Each comedian profiled has their own angle on both the entertainment business and the experiences of Muslims in the United States. Maysoon Zayid talks about being a Palestinian-American Muslim woman who doesn’t cover her hair, a virgin, and a disabled person aspiring to become an actress.

Dean Obeidallah shares the story of how he initially stopped using his Arab last name when performing in the aftermath of 9/11, then had a change of heart and a change of direction.

Azhar Usman, who is shown praying in his dressing room at one point, discusses going through a conservative phase before realizing that his path in life ultimately lay elsewhere.

Many viewers will relate to Ahmed Ahmed’s anxiety in regards to air travel, except that in Ahmed Ahmed’s case there is the added “bonus” of traveling while Muslim and enduring extreme suspicion. And Tissa Hami’s account of enduring prejudice both from non-Muslims and Muslims (some of whom have told her that she is “going to hell”) is not exactly a laughing matter.

Yet, staying true to its subject matter, the special manages to be light-hearted as well. The featured jokes could probably make even David Horowitz laugh, or so I’d like to believe.

Prior to the premiere, I was given an opportunity to interview several of the comedians, and here is what we talked about:

Natalia: Can you tell me more about the PBS special?

Dean Obeidallah: The one-hour special is the brainchild of producer Glenn Baker who first approached us almost four years ago with the idea of shooting a documentary about Muslim and Arab-American comedians. The documentary begins with us performing before any of us had appeared on any major US TV networks. However, by the end of the documentary many of us had appeared on Comedy Central, ABC, CNN, NBC and on numerous other TV networks, so viewers get a chance to watch us move up the entertainment ladder.

Maysoon Zayid: I am so blessed to be involved in this project with such extraordinary talent, including my brother from another mother, Dean Obeidallah. Glen and Omar [Naim - the co-director] were invisible. They made it so easy for us. I’m amazed with the end product. Omar is truly genius. It’s funny. And no one gets shot. AND you get to see my Dad. That alone is worth TiVo-ing.

Natalia: What’s it like to be a Muslim American working in the entertainment industry in the year 2008?

Dean Obeidallah: The entertainment industry is very competitive and is a struggle for everyone, regardless of race or religion. [Being] an Arab-American comedian who talks about my heritage in my act, has set me apart from many other typical comedians because I have a point of view that has not been heard from too often in the past. In the last few years, the entertainment industry has increasingly been supportive of our comedy.

Maysoon Zayid: I don’t know. No, just kidding, I do. I find it very difficult not only being a Muslim but a disabled female Muslim who doesn’t fit the stereotype shown by mainstream media of what a Muslim woman should look and sound like. Nearly all of my experience comes from the entertainment side and I found that, once someone takes a chance on casting me, its been a great opportunity for people who know very little about my culture to learn. In those instances I’ve had a wonderful reception from the majority of my colleagues as well as the Muslim community itself. Oh and the Italian Christians love me too.

Natalia: What are your audiences like nowadays, do lots of Muslims come to see your shows? Are there Jews in the audience?

Dean Obeidallah: When I’m not traveling for shows, I’m in NYC performing nightly at the major comedy clubs so the audiences are a cross section of every race and religion. When we do the Middle Eastern themed shows then the audience is probably 60% Middle Eastern. I am fortunate to have supporters of all different backgrounds

Maysoon Zayid: I don’t make it a policy to check what religion my audience members are, so I cant answer that. Because its not really something I think about nor do I care. Religion is personal. It doesn’t matter to me what religion anyone in my audience is.

I do know for a fact however that I’ve had a Mormon in the audience because she happened to be my best friend.

Natalia: This is just a stab in the dark, but, as an American, I get the impression that there is this sense of discomfort between Muslim Americans and Jewish Americans, and I see comedy as something that has the long-term potential to repair this situation. Am I naive to think this way?

Maysoon Zayid: Please don’t use the word “stab” in the same sentence as “Muslim Americans” and “Jewish Americans.”

