Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ lagniappe (and a digression)

April 20, 2016 • 8:30 am

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “sitcom,” came with this note from the author:

Is Mo pretending to be stupid? I have no idea.

This one was inspired by British MP Rupa Huq’s complaint about a popular sitcom called Citizen Khan.

The link goes to an Express & Star piece on the show, and Rupa Huq deems it Islamophobic, even comparing it to the child sex abuse crimes of Jimmy Savile that, she says, were “excused”.

Huq:

“I feel if I didn’t know what the year is… you would think it’s an every day tale of a Birmingham family of Muslims but they’re really quite backward.

“Again the Islamophobic point (Labour MP Chuka Umunna) made, it’s a beardy weirdy chap and they’re not quite cutting off people’s hands but I can imagine that being in a future episode.”

Mr Umunna (Streatham) earlier attacked the “representation of our Muslim communities” on broadcast television.

He said: “The rising Islamophobia that we see is in no small part to certain broadcasters, I’ve seen it happen on the BBC but on others, who put up so-called community leaders who purport to speak for that community but have no mandate whatsoever to do so.”

By the way, if you want a really good treatment about censorship and the Regressive Left—a prescient book since it was written in 2011—read Nick Cohen’s You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (you can get a used paperback by mail for about five bucks). I’m a third of the way through it, while simultaneously reading another equally prescient book by Cohen, the 2007  What’s Left? How the Left Lost Its Way. The censorship book is filled with statements that ring very true, and reflect Cohen’s uncompromising liberalism and support for freedom of speech.

The initial chapters on Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are worth the price of the book alone. One point that Cohen makes, which I’ll underscore here, is about the unpalatability to the Left of liberal Muslims.

I’ve always been puzzled why people like Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are vilified or rejected by much of the Left. There is no ex-Muslim or liberal Muslim, it seems, except for falsifiers and whitewashers like Reza Aslan, who are acceptable to liberals. But why?

After all, Hirsi Ali should be a poster child against Islamic extremism and misogyny, what with her being black, genitally mutilated, fiercely smart and outspoken, and having brought herself from status as a refugee—from a forced marriage and an unpalatable life under Islam—to membership in the Dutch Parliament. Nawaz was a former extremist Muslim, member of a terrorist organization who converted in prison to liberal Islam, and then founded Qulliam, an anti-extremist think tank. Rushdie, as Cohen shows, has never recovered his reputation after having written The Satanic Verses, whose publication should have been defended by all liberals, but wasn’t.

Why are they vilified? According to Cohen, it’s because, as moderates or apostates, they’re not seen as genuine representatives of Islam, or as having credible opinions. As Cohen notes, the Left sees a “genuine” Muslim as someone with a Kalashnikov in one hand and a Qur’an in the other. I think there’s something to that: it’s the racism of lowered expectations. At any rate, I think most of you will really like Cohen’s discussion of censorship in You Can’t Read This Book.  I recommend it very highly. Along with Hitchens (to whom the book is dedicated), Cohen is the Orwell of our day.  

But I digress. Here’s today’s strip, good but quite subtle—”nuanced,” if you will:

2016-04-20

I haven’t seen the show, but if it’s not presented as representative of all Muslims, then the J&M artist is right. One could just have well deemed All in the Family an anti-working-class show.

And, as lagniappe, reader jsp sent me a link to the latest Pearls Before Swine comic, by Stephan Pastis:

pb160420

33 thoughts on “Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ lagniappe (and a digression)”

  1. Nick Cohen is excellent, and is the English writer with whom I tend to agree the most. ‘You can’t read this book’ is eye-openingly good and disturbing in equal measures in my view and well worth a look. I also have ‘What’s left’, an older tome, but one that is apparently having a resurgence in sales due to various current events!

    1. To be fair, Dougal was stupid but not a drunkard, and Jack was a drunkard but very shrewd … and lewd.

      Ted was neither a drunkard nor particularly stupid, just … inept.

      /@

      1. I didn’t find it funny. Far too simple-minded. No subtlety at all. Much prefer Citizen Khan, though that’s pretty simple-minded too.

        The Vicar of Dibley, now, that was hilarious.

        Of course, comedy is a matter of personal taste.

        cr

  3. Rupa Huq MP is the sister of the well-known BBC presenter Connie Huq, so she has even less excuse than others for her ignorant and blinkered views about the BBC and Citizen Khan.

    The character and the series were created by a Brit of Pakistani background called Adil Ray. It is worth scanning this interview he gave to the BBC website:

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/mediapacks/citizenkhan/adilray

    1. And Connie Huq is married to Charlie Brooker who has Philomena Cunk on his show. Small world.

      I wonder what Charlie makes of his sister-in-law?

