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Serious satire
"Humor is a funny way of being serious"
-Thomas Edison
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To have your emails deleted please write to me at renatoobeid@hotmail.com
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Copyright© 2001-2010, Renato Obeid
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"Top blog/Renato Obeid's World/Today's pick: This rambling weblog is worth reading not so much for its satirical posts but more for its insight into the minutiae of life in Lebanon, including the etiquette of road accidents and how to hire a taxi.”
-Jane Perrone, The Guardian
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Friday, August 03, 2001
“To eat they had a handful of white sugar sachets, to drink a liter of water which froze at night and in pursuing their dream of fleeing Australia for a better life they rode across the continent on the roof of a goods train at speeds of up to one hundred and ten kilometers per hour.
Three Iranian men who escaped from the Woomera detention center waited for days in the desert before jumping the train for the 2150-kilometer journey to Perth.
Their mission?
To get to another country with a more sympathetic attitude to their application for refugee status.
Their big disappointment was that the train was headed the wrong way.
One wanted New Zealand, another wanted to head for Canada.
Australia, which they had been told by people smugglers who brought them from Indonesia would treat them well had become a country they wanted to flee…
Sentenced to eight months jail for escaping…
Mr. Keily (their solicitor) said the men were not upset about going to jail – “they made the comment to me that the remand center here is much more comfortable than Woomera”.
This left the Magistrate with few choices he said – “what sort of penalty do you give to people who have just escaped from a concentration camp? – a bond wasn’t an option so the choice was prison or a detention center and they prefer prison”
- “Escapees jump on the slow train to a country jail” (Andrew Stevenson, today’s Sydney Morning Herald)
This reminded me of the equally ill-fated convicts who used to escape their prison settlements and trek across the country in the vain hope of reaching China (which they thought was across the continent) in the early days of White settlement here.
Plus ca change.
Putting aside the Aboriginals (the decimated and alienated ghost people who make up one percent of our population), everybody else in Australia, from the British colonists who founded the colony, to the most recent Asian immigrants are illegal immigrants in this country.
Nobody is an Australian but everybody is an Australian.
We’re all in it together; nobody has primacy over anybody else – just a couple of years.
E.g. Anglo-Australians, whose ancestors arrived here two hundred years ago, have simply been here longer than an Asian who arrived five years ago.
By coming from somewhere else and settling on Australian soil, you, like any existing Australian or any Australian who’s ever existed or will exist, are an Australian.
I think that almost anybody who manages to get to Australia should be allowed to stay here because they have passed the unwritten Australian test – they got to Australia (like every other Australian has ever done before).
Australia is like the try zone on a rugby ground – the melee that occurs on the rest of the field is like the chaotic rest of the World.
But if you can get the “ball” from that and into the safe zone (Australia), then you’re in.
A terrorist threw a bomb into a crowded Jerusalem marketplace today (police are looking for a man of Middle Eastern appearance).
GOLD STANDARD
Commenting on Australian sports stars and the reverence they’re accorded, somebody retorted with “how many gold medals have you won?”
I replied that I hadn’t known that winning a gold medal was the prerequisite for expressing an opinion in this country.
FIGHT BREAKS OUT ON SET OF JERRY SPRINGER SHOW
The Kremlin has declared the Russian nuclear submarine the Kursk, which remains at the bottom of the Barents Sea along with the remains of it’s 118 man crew after sinking nearly a year ago, “the most successful submarine ever”.
“We don’t understand what all the fuss is about – it’s a submarine and submarines are meant to be underwater”.
“The Kursk is a victim of it’s own success”
BEJIING TO HOST 2008 OLYMPICS
- Hangman to debut as an Olympic sport
Cigarettes don’t kill people, smoking does.
PHILOSOPHERS URGED NOT TO ANSWER EVERY CENSUS QUESTION WITH A QUESTION
A couple of weeks ago I met a Waspish urban thirty-something yuppie who made the very rich claim that she was descendant from the exotic nomadic spear-carrying mountain dwelling Berbers of North Africa.
This strikes me as typical Western yuppie grass is always greener on the other side-ism.
I got to wondering whether there were Berbers who claimed to be descendant from “exotic” sedentary mobile phone-carrying urban Sydneysiders.
I also wonder whether there are exotic Tibetan Buddhists who have converted to “exotic” Australian Anglicanism picketing the Australian Embassy in Beijing demanding that their Australian co-religionists be released from the oppressive yoke of, say, the GST – just like the Australian Anglicans who have converted to Tibetan Buddhism picket the Chinese Embassy here demanding freedom for Tibet.
Despite all the media rabblerousing incitement about ethnic crime gangs here in Sydney, such ethnic crime gangs are not a new phenomenon here – ethnic crime gangs first appeared in Australia circa 26th January 1778 (wearing t-shirts that said “you don’t have to be a criminal to get sent her but it helps”).It can also be argued our most famous folk hero, Ned Kelly, was a member of an (Irish) ethnic crime gang.
12:00 pm
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