting the demolition of a mosque and the punch line (or shall we say 'the dynamite line'?), "Only God forgives." On the left is a shirt made for the "graduates" of a sharpshooting course. It shows a child holding a gun in the crosshair with the text, "Smaller is harder."

Of course, the official spokesperson of the Herrenvolk Army says that
The designs are printed at the soldiers' private initiative, and on civilian shirts. The examples raised by Haaretz are not in keeping with the values of the IDF spirit, not representative of IDF life, and are in poor taste.
And Ethan Bronner from the NY Times, says that the horrible death and destruction in Gaza
seem like the painful but inevitable outcome of a modern army bringing war to an urban space.
But the makers of the designs, being trained to kill but not (yet) to prostitute their mind (first army, then university), disagree:
Some of the people who saw it told me, 'Is that what you've got to show for the IDF? That it destroys homes?' I can understand people who look at this from outside and see it that way, but I was in Gaza and they kept emphasizing that the object of the operation was to wreak destruction on the infrastructure, so that the price the Palestinians and the leadership pay will make them realize that it isn't worth it for them to go on shooting. So that's the idea of 'we're coming to destroy' in the drawing." (my emphasis)
But what do soldiers know? If Ethan Bronner and Marc Regev say Israel tries to limit damage to civilians, surely this soldier simply misunderstood the orders, didn't he?

And this one did too:
At first the specified action was to go into a house. We were supposed to go in with an armored personnel carrier called an Achzarit [literally, Cruel] to burst through the lower door, to start shooting inside and then ... I call this murder ... in effect, we were supposed to go up floor by floor, and any person we identified - we were supposed to shoot. I initially asked myself: Where is the logic in this? (Haaretz)
And the guy who tells this story, what does he know, not being a New York Times journalist and all?
One of our officers, a company commander, saw someone coming on some road, a woman, an old woman. She was walking along pretty far away, but close enough so you could take out someone you saw there. If she were suspicious, not suspicious - I don't know. In the end, he sent people up to the roof, to take her out with their weapons. From the description of this story, I simply felt it was murder in cold blood.
Now when you come to think about the birth control advert that another sharpshooting unit ordered for their T-shirts:

This is the legacy of Meretz and the rest of the "Zionist left", and its very original idea of combatting racism with...racism, a.k.a. "the demographic threat," which is Meretz's best argument in favor of "peace."

The "Palestinian State" that the Israeli "left" advocates and the bullets of the sharpshooters are two solutions for the same "problem": Palestinian children.

But as Israel proves, widespread use of prophylactics does not make for better people.



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