  4. One could just have well deemed All in the Family an anti-working-class show.

    Or Friends‘ Joey Tribiani as an anti-Italian stereotype. Or Will and Grace and gays. Or Gilligan’s island, where most of the characters are identified explicitly by their stereotypical role. The list goes on. Sitcoms have often been about shallow stereotypes.

    This doesn’t mean we should excuse all of them. Some are going to be unfunny and offensive to some viewers, and its perfectly fine to complain to a network if you think they’re putting on crap. But it does mean that pretty much all shows (including Citizen Kahn, though I haven’t seen it) should probably be considered more a product of network ham-handedness and superficiality in its treatment of comedy, rather than malice.

    1. Or, like Mrs Brown’s Boys, maybe it really is funny.
      Over-the-top stereotypes can be funny.

    2. Well I do watch it, and it’s funny. The stereotypes are typical of those you see in all sitcoms. I do not see the show as anti-Muslim or Islam or Pakistani. In fact I would say it presents such families as a normal part of British society.

      As far as I’m concerned this is a combination of an MP looking for name recognition and the over-sensitivity of Islam to anything that can possibly be construed as placing it in a negative light.

      1. Agreed. I watch it if it happens to come on, and it’s quite funny, but not, I think, malicious. The family are figures of fun, but no more so than every British sitcom family since TV started. The title character is much more concerned with his standing in the local Muslim community than he is devout. I could name a dozen British sitcoms that are similar in that regard.

        Not that I know many US sitcoms but of the few I do know, I’d say the tone of Citizen Khan is closer to Married With Children than Archie Bunker.

        cr

  6. Can I, as a man, complain about being portrayed in sitcoms as an imbecile who can’t change a tap washer without flooding his kitchen?

  7. Another political/historian writer, Rick Shenkman, may have some insight with a book called Political Animals, How our stone age brain gets in the way of smart politics. Part of his story goes – Once people have made up their mind and decided on an issue or candidate, it is very hard to change this. The left, with their minds already made up on the Islam issue, will not be moved to change no matter what the reality. The brain ship, she has sailed.

    1. I think psychiatrist Scott Alexander really nailed the explanation with his post I can tolerate anything except the outgroup:

      You can talk all you want about Islamophobia, but my friend’s “intelligent, reasoned, and thoughtful people” – her name for the Blue Tribe – can’t get together enough energy to really hate Osama, let alone Muslims in general. We understand that what he did was bad, but it didn’t anger us personally. When he died, we were able to very rationally apply our better nature and our Far Mode beliefs about how it’s never right to be happy about anyone else’s death.

      On the other hand, that same group absolutely loathed Thatcher. Most of us (though not all) can agree, if the question is posed explicitly, that Osama was a worse person than Thatcher. But in terms of actual gut feeling? Osama provokes a snap judgment of “flawed human being”, Thatcher a snap judgment of “scum”.

      I started this essay by pointing out that, despite what geographical and cultural distance would suggest, the Nazis’ outgroup was not the vastly different Japanese, but the almost-identical German Jews.

      And my hypothesis, stated plainly, is that if you’re part of the Blue Tribe, then your outgroup isn’t al-Qaeda, or Muslims, or blacks, or gays, or transpeople, or Jews, or atheists – it’s the Red Tribe.

      […]

      Imagine hearing that a liberal talk show host and comedian was so enraged by the actions of ISIS that he’d recorded and posted a video in which he shouts at them for ten minutes, cursing the “fanatical terrorists” and calling them “utter savages” with “savage values”.

      If I heard that, I’d be kind of surprised. It doesn’t fit my model of what liberal talk show hosts do.

      But the story I’m actually referring to is liberal talk show host / comedian Russell Brand making that same rant against Fox News for supporting war against the Islamic State, adding at the end that “Fox is worse than ISIS”.

      That fits my model perfectly. You wouldn’t celebrate Osama’s death, only Thatcher’s. And you wouldn’t call ISIS savages, only Fox News. Fox is the outgroup, ISIS is just some random people off in a desert. You hate the outgroup, you don’t hate random desert people.

      […]

      We started by asking: millions of people are conspicuously praising every outgroup they can think of, while conspicuously condemning their own in-group. This seems contrary to what we know about social psychology. What’s up?

      We noted that outgroups are rarely literally “the group most different from you”, and in fact far more likely to be groups very similar to you sharing almost all your characteristics and living in the same area.

