Politico reported Monday that “two comedians are tackling the sensitive topic of Islamophobia in the way they know best: laughter.” The article, entitled “Film tackles Islamophobia with humor,” puffs up Negin Farsad and Dean Obeidallah, “the co-directors of ‘The Muslims Are Coming!’ which tracks a group of Muslim-American stand-ups as they perform across the country and tackle people’s stereotypes.”
We aren’t even allowed to discuss Islam and the doctrine of jihad in the mainstream media, but “Islamophobia” is a matter for comedy? How perfect: making fun of a subject that the American people don’t even begin to understand because of the prohibition on the subject matter.
The slaughter of religious minorities under Sharia is hardly a laughing matter. Neither are New York on 9/11, Madrid on 3/11, London on 7/7, the Bali bombing, Beslan, Boston, Mumbai and the over 20,000 jihad terror attacks worldwide since 9/11. The vicious oppression and slaughter of Christians in Nigeria, Indonesia, Egypt, Ethiopia, the Philippines, and Lebanon is not funny. The slaughter of Hindus and Buddhists through jihad is not funny.
And make no mistake: those tens of thousands of acts of jihad violence are what lead to caution concerning devout Muslims. It doesn’t come out of nowhere. There is a body count in the millions. It isn’t the work of people who are accused of being “Islamophobes.” And even less funny is that we can’t talk about it. Those few voices of truth who dare to speak on this subject matter are marginalized, demonized and rendered radioactive.
So the new cultural jihad is to make it cool and happening and now to make fun of the people who do talk about it at risk of their reputations and livelihoods and personal safety.
In June 2012, Robert Spencer and I held a human rights conference in California as a tribute to Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani, who was on death row in Iran for the crime of converting from Islam to Christianity. All of the speakers were former Muslims, and each one related his or her personal journey away from Islam and the personal and physical cost of that journey: loss of their families, loss of their homes, loss of their jobs. Some spoke in harrowing detail about how Muslims physically attacked them, solely because they had turned away from the religion.
What about the human rights of those people? Are they to be held up to ridicule and scorn? Apparently Dean Obeidallah thinks so. He attacked us mercilessly for holding that conference.
At the same time as our conference was being held, Dean was in another hotel nearby, speaking at a conference of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Incidentally, that group was named an unindicted co-conspirator by the Justice Department in the trial of the Holy Land Foundation for its ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Politico says: “The two have some powerful friends in their corner; the film features cameos from such notables as Jon Stewart, David Cross, Janeane Garofalo, Colin Quinn, Lewis Black and Aasif Mandvi.” The Hollywood hordes who have signed on for this film have no intellectual depth, but fighting against “Islamophobia” is perceived to be politically correct and chi chi, and that’s all they need.
I would love to see Negin Farsad and Dean Obeidallah take on the reality of Sharia. Let’s see a documentary about the monstrous misogyny and the persecution of religious minorities in Muslim countries. That is long overdue. But poking fun at those who do address such issues is just part of the war in the information battle space, making it culturally uncool and therefore toxic.
This seems to be a new trend. Another recent film is Building Babel, an attempt to whitewash the Ground Zero Mosque developer, Sharif El-Gamal, portraying him as an honest, hard-working Muslim fighting against entrenched “Islamophobia” while ignoring the fact that he has defaulted on numerous loans. PBS is running Building Babel; our taxpayer dollars are used to poison the water supply — and I don’t mean the way seven Islamists allegedly tried to do so in Massachusetts.
Meanwhile, anti-jihad activists can’t get movies made. We couldn’t get distribution on our film, The Ground Zero Mosque: The Second Wave of the 9/11 Attacks, which features, among others, Andrew Breitbart. Even the producers of Hating Breitbart couldn’t get distribution and faced enormous obstacles.
Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of AtlasShrugs.com and author of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter here.