Death Creeped Out By Hamas Worshiping It

“I suppose you can say it Styx in my craw.”

The Underworld, July 17 – The Grim Reaper voiced dismay this morning at rhetoric of the militant Islamist group Hamas to the effect that Israel must fear them because they worship death, saying that such talk makes him feel discomfited, to put it mildly.

The personification of death, taking a break from a recent visit to Turkey, told reporters at a press conference that frankly, he found it more than a little bit creepy to be the object of Hamas’s worship, not to mention inappropriate.

“My role, by nature, is meant to instill fear, dread, and perhaps regret,” said the being also known as the Angel of Death. “Veneration is out of the question. There is something clearly wrong with the attitude of people who worship me. Is it psychological? An educational problem? This is definitely going to come up at the next annual meeting of divine agents.”

Hamas has repeatedly sought to intimidate Israelis by claiming that not only does the movement and its fighters not fear death, they love it or worship it, depending on the iteration of the bombast. In contrast to pagan societies that viewed Death as a force to be reckoned with and perhaps appeased, the Palestinian Islamist organization appears to have taken the utilitarian approach to Death far beyond mere appeasement and into the unsettling realm of fetish, a phenomenon that disgusts and alarms the entity charged with removing souls from the corporeal realm and transferring them to the Afterlife.

“I’ve never had a stalker, online or otherwise, but I imagine this is what it’s like,” continued Death. “It would make my skin crawl, if I had any skin – so thank God for small mercies, I guess. I’m beginning to think what I mete out might not be the most dreadful experience mortals can have. This makes me feel just… unclean. More than usual, I mean.”

“There’s a part of me that sort of understands them from time to time,” he admitted. “If the only place you had to yourself was the Gaza Strip, and you never did anything constructive to it so it perpetually looked like a rubble-strewn dump that you insisted on keeping that way because you’d rather generate antipathy for Israel than make life tolerable for yourselves, then, yeah, death might be an improvement.”

“Occasionally, beyond the creep-out factor, I get angry about it,” said the Reaper. “I mean, in lighter moments I can laugh at it, and at them and their warped sense of reality and what Allah wants of them as humans. I suppose you can say it Styx in my craw.”

“See what I dead there?” he added.