      We then noted that although liberals and conservatives live in the same area, they might as well be two totally different countries or universe as far as level of interaction were concerned.

      Contra the usual idea of them being marked only by voting behavior, we described them as very different tribes with totally different cultures. You can speak of “American culture” only in the same way you can speak of “Asian culture” – that is, with a lot of interior boundaries being pushed under the rug.

      The outgroup of the Red Tribe is occasionally blacks and gays and Muslims, more often the Blue Tribe.

      The Blue Tribe has performed some kind of very impressive act of alchemy, and transmuted all of its outgroup hatred to the Red Tribe.

      So someone who criticizes Islam — no matter how liberal they are — is automatically grouped as being part of the left’s “outgroup”. Real liberals don’t criticize Islam, liberals only criticize conservatives. Only conservatives criticize Islam. Therefore, anyone who criticizes Islam must also be part of the left’s “outgroup”.

      It’s the “all rectangles are squares therefore all squares are rectangles” logic.

      1. Very good. And when attempting to understand the crazy politics it explains some of it. Even after the Watergate scandal, Richard Nixon was re-elected. Many hung in there almost until he was on the helicopter.

        Trump’s success is pandering to what the base thinks so — he must be good, even though his answers are crap.

      2. Yup. As much as it pains me to say, it appears dichotomous, tribal thinking is just as common on the left as the right nowadays. Maybe it always was; I’m not old enough to be sure.

  8. Pearls before Swine: I try to be nice and greet these people when they knock. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, unusual among German Xians, did not give into Hitler and denounce their pacifism. That I can respect and admire. However, they are a pain in the a$$ and will not stop putting church tracts in my mailbox. Guess I am marked for life.

    1. Last time they came to our house I got to the door before my wife did (she’s usually polite to them – her “sod off” is much nicer than mine).

      When they left one of them was on the verge of tears. That was a year ago and they seem to avoid our house now.

      1. Much the same experience: the last time two of them came knocking on my door, in 2002, they were quite upset (*) by the time they left, and they have never bothered me again. I have heard that they “blacklist” awkward customers like me.

        (*) not that I was rude to them; I just said things that they didn’t want to hear.

        Though once I answered a knock on the door to find a good-looking young blonde standing there:

        Her: “Hello, I’m a Jehovah’s Witness”

        Me : Damn!

        but we did have a quite pleasant conversation.

        1. I didn’t say “Damn!”, I just thought it.

          The “thinks” pseudo-XML tag I put on that line was removed.

    3. I believe that is against the law over here. Only the postman can put things in the mailbox.

    4. The Crocs look just like the earnest young Mormons who knocked at the door the other day.

  9. Even with the great writing of people like Nick Cohen, it may not be possible to move the mind that is already made up. The writer/historian Rick Shenkman says that once the decision is made on an issue or a candidate it is nearly impossible to change it.

    1. Sorry about this one…please ignore
      There was considerable delay on the first try and I thought it was lost.

  10. The case of “The Satanic Verses” is especially interesting, since it came out at the same time as Martin Scorsese’s allegedly blasphemous film “The Last Temptation of Christ”.

    I was living in a fairly conservative section of Ohio at the time, and I remember liberals there and then pretty much backing & defending “The Satanic Verses” (especially Unitarians!!)

    But I also recall conservatives not wanting to seem too much like the Ayatollah and somewhat backing off on “Last Temptation”.

  11. “… it’s the racism of lowered expectations.” Probably better to say “… it’s like the racism of lowered expectations.” True Islamophobia [like, “Sharia law is about to be imposed on Oklahoma”] is a bad thing, but I don’t think it should be labeled “racism”.

    And let me add my favorite encounter with door to door proselytizers: after asking me if they could share the good news about their religion, I said, sure, but first give me five minutes to explain to you why atheism is the only rational position. I am not mis-using the word “literally” when I say they literally took off running.

  13. Love Pearls Before Swine. I suspect Danny Donkey would’ve gotten along famously with Christopher Hitchens; he smokes, drinks, and has a very low tolerance for stupidity.

  14. I can’t remember where I originally heard about Cohen but I also bought What’s Left? and YCBTB at the same time and devoured them both in days.
    A few weeks later a family friend(who worked for years high up in an extremely prominent human rights organisation which is infamous for its recent history of allying with Islamists) came to stay, and upon seeing What’s Left? lying around a brief but unmistakable expression of loathing flashed across her face.

  15. YCRTB is what woke me from my apolitical slumber.

    Been meaning to get What’s Left, though I’m depressed enough reading my Facebook feed actually seeing what leftist thinking has become.

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