Standard wisdom has it that you can't beat opening a column or a talk with a joke. Last week I came across a whole "banta" of jokes (along with that wonderful suggestion for a collective noun) when I least expected it.
Searching the Web for an update on the terror attack on Israeli Arab tourists in Cairo, I chanced upon not only some light relief but a ray of hope, courtesy of Iranians with a sense of humor and the BBC's Trending site that shared it under the catchy title: "‘To cut diplomatic ties, press 9' - and other Iranian jokes about tension with Saudi Arabia."
After the Saudi authorities executed prominent Shi'a cleric Nimr al-Nimr, Iranians stormed the Saudi Embassy and a consulate, and Saudi Arabia and many of its allies suspended diplomatic ties with Iran, some Iranians bravely took to social media to express their frustration with the latest turn of evvents.
"I slept for few hours and when I woke a few countries cut ties with us. I don't even dare to take a nap now!" a Twitter user commented, according to the BBC site, after Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Sudan and Djibouti swiftly severed ties with Iran.
"One good thing that the snapping of ties with Saudi Arabia taught me is geography.
At least now I know where Djibouti is," read a joke on mobile messaging app Telegram, according to the site. It reminded me of how Israelis quipped about learning local geography in the last war as the names and locations of little-known communities were announced on the radio as they came under Palestinian rocket fire from Gaza.
Many jokes concerned the storming of foreign embassies, a stereotypical Iranian response to express anger at another country's policies.
The BBC site shared a joke doing the rounds on Facebook: "Have you climbed any embassy walls in the past 5 years? - New question to be added to visa application forms [for those applying from Iran]."
A plea on Telegram read: "Please leave some embassies for the future generations. They also have the right to seize embassies!" One of my favorites was the Twitter image and comments, also picked up by the BBC Trending site, concerning the unexpected difficulties some Iranian rioters encountered when they wanted to burn the Saudi flag and realized they first had to cut out the Islamic statement of faith written in white on the green background.
There is a chance for peace with the Iranian people (although not under the current regime), I concluded. A people with a sense of humor like this we can live with one day, inshallah, as long as they outnumber the flag-burners.
At this rate, there's a better chance for peace with the citizens of the Islamic Republic of Iran - and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia - than with the foreign minister of Sweden, who seems bereft of both a sense of humor and common sense.
After a brief interlude last year in which she denounced Saudi Arabia's 1,000-lashes flogging sentence for blogger Raif Badawi, Foreign Minister Margot Wallström is at it again: Like Iranians storming embassies and Saudis afflicting political and religious opponents, she just can't seem to stop herself from demonizing Israel. This week, according to Swedish media reports, Wallström called in parliament for an investigation to determine whether Israel is guilty of "extrajudicial killings" of Palestinians during the current wave of violence.
She has apparently completely accepted the Palestinian narrative that Israeli police and security forces have decided to shoot-to-kill people waving guns, knives and other sharp objects, or ramming their cars into crowds of innocent bystanders (can Israelis be innocent bystanders in Wallström's world?), rather than exercise a wait-and-see policy: How many people have to die before shooting the attacker dead is considered a "proportional response"? I don't seem to recall her having a similar problem with the French police who shot and killed a man wielding a meat cleaver, carrying a copy of the Islamic State flag and yelling "Allahu akbar," as he tried to break into a Paris police station on January 7.
For that matter, I don't want to start an international incident by wondering how the police handled the flag, which also has the Islamic statement of faith on it above the seal of the Prophet Muhammad.
The French and the Swedes both have enough problems at the moment.
Following the massacre in Paris in November, when Wallström was asked by Swedish state broadcaster SVT if she was concerned about the radicalization of young people in Sweden who are fighting for Islamic State (according to the Swedish security service some 300 Swedes have joined the terrorist organization in Syria and Iraq), she replied: "Clearly we have a reason to be worried not only here in Sweden but around the world because there are so many who are being radicalized.
"Here again, you come back to situations like that in the Middle East where not least the Palestinians see that there isn't any future [for them]. [The Palestinians] either have to accept a desperate situation or resort to violence."
