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:

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: