Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World

At least Mel Brooks is getting the irony here. I don’t want to read anything more on the ‘Cartoon 2006′ issue anymore. Moacir, though, forwarded me David Brooks’ column last night. Damn you Moacir.

I imagine that if there is a higher being, she is the most unimaginative being in the universe. The plotlines she plays out here would be unbelievable in a stodgiest of Egyptian soap operas. Someone drew some cartoons of Muhammad and I cannot get the twisted, enraged faces of Muslims off of my tv screen for days on end. Over a 1000 passengers drowned in the Red Sea. Bombs exploded in Shi’a mosques in Pakistan over Ashura. War rages on in Iraq with innocent civilians dying in the name of some god. But, the masses are in the street over be-hurmati-e rasul. And our so-called intellegentsia debate what is lacking in Islam. Oh, they can’t understand our precious freedom of speech. Oh, they can’t understand our beloved public sphere.

The truth is that the Cartoon 2006 is a big story. Not in the Middle East where it has simply proven the lie behind Bush & Blair’s ‘respect for Islam’. It is one more desecration to be added to the laundry list of burned Qur’ans. It is a big story in the Western mind. Since the seminal article in 1990 by Bernard Lewis, The Roots of Muslim Rage, we have been waiting for this exact moment. A moment when something fundamental, yet trivial, will expose the Muslim rage and blow the lid off the case made by liberal apologetics. That moment has now come to pass. Say what you will about Islamicate traditions of satire and humor that would put Voltaire to shame; show however many slides of Muhammad through the centuries; there is nothing left to prove. We now have images of insane Muslims burning down building over some scribbled half-assed lines. The case is closed.

I say more in comics after the jump!

Tagged as: imperial watch