So if Israelis are suffering “a deepening psychosis” because of inbreeding than Palestinians are probably suffering from the same psychosis.

Best solution would be if Israelis and Palestinians stated breeding together. One big happy family and no war..

mark: No, I wasn’t joking. I read recently that medical authorities in Israel are worried. I’ll try and dig up the source.

Rats–can’t seem to find the site where I read it but apparently the small gene pool is causing concern in Israel, especially in the long term. They are also worried about being ‘outbred’ by non-Jewish Israelis and Palestinians. It’s a problem.

A long time ago, as a relative newcomer to Australia, I decided to experiment with my own Tasmanian inbreeding joke, having heard a few in the genre already.

Unfortunately, the young academic I was chatting with was (a) Tasmanian by birth, and (b) quite an expert on the topic of heavy metal pollution, which he claimed was responsible for a lot of the tales of birth defects.

I decided then once was enough. These days I joke about the ideology of inbreeding, which is arguably more dangerous than the real thing.