Jihad of Comedy

In my essay, The Multifarious Strategy of Jihad, I presented and discussed a list of styles or flavors of jihad.  Aside from the classics -- Jihad of the Sword, Jihad of the Pen, and Jihad of the Tongue, we can infer others:

Jihad of Criminality

Jihad of the Feet

Jihad of the Womb

Jihad of Lawfare

Jihad of the Publicity Stunt

Jihad of Victimology & Grievance

Jihad of the Phony "Hate Crime"

And, perhaps the subtlest Jihad of all:

the Jihad of Just Being Here. 

(See also my more recent discussion of this, Are all Muslims Jihadists?)

The last listed, the "Jihad of Just Being Here", in a nutshell could be termed "false assimilation".  Perhaps one could then include today's "Jihad of Comedy" as a subset of this broader jihad; just as any seemingly innocuous pursuit, career, or identity a Muslim would follow in the secular West (the Dar-al-Harb in Islamic eyes) would also be a subset -- taxi driver, nurse, doctor, pharmacist, engineer, 7-11 clerk, college professor, television producer, actor, actress, dental hygienist's assistant, Congressional aide, Congressperson, lawyer, barrister, policeman, fireman...  "tinker, tailor, soldier, spy"...

So, today's exhibit is the impeccably personable Sakdiyah Ma'ruf, a relatively young (35 years old) female Indonesian stand-up comedienne.  This slickly glitzy video of her presented in a glibly breezy bite-sized and chewable mini-production (which must have cost a lot (of Arab oil money?) to produce), gives one a flavor of her personality and comedic philosophy.  She packages herself as a comedienne who tilts at, and mocks, the "extremists".  The punch lines recorded in this video, however, are rather tame -- and, of course, stay safely away from the heart of the matter, the Koran and Sunna (even though she bills herself in terms of "moral courage").

It was revealing, but of course infinitely unsurprising, then, to find within 5 minutes of Googling, this tweet-&-retweet on her Twitter page:

9. sakdiyah ma'ruf ‏@sakdiyahmaruf Oct 2

   sakdiyah ma'ruf Retweeted (((DeanObeidallah)))

   The jihad of the jihad; comedy jihad. Support @Deanofcomedy !

   sakdiyah ma'ruf added,

   
   

   (((DeanObeidallah))) @Deanofcomedy

   On @amjoyshow today I called for a comedy Jihad on trump. We need to collectively turn trump back into the punchline he was pre campaign

   0 replies 5 retweets 6 likes

Notice whom Sakdiyah is retweeting (and hugging so dearly with six warm parentheses) -- Dean Obeidallah; also a dabbler in comedy schtick, also quite personable looking, and impeccably Westernized (on the surface):



Dean Obeidallah is a Muslim activist comedian whom Robert Spencer has described as an "Islamic supremacist hate propagandist and filmmaker" (and on this Google search page, one can find many other illuminating articles about him by Spencer).  In addition, Sam Harris penned a post on his blog over a year ago, titled Never Stop Lying: How to Pass as a "Moderate Muslim" in the Media -- all about Dean Obeidallah, and how he is effectively pretending to be a "Moderate" whilst (pretty much successfully) hoodwinking the mainstream Western media.  

That same Western media and the majority of pleasantly Islamo-illiterate Westerners would ignore all of this, of course, while their brains go through the following operation:

Sakdiyah is ridiculing the Tiny Minority of Extremists in her standup -- how brave! -- and she has such cute dimples!  Therefore she must be a Moderate, and Dean Obeidallah, with his cute haircut and snazzy necktie must also be a Moderate, and of course untold hundreds of millions of Muslims must be harmless just like them, for to think otherwise would be to slip dangerously close to the edge of the horrible chasm of bigotry and Islamophobia.

No punchline there, I'm afraid; other than that of the blackest humor of our collective tragicomedy we can console ourselves with as, with jaded dismay, we watch our beautiful, flawed West swirl the drain of a slow, inexorable Mohammedan conquest in this Twenty-First -- our Last -- Century.

Further Reading:  

Al-Beavis and Al-Butthead: Or, a Plane is not a Comedy Club

Muslim comedians Trumpbash