Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Shazam!

A little bird told me…

Another day, another joke.

Regular reader and commenter Cheradenine Zakalwe translated this one from the French, and explains its origins:

Josaine Plateret, a candidate for Sarkozy’s ruling UMP party in France, has just been suspended from the party for posting “racist” jokes on her Facebook page, among which is this gem.

When you get to the punch line, you’ll probably say, “Wait a minute, Baron! This isn’t a joke — it’s just a somewhat fanciful depiction of the reality of 21st-century Europe!”

And indeed it is. But if we can’t laugh at all the absurdity around us, what is there left?

One day, by chance, an Arab comes across an angel. The angel invites him to make four wishes and promises to grant them immediately.

The Arab thinks for a while then says, “I wish I had blue eyes”.

Shazam! He has blue eyes!

The angel asks for his second wish. The Arab thinks for a moment then says, “I wish I had blonde hair”.

Shazam! The Arab has blonde hair.

The angel invites him to make his third wish. The Arab replies, “I wish I was a Swede and had a Swedish passport!”

Shazam! He is now a Swede with a Swedish passport!

The angel asks for his fourth and last wish. The Arab thinks carefully then replies…

“I wish I didn’t have to work, and I could get loads of money without doing a stroke of work!”

Shazam! Transformed back into an Arab again, with brown eyes, dark skin and curly hair.

But in his pockets he finds a benefits book, a social security card, a free bus pass, a family credit pack, and a housing benefit form!

11 comments:

Juniper in the Desert said...

The truth condemned as hate-speech...

bewick said...

Ha ha ha
Sadly it is all but true and not least in the UK . We have the claim for THE BEST welfare benefits for immigrants which is why they all try to get here.

babs said...

Hey Bewick - Are you sure about that? It seems to me that Norway has a rather sweet thing going...

S/

bewick said...

Babs, You may well be right but here in the UK I think 50% of those of Pakistani origin don't work and 75% of Bangladeshis.
Wish I had the time to do it but a comparative analysis of the welfare benefits of various countries would be useful. Except of course that that might be misleading because of different tax regimes.
The benefits paid to immigrants even wouldn't totally help. Even in the UK figures for, say, Pakistanis then those born in the UK don't figure in official statistics. Only immigrants.
Some countries, France may be one, don't even collect such figures. WHY?

MORFINY BOOKS WORLD REVIEW said...

http://rossrightangle.info/west-java-uniformed-bigots-bully-ahmadis-to-betray-their-faith-11237/
It's getting bad, bad, bad in Indonesia.

Anonymous said...

She had another good one too:

What's the difference between an Arab who got knocked down by a car and a dog that got knocked down by a car?

There will be brake marks in front of the dog.

Anonymous said...

I wonder where Cheradenine found those. The news about this candidate's "racist" jokes were all over French media -- except that the jokes themselves were ostensibly not mentioned. At least not where I looked.

This is a trend, by the way. Make a big fuss about someone's allegedly "racist" remarks -- but don't publish the remarks. Why, it would be "racist", of course, and we can't let you see that.

This is getting more and more totalitarian.

Anonymous said...

However, it was of course incredibly stupid for this candidate to publish those jokes on her Facebook page. Especially the second one, which, frankly, does not belong to the public discourse of any politician, and is best left to pub banter.

it seems the ruling French party has a way of swamping the country with immigrants, and at the same time trying to apologise by venting racist jokes.

Just the opposite of what they should be doing. How boorish is that ?

Anonymous said...

Some of the anti-racist witch-hunting organisations posted screen captures of her Facebook page.

For example, here.

I didn't quite get the humour in some of the jokes. There must be some linguistic nuances that are lost on a non-native speaker. For example, what's a "gris bouilli"? A "boiled grey"?

Anonymous said...

Cheradenine,

Your link appears as a blank page to me (under the banner and headline).

"Gris bouilli" is a spelling mistake. The correct word is "gribouillis", which means scrawling.

Unless it is a pun, which might be a part of some joke. "Bouilli" does mean boiled. "Gris" means grey, and it's sometimes used as a noun and a code word, among nationalist circles. It means either "non-native person", "non-white", or "Arab" (not white, not black, in-between).

Few Frenchmen would understand that meaning, though. It's slang, meant to evade the politically correct police.

I'm surprised that a UMP candidate would use such a word.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the info about the slang term.

The link works fine for me. Maybe try a different browser?

Actually, looking at the page again, I see that the second joke I mentioned about being knocked down by a car was posted by someone else rather than the candidate herself.