Seventy Two Virgins and a Giant Bag of Lard

By Jawad Ali

I sat next to a table full elderly and affluent looking folks at a restaurant last night. I missed the joke that gramps was telling, but the punch line had something to do with 72 virgins. People at his table laughed politely. They all knew what he was talking about. Those 72 virgins are all the rage in America these days. They are the main reasons why suicide bombings have become the only form of political murder in our peaceful little world.

This may come as a shock, but people in the Islamic world are not particularly aware of these virgins, nor do they spend much time thinking about them. Their imaginations are correctly ruled by such imperial images as Jennifer Lopez’s rear end and Michael Jackson’s tragic nose. At least that is how things were till the virgins burst on to the American pop scene and became a global phenomenon.

The virgins have now joined I Dream of Jeannie and harem girls as things that white folks imagine the Islamic folks to be imagining. This is all part of sexualizing the erotic exotic East. If you are reading this on a university computer, please be aware that your school could soon lose its federal funding for allowing too much discussion of how the West views the East. Please reformat your hard disc now. Pour your remaining bottle of Mountain Dew into its USB port and leave quietly.

This brings us to the political dimension of these particular 72 virgins. They currently draw their paychecks from the American Enterprise Institute and receive free condoms from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The suicide bombers blow themselves up in a desperate attempt to impress these virgins. This is similar to the way presidential assassins have been trying to impress actress Jody Foster ever since John Wilkes Booth first shot Abraham Lincoln.

This theory quietly puts an end to any discussion about the political realities of those who may blow themselves up. People have been willing to kill and get killed for political reasons ever since the paleo-conservatives first liberated ancient Babylon in 4000 BC. The 72 virgins have been hired to draw attention away from this obvious fact, and away from the realities of life under sadistic military occupation.

The 72 virgins are a fantasy about a perceived fantasy, and it doubles up on itself like an MC Escher drawing. The authorities in Israel have become so dizzy just thinking about this that they have decided to plant bags of pig fat on their busses. This will discourage, and not encourage, the suicide bombers, they desperately want us to believe.

My American friends thought that this was a brilliant and novel plan. They want to know how this story turns out. I think that they are looking for some life affirming story about how the sight of a clearly marked bag of pig fat disarmed just one deranged bomber. The bomber would later tell a teary eyed Barbara Walters how he donated the last remaining change in his pocket to the World Jewish Fund to increase the acreage of Jews-only property in his own country.

I can tell you how this story will turn out. The bags of pig fat will never appear on Israeli buses. They are just a propaganda ploy to smear the Palestinian people who are already the evilest people in the history of the world according to 4 out of 5 Middle East “experts” on TV. And if these bags do appear for some bizarre reason, then God help us all, the bombings will only go up.

As the self-appointed supervisor of the famous Chosen People Transit Authority of Israel, I would like to ask the following tough questions before I approve the budget for this “brilliant” plan.

1. If you think that the Number 22 bus on Fillmore street smells bad, can you imagine what a 33 gallon bag of lard and gizzards would do to the ambience, especially if it has been “guarding” a bus in the hot Middle East summer for the better part of a week? Was it not Benjamin Franklin who first observed that people who sacrifice the odor of their public buses for a measure of safety deserve neither?
2. People like you and me, whose first thought might be “Ouch this might hurt” will never set off a bomb in their lap. No sir. Suicide bombers are people who think of others first, especially the others who will be going up in a ball of fire and shrapnel. Might such people now have the added incentive of creating a ball of fire, shrapnel and pig fat for heavens sake?
3. Did we learn anything at all from the fact that Muhammed Atta partied like a rock star with hookers, strippers and Coors Lite before he reviewed his Arabic flight manual for the last time? Come to think of it, who publishes flight manuals in Arabic for the Boing 757?
4. There is lot in Islamic theology against killing innocent people, and against suicide. And if that did not stop these people, then why would a bucket full of burning lard fit into their calculations? Especially since there is absolutely nothing in Islamic theology (or even fantasy, for that matter) about the fate of those who go down in the lard mobile.
5. What is the historical batting average of such “brilliant” plans? There is a famous story of a US general pouring pig blood on the graves of Muslim rebels that he scalped in the Philippines. Those pesky rebels are still stirring things up some 80 years later.
6. Do we really want to add highly combustible grease to this mixture of Arabs, Jews and bombs on a bus?
7. What would be the total cost of the operation if some mullah announces that blowing up the lard mobile brings extra blessings (and virgins), and we have to dismantle everything the next day?

We hope that saner minds prevail at the transit authority. If Israel is anything like the US, every pound of extra lard will be dearly needed during next year’s budget negotiations. The whole story reeks of pig gizzards and propaganda. If I saw a press release from David Duke about how he has wrapped the last three dollar bills in his wallet in strips of bacon to keep the greedy Jews from stealing them, my first thought would be to think that Mr. Duke has lost his mind. Again. My second thought would be that the “clever” Mr. Duke is just trying to slime the innocent Jewish people rather than protect his meager savings.

So what does the ill fated exploding pig have in common with the 72 nubile virgins, you ask? They are clumsy attempts to slap on a religious dimension to a very political conflict. They are attempts straight out of Monty Python to attach a carrot to the face of the Palestinian people to prove that they are all witches. They are your garden variety hate propaganda, and they make it seem impossible to find a political solution to a relatively simple political problem.