Thursday, June 20, 2002

Some really funny stuff on War Now!
If you need a laugh in these troubled times, look no further than these two War Now! posts. First, an excerpt of a secretly-recorded conversation of Arafat with his staff:
Arafat: The Intifada continues, but Israel refuses to end this oppressive occupation. We must do something to get their attention. Any ideas?

Abdullah: We could blow up a bus or something.

Achmed: Yes! We’ll blow up a Zionist bus!

Ali: Brilliant! That will teach them a lesson!

Next, he wonders, "JUDAISM - JUST AS SCREWED UP AS CATHOLICISM, OR WHAT?"
Suppose you're traveling to work and you see a stop sign. What do you do? That depends on how you apply exegesis to the sign.

1. An average Jew doesn't bother to read the sign but will stop if the car in front of him does.

2. A fundamentalist stops at the sign and waits for it to tell him to go.

3. An Orthodox Jew does one of two things:

(a) Stops at the stop sign, says "Blessed art thou, O L-rd our G-d, King of the universe, who hast given us Thy commandment to stop," waits 3 seconds according to his watch, and then proceeds.

(b) Takes another route to work that doesn't have a stop sign so that he doesn't run the risk of disobeying the halachah.

4. A Haredi ("ultra-Orthodox") does the same thing as the Orthodox Jew, except that he waits 10 seconds instead of 3. He also replaces his brake lights with 1000-watt searchlights and connects his horn so that it is activated whenever he touches the brake pedal.

5. An Orthodox woman concludes that she is not allowed to observe the mitzvah of stopping because she is niddah. This is a dilemma, because the stop sign is located on her way to the mikvah. She refers the problem to her rabbi, who shrugs.

There's more, and anyone who has any training in biblical or religious studies will find it hilarious. My New Testament professor was a Jewish woman (no joke; she is a world-renowned scholar of Saint Paul's writings). Because of my classes and conversations with her I laughed so hard when I read this that I ached.

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