This Friday marks the Chicago, Seattle, and Los Angeles
premiere of a documentary called The
Muslims Are Coming!, which
features a band of Muslim comedians touring middle America “to explore the issue of Islamophobia!”
The exclamation mark is there to let you know that the show is going to be
great fun! And all just in time for the 12th anniversary of the 9/11
attacks (as they say in comedy, timing is everything).
As the film’s website explains, this project arose in a
context in which “Islam has been duly tarnished by the mainstream media.” Actually,
it has been duly tarnished by the barbarism of Islamic fundamentalists, and
duly defended and whitewashed by the
mainstream media. “We are so many years out of 9/11,” the website continues, “and
Muslim fear-mongering hasn’t dissipated.” Yes, 9/11 was so long ago and yet the Islamophobia inexplicably never ends! When
are we Americans going to get over it and realize we have nothing to fear from
Muslims?
As FrontPage Magazine has pointed out many times,
“Islamophobia” is a Muslim Brotherhood construct to paint legitimate concern
about the demonstrable threat of fundamentalist Islam as bigotry and “Muslim fear-mongering.”
That threat didn’t end on 9/11 – it is a continuing danger not just on our own
soil but worldwide, as the most cursory look at history and current events will
show. It is offensive and dishonest to claim that the media are to blame for
Islam’s bad reputation and that 9/11 is in the distant past. The day that the
victims of 9/11 stop living in American hearts will be a day of shame and surrender
for this country.
The movie description on the website goes on to say that “the
idea that Islam is somehow antithetical to American culture just won’t go away.”
I wonder why that is. Could it be because the foremost clerical authorities on
Islam keep openly declaring that the faith is
antithetical to Western values? Could it be because the Muslim Brotherhood’s
stated mission is the elimination of Western civilization? Could it be because
sharia law is unquestionably incompatible with our Constitutional rights and
freedoms?
The description continues: “If all you’ve ever heard about
Islam”
is that it’s a dangerous religion,
that women cover themselves, and that those shifty eyed Muslims have evil
ulterior motives, this movie wants to give you a new stereotype. Yeah, this
movie is going to convince you that Muslims are just a bunch of hilarious
people. By the end of this movie, you’re gonna love the pants out of
Muslims.
That is just pathetic.
The documentary’s point is that not all Muslims are
terrorists – some of them are hilarious! And getting to know them will make
Americans less bigoted and fearful, and that will heal the clash of
civilizations. “The ultimate goal: present an Americanized face of Islam,
create awesomeness between Muslim- and non-Muslim Americans of all stripes, and
get these crazy kids to fall in love (the crazy kids being Muslims and
non-Muslims everywhere)! Rest assured, you’ve never laughed this hard at a
Muslim!”
It won’t solve anything. It won’t make terrorism go away, or
the stealth jihad, or the violent hatred of Western kaffir, because those are objective threats and not paranoid
fantasies that can be dispelled by a standup routine.
The comics themselves make this point in the film’s trailer.
One says to an interviewer, “I don’t know if Muslims watching this documentary
will consider these comics proper representations of Islam.” Another says,
tearfully, “I wish I had more support from certain subsets of the Muslim
community, and I don’t.” One reads aloud a message on the computer, “I wish
these folks the best. They may well be setting themselves up to be killed.”
Exactly. These comics are potential targets of their own
co-religionists’ savage intolerance. So to pretend that “certain subsets of the
Muslim community” are not a threat, or that there isn’t something seriously
wrong with the religion, is willful blindness. To try to shift the blame to average
Americans for their supposed “Islamophobia” is literally to give aid and
comfort to the enemy.
American bigotry and ignorance are not the problem. The
problem is a politically correct insistence that there aren’t serious doctrinal
issues of violence, religious supremacism, misogyny, anti-Semitism and
totalitarianism within Islam that need to be confronted honestly and unflinchingly.
Is suspicion of Muslims common today in America, twelve years after 9/11? Of
course, and with good reason. And who is to blame for that suspicion? The
media? Ignorant fear-mongers? Or Islamic fundamentalists themselves?
A more honest documentary about anti-religious bigotry in
this country now would actually be called The
Christians are Coming!, because there is far greater antagonism in the
media and pop culture toward Christianity today than toward Islam. Are there even
any Christian comics? I don’t see any with HBO specials or appearances on Late Night with David Letterman. Anyone
billing himself as a Christian comic should prepare to be utterly ignored, if
not reviled, by the entertainment industry.
For Muslim-Americans who
don’t want to be judged by the evil their fellow believers do, the answer is not
to try to slap a happy face on the issue and expect to laugh our troubles away,
but to acknowledge that Islam itself, not “Islamophobia,” is the biggest obstacle
to peace.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 9/12/13)
