Jihad and the West Black Flag over Babylon - Chapter Three Podcast Five

Weaponized Humor and the Caliphate

            Some American leaders have turned to Hollywood to develop a propaganda strategy against the Caliphate. This action has precedent; presidents have partnered with movie studios to confront an external enemy before, including during World War II, when films boosted morale on the home front and many celebrities went to war against the Axis powers. Three generations later, the Obama administration is recruiting Hollywood to battle the Caliphate. In February 2016, Secretary of State John Kerry sought strategic advice from Hollywood producers, executives, and actors.

 

            Hollywood had some answers. The rock band U2’s lead singer, Bono, long an advocate for political causes, suggested that the White House build a team including comedian Sacha Baron Cohen and others who connect with millennials. They would joke and make sarcastic comments about the Caliphate. But some are skeptical that that would make for effective propaganda. “Bono says fight extremism with comedy? Yeah Bono, like that worked for Charlie Hebdo.”

 

            In Canada, a trio of Middle Eastern–raised Muslims host the Weekly Show, which lampoons hot issues in the Arab world, including sexual harassment and the Caliphate. One host explains, “Our message to young Muslims is that ISIS is using Islam in a sick way.”

            Western civil servants seek to undermine the State’s popularity by appealing to moderate Western Muslims. In Europe, some governments have subsidized anti-Caliphate popular culture. Belgian authorities funded a play titled Djihad, in which three Belgian Muslims stumble to Syria to fight for a cause they don’t understand. One of the militants is an Elvis impersonator. Belgian educators liked the play and subsidized its performance because young people found it funny.

 

            Elsewhere in Europe, government officials occasionally serve as talent scouts for entertainers who can keep young people away from the Caliphate. Britain’s Humza Arshad is a popular Muslim comedian. An eighteen-year-old woman explained that his popularity stems from his warmth, empathy, and wit. She said, “A lot of students look at police and think they don’t know what they’re talking about or don’t see things from our perspective. But Humza . . . we’ve grown up watching him. He raises awareness in a way we can understand.” For this reason, police have hired him to counter the Caliphate’s appeal.

 

            In Britain, funny-lady Shazia Mirza used comedy in her acclaimed 2015 one-woman show, The Kardashians Made Me Do It, in which she asks why so many young Western Muslim girls choose to run away to join the Islamic State. She crafted her script from public hearings of three teenage girls who left Britain for the Caliphate. Mirza was intrigued by what one of the girls took with her: “an epilator, a packet of new knickers, and body lotion. I thought, ‘You’re going to join a barbaric terrorist organization, and you are thinking of your bikini line?’”

 

            In Germany, satirists had fun with the Green Party’s focus on nonlethal force to stop the flurry of migrant violence. In one sketch, an actor dressed as a German police officer speaks to the camera, endorsing a new, nonlethal response to the random stabbings and machete slashings. He demonstrates a new tactic as a burly man, dressed in black and wielding a two-bladed axe, charges him. The police officer ducks, hugs his assailant, and says, “I love you.”

 

            The Iraqi government promotes parody on national television. One sketch portrays a coy European-looking journalist, anticipating the interview of her life, asking Caliph Abu Bakr if he had slaughtered a sheep in her honor. He replies, “A sheep? I slaughtered 300 men in your honor.”

            There is also far more stark satire than that presented in the West. A roaming band of avant-garde poets and activists travels to Iraqi towns reciting poetry in absurd situations. Wearing orange jumpsuits, they perform from a prisoners’ cage, an ambulance, even body bags. The poets kneel down with their hands tied behind their backs and orate. They burlesque the killing fields of their homeland and taunt the Caliphate through verse in what has been called “poetry of the absurd.”

 

Cringe Humor, Gallows Humor, and Caliphate Humor

 

            Some American comedians have fun with the Caliphate, too, but few joke about its Islamic component. They may find nothing humorous about Sharia or do not wish to meet the fate of the French satirical cartoonists. A late-night entertainer, Bill Maher has been a leading celebrity critic of the Caliphate, but he often feels alone. He admits, “I just don’t understand how liberals who fought the battle for civil rights in the  1960s, fought against apartheid in the 1980s, can then just simply ignore Sharia law in forty countries.” Milo Yiannopoulos, editor of the conservative Breitbart news outlet, said that it is “obscene that the political left . . . is happy to pander to and mollycoddle people that want me [referring to his homosexuality] dead . . . And I’m tired of being polite about it. . . . The problem is Islam.”

 

            Some Caliphate-connected humor has panicked the audience. In May 2016, there was no laughing when guests at a swanky hotel in Cannes, France, fled for their lives after a boat with a black flag and six men landed on the Riviera. Guests at the tony Hotel Du Cap Eden-Roc scrambled, hid, prayed, and clutched each other while sneering men in commando dress and make-believe suicide vests roamed the area. However, it turned out to be a publicity stunt by a French internet startup, which received the attention it sought.

 

            Far from the Riviera, many suffer the reality wrought by the Islamic State. Some use humor as both an escape and a means of protest. Hundreds of thousands of displaced persons subsist in the haunts and despair of vast refugee camps in the Levant. Some are under attack from all sides of the conflict. Mohammed is one of them, as shown below.

 

Profile Seven: Snickering from the Refugee Camp—“We Also Killed the Dentists”

 

            The unrelenting despondency of Caliphate-created refugee camps offers both opportunities and challenges for Syrian comics. An example of Mesopotamian cringe comedy comes from the comedian “Mohammed,” a refugee who wrote a story for an American audience. First, he apologized for being late in blogging his heartbreak at the death of Cecil the Lion, who was killed by a wealthy American dentist on an African bow-hunting safari. The death of the feline made world news. Wrote Mohammed, “Not Cecil the Lion! Not him! Truly, is there no innocence left in this world?”

 

            In thinly disguised mockery, Mohammed explained that he couldn’t use his email to communicate his sorrow at the lion’s death because Americans had bombed the local power plant, plunging his village into complete darkness. He wrote that he had had to walk for two days to reach an internet café, ducking fighters along the way, hopscotching over decomposing corpses of old friends, avoiding the blasts of Syrian barrel bombs, watching State soldiers decapitate boys, and wiping the tears off of the faces of girls who had had acid thrown at them. His journey was interrupted when “ISIS discovered my brother was gay and . . . they forced [me] to throw him off a building.” Mohammed then had to bury his daughter, who had died of cholera. He did not have to feed his wife because she had been carted off as a sex slave months ago.

 

            Mohammed could brave all of this. But the death of Cecil the Lion was too distressing to endure. Finally, stepping out of comedic character and now deadly serious, Mohammed wondered, “What is wrong with America?” and concluded, “You do not hear stories like this in Syria, partly because we already killed all our lions but also because we killed all our dentists.”