He won’t be getting a call from “Little Mosque” any time soon. But, on the other hand, he is a genuine practicing Muslim, which is more than can be said for any of the cast of the CBC’s sitcom. The Muslim members of Canadian Equity decided to sit this thing out, and so every warm fluffy moderate Muslim on the show is played by a Protestant or Catholic, Italian or Indian. As comedy of bicultural manners goes, it’s like a surreal latterday PC version of the old vaudeville act “The Hebrew And The Coon”, where the Hebrew was the genuine article and the Coon was played by Al Jolson. So today Muslim funnymen are happy to stand up in public and threaten to drink your blood but won’t risk doing anodyne CBC sitcoms. Which is also pretty hilarious when you think about it.
As for my throwaway crack that “Muslim is the new gay”, well, Washington isn’t like Swift Current. In DC’s sleepy backwater, on a slow news day with not much going on, a Beltway reporter picked up on my line and sought a reaction from a local Islamo-bigshot, Hady Amr. Predictably enough Mr Amr denounced my observation as “inappropriate”:
“‘American Muslims are taking their rightful place at the political table,’ Amr said, ‘and America needs to come to terms with that in terms of its rhetoric.’”
Oh, dear. You try to pay a compliment and it gets taken as a beheading offence. Zarqa Nawaz has done her best but for most of her coreligionists Islam remains no laughing matter.
According to Khurrum Awan, Muneeza Skeikh, Naseem Mithoowani, Ali Ahmed and Daniel Simard, the authors of Maclean’s Magazine: A Case Study Of Media-Propagated Islamophobia, the above is “Islamophobic” because of the following assertions:
1. Even a small joke (“Muslim is the new gay”) related to Islam and or Muslims results in your life being put in danger.
2. The sitcom, “Little Mosque on the Prairie” is part of a campaign to hide the “truth” that Muslims and Islam: that they are radical, violent, and extremist. The intention of the show is to make Islam, just like homosexuality, normal and acceptable.
3. The sitcom attempts to crack jokes about “irrational” prejudices about Muslims. But in reality, these prejudices are perfectly rational and not prejudices at all.
4. In Canada today, you cannot say anything about Muslims without being put into “oblivion”.
5. The ordinary Imam in the West has a “fierce” beard, is trained in Saudi Arabia, and is fluent only in Arabic.
6. Muslims are obtaining undue and unwarranted cultural sensitivity from law enforcement (ridiculing of any kind of sensitivity towards the Muslim community)
7. The only kind of activity Muslim Canadians are engaging in, in Afghanistan, is terrorist activity
8. Churches in Canada are emptying out while mosques are filling up.
9. Moderate Muslims are a rarity; Moderate Muslims who are actually funny are an even greater rarity.
10. Muslim comics generally crack jokes belittling terrorist events like those of 9/11.
11. Muslim comics are aligned with the 9/11 hijackers.
12. The show attempts to “scale down” the Muslims from “a global security threat” to warm “lowkey domesticity” —- the show is trying to deceive the Canadian public away from the “fact” that Muslims are a global security threat and into believing that Muslims are just like the average person next door.
13. The real Muslims are “no laughing matter”: they believe that they have to kill non-Muslims and drink their blood everywhere.
14. The actors playing the moderate Muslims on the show are not really Muslims. This fact indicates that there are no moderate Muslims.
15. Actual Muslims comics talk about drinking blood and killing non-Muslims, but are not prepared to play moderate Muslims on CBC.
THE ISLAMOPHOBE RESPONDS:
Shortly after the above analysis was made public, the creator of the taxpayer-funded “Little Mosque On The Prairie” criticized the American sitcom “Seinfeld” for “failing to deal with the contentious issue of Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory”. Were they still on the air, I doubt “Seinfeld”’s writers would have risen to the bait and done a show about Jewish settlements. However, they might have done a show about being accused of not doing a show about Jewish settlements. After all, it’s pretty funny when a famous “show about nothing” gets accused of not dealing with geopolitical issues.
By contrast, “Little Mosque On The Prairie” purports to be about geopolitical – or, at any rate, cross-cultural – issues, and turns out to be about nothing – or, at any rate, nothing more than wafer-thin propagandization. And, for pointing that out, my review became the subject of three law suits. Whereas Zarqa Nawaz has yet to file a “human rights” complaint about “Seinfeld”.
A couple of years back, I started having some sport with a fellow called Oscar van den Boogaard. He’s a novelist over in Europe, and, while I’m not the most assiduous reader of Continental fiction, my eye was caught by an interview he gave to the Belgian newspaper De Standaard. Reflecting on Europe’s accelerating Islamification, he concluded that the jig was up for the Eutopia he loved, but what could he do? “I am not a warrior, but who is?” he shrugged. “I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.”
This seemed such a poignant epitaph for the Continent that I started quoting it hither and yon. That involved explaining that Mr van den Boogaard is a Dutch gay humanist, which is, as I like to say, pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool. A cheap joke, but it got a laugh. And before you know it Mr van den Boogaard was playing the same function in my act that Elizabeth Taylor does in Joan Rivers’. (I haven’t seen Miss Rivers since, oh, 1973, so this may have changed.)
Anyway, what with this Internet thingy that the young people are crazy about, it was inevitable that at some point the Dutch novelist wallah would be Googling himself and discover he was now a household name in Cedar Rapids, or wherever I’d last used him as the butt of my Eurowimp mockery. And so it came to pass. In 2008, in the newspaper De Morgen, Mr van den Boogaard noted that he had recently attracted the attention of “de Canadese oerconservatieve commentator Mark Steyn” who had derided him as “een Nederlandse homoseksuele humanist”, which is “de heilige drievuldigheid van Eurocool”. And he attempted to put my soundbite in context. The column wound up as a sentimental, writerly and contrived meditation on his dad’s lifelong service to the Dutch Army, but it ended with what he regarded as the best hope of saving his beloved Netherlands: “De islam moet eindelijk om zichzelf leren te lichen.”
“Islam must learn to laugh at itself.”
Good luck betting the future on that. When the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal convened in a Vancouver courthouse to try my “flagrant Islamophobia”, it devoted the best part of a day to Khurrum Awan’s critique of my jokes and “tone”. As we see in the above complaint, my throwaway line that “Muslim is the new gay” had not been received terribly well. Subsequently, I tried to explain that I meant it as a compliment, but that only appears to have made things worse. Both the quip and the clarification went down about as well as that University of Amsterdam study into the recent increase in gay bashing by Dutch Muslims, which concluded that “the attackers may be struggling with their own sexual identity”. Amazingly enough, suggesting that these Muslim chappies are most likely a bit light on their loafers doesn’t seem to have done anything to ease inter-communal relations in Europe’s “most tolerant city”.