Friday, April 17, 2009
Did you know for 40 bucks you can hire a guy to go out to the security fence and spray a custom message on it? CNN: Palestinian graffiti spreads message of peace
Emblazoned on a long, tall, concrete barrier in the midst of a rocky Middle Eastern landscape is this spray-painted message: "Mirror, mirror on the wall. When will this senseless object fall?"
It's one of more than 900 graffiti messages that have been spray-painted by Palestinians on the controversial wall that separates Israel and the West Bank.
The painters take orders through a Web site that lets customers get a message on the wall. For the equivalent of $40, a Palestinian will spray paint the message and send three digital photos of it.
Anything goes -- marriage proposals, jokes, notes to friends -- as long as it isn't extremist, hate-filled, or pornographic, said Faris Arouri, one of the founders of the site...
... Nieuwenhuis said he heard about the site through van Oel, a friend, and liked the idea right away.
"I thought it was a brilliant idea to have something beautiful written on an ugly wall," he told CNN...
You know what's even uglier? Body parts on pizzeria walls.
I wonder if they'd print some of these messages: "Homosexuality is not a crime!" "Israel is a Jewish State!" "We love the Jews!" "Jerusalem is Jewish land!" "Freedom means no death for apostasy!" Fill in your own blanks...
I just went to http://sendamessage.nl/ and tried my own message. It crashed when it tried to connect to PayPal. I'll try again.
(They do say: "All messages will be screened by us ( 'Stichting www. sendamesage.nl' in Amsterdam, Holland) AFTER payment. Obscene, extremist, or offensive messages will be refused. This decision is final. Your money will not be refunded." So I suspect that pro-Israel, or even anti-terror, messages will be censored.)
For the record: messages are limited to 80 characters. My message would have been: "Killing innocents on purpose is terrorism, and terrorists should be shot on sight".
respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline