Two Muslim comics – Negin Farsad and the egregious Dean Obeidallah — are apparently behind the campaign of Muslim propaganda posters, “Facts About Muslims,” that have been put up in 140 stations of the New York City subway system. “We wanted to do things that ranged from being informative—like ‘Muslims invented algebra’—to silly, playful, and funny,” said Obeidallah.
Here are a couple of these posters:
“Muslims are coming to strike with hugs so fierce, you’ll end up calling your grandmother and telling her you love her.”
and
“The Ugly Truth About Muslims: They have great frittata recipes.”
Their strategy is simple: make absurdist claims for Muslims that will point up, with that light-hearted mickey-mockery for which Muslims are famous, the idiocy of all those terrible charges by Islamophobes – you know, such preposterous claims as that “Muslims are taught that apostates should be killed” or “Muslims are responsible for more than 90% of ‘honor killings’” or “Muhammad consummated his marriage to little Aisha when she was nine years old” or “the Qur’an has 109 verses preaching Jihad” — crazy stuff like that. No, I didn’t find the hugs-and-frittatas funny, either.
But there is something else going on as well. It’s the “informative” part. Here’s what’s on another poster:
Fact: Muslims invented the concept of a hospital (“informative”)
Fact: Grownup Muslims can do more pushups than baby Muslims (“silly, playful, funny”)
Fact: Muslims invented Justin Timberlake (“silly, playful, funny”)
Well, the thing about the hospitals is true, the other two might be kinda true.
Here three claims are made, two of them self-evidently absurd, but one of them –“Muslims invented the concept of the hospital” — meant to be taken as serious and true (“the thing about the hospitals is true”). If your standards of humor are suitably sophomoric, you may allow yourself to laugh at the two “silly, playful, funny” claims. You have then been put in the frame of mind to think that the people who could be so winningly humorful with these claims (those pushups, that Timberlake), are entitled to be believed when they make their serious “informative” claim. You do not stop and say to yourself: hey, wait a minute, let me check Wikipedia about that “concept of a hospital” claim, where, if you did, you would find that hospitals did not originate with Muslims but date back to Greek and Roman times. Instead, bemused by these two Muslim comics, we let down our guard, as they slip in the one claim where they are not being absurd but merely mendacious – and we accept it. The claim being made, after all, is not obviously outrageous, as would be, say, a claim that “Muslims discovered America” or “a Muslim discovered the structure of DNA”; most of us are hazy on the subject of when hospitals began, and having been softened up by the other two putatively humorful claims, are now prepared to accept the claim about Muslims inventing “the concept of the hospital” as not just “kinda true,” but “true.”
As a thought experiment, imagine that the poster had contained neither of the “funny” claims, but just this one: “Muslims invented the concept of the hospital.” You would no longer be inclined to accept it. Instead, you would have gone at once to consult a reliable reference source, and would have found the Islamic claim of priority given short shrift.
Another example of the extravagant claims for Muslim achievement is this Farsad-Obeidallah poster:
“Muslims! They invented coffee, the toothbrush and algebra … Oh wait, sorry about the algebra. That’s a year of class you’ll never get back.”
Three claims, all of which are false. Coffee as a beverage has its origins in Ethiopia; the toothbrush comes from China; and algebra, the most important of the three claims, was developed first by Sanskrit mathematicians, though Arabs later affixed an Arab name to this branch of mathematics.
“Oh wait, sorry about the algebra. That’s a year of class you’ll never get back.”
Ha-Ha. Farsad and Obeidallah don’t make a big solemn deal about Muslim claims of priority about algebra – they can even make a joke about that wasted year of class — or for that matter, about toothbrushes and coffee. Though they insist, of course, that those claims are all true.
The Muslim propaganda that mimics and mocks, holding up for ridicule the cogent and unanswerable charges made by the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), also presses claims about Muslim achievements that are false, and without much difficulty could be discovered to be false. But how many people know, or would take the time to find out, who first invented the toothbrush, or first brewed coffee? How many of us lazily assume that because “algebra” is an Arabic name, it must denote a branch of mathematics developed first by the Arabs?
“There is no fun in Islam,” said Ayatollah Khomeini. Silly and playful, sinister and persistent, Negin Farsad and Dean Obeidallah don’t agree, and want to introduce Infidels to the zany laff-riot that is Islam, and while we Infidels are consumed in cozy mute mirth from all of their “silly, playful, and funny” claims, they can smuggle in preposterous “informative” claims about Muslim achievements, those lists we are by now accustomed to, that include hospitals, algebra, toothbrushes, coffee, gunpowder, paper, the Discovery of America, the Rediscovery of Greek philosophy, the Renaissance, and so much more.
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One Response
Ah yes, hugs.
Here’s a story of a mohammedan human bomb who hugged someone (a fellow mohammedan whom he deemed insufficiently islamic] and then… blew himself up.
‘…The moment he stepped out of the car to check out this road between Fallujah and Amriyah, at this moment, there was a man,” the lawmaker’s office chief, Sohaib Haqi, said.
“He came to him, hugged him, said Allahu Akbar, and blew himself up.””
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-01-16/suicide-bomber-kills-iraqi-mp–6-others/4466534