They Already Paid for It, Asshole

Today's Failbook fail: You Break It, You Buy It.

Congratulations to Failbook for being about the eighteenth entity to try to tell me this stupid joke:

Dear Egyptian rioters,
Please don't damage the pyramids. We will not rebuild.

Thank you.
The Jews.

Failbook is behind my grandmother on this one. My AOL-subscribing grandmother. Hooray for relevance!

Moreover, this joke is just bullshit. First of all, the pyramids were almost certainly not built by Jewish slaves. Archaeologists think the builders were skilled, paid laborers. In fact, the historicity of the entire Exodus narrative is not supported by any science or, indeed, any accounts outside the Bible.

So the Jews didn't build the pyramids. And, you know, that's not widely known, so whatever. But I think the larger point is that this is actually a really negative, awful message about an oppressed group of people that is trying to throw off their oppressors. The Egyptians have been protesting -- not "rioting" -- since January 25th. They've already effected a lot of change, and it looks like there's more to come. But there's no surer way to denigrate a group of protesters than to call them "rioters" and boil all their struggles down to a destructive action that might hurt the only landmark in their country that most white Westerners give a shit about. And since Jews are construed as "white" in the sane corners of America, it's just a racist/Islamophobic clusterfucktastrophe of a "joke."

Look, I'm Jewish; I get that I am the owner of a problematic identity, to say the least. But this joke makes me ashamed, since it was probably kicked off by a Jew. We should give more of a shit about the Middle East than to crap out a dud like this.