Palestinian Sign Language

Here is the link to the news story that inspired this post:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/palestinian-wakes-up-to-find-his-innocent-facebook-photo-use

Courtesy of Mohammed AlQadi

When you stop to think about it, numbers have a meaning and a power beyond their original numerical value. In its most basic sense a number refers to a physical entity whose repetitiveness imbues that number with its meaning. That was what numbers originally signified. Then came the Indians and started meditating on those numbers while doing their yoga, trying to fill their minds with void. Lo and behold, numbers suddenly had their own independent existence that one could manipulate, aggregate and disaggregate, fiddle with and twist into different sequences and formulas. This inevitably led to the all-encompassing infinity, the endless concept with no substance to limit its possibilities. From there the Indian mind reversed back to Zero, the mother of all abstract thinking, which the Indians bequeathed to the Arabs.

That, in a nutshell, was the root of Israel’s problem with the Palestinians: Not only that they knew how to count but also that they were comfortable with zero. They claimed it as the basis of their practice of resistance, their famous Sumoud or perseverance: You have nothing, do nothing and get zero from the international community; you just sit still and wait expecting nothing. But also, as part of the Arab Semitic people, the Palestinians had the peculiar habit of using their hands to say things. It started with their closing their fist and extending the index finger straight to give witness to the unity of the creator. Whether praying, meditating or preparing to die, they would be seen making that sign. Such Palestinian pious pretensions didn’t fool us. We Israelis knew intuitively what the one finger sign meant. True, we weren’t about to start documenting which finger those sneaks were using: “As soon as our soldiers would look away, even in the midst of prayer a Palestinian would switch from the index to the middle finger,” The official IDF spokeswomen said. “Even under the strictest of security measures they would give us the ‘up-yours’ sign. You look back at one of them and he or, even worse, she would beat you to it and switch back to the index finger pretending to be deep in communion with Allah. But then, Allah probably would give us the middle finger sign if only we could see Him. But you just wait. Our Yahweh will get Him sooner or later.”

Then came the First Intifada and the whole world colluded with the Palestinians by opening its media to let their criminal youth into living rooms around the globe. And what did the little terrorists do but use the world’s innocence to their advantage showing the two finger sign under the guise of making the V-sign as if for victory. But we knew the way their dirty minds worked. Our analysts figured out their thoughts even before they conceived them. We knew instinctively that they were using England’s code signals to say to us the F-word. You go figure which way they turned their hand as they made that signal. We knew they all meant to turn its back to us as in the original English tradition not the palm side as in the V for victory. That was why our peace campaigner, Rabin, issued his order to pardon all those creeps and only to break their arms so they won’t raise them with the vulgar sign again. Arafat himself played along and imitated Nixon and Churchill with that V-sign for victory while deep in his heart he knew that they too were saying ‘up yours’ to the whole world.

And then the Palestinians started scheming to abduct three of our boys while on a hike. They began more than a year in advance and enlisted the services of the world media on which they have a monopoly as we all know. Can you imagine a more sordid trick than to use the well-tested method of hiding in full view of the whole world? Here they were signaling their plan to abduct three of our settlers, using the three finger sign of course and passing the information across the entire Arab world in the guise of the number they connived to assign to Mohammad Assaf as a contestant in the Arab Idol song fest. Imagine a Gazan refugee winning in a civilized singing competition! Where would he have studied music and voice? Did he start with imitating the sound of a sick camel or the screams of hungry camp orphs? But he won that competition on the strength of the popularity of their planned crime. There was hardly a Palestinian man or woman, adult or child, in or out of jail who didn’t raise his hand with the three extended fingers in support of the abduction scheme.

They may well be geniuses in connivance and trickery but they are poor in math. They must have figured that if they were to get the same thousand-to-one prisoner exchange rate as they had with Gelad Shalit then three of our youth would be enough to free all their prisoners. They knew we had some five thousand Palestinian prisoners in our jails. But they must have figured that 1000 X 3 > 5000. Believe me I have meditated on that one for a long time and I can’t get it to work. Perhaps they do their calculations on basis of volume. Might that be why so many Palestinian prisoners have started fasting in preparation for the coming exchange, I wonder? Or it must be that, in their simple-minded calculations, they count every two or three children as one adult prisoner. But that formula doesn’t work. even if we were to subtract all 700 Palestinian children that we arrest every year, 99.74% of whom we convict in our military courts. I told you we know what they think before they even think it, those slow Arabs, and we manage to beat an admission of guilt out of their dirty little minds every time.

And about those 10 and 11-year old children of theirs: You must think that we have no right to abduct them out of their beds at night. But you can quote me on this matter: "I am not racist but it is necessary to kill them from the moment they are born." http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/patrick-strickland/kill-palestinian-every-hour-says-new-israeli-facebook-page Every Palestinian squatting in our promised land commits a crime against us every time he or she breathes. They consume the oxygen our future generations need.

Got it straight now? You tell me how many fingers I should give.