Bomb Jerusalem!
by Tiger Tom
Veteran Gazette Columnist Tiger Tom’s RX for Peace in the Holy Land
Editor’s Note: This piece first appeared on the Gazette’s website a few weeks before the 911 bombings–at a time when the Taliban were taking heat from the whole western world over the destruction of Buddhist holy objects. — Hardly Waite.
I, Tiger Tom, am weary of hearing artsy yuppies whine about the religious statues blasted to oblivion by the Taliban. Good riddance, I say. Let me tell you why.
Religious objects have been nothing but trouble since the beginning. If the Taliban blows up a statue, that’s one thing less to have a religious war about. If cubs fight over a toy, the wise mom puts it out of sight to stop the fracas. That’s what the Taliban did when they blasted the religious art works. I, Tiger Tom, say well done.
As long as there’s a Temple Mount or a Wailing Wall or even a bush that Ahab or some lower-echelon prophet took a dump behind, the Jews and the Palestinians are going to keep fighting over who gets to have them. I say that for the good of humankind and animalkind alike we must demolish every last smidgeon of religious paraphernalia in the whole Holy Land so that there isn’t so much as a holy splinter left to fight about. You can negotiate your paws off and talk till your tongue has blisters, but as long as there’s a holy this or that or an ark of the whatever, those people are going to fight over them. As long as there’s a wall to wail on, those people are going to fight over who gets to wail there. And if you take away their guns, they’ll fight with sticks, and if you cut off their hands, they’ll fight with their bloody stubs.
So I, Tiger Tom, say, blow up every last relic. Blow up the whole sacred bunch of them. Blow them up so the world can get on with its life. And if they pick up the dirt where the temple used to be and start saying it’s holy dirt, I say take the dirt away from them, hurl it into the deepest part of the ocean, and throw away the key.
Probably the only reason we don’t have never-ending wars in the USA is because we don’t have any places where some long-ago god ate his last meal or said something nifty or talked to an angel or fed a multitude with a single tuna-fish sandwich. We do great without holy places. I, Tiger Tom, say let’s give the Jews and Palestinians the same advantage by ridding them of holy stuff to fight about. In the name of peace and all that’s sacred, bomb Jerusalem!
And I would hope that in the future gods would have the good sense and common decency to stay in the heavens or wherever they are supposed to stay and not to go wandering around the earth creating a lot of holy stuff for people to fight about.
