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Having nothing better to do last night, I sat down with a friend to watch a DVD performance by the brash, Hicksian comedian Jim Jefferies. The show was called ‘Contraband’.
About half way through, as seems to be obligatory in modern comedy, the Australian performed a routine critiquing the religious, beginning (naturally) with Christianity, moving onto Judaism and then, to my great surprise, Islam.
And he didn’t ‘tackle’ Islam in the playful, tip-toeing style of Dara O’ Briain, Frankie Boyle or Ricky Gervais, but with a dirty-mouthed fearlessness usually only employed against Biblical ideas.
Commenting on a recent scandal involving blasphemy against Mohammad (there have been so many, I honestly don’t know which one this was), Jefferies informed any Muslims in the crowd that his microphone stand was the literal incarnation of Mohammad and that it was ‘fucking gay!’.
I was taken aback, not because I have never encountered this sort of thing before (the internet is filled with anti-Islam comedy), but because Jim Jefferies is not a ‘right-wing’ race-baiter, and nor is he a reviled ‘working man’s comedian’ of the Jim Davidson or Bernard Manning variety. He is a respected liberal who campaigns against race-discrimination and in favour of gun control (born in Australia, Jefferies now lives in Los Angeles), and yet here he was, giving an equal allotment of hatred to a variety of anti-liberal targets. I surely don’t need to remark as to how rare that is.
Jefferies is said to have form on this. I am told that his Islamophobic gestures from ‘Contraband’ are repeated in his other performances (most of them are available on YouTube). We must hope that this bravery has sufficiently cleared the way for others to follow in his footsteps. As an American observer commented in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks – “blasphemy (against Islam) must become so commonplace that it bores people” rather than shocks them.
Of course, it is inevitable that popular culture and Islam will collide at certain points and in regard to certain subjects. While no-one is going to risk being murdered in the defence of bacon, a celebrity or two might be tempted out of PC-world by issues like Muslim homophobia, sexism, and the prohibition of music.
Indeed, that last element is potentially the richest Islamophobic vein of all. Surely nothing is so fundamentally beloved by and interwoven with the spirit of the Western world as music. It is an art the West (and the West alone) has perfected and through which the highest forms of Western expression have been communicated. It consoles our deepest miseries, undergirds our joys and sustains us through all the voids in-between. Naturally then, music artists are revered with an intensity superior to that aroused by the practitioners of any other art-form.
I sometimes wonder what would happen if Taylor Swift – a woman currently worshipped like a Nordic Goddess – fell victim to a Muslim bullet for being ‘Haram’ (which, like all musicians, she undoubtedly is). I’m pretty sure the backlash (among the public, if not the government) would be palpably more severe than followed 9/11, 7/7 or Charlie Hebdo. At a stroke, the youngest billion of the world population would be transformed into dead-eyed, anti-Muslim zombies, horny for violent relief. Such is the terrifying power of sex, groupthink and idolatry.
Popular culture has, by definition, immeasurably greater political influence than the exotic fancies of the intelligentsia. Very few people pay any attention to books or newspapers. The majority of people live in a state of cheerful stupidity, a kind of apolitical daze. What would happen if they were shocked out of it? The mind boggles.
D, LDN.
Defend the Modern World 
These are the delightful moments when someone actually says that is truly thought. I think there are many more who truly know the connection between the facts of the world, and values indeed truly believed. It is those moments that the social justice warrior lives to attack.
But – always a delight to hear.
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Social justice warriors are increasingly a minority; powerful minority, but they can be overwhelmed if we can motivate the silent majority.
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Dicy suggestion which could cost some one or many more lives. Isane virally infested minds are @ work here.
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Sorry, I don’t understand.
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I had not heard of this comedian till just now, and will have to seek him out online.
The time is nigh for some more all out “Michael Moore” type documentaries on Islam, there is a definite thirst for it. Ironically, it would appear that the potential producers of such a film, are too heavily left-leaning at this time to take it on.
Look at how much traction the recent documentary on Scientology attracted: “Going Clear”. The cult of Scientology has withstood attacks for years with sophisticated retaliations, and despite their famous adherents Scientology at least as a religion has become a joke even while very powerful within the Hollywood system. Try getting anyone other than a follower of Scientology to defend it as a religion, its just not cool.
Like with your Taylor Swift hypothetical, it will take someone as LARGE as her to be able to come at such a subject with any real credibility. Mel Gibson prior to drunken anti-semitic rants, and wife bashing allegations would have been a good contender, especially since he already made that other movie with Monica Belluci as Mary Magdalene. The reality is that any right wing personality that takes this on, will be condemned by the left before it even comes out.
It needs to be a Brad Pitt produced film, or someone else who has shown his both comedic stripes, and flair for crusades: Judd Apatow?
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The closest thing we have (so far) to a Michael-Moore type of expose of Islam is the documentary ‘Obsession: Islam’s War on the West’. It’s been very controversial with Muslim groups calling for it to be banned, which is probably a good sign.
