You’ve probably noticed the absurd spectacle – and resulting media feeding frenzy – of a Muslim “group” in New York making a barely veiled threat to the creators of “South Park” for (almost) portraying Muhammad and causing the episode to be censored.

As Hussein Rashid rightly emphasizes in his observations in Religion Dispatches, these inane provocations don’t come from an Islamic “group”. To hear the breathless media coverage you’d think this a call to arms from jihadi leaders on American soil, when this duo is far more Beavis and Butt-Head than Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri. Two foolish men with an Internet connection that happen to be Muslim are getting their 15 minutes of fame and scaring the daylights out of everybody. Two men do not an organization make and so far, there is no more evidence that these hateful nutcases are any more representative of any broader stream–or even a really narrow one–within “their” community than, say, the infamous and equally odious Westboro Baptist Church, whose handful of congregants are known for traveling the land to picket at high profile events with outrageously homophobic and anti-Semitic signs (e.g., “AIDS cures fags.”). Both “groups” are minuscule and repudiated by their fellows, and both would be unknown were it not for the media attention they’ve gotten.

That doesn’t make their antics any less disturbing or repulsive. (But what do you expect from disturbed cretins who’d praise the murderer of Fort Hood as an “officer and a gentleman”?) Neither does it make the threat any less concerning or worthy of investigation–I don’t always agree with what’s done in the name of the War on Terror today, but vigilance is certainly necessary. Nonetheless, this episode still needs to be kept in perspective.

Activist circles in every community include within their peoples some who even the most egalitarian-minded person must concede are its dregs. Dim bigots who yearn for glory and power know full well the only way to get noticed in politics is for them to carve out a niche as fire-breathing ideologues. In the business world, they say that those who can’t “do” teach–in politics, those able to neither contribute constructive perspectives to the debates of the day nor formulate sound proposals for the dilemmas facing policymakers invariably try to cast themselves as fearless standard-bearers willing to challenge the “politically correct” sacred cows of political life, establishing their ideological bona fides by channeling in, unfiltered, the Id of the most ignorant and paranoid within their community’s fringe.

In the past, such figures often labored in well deserved obscurity, with their self-published manifestos reaching only locals unfortunate enough to chance upon their literature or a handful of fellow travelers motivated enough to seek out such addled ruminations. Moreover, the economic and political constraints of traditional publishing were such that a sort of natural selection reigned in publishing that inevitably culled such infirm tracts from the herd of popular culture. Those constraints didn’t prevent a feverishly paranoid and reactionary screed like The Turner Diaries from making the rounds in the shadows of American society like some perverse parody of Samizdat, but it did mean that those consuming and being influenced by it (e.g., Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh) were more likely than not to already be walking that benighted path.

Those days are obviously long gone. It used to be a commonplace that anyone with a PC, a decent printer and some basic desktop publishing skills could publish their own book (even if it might get sold out of the back of their car), but the advent of the Internet, search engines (and then blogging software–it is not out of mere vanity that one of the best known blogging platforms likens itself to Gutenberg’s earthshaking technological innovation) have further democratized and decentralized publishing. Likewise, with the power of the mass media today to transcend geography and with the mind-deforming backdrop of polarizing conflicts and geopolitical trash-talking, yesterday’s marginal frothing-at-the-mouth loudmouths can not only overcome the constraints of location to reach their few kindred spirits scattered out there, but they can also be transformed from impotent nonentities to famed resistance leaders (at least to the few who share their warped worldview), courtesy of MSM sensationalism.

As a longtime consumer of the “literature” produced by people of this ilk – I used to subscribe to all manner of strange (snail) mailing lists to see what was going on in the underbelly of American religious and political life– I must confess to occasionally missing the old days, if for a less enlightened reason: There is something profoundly jarring and inauthentic about the polished form that even the worst conspiratorial dreck to be found online today usually takes. Whether it’s a breathless exposé of the aliens who, don’t you know, live beneath the North Pole, or a footnoted treatise on the imminent takeover of America by the New World Order, professionally printed books and websites don’t do such people’s worldviews justice. To really grasp them in all their glory, one must consume their ideas in their natural form, as crude manuscripts replete with handwritten corrigenda, wildly varying margins and self-indicting solecisms.

It’s enough to turn you into a Luddite. In the old days of publishing, the incoherent rants of kooks and nobodies like the dim duo behind MuslimRevolution.com [which appears to have been pulled off the web] would end up where they belong, in a trash barrel with all the other waste produced by modern society.

Getting back to the antics of these Muslim Revolution characters, perhaps the best response Muslims could make is to take a page from “South Park”–whose right to parody Islam and Muhammad I defend as vigorously as I repudiate the slurs of Islamophobes–and subject these zealots to the public humiliation they deserve. I wonder sometimes if when dealing with thugs who wouldn’t know a daleel (i.e., a sound scholarly argument in Islamic law) from a doughnut, a satirist who is able to comically boil jihadi thinking down to its absurd, internally-inconsistent essence might not occasionally be far more effective than the most learned mufti. Fatwas and sermons have a crucial place in the battle of ideas among modern Muslims, but man does not live by theology alone and another comparably crucial struggle rages on the ground in Muslim societies (and indeed in all societies) , far beneath the rarefied air of doctrinal debate.

I, for one, would love to see Al Jazeera feature skits on the idiotic extremes that some Muslims go to in the name of their religion—think “Stupid Jihadi Tricks”, a la David Letterman‘s legendary skits on human foibles–and think it could have a real impact on popular attitudes. I’m not holding my breath, but it’s not as far fetched as you might think; while Al Jazeera sometimes provides a platform to nasty characters, it also features dramatically more hard-hitting wide-ranging intellectual debate than one finds on, say, CNN or MSNBC. Contrary to Albert Brook’s leaden and trite 2005 film “Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World,” Muslims by and large aren’t in need of tutoring in humor (not even in much maligned Pakistan, where a cross-dressing talk show host is a smash hit), and anyone who’s spent much time among Arabs has discovered the wicked jokes that get passed around concerning the incompetence, venality and hypocrisy of some Middle Eastern leaders.

With farcical extremists passing themselves off as Islam’s most ardent defenders and in a world where Marshall McLuhan’s rules of Hyperreality increasingly seem to trump logic itself, perhaps what the Muslim world needs most is an army of John Stewart’s.


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