Bombing for dummies on Facebook, Gaza limited edition

Shai and Batya Mesisenberg from Petah Tikva are the founders of one of the groups which support the city of Sderot, in the Gaza Strip. Sderot is daily bombed by Qassam rockets from Hamas and assists to the massive Israeli army’s raids. Weary by the non-intervention of their politicians, Shai and Batya decided to show on their group, with the involuntary help of the NASA, how to make rockets*. Instructions are available through a link to the Nasa Rocket Science 101.
We have recently seen how Facebook can become a parallel field for electoral campaigns – see post “Return to work (or Facebook as it’s now called”) – and in a democratic environment this is just an evidence of how politicians need to undertake new paths to communicate with their audience. No worries, if the message is, with the due variation, something common like “Vote for me and my party”. One may think that this new kind of communication could represent a new way for a closer relationship between politicians and common people. Especially in some areas where the political debate is polluted by a distorted information and a rough social environment.

What Shai and Batya Mesisenberg are indirectly saying is that there’s an extreme need for real and concrete responses from politicians and when they don’t give them, they create an empty space that people try to fulfill by themselves, which is something already happening also in some democratic and developped countries like Italy – see post “Italy’s comic turn”.
This sort of “Bombing for dummies” digital handbook** should not only alarm for its content itself (which could also be read as a self-defence attempt), but it should lead to a deeper consideration about what takes people to bypass politics and politicians. It would be insane if the bridge between reality and the political debate was built by strong but blind and angry forces.

*See The Jerusalem Post of 11th February.

**The group’s description says “It cannot be so difficult: if those retards from the Gaza Strip can do it then so can you”.