On Purim it is traditional to play April Fools type pranks in celebration of the holiday. Its also traditional to get so drunk that you can’t tell the difference between “cursed be Haman” and “blessed be Mordechai”.
It seems though that Richard Silverstein (a/k/a Little Dickie) in his celebration of Purim has taken this to another extreme. In his drunken stupor, not on alcohol of course but the anti-Israel Kool-Aid variety, he wrote a blogpost lambasting the government of Israel for its decision to sell ad-space on the Western Wall (the Kotel). Here’s a screengrab of his post (for posterity):
Silverstein writes:
I know I’ve said this before, but I gotta tell ya, just when I thought the Israel government couldn’t provide any more fodder for this blog, it goes and surprises me again.
He goes on:
One of the real jaw-droppers of this report is this statement from the high-tech entrepreneur whose company stands to benefit from this wretched scheme:
“After thousands of years of just being there, the Western Wall will finally be able to fulfill its commercial potential,” King said. “The religious and spiritual center of the Jewish people should reflect Jewish heritage – and thus be dedicated to bringing in a healthy profit.”
The problem is that the source for Silverstein’s bogpost was a prank article in Ha’aretz that was clearly intended as a joke:
It seems that Little Dickie has now realized his, how should I put it, faux pas and has taken down his post.
Purim Sameach Richard! (hat tip Purimspiel)
Update 1
Silverstein’s nemesis Aussie Dave has a post up on this story too where you can read a copy of the entire Silverstein post.
Update 2
Silverstein having been totally embarrassed by the affair has come up with one of the lamest excuses:
For the sake of my honor, I’ve got to explain a real boneheaded set of errors that happened last night, which happened to also be Purim. This holiday is the equivalent of April Fool’s and it’s common to read wild newspaper stories attempting to take in the reader in a good natured way. Of course, I was silly not to realize that Haaretz wrote just such a story claiming the Israeli government was planning to beam high tech ads onto the stones of the Kotel (Western Wall). I got halfway through writing a post criticizing this plan when I realized the article was a Purim joke. And a very funny one that took me in for the few minutes it took me to get halfway through writing the post.
I hadn’t published the post yet, so I saved it as a Draft. For some strange reason insted of deleting the post (that’ll teach me) I decided to make some formatting changes and after one of those changes instead of hitting Save Draft out of habit I clicked on the Publish button. I immediately realized my error and changed the status of the post from Published to Draft, but I didn’t realize that I needed to click another button, Update, in order to change the post back from Published to Draft. So unbeknownst to me the post was still sitting out there for all of the pro-Israel right-wing to see, and call me a fool.
Talk about digging a hole. There’s more.
