LEBANONESQUE

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Monday, October 17, 2005

Avian/Bird Flu: The "Zionist-Imperialist" plot thickens


This Daily Star story tells of people, in southern Lebanon, who do not believe that there is an avian flu.

The chicken plot thickens, and may very well sicken. ALRIGHT! The pun is the lowest form of humor, but I just could not resist.

The DS quotes Umm Walid:

I assure you this is not bird flu, this is an American flu, a flu of personal interests and ambitions.


Another denizen, Mohamed Masri, tells us:

This is an American creation aimed at distracting the people from their economic and political problems.


You'll find other delightful quotes in the article by like-minded worldly ignorami. The problem of course is that this kind of idiocy in Lebanon and the Middle East is not confined to some crazy man/ woman who owns three chickens.

These people may well facilitate the spread of the flu in Lebanon, the same way demented conspiracy theorists keep hindering progress or solutions.

We all know people who make similarly nutty arguments, sometimes with big words and more sophisticated language, but the impact is as bad. Some of these people are politicians. Some are published journalists/columnists. And some are (gasp!) bloggers. Very sad commentary on the damage to the culture, and the time that will be needed to overcome this dementia.

posted by JoseyWales @ Monday, October 17, 2005  

7 Comments:

  • At 10/16/05, 7:26 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Re: Silver Lining:

    Perhaps there a silver lining to this whole avian flu thing. What if Lebanon admits it has to work with Israel to mitigate a possible outbreak of the disease? The threat of avian flu could give rise to the first long-term official contact between Israel and Lebanon ever. Surely no one could think that the birds who spread the disease will respect the international border?

    Itiail

     

  • At 10/17/05, 1:35 PM, Blogger JoseyWales said…

    Vox,

    You think you are (almost) kidding. In today's NY Times (OCT 17), there is a story on the Bulgarian nurses accused of inoculating Libyan children and with the AIDS virus.

    The nurses claim innocence, and if convicted would be put to death.

    The motive charged by Libya: destabilizing the state and of course "agents" of the ubiquitous Mossad.

     

  • At 10/17/05, 5:02 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Let's chop the heads of all the Zionist homosexuals who innoculate AIDS to our children, be them Jewish Bulgarian of Zionist Christian!

    Bunch of idiots conspiracy theorists.

     

  • At 10/17/05, 5:03 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    I meant the conspiracy theorists, not you JW

     

  • At 10/19/05, 11:29 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Israel and Jordan have announced that they will coordinate in case of a bird flu outbreak.

    http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/635949.html

    Israel and Jordan to coordinate response to potential bird flu outbreak
    By David Ratner, Haaretz Correspondent, Haaretz Service and Reuters

    Israeli and Jordanian agriculture officials plan to meet Thursday to coordinate the handling of any domestic outbreak of the avian flu virus.

    An official at the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem said the meeting would take place at a border crossing between Jordan and the West Bank.

    A United Nations agency said Wednesday that the risk of bird flu spreading to the Middle East and Africa has markedly increased following the confirmation of outbreaks in Romania and Turkey.

    Health Minister Dan Naveh also warned earlier Wednesday that Israel would be unlikely to escape the global outbreak of avian flu, which has recently been identified in Greece and Turkey, Israel's near neighbors.

    "Avian flu is a global problem, and there is a reasonable assumption that it will also reach Israel," Naveh told Israel Radio.

    Naveh said that if there is a case of bird flu in Israel, all fowl within a 3-km radius will be destroyed. Other birds would be innoculated.

    He stressed that even if a person became infected with the disease, that did not mean that he or she would go on to infect other people.

    He said that contrary to reports, the Health Ministry had sufficient medical technicians and laboratories to carry out bird flu tests and could cope with a heightened demand for them. He declined to comment of the level of preparedness at the Agriculture Ministry.

    The UN Food and Agriculture Organization said in a statement that recent confirmation of the H5N1 bird flu strain in Romania and Turkey confirmed the virus is spreading along the pathways of migratory birds outside southeast Asia.