Dean Obeidallah: I truly believe that comedy can be used to foster understating between Jews, Muslims, Arabs, and [people of] all different backgrounds. In fact, I have toured colleges for four years in a show I co-created called “Stand up for Peace” with Jewish comedian Scott Blakeman. Our shows are generally co-sponsored by Arab, Jewish, and Muslim student groups.

The goal is to bring together people of different backgrounds and religions (especially Arabs/Muslims and Jewish-Americans), to foster understanding through laughter as well as to attract support for a peaceful, negotiated resolution to the Middle East conflict. I can promise you that our show is much more fun than the events featuring speakers on the extreme right who appear on college campuses with the goal of dividing people through their hate-filled rhetoric.

Natalia: “Axis of Evil” was a success in the Middle East . Would you say that this success is indicative of the way that Muslim American comedians are perceived in Muslim majority nations overall?

Dean Obeidallah: I actually didn’t go with the Axis guys for that tour. However, I have performed in the Middle East before on my own and am returning for shows in late May/early June with Ahmed Ahmed and Maz Jobrani.

Comedy does not have geographic barriers. The Internet, TV shows and films have brought the world closer together. I can also tell you that I learned that we have one big thing in common: Jokes about President Bush get big laughs both in the US and in the Middle East!

Maysoon Zayid: Whether you’re part of the Muslim community or not, if you appreciate good comedy, you’re gonna love our shows. I’ve done shows in Beirut, and I’ve done shows in Tennessee, and I can honestly say the audiences I’ve encountered have been equally enthusiastic on both sides of the globe. Masha’allah.

Natalia: I recently interviewed a Muslim American author, Dilara Hafiz, and one of the most interesting things we talked about was her idea that Islam has a great future in the United States, because it can thrive more alongside democracy. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Maysoon Zayid: First of all, I want to give respect to Dilara Hafiz. I think what she did is such a cool idea and I love the fact that she collaborated on it with her own children. That being said, I heartily disagree.

Being Muslim in America, I feel put in jeopardy. Growing up in Cliffside Park, New Jersey I never felt as if I was an “other,” and I definitely was never attacked for my religious beliefs. But, during the George W. Bush Presidency, I, as well as my nieces and nephews, started to feel overwhelmed by the pushing of his distortion of Christianity on our daily lives. I started feeling a lot less comfortable in my own country, because of this.

If, by the grace of God and the Diebold machines, we get a Democrat in office, Islam may have a slim chance of thriving, but if we end up with that dude McCain, I got two words for my fellow Muslims: “Move to Canada”. OK, sorry, that’s three words.

Natalia: Would you like to share more thoughts on this year’s election?

Maysoon Zayid: I am super-proud to say that I am actually going to be ATTENDING the Democratic National Convention, as both a delegate from the great state of New Jersey and a performer with my arab-boy-comic-harem, aka “Axis of Evil” and Dean Obeidallah.

I am so excited for this election because it means no more Dick and Bush (forgive me for not being halal, but those are their names), and I’m thrilled at the prospect of having either Hilary or Barack Obama for president (as long as Hilary shuts it about obliterating Iran).

Ideally I’d like to see them on the same ticket. But more than anything else, I want Bill back! I know he’s itchin’ to get back in the Middle East peace process/ circus. The one other thing I will say, is Michele Obama is frickin’ awesome.

Dean Obeidallah: This election has both inspired and distressed me. I have been inspired by that fact both a woman and an African-American have a realistic chance of being the next President. I am personally supporting Senator Obama, but I am confident that Senator Clinton would still be a far better president that John McCain.

I have been distressed by some people’s use of Barack Obama’s middle name “Hussein” and the word Muslim as a slur in this campaign. I believe strongly that most Americans will reject these attacks – which I view as not anti-Muslim, but as anti-American, since our country was founded on the principles of religious tolerance. Let’s hope that these haters’ voices will be drowned out by the voices of mainstream America.

Natalia: I have to ask, what’s the most ridiculous thing that’s anybody ever said to you in regards to your brand of comedy?

Tissa Hami: “Are you only doing this to get a husband?”

Dean Obeidallah: I have been asked several times: “Are you really Arab?” As if I’m going to make up an ethnic background.

Maysoon Zayid: People call me anti-Semitic all the time which is completely ludicrous, because first and foremost I am a Semite and definitely not self-hating. Also, of you look at my catalog of work I defy anyone to find an anti-Jewish comment. They don’t exist.

A funnier misconception that always shocks me is when people accuse me of pretending to be disabled. All I can think is wow. I must be the best actor ever, because I have never broken character, EVER. I always get a kick out of that one.

Natalia: And what’s the best thing?

Maysoon Zayid: The best comment I’ve ever gotten was when a really well known actress came up to me at the end of my show, and said “I never knew Palestinians had children!”… In that moment, I had introduced humanity to a people who often see Palestinians as being very far from human. So that moment really validated me.

I also absolutely love it when [people with cerebral palsy] come up to me and are like, this is dope. I can totally do whatever it is they were dreaming of, that they didn’t think they could do. That gives me the warm fuzzies except for when I remember that 98% of them wont make it.

Dean Obeidallah: By far the best comment I have heard is from people – and it’s usually from Middle Eastern-Americans and Muslim-Americans – who after a show, or in an email, say: “Thank you for doing the type of comedy that you do.” I like this so much because it means they appreciate that my comedy is not just intended to make people laugh, but also intended to challenge the way we are often defined in mainstream media and present us in a positive, likable, and accurate light. The support of our community has inspired all of us to continue talking about these issues.

Tissa Hami: When a young boy came up to me after a show and said, “You were the best comedian on the show, by far.” He didn’t tell me that I was the best female comedian on the show, or the best ethnic comedian, or the best female ethnic comedian, if you see what I mean. He just saw me as a comedian.

On a related note, check out my interview with “The Axis of Evil” comedians in Dubai. For more, please read the interview with Maysoon Zayid and Tissa Hami at Muslimah Media Watch.

This thought visited me again most recently when I travelled to attend a conference and unpacked my favorite navy blue suit out of my suitcase, the one I usually put on when I am about to meet a bunch of very serious people.

Mankind, I said to myself as I examined the state of my official uniform, was able to squeeze billions of documents and complex data inside a tiny microchip, retrieve them at will, save them back and then retrieve them again in mint condition. All inside a piece of silicon the size of a finger nail. Mind-boggling stuff, almost like magic, we all agree.

However, we have not yet figured out a way to place a business suit inside the common suitcase and retrieve it at our destination without creasing the hell out of it. If that task is physically impossible, why can’t the federation of world manufacturers of travel bags come together and decide to rename the famous suitcase to something else, like underwearcase or sockscase, since it has been forensically proven that the worst item you can fold into a suitcase is an actual bloody suit?

You try to fix the problem.

Some hotels often leave you an ironing kit inside your room, assuming that you have just arrived in a luxury hotel and would want to start performing a tedious manual task, one you have not even considered attempting when you were a broke student, let alone the guest of a five star hospitality institution. This makes me wonder even more.

Mankind was able to invent machines whereby you insert a thin disc into an automatically sliding compartment and a crystal clear moving picture comes out on the screen. We perfected machines where you throw in a small sack of plastic, press a button, and a nice cup of espresso comes out of the other end, with a choice range from Bourbon Amarelo to Decaffeinato Intenso. Yet, we still cannot fix the creased shirts dilemma; we cannot invent a machine in which to throw all those garments with the nasty wrinkles and receive them crisp and silky at the other end.

Blindfolded, I’ll put my money on the inventor who starts drawing the designs for the next big thing: The Decreasinator, the portable device that is certain to outsell the entire world’s output of DVD players, suitcases and coffee machines, combined.

Such is the folly of scientific achievement in our world today, which is only a reflection of the inherent deficiencies in the evolution of our brains. We can send a rover light years away to reach and photograph planet Mars, but we still cannot reach out to each other to resolve our differences back on Earth. We can discover DNA and map the human genome, yet we are unable to find a cure for the common cold. We can peek at other galaxies with giant telescopes and google-earth our houses and backyards, but we still cannot locate Osama bin Laden’s hideout in the mountains of Terroristan.

