Now for what is meant to be somewhat of a secular broadcasting company, the BBC still managed to astound me with this headline: “Flying rabbis fight swine flu“. The story as reported by the BBC is that a group of rabbis and “Jewish mystics” have been flying around over Israel in an attempt to ward off swine flu. Don’t stop me there, because it gets better.

Apparently “about 50 religious leaders circled over the country on Monday, chanting prayers and blowing horns” because they got it into their heads that this would “stop the pandemic so people will stop dying from it”, at least this is according to Rabbi Yitzhak Batzri, who is evidently a complete idiot.

The video included with the article will brings tears of laughter (as well as utter disbelief) to your eyes, so please go and watch it. What is perhaps even crazier is the announcement by our friend Rabbi Batzri, that “thanks to the prayer, the danger is already behind us”. No Rabbi, I’m afraid that we discovered centuries ago that these things have natural causes, and do not go away with prayer; they go away with medical treatment!

Now back to the BBC, which has a history or putting ‘quotation marks’ where they don’t belong, yet failed to put the obvious ones in this headline: Flying rabbis ‘fight’ swine flu. Honestly, how could they justify giving these people credit? They are not fighting swine flu in any sense of the word; what they are doing is flying around in a plane acting like a bunch of children.

If I was cruel I’d make some kind of remark like “I hope they get swine flu”, but I don’t want anyone to suffer through something like that, even if they are displaying such idiotic behavior. Instead, I can only hope that once they see that the threat isn’t gone; instead of pulling a stunt like this again, they will encourage their followers to get proper treatment.

Well…one can dream.

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