Thanks For Coming and Try the Shawarma
As "fun" fundamentalist Zarqa Nawaz can tell you, funny business is a great way to counter infidels' unfounded stereotypes of Muslims. And it looks like a bunch of fun-minded folks in Murfreesboro, TN, think so too, as onIslam reports:
CAIRO – Fighting against a growing tide of hostility in Tennessee, American Muslims are using comedy to draw a brighter face of the Muslim community and their faith.
"We’ve been trying for quite a while to show that Islam has another face," Saleh Sbenaty, a spokesman for the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, told The Tennessean on Sunday, August 7.
"People need to see that."
The show "The Muslims are Coming" will be featured in Murfreesboro and Nashville, Tennessee, this month.
Through laugh, the show aims to clear stereotypes and misconceptions about Muslims and their faith.
In Murfreesboro, a Jewish and a Christian comedian will join the cast as special guests. In Nashville, an independent music group will also join in.
At the end of each show, there will be a 20-minute question-and-answer session for audience members.
"Muslims, regardless of the talents we have, whether it’s sports or comedy, whatever, need to use those avenues to reach mainstream Americans,” said Abdelghani Barre, president of the Islamic Center of Nashville and adviser of the Muslim Student Association at Middle Tennessee State University.
"So many questions have been raised about Islam and Muslims, particularly about our loyalty and faith, and I think we have an opportunity here to dispel some myths about Islam."
The comedy show comes amid a growing controversy over the building of an Islamic center in Murfreesboro.
"There is this teeny percentage of people in the Muslim community that are threats to America,” New York-based comedian Dean Obeidallah, co-producer of the show and a member in the Comedy Central special Axis of Evil, said.
“They are not the majority, but so often we are defined by the worst of us, and that isn’t right.”
Obeidallah, who began planning the tour last year, said he heard about the mosque controversy on the news.
“It’s easy to demonize a person you’ve never met. And then you meet them, and generally it breaks down the stereotyping."
A Gallup poll found this week that the majority of Americans Muslims are loyal to their country and optimistic about their future in the United States...
Why wouldn't they be? Political correctness and the "diversity" mantra have virtually assured that the remorseless Islamization currently underway in the West--including in the land which prior to hopeychangey times used to consider itself exceptional--will continue apace. And, no joke, wouldn't you prefer living in the bosom of a crumbling Great Satan than in in, say, Iran or Syria?
3 comments:
I'll have to say, Scaramouche, that, though we definitely have Islamofanatics among the U. S. Moslem population--witness the Ft. Hood shootings by Dr. Nidal Hassan and its near-reprise by Pfc. Naser Abdo just recently, the bulk of American Moslems are generally well-behaved, . . . in public, anyway. Only in a few unusual enclaves where large Moslem populations are concentrated, e.g., Dearborn, Michigan, do we find Moslems being obnoxious at times.
I think a big factor is that Mr. and Mrs. America are much more likely to be armed--outside certain "blue" metropolitan areas, e.g., New York City, Detroit, Chicago, etc.--than, say, M/Mr et Mme/Mrs Canada. For example, my wife, my older son, my older daughter, and I all have concealed-carry permits. My daughter and I seldom do carry-- we got the permits largely as a political statement--but my wife and older son often do . . . the point being that you can't tell, at least in the "redder" jurisdictions, like Jacksonville, Florida, who is and who is not armed.
That sweet-looking late-middle-aged lady (that would be my wife), may have a .357 magnum tucked in her fanny pack (which she does) and knows how to use it proficiently (which she also does . . . don't get in her face and threaten her!). Generally, punching someone in the face and trying to take away his camera in Jacksonville would not be advisable!
By the way--and I think I've mentioned this before in other comments on your site, but, heck, I'm getting old and therefore entitled to be repetitive--the gun culture of the American South extends to a significant sector of the Jewish population, something unthinkable in, say, deepest red East Side Manhattan. I know, because I recognize acquaintances I know to be Jewish shooting at my gun club with some wicked-looking military-type rifles or handguns; one of the regulars there is a man who, I am pretty sure, is an Orthodox rabbi (he is easily identifiable as the only club member who shoots while wearing a yarmulke and a white shirt and tie; he may be eccentric in his dress, but he is deadly with an AR-15 rifle!). So, launching a pogrom against the local Jewish population would probably not be a good idea either.
CP--I have no problem with Muslims who are content to live under man-made law. It's Muslims who want all to acknowledge the primacy of Allah's law--however "well-behaved" they appear to be--that I worry about.
We're in accord, Scaramouche, regarding how Moslems should behave. My point is that the best guarantor of good behavior is a general population that won't stand for bad behavior . . . and that requires having at its disposal the means to forestall or punish bad behavior. The police won't do it for you, especially under the current regimen of political correctness that seems to have gripped all major police departments in the West.
I hesitate to give a citizen of a foreign, sovereign country unsolicitied advice regarding how her society should organize itself . . . but, what the heck: Canadian conservatives should push hard for the expansion of gun rights in their country, including a reasonable standard of what constitutes legitimate armed self-defense. Here in Florida, even the common law "duty to flee" (which made more sense before the advent of firearms) when attacked has been modified by legislation. The result has been not more, but _less_ violent crime. And, yes, that has the secondary effect of forestalling the kind of aggressive in-your-face mob behavior that Moslems are wont to use to intimidate non-Moslems in places like Toronto.
Again, at the risk of overstepping my cross-ethnoreligious advice license, I would like to add that Jews, especially, should arm themselves (as so many have in the gun-friendly South, as related in my first comment). One of the factors that has made Jewish communities such attractive targets for political bullies in the past has been the relatively low rate of gun ownership among them. Israel, of course, provides the contrasting example--exemplar, really: One of the factors that has allowed it to survive in a sea of Arab hostillity is the high rate of _private_ gun ownership and the liberal concealed-carry laws there.
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