It’s cold and rainy, with today’s newspapers full of depressing headlines.
Do you need cheering up? If so, here's a story that might manage to raise a smile:
It’s Berlin 1936 and two Jews sit together on a park bench to read their daily newspapers. One pulls out a copy of a familiar Yiddish newspaper that offers up its latest daily bulletin of woes currently besetting their people.
Much to his amazement, his companion pulls out and proceeds to immerse himself in the pages of a copy of the Nazi newspaper Der Sturmer.
The first Jew turns to the second in horror and asks what could possibly have possessed him to choose to read such a virulently anti-semitic newspaper. His companion patiently replies by explaining as follows:
‘Well’, he says ‘whenever I read a Yiddish newspaper, all I ever learn about are pogroms, more Arab riots in Palestine against Jewish settlers, the latest German laws dispossessing Jews and curbing their freedom. It’s all too depressing. If, however, I turn to Der Sturmer, what then do I read? That the Jews own all the banks; they control the media, dominate the arts. Frankly, that's far more uplifting.’
I was put in mind of this old story by two recent 'news' items currently doing the rounds of the Middle East media.
The first is a report of a recent speech by Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayattollah Ali Khamenei, to his country’s air force in which he claimed a Zionist conspiracy had been responsible for the publication by a Danish newspaper of cartoons of the prophet Mohammed. Their publication, he claimed, had been caused by Zionist anger at Hamas' victory in the Palestinian elections.
Never mind the cartoons were first published months before these elections took place.
The second is a 'news story' that appeared at the end of last month in the Syrian government daily, Al-Thawra. It accused the Israelis of being behind the current global outbreak of Avian flu, suggesting the Israelis had developed the virus so as to damage “genes carried only by Arabs”. The article went on to speculate the the virus had been planted in East Asia to throw the world off the scent as to its real cause, but offering as an alternative explanation for its far eastern original location its having been placed there first to damage the rapidly developing yellow races who, it claimed ,were threatening the hegemony of Israel’s main ally, the USA.
Are the Chinese more closely related genetically to Arabs than the Sephardic Jews are who form the majority of Israel’s population, one cannot help wondering?
What with Mossad being widely accused in the Middle Eastern media of being responsible for the destruction of the Trade Towers in New York, you can bet which newspapers the German Jewish reader of Der Sturmer in our story would be reading today had he managed to survive the Holocaust. Whoops, I forgot! Sorry, the Holocaust never happened, having been just a figment of the wicked Jewish imagination.