We can remove a human heart and replace it with an artificial or even an animal equivalent, yet we cannot get rid of simple bad breath. We can afford to spend trillions on building enough bombs to turn Earth into dust in seconds, yet we cannot allocate a small fraction of our nations’ wealth to fund research to cure cancer.

We can invent technologies that enable us to talk to each other across continents at the press of a speed dial, yet we miserably fail to communicate with each other face to face to avoid waging genocidal wars against each other. We can build gravity-defying flying machines that serve Dom Perignon while crossing the Atlantic or send a man to the moon and bring him back, yet we cannot achieve peace between Arabs and Jews that would send a Palestinian child walking to school without the risk of getting killed.

Indeed, we can espouse many stubborn beliefs linking us to a benevolent, omnipotent Creator of this life, yet we are unable to recognize that the single most act this Creator would abhor is the unnecessary taking of this same life in His very name.

It is obvious that we have got our priorities mixed up somewhere along the way. For example, I could never understand how so many people can get overly obsessed with the prospect of certain species becoming endangered, all along oblivious to the impending extinction of our own kind in a man-made nuclear holocaust. Why are we so worried that killer sharks, for instance, are dwindling in numbers?

What possible inconvenience can such an eventuality add to our already complicated daily lives, apart from many divers and surfers feeling safer while frolicking in the oceans? What great loss to humanity has the extinction of dinosaurs brought about anyway, except to make Steven Spielberg much richer than he already had been?

I bet you if these giant lizards were running around today causing mayhem to lives and properties, we would make them extinct yet again, because all the arguments about protecting the eco-balance of mother nature would go down the green drains they came from when you or your child are being chased down the street by a hungry Tyrannosaurus Rex. You and I would kill the bastard without hesitation, even if it was the very last one walking the Earth, and so would all conservationist freaks, although they wouldn’t like to admit it.

The same goes for snakes and alligators. I, for one, am not going to lose sleep if none of these nasty reptiles are left to spread their venom and terror, and will be very happy if my wallet or shoes were made of raccoon skin instead. My children are not going to mind either, and are going to be equally happy poking fun at elephants or chimpanzees when they go to a zoo, because neither of them has yet complained that they cannot go Apatosaurus back-riding on the weekend.

Don’t get me wrong here, but I’ve had it with the fantasy world of the scaremongering green industry. Their alarmist tactics have gone too far, and their conviction in their trade has turned into zealotry, seldom relying on solid scientific grounds. For example, I’ve always had a hunch that Al Gore’s dabbling in documentaries had more to do with his apocalyptic mood after conceding the election to a monkey than him sincerely fearing the extinction of all monkeys.

I’ve always felt that his “Inconvenient Truth” was never really about truth as much as it was about the re-invention of Al Gore as the savior of this planet. I was right. Last November, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the best experts on global warming that money cannot buy and the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize along with Al Gore for their work on the subject, finally published their findings.

Contrary to the green lobby’s assertion that a 20-foot wall of water would drown low lying cities in the near future, the IPCC predicted that oceans would rise by no more than one foot over the next century, as they have also risen by one foot during the last 150 years, a natural phenomenon that we have hardly noticed when it did happen. Here is a conclusive quote from their report: “Catastrophic scenarios about the beginning of an ice age… are mere speculations, and no climate model has produced such an outcome. In fact, the processes leading to an ice age are sufficiently well understood and completely different from those discussed here, that we can confidently exclude this scenario.”

There is a lot more evidence out there to prove that Al Gore’s hysterical claims are not only unfounded exaggerations, but at points mere fabrications. I am not saying that we therefore should continue desecrating our environment and continue burning those fossil fuels as if there is no tomorrow. On the contrary, there is nothing I find more detestable than the black diesel fumes coming out of all those trucks and buses on the streets of Amman.There is nothing I despise more than a family not cleaning up every single piece of litter after a picnic in the Dead Sea.

