Never Been Plucked

Those of you who keep up with the news on terrorism will have seen this:

Islamist Website Design Contest: Winner Fires Missiles at U.S. Army Base in Iraq

Yaakov Kirschen, an Israeli cartoonist who writes Dry Bones Blog, posted a cartoon in response, Terror on the Web, which depicts two excited 'youths' -- as the French might say -- looking at a computer screen:

Youth 1: "A contest for designing a website for an Iraqi terrorist organization?"

Youth 2: "Yes! The winner gets to fire three missles at American troops by pressing a button on his own computer."

Youth 1: "And what do the losers get?"

Youth 2: "Let's see . . . Losers get '72 Virgins.'"

At that, both youths look crestfallen.

The humor here lies in the fact that -- as Kirschen notes -- "These days '72 virgins' is synonymous with 'go kill yourself!'"

I guess that this is morbid humor, but I share it. So, I posted a comment:

Virgins?

Actually, the losers just get 72 dried-on-the-vine raisins.

Never been plucked!

Hence the misunderstanding.

The humor here -- if there is any -- lies in the wordplay on "plucked" and the knowledge of Christoph Luxenberg's book Die Syro-Aramäische Lesart des Koran. Ein Beitrag zur Entschlüsselung der Koransprache (review here), which argues that much of the Qur'an stems from Aramaic sources and that what has been long interpreted as houris, those putative virgins of a promiscuous paradise eagerly awaiting the Muslim martyr, are actually . . . uh, "white raisins."

Well . . . raisins are better than nothing, I guess.