14 January 2009

Hamas - change of language and pricing issues

At the beginning of Cast Lead operation, Hamas sent to randomly chosen Israeli citizens a lot of SMSs in garbled Hebrew, here is an example courtesy of Ynet:

Translated into (equally garbled) English the message means: "Rockets on all cities, shelters not protect, Qassam rocket, Hamas."

Inspired by the success (oh well) of this action, but probably worried about the syntax and the style, Hamas abruptly decided to switch to English. Here is a new version:

Sounds like a professional promo of a tourist agency now, have you noticed the improvement? It is also interesting to notice the +44 prefix of that incoming phone number. Of course, this is not a real phone number of a British citizen, rather a virtual number generated for some server that, most probably, either resides in Britain or uses services of an unsuspecting British phone company. And of course, there is no sense in calling that number, as someone in Ynet tried...

But this is not the point of the post. Hamas, unwittingly of course, is enriching Israeli phone companies. The Israeli cellular phone company that provides services to the receiving number, gets its share of the price per every SMS sent from abroad.

And, if the Hamas scientist behind this brilliant idea was able to make a few logical steps based on this fact, he would have understood that, being exemplary taxpayers, the phone companies will transfer a share of the proceeds to the government which, in turn, will pass some of the shekels to the factory that produces bullets for M16 or Tavor or Galil rifles, which bullets may one of these days...

Do you get the hint?

Cross-posted on Yourish.com.

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