MB Civic

There will be resisting the ‘black berets’ …
Al Baraka

French Intellectuals to be Deployed in the Lebanon to Convince Hezbollah of
Non-Existence of God

Reuters – Tel Aviv

The relentless war in southern Lebanon hotted up yesterday when the Allies
revealed plans to airdrop a platoon of crack French existentialist philosophers
into the country to destroy the morale of Hezbollah zealots by proving the
non-existence of God.

Elements from the feared Jean-Paul Sartre Brigade, or ‘Black Berets’, will be
parachuted into the combat zones to spread doubt, despondency and existential
anomie among the enemy. Hardened by numerous intellectual battles fought during
their long occupation of Paris’s Left Bank, their first action will be to
establish a number of pavement cafes at strategic points near the front lines.
There they will smoke, drink coffee and talk animatedly about the absurd nature
of life and man’s lonely isolation in the universe. They will be accompanied by
a number of heartbreakingly beautiful girlfriends, who will further spread
dismay by sticking their tongues in the philosophers’ ears every five minutes
and looking remote and unattainable to everyone else.

Their leader, Colonel Marc-Ange Gauthier, spoke yesterday of his confidence in
the success of their mission. Sorbonne-trained Gauthier, a very intense and
unshaven young man in a black pullover, gesticulated wildly and said, “The
Hezbollah are caught in a logical fallacy that is the most ridiculous. There is
no God and I can prove it. Take your tongue out of my ear, Juliette, I am
talking.”

Marc-Ange plans to deliver an impassioned thesis on man’s nauseating freedom of
action, with special reference to the work of Foucault and the films of Alfred
Hitchcock. Asked whether he and his fellow intellectuals were prepared to resort
to Deleuze and Derrida’s techniques of ultimate deconstruction, Gauthier
apparently contradicted himself by saying “Let’s hope it does not come to that”,
and then immediately adding that “Of course such meta-philosophical discourse is
banned by the Geneva Convention, as we all know”.
Confronted by reporters on this point, he said that he was “ontologically
coherent in a Heiddegerian sense” and that it was only the media’s “narrow
bourgeois concept of contradiction” that made it seem otherwise.

However, humanitarian agencies have been quick to condemn the operation,
pointing out that the effects of passive smoking from the Frenchmen’s’ endless
Gitanes could wreak a terrible toll on civilians in the area. “This is taking
Shock & Awe to unprecedented levels of callous disregard for life”, said a
spokesman for the World Wildlife Fund.

Amid all this controversy, speculation was mounting last night that Britain may
also contribute to the so-called “carpet-doubting” effort by dropping Professor
Stephen Hawking into Iran to propagate his non-deistic theory of the creation of
the universe.