Tags
Adil Ray, BBC, BBC Communist, BBC Debate Islam, BBC left-wing, Blank Space, Citizen Khan, Counter-Jihad, Cultural Marxism, Defend the modern world, English Defence League, Islamophobia, Multiculturalism, New Series, Priti Patel, Review
I don’t watch much television (I prefer to read), but if I did, I understand that this month I would have been treated to the return of ‘Citizen Khan’, the BBC ‘sitcom’ which introduces (or seeks to introduce) the softer, funnier side of Muslim culture to our cynical, semi-hostile nation.
If you’re not from Britain, it’s probably best to think of this show as the British version of ‘Little Mosque on the Prairie’. Though the storylines are different, the intended political function is the same in both cases: Make Muslims seem capable of humour and integration; disarm the country at large with the use of comedy.
I’ve only watched two or three episodes of Citizen Khan. That was enough to gauge the nature of the thing. It is a very amateurish production and the Islamic element is tacked on in such an arbitrary way as to seem irrelevant.
And that is obviously the point. The message intended is as follows: “Muslims are people, just like you. They argue about who left the toilet seat up, just like you. They use toothbrushes, just like you. They watch X-Factor, just like you. etc…”
This is the great liberal delusion about Islam; the idea that Britain would be the same in a prayer cap as it is in a trilby; that Islam is something private and therefore largely irrelevant to everyday life. This is the lie told by shows like Citizen Khan. Muslims might pray to a different God, but other than that, they are as English as battered fish. I simply don’t buy that, and for evidence, I call to the stand every sentient witness of the modern world.
Of course, I don’t doubt that Muslims who were born and raised here have picked up some cultural practices along the way. But, as the subjects riffed on in Citizen Khan accidentally demonstrate, these are usually the shallow and unimportant aspects of British life, many of which we could do without.
Even if Citizen Khan was funny (and it really isn’t, in any way), British Pakistani life is very difficult to make humorous after Rotherham – after the 1400. How indeed are the numberless victims of the rape-Jihad to feel when watching shows like this?
If British Muslims really wanted to use media to demonstrate their capacity to integrate, they would produce dramas criticising the demonic misbehaviours of their peers. They would own up and examine the rape culture (for once, that term is justified) in the Pakistani hamlets popping up throughout this otherwise harmonious nation.
And they would also concede that we are a long way from being able to laugh at their ways. We have been blown up by them, raped by them, threatened by them innumerable times, insulted and infiltrated in the most destructive ways imaginable. It will take more than jokes about the toilet seat to undo the harm that has been inflicted.
D, LDN.
Defend the Modern World 
This is similar to the frustration I felt when I watched Four Lions, the film directed by Chris Morris.
Morris carried out a lot of research for the film, yet he was totally unsuccessful in his attempt to show that Muslim terrorists are as prone to comedic idiocy as the rest of the human race.
Muslim terrorists may be as liable to stupidity (and every other human frailty come to that) as everyone else, but Four Lions fell totally flat, because most of the characters were so stupid that I felt as if I was watching a group of subnormal, bearded, Norman Wisdoms prancing around Sheffield and London.
Morris’s other material (Brass Eye, The Day Today, etc.) has often made me laugh, so I’m reluctant to be too harsh on him, but it’s hard to escape the nagging suspicion that he’s just a PC, liberal sophist.
Whatever Morris is and whatever his politics are, though, his film isn’t nearly as funny or as clever as he would like it to be.
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I haven’t seen that yet, but I’ve heard a lot about it. I’m also an admirer of Morris’s other stuff. Brass Eye is one of my favourite shows. He is nevertheless a Leftist, as was demonstrated by his anti-Israel heckling during a speech by Martin Amis.
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What would make a *brilliant* movie, if a SWAT team of very brave indie film-makers were willing to have a go at it – and you’d have to film it undercover, handheld cameras, in the style of the “Blair Witch Project”, preferably in black and white, and then upload it to the internet for people to download and view and share as samizdat – is G K Chesterton’s 1915 novel about an islamified England, “The Flying Inn”. But updated to modern Britain, with the cast of characters in the resistance group somewhat enlarged, and extra incidents folded in (you could probably include a reference to the mohammedan rape gangs).
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I saw the movie “Four Lions” and had a completely different reaction from the commentator above. I felt that the strength of the movie was that it never tried to convince you that Islamic beliefs were either good or bad. It simply showed the behaviours of men and women who accept Islamic cultural norms. Hence, when the wife of one of the wannabes is informed that he and his bunch are “going all the way to the top floor”, her reaction is one of approval. Any normal woman, on being informed of her husband’s intention to die while blowing up others, would be horrified and try to stop him, at the very least.
I feel it was a very honest movie and remarkably refreshing, as well as being very funny in parts. The blowing up of Boots toward the end, as well as the demise of the white convert, made me stop and ponder the effect of belief in Islam on the actions of individuals, without ever feeling that the movie wanted me to think or react in a certain way.
For people wanting a black and white, goodies-vs-baddies type of film, I am guessing it would be a disappointment.
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I appreciate your argument, and I admire Chris Morris’s dark style of humour, but that movie was still misguided in my opinion. Morris is also a Leftist, so one has to wonder about his motives.
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