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As left as he is, I really enjoy Bill Maher’s views on Islam. He is strident, yet Left, and calls out the Left on a regular basis for bashing him for critiquing Islam. He is also very funny about it.
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Then there is the documentary Islam: The True Story/the Real history (different names with different networks) with historian Tom Holland.
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Hum…well, this is Australia, I still doubt this kind of humor will ever become Mainstream in Europe. Look simply at all the negative covering of Charlie Hebdo and you’ll see that making fun of some aspects of the muslim faith is still a big no-no.
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If more and more public figures do it, public views will change. In the Jim Jefferies show, the crowd cheered wildly after he addressed Islam.
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I did check out Jim Jefferies last night on YouTube, and he cuts a very base figure in most of his comedy. I am Australian and I had never heard of him.
This type of comedian has been very popular in the past here in Australia – connecting with bogans. There is a reason that he is not well known here – the media would not know how to deal with him, I was surprised to see he had a special on Netflix too. There is a lot of taboo covered within his material, and debasing Islam (along with the other religions) was hardly the most politically incorrect of the content!
To put it mildly: he is not date-movie material.
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And the thing is: besides being simply HORRIBLE – violent, cruel, sadistic, murderous – Islam was *made* to be satirised, a/ because it is so puffed-up megalomaniacal – it *needs* a good hard taking-down-a-peg, it *needs* to step on a banana skin and have all its pretensions exploded – and b/ because so many of its everyday practices and beliefs are so richly absurd that to a certain degree it satirises/ parodies *itself*…critics don’t have to make anything up, they just have to ‘tell it like it is’…and then when the audience finishes laughing and/ or throwing up, the audience has to be told…”I didn’t make any of this up, this is *really* what they believe and what they do”. Have you ever come across the internet comic “Mohammed’s Believe It…Or Else!”? Drawn in the style of the old Ripley’s “believe it..or not!” strips…and done by a very brave and knowledgeable apostate from Islam. It’s linked, I think, at the Ali Sina Faithfreedom site.
Your point about music is spot on. If the dar al Islam *fully* obeyed the sharia there would no music whatsoever, neither vocal nor instrumental, except perhaps for a few harsh war-chants and some drumming. There is a hadith that specifically singles out “flutes and stringed instruments” for destruction, right along with those other hated objects, Christian crosses. There is *no* canonical Islamic text that praises music/ singing; there *is* a hadith that says that in hell anyone who has listened to a woman singing will have molten lead poured into his ears. There’s also a hadith that says that Mohammed once met a man playing a flute and promptly stuffed his fingers into his ears and went away (this would have been during the mecca period when he wasn’t powerful enough to just kill the musician and smash the flute). And not one of the descriptions of paradise in the Islamic texts includes music (made by humans or angels) as part of the experience. You might recall the eruption of jihad in Mali not so long ago? – the musicians of Mali, who are truer to their African pre-Islamic past than to their Islam, were savagely attacked by the pious sharia-pushers, one of whom proclaimed, in an interview, that “we are in a war against all the musicians of the world”. Totally horrifying statement. ALL the musicians of the WORLD. But totally consistent with what orthodox Islam – the canonical texts – say about music and song. People need to *get* this. Whatever music exists in the dar al Islam has survived not because of Islam, but *in despite of it*; it has stubbornly persisted – in the face of often violent attempts to extirpate it – because music is so deeply hard-wired into humans that the attempt to suppress it altogether is never quite going to succeed…one might as well try to make the earth stop turning. But music *has* historically been suppressed throughout the dar al Islam much more than anywhere else. There is no richly-elaborated body of sacred music in Islam as there is in every other religious tradition one might care to name. and there are quite a few news reports – I recall one in particular, from Italy – of muslim kids in state/ secular schools being taken out of music classes by their parents, because ANY sort of music is seen as ‘corrupting’ and un-Islamic.
The Muslim sharia bans on 1/ pet dogs and 2/ nearly all forms of music whether sacred or profane, vocal or instrumental are things that need to be more widely known. Because they reveal just how insanely anti-human – not just ‘anti-western’, but anti-HUMAN this cult actually is. Pet dogs and music have been part of nearly all known human cultures since the early stone age.
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I doubt that the asassination of a major Western musician would wake people up any more than the constant jihad we are now seeing. I do not subscribe to the ‘Bring on more mayhem in the hope that it will wake people up’ school of thought. In any case, Al Qaida’s 7 stage plan, which has proved completely accurate so far has 2016 as the date for ‘Total confrontation’ so we are in for a bumpy ride very very soon.
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Wow a comedian taking the piss out of the ‘religion of peace’ – incredible; a bit off topic, but I was holed up last week with a cold, and inevitably ended up watching hours of sitcoms on Sky – I have to say, that it wasn’t just harmless shows such as Only Fools and Horses that would be deemed offensive nowadays, but even something as innocent as friends – it’s what I call the death of comedy
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I agree. It’s very sad. Few sitcoms amuse me now for that reason.
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