    The Agriculture Ministry's chief veterinarian for fowl, Dr. Shimon Pokomonsky, has warned that the fears over an Israeli outbreak of avian flu center on the possibility that a bird whose migratory path passes through Israel may contract the disease in one of the countries in which there is an epidemic, and then somehow come into contact with domestic fowl.

    A veterinarian for a commercial company in the chicken farming sector says that when it comes to fowl raised for eating, the coops are almost hermetically sealed, with little chance of infiltration by an affected bird. The same goes for the breeding flocks.

    The big problem comes with the coops that house chickens raised for their eggs. According to the veterinarian, these coops are often primitive structures in small communities - moshavim and villages in the periphery.

    These coops, which contain "just" a few hundred chickens (as opposed to some 8,000 in a "small" coop used for raising chickens for meat), are open and relatively accessible to birds from the outside that could be carrying diseases.

    "There are moshavim on which the coops serve as `occupational therapy' for elderly farmers; and there, one can sometimes see more songbirds than chickens enjoying the feed mixture," the veterinarian says.

    Dr. Pokomonsky says he, too, is concerned about these coops, noting that farmers today must be more aware of signs of diseases among their birds. The Agriculture Ministry official adds that veterinarians have been explicitly told to be on the lookout for symptoms that may be an indication of avian flu.

    Raising poultry accounts for some 18 percent of Israel's agricultural sector, and some 40 percent of the Israeli livestock industry. At any given moment, there are some 40 million to 42 million chickens in Israel, with around 40 percent of them raised for eating.

    The industry yields some 340,000 tons of meat and 1.6 billion eggs a year. And the entire sector is now on the defensive due to concerns that the avian flu will spread to the Middle East.

    Palestinian Agriculture Minister Walid Abed Rabbo, who was unaware of the meeting between Jordan and Israel, said the Palestinian Authority had stopped the import of all birds and bird products, but that migrating birds were also a risk.

     

  • At 2/13/06, 2:32 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    And the other option...

    a flu that started in Asia, and spread to the Arab world... and now instead of having their citizenry focusing on things like improving their personal lives, they can find a new readon to hate Israel/America.

    Everybody seems to need a scapegoat. Arab dictators simply need one to keep their people from focusing on their own atrocities.

     

  • At 5/12/06, 10:57 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    this talk of scapegoats and hatred leads me to many thoughts.
    Do you know the term scapegoat comes from the bible. When God directed abraham to bring his son to the sacrificial stone. Abraham obeyed the lord, but just before Abraham would sacrifice his son to the Lord, God said to stop. In place of Abrahams son, the sacrificed a goat

    Now, about the modern day scapegoat, i refer you to the Early 1940's in Germany. The country was devastated by inflation due to the payment of heavy reparations from world war one. There was turmoli within Germany, And Adolph Hitler pointed the finger at the Jew. The jews became Germany's scapegoat, the blame for their problems. It is wrong to hate isreal, it is wrong to hate "zionist", it is wrong to hate ANY HUMAN BEING.

    However, on to another matter more closly related to this posting;

    AIDS PLOT: Back in the late sixties, early seventies, many men were being drafted into the United States Military to serve in VietNam. It is my suggestion that some of these men (San Francisco, California) declined selective service enlistment because of there sexual preference (homosexual), these men were then told that they would still have to go through regular enlistment procedures untill there claim for military service exemptment could be processed. While in basic training, waiting for there exemptment status to be processed, these recruits were “innoculated” against disease common to recruits serving in the South East Asian peninsular. This innoculation, in a program initiated by none other than J. Edgar Hovver Due to the ten year incubation period required for HIV to develope into AIDS, it wasn’t untill 1980 that the disease began to immerge.
    If this conjecture were to be proved true, is it possible that the South African Government recruited the help of American Science to further advance the devastation of AIDS within it’s own continent?

    BIRDFLU:People of the world, do not be fooled.
    have you heard of the ILLUMINATY, how about the BENEFICIENT DEATH. A plot to wipe out 90% of the worlds population. I beg you, Should your Government ever urge you or otherwise compel you to get innoculated against the “AVIAN FLU” DO NOT DO IT!

     

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