But for Al Gore to make a movie telling us to start building Noah’s Arc because of carbon emissions, while ignoring the real catastrophe of his country’s intentional littering of Iraq with thousands of tons of depleted uranium – a substance so poisonous that its cancerous qualities have a staggering half-life of 4.5 billion years, a substance that has already caused a cancer epidemic for those Iraqis who were fortunate to survive the unprovoked war against their country – this I find to be the most immoral course of distraction from the real environmental evil facing our planet, and is in my opinion the lowest depth of unashamed hypocrisy.

My son will hate me for saying this, but to hell with all the sharks. Let us first worry about the well-being and survival of human beings. Once we’ve achieved that – and we are very far from doing so at the current rate – then, and only then, we can perhaps start dedicating resources towards saving the great white killers, and all those other man-eating beasts out there that we like to stare at as long as they are securely chained in captivity.

Take care, and if you ride – or scuba dive – do it safely.

This article was originally published in Jordan’s Living Well magazine

If anyone could deduce anything from the previous Uglification articles (exposing and denouncing the stranglehold that the treacherous cult of Wahabism has tightened around the neck of Islam today), it is the conclusion that such an organized destructive movement could not have been empowered to hijack one of the world’s greatest religions and cultures – with the unprecedented financial power that this movement wields – except through a conscious conspiracy of collusion by the West to resuscitate and permanently sustain such a sect of madmen by installing them to be the official guardians of this awfully disfigured and intentionally falsified religion.

Those who went further in reading between the lines may have grasped the crucial role the Zionist movement played in justifying the barbarity of Israel, through its powerful grip on the world media, by fortifying the message that the victims of Zionism are nothing more than an irrational breed of suicidal savages who loathe every manifestation of culture, from music and architecture, down to children’s kites. In other words, the obvious fact which I may have shied away from blurting out more openly is the unmistakable existence of the “C” word, the great, but nowadays automatically discredited, conspiracy theory.

Yet, a conspiracy is not always directly implemented and constantly monitored by its creators. The conspiracy I’m talking about here is not as one imagines the word, i.e., a group of evil men sitting down in secret in a dark room to dictate the next move of the Wahabists. No, that would be a little paranoid (although on many occasions when an urgent fatwa was needed, this was exactly what happened, such as the custom-tailored fatwa in 1990 that American forces can be relied upon to wage war against fellow Muslims in Iraq).

In the annals of the ongoing Wahabist conspiracy, the wheels have been set in motion a long time ago. While they may continue to be oiled every now and then as the exigencies of empire require, external intervention can be kept to a clandestine, undetected minimum. Today, the backwardness of this Islamist scourge has assumed a life of its own. I’ll give you a live example.

As I left the house of a friend one night, I tuned in by chance to the BBC Arabic service in my car, and got a jolting reminder of how efficiently executed such Uglification scheme has been, albeit without the need for constant involvement by the conspirators.

The idiot on the radio, your typical ignorant Islamist from Egypt, was parroting the recent announcement dominating the news coming out from Al Azhar clergy these days: that a woman should not become a head of state in a Muslim country. The fascinating aspect of this discussion was not in the actual merits of such an opinion, but in the absolute and almost surreal irrelevance of the whole bloody discourse.

The question being debated was exactly akin to a heated argument being initiated about whether Egypt should send female astronauts to space, fully knowing that the closest any Arab, let alone a brain-dead Egyptian Islamist, will ever come to conquering space at the current rate is by tuning in to the naked thighs of Nancy Ajram over a TV ‘space’ channel.

Yet, Al Azhar has been making some news lately. In addition to the recent fatwas of breast-feeding at the workplace and legalized prostitutional marriages, the flow of enlightenment emanating from this Wahabist-dominated institution culminated recently in a group of Al Azhar clerics confronting the nation with a most peculiar and highly topical debate: should a woman be allowed to become the head of state of an Islamic country? Without conspirator involvement, left to their own devices, the Islamists proved that they can be relied upon to produce a wealth of pure comic genius. Egyptians in particular have been known to exhibit a unique sense of humor