Nation of fools
Benny Ziffer
Haaretz 27/11/09
| There are several nations whose citizens, due to some mutation, are born with their brains and their hearts reversed. Who are these stupid nations who allow themselves to be ruled by emotions and not good sense? Who are these people who are more entitled than others to wear the fool’s cap? If you ask Israel, there is little doubt it will point at its neighbor Egypt, and its neighbor’s neighbor, Algeria, who both recently became embroiled in a bloody quarrel because of a soccer match. After all, what is more idiotic than attributing such colossal importance to a game and sinking into despair after a victory is not achieved?
To confirm the medical diagnosis of the Egyptians’ over-emotionalism, the adventure reporter for Channel 2’s “Fact” program, Itai Engel, was dispatched to Egypt. He returned with exactly the diagnosis he had been seeking. The predictable title of Monday’s report on one of Israel’s most prestigious investigative programs was: “The Men Weep at Night.” Engel went around to cafes and filmed “the Egyptian populace” getting excited and angry, moaning and smoking narghilehs. Naturally he did not interview a single Egyptian who wasn’t an anonymous “man in the street” or was not watching the match outside. He did not interview any of the millions of quiet, stay-at-homes who aren’t particularly interested in sports, nor any of the many people who denounced the outcry and accepted the defeat with sportsmanship in interviews in the Egyptian media.
It is becoming more and more evident that we, who see ourselves as an intelligent nation dwelling in the midst of a jungle of wild fools, need increasingly large doses of narcotics in order to maintain our faith in our superior intelligence vis-a-vis our firebrand neighbors. The drugs are provided regularly by “our Arab affairs correspondents,” who are in charge of bringing us shocking curiosities from the Islamic countries designed to depict them as semi-retarded. The greatest expert in this field is Zvi Yehezkeli of Channel 10, who has a regular slot for demonstrating his arrogance, even and especially when he is “praising” progress in some area or another, such as women’s rights. In this respect, we are no different from any other nation. In order to maintain belief in one’s uniqueness, everyone needs an “other.” What isn’t taken into account is that the need to make a comparison is stupid. Because when a person says to himself, “Look how much smarter I am than so-and-so,” and relies on the other’s stupidity to prove his own intelligence, he comes off looking like a huge idiot himself. And in this respect, Israel’s stupidity cries out. True, several Egyptian citizens who had the bad luck to be in Algeria at the time of the flare-up after the game fell victim to hooliganism, as did some Algerians in Egypt who paid bodily for the blow to the national prestige of the Land of the Nile. And true, the diplomatic tension between the two countries nearly reached the point of no return, so much so that the man of peace, Libyan leader Muammar Ghadhafi, a saint in his own right, was enlisted to smooth the ruffled feathers. But let us compare that idiocy to the idiocy of the State of Israel when it believes its national prestige has been damaged. One example is enough: The official justification for launching Operation Cast Lead was that our prestige was damaged. The rationale, which quickly proved to be stupid, was that “no country would remain silent if rockets were being fired at it.” And the idiocy is that today, almost a year after the operation, we have been defeated in the field of international prestige (the Goldstone report), and we are being compelled to reconcile with Hamas, with the mediation of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak – leader of that very country we consider the mother of all stupidity. And who can even count the number of casualties because of a stupid war for prestige? Ergo, it turns out that it is much more rational to channel national frustrations onto the soccer field, with all the hooliganism this entails, and it is a lot more stupid, more expensive and more dangerous to channel such frustrations automatically onto the battlefield. How amazing: The one who seemed to be irrational suddenly seems like the king of sanity alongside our nation. It is we – we – who are wearing the fool’s cap. |
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