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My Head Might Burst with Irony

by Alizarin J. Crimson

Sometimes I feel like my head is going to burst with irony.

Like walking through Arab East Jerusalem and seeing Palestinian men wearing tshirts that say: “F.B.I. anti-terrorism unit”. And I wonder if they are wearing it out of irony or if they don’t actually know what it says. Clothing covered with English words and phrases is very popular in the West Bank. Many of the phrases make absolutely no sense at all, while some of it is quite sexually suggestive. So it blows your mind when you walk through extremely conservative Hebron and you see a Palestiniain kid wearing a t-shirt saying “No, you’re NOT coming home with me tonight.” or “Mad licking skills.”

Today I had some business in Jewish West Jerusalem and stopped in a few art galleries that were on my way. To be confronted by a nice Jewish man who tries to sell you some Judaica painting for $3000 and who happens to be dressed in the exact same manner as the people who just spit on you and called you a Nazi the day before is irony. When enough of these people harass you, you have a physical reaction everytime you see them because your body is preparing you to be harassed.

So is kneeling down and feeling the pain in your right thigh where the gigantic rock hit you a few weeks before, (courtesy of the religious Jews in Hebron) as you examine a painting of a bunch of
religious Jews praying. This particular injury which has not healed yet came from an adult male this time (never got around to writing in detail about it, but the official report is here) who was never arrested despite a police complaint by both me and Joe Skillet.

More irony is when I ran into a border policeman who happened to be in the police car which took Joe and I to the police station that day we made the complaint. He saw me going through the checkpoint from Palestinian controlled H1 into Israeli military controlled H2 and told me that if I ever saw the guy in there (pointing to Palestinian controlled H1) who hit me with the rock, he’d arrest him. I informed him that it wasn’t a Palestinian who threw the rock, it was a Jew. With a look of shock and disbelief, he asked, “Why do they throw rocks at you ?”

“I don’t know, why don’t you ask them ?” I replied. Suffice it to say, he didn’t offer to go into Beit Hadassah and find the Jew who hit me with the rock.