Bill Clinton defends Tony Blair:
“People can argue about Iraq – we will find out about Iraq as time passes [...] but on balance [the Special Relationship] has been a good thing for the world because we are not imperialist any more and whatever we do we have the capacity other countries don’t”.
Rory Bremner ‘afraid’ to jokes about Islam:
Bremner said self-censorship was the biggest obstacle today for comedians addressing topical issues, due to fears of retribution by extremists.
I penned a responce for the Comment is free here
Laughing at Islam: bad for your health?
Rory Bremner has confessed his fear of making fun of Islam. But Muslims need satire just like everyone else
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/jun/18/rory-bremner-islam-comedy
I also should learn how to spell response
I was trying to find a relevant video clip of boozy misanthrope Doug Stanhope, who claims to have insulted Muslims at his gigs. But I can’t find one.
The Graun has an interview with Chris Morris, ahead of the release of Four Lions.
The Infidel is a new comedy written by David Baddiel, and starring Omid Djalili:
Watch a clip at the Graun.
Judging from the clip, it doesn’t look too funny. That could be the American in me. I also don’t like the idea in this movie (or at least in this clip) that Muslims are “anti-Semitic” in the “racial” sense that other groups (particularly Europeans) have been/are.
Muslims that dislike Jews dislike them because of politics , not religion or “racial essentialism.”
Excellent point. I think it needs to be stated over and over that Muslims who dislike Jews are not guilty of anti-Semitism. The concept is a historically loaded term predicated on Christian Europe’s hatred of the Jewish people. Muslims who reject the politics of Israel must not be forced to bear the burden of this racist disease.
I posted my thoughts on this issue some while back.
Sorry, I meant to say in my first sentence “Muslims who dislike the politics of Jews”.
Big difference.
True that is the motivating factor; unfortunately the boundaries have become very blurred now and a lot of the discourse has been badly poisoned to the extent that there is a lot of borrowing of symbolism, themes and other elements from European anti-Semitism.
I don’t expect this film to be funny. It is written by Baddiel and starring Djalili, who are both unfunny. It’ll probably have a lot of very obvious jokes about Jewish-hating Muslims, and Muslim-hating Jews. (Four Lions on the other hand, promises to be genuinely funny.)
As for antisemitism, I think Conrad has it about right.
Er, sense of humour failure? I’ve seen a preview of this and there are a couple of tired stereotypes it’s true, but most comedies do. As far as people hating each other, I think it rather overassumes the cool rationality of the human animal to assume it’s possible to disentangle different modes of hatred entirely from one another. While that disentanglement is a necessary project to pursue its one that has to take place hand in hand with one that acknoweldges that the political, the religious and the ethnic merge into and constitute one another in lived experience and will always do so. To call that “poisoning” is a somewhat misanthropic way of perceiving things that can only ever lead to a rhetoric of suspicion and distrust, as this strand evidences.
For me this film which had a warm heart even if some mistakes were made — is one that manages to do that. Anyway, I could be wrong but let’s proceed carefully and with a sense of humour. Otherwise the let’s say revealing Freudian slips of the keyboard that Naeem makes will seem sinister to some people, rather than something we can smile together about. Thanks, K
Chris Morris is back, this time with a comedy about four wannabe British ‘jihadis’.
Watch a clip at The Guardian.
Looks like another Morris classic in the making.
Morris introduces us to some people we already know:
Perhaps the angriest and most deranged member of Morris’ aspiring terror cell seems an especially unlikely figure — a white, angry and painfully stupid English convert named Barry (Nigel Lindsay) who preaches violent Islamist uprising in his working-class, north-of-England accent. He too, says Morris, is not fantastic: There was a real-world right-wing activist who began studying the Qu’ran, at first to educate himself about his racial and ideological enemies, and who ended up converting himself. “There have been quite a few of these white converts who’ve taken on the most extreme kinds of Islam,” Morris says. “It’s almost as if they’ve given up so much, and gone through so much change, that they follow it all the way to an illogical conclusion.”
And this seems like a pretty good observation:
Among the observations in “Four Lions” is the idea that the police and authorities are mesmerized by the most rigorous and conservative Muslims — the bearded and veiled set — who may strike Westerners as dangerous outsiders but are most often focused on the mosque, the Qu’ran and the many rules of daily prayer and observance. “What we don’t grasp too well is that there may be people who have extremely conservative views about the world, the separation of women, and the West, but who also abhor acts of violence,” Morris says. “We see a connection or a progression from Salafism to Wahhabism to, you know, Osama bin Laden, and while that exists, it’s simply not true that they’re all the same.”
There was a real-world right-wing activist who began studying the Qu’ran, at first to educate himself about his racial and ideological enemies, and who ended up converting himself.
David Myatt is probably the most infamous.
Nick Griffen, recently elected as an MEP for the extreme right-wing racist British National Party, turns out to be even less human than previously imagined. Hat tip to HIGNFY.
Sometimes The Onion is more pointlessly goofball than satire, and there is nothing wrong with that, but on those odd occasions when it does get genuinely Swiftian, its off-the-wall perspective makes me laugh out loud as well as reminding me that facets of the familiar and everyday are in truth utterly vile, as in its “report” that more U.S. soldiers are suffering From “Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder”.
Muslims To Boycott All Pope Merchandise, reports The Onion.
Null is discussing. 
Kalim, 
thabet, 
cbarwa, and 2 others are discussing. 
johnpi are discussing. 
The Onion is still funny sometimes. A timely post, considering MWS’s comment in the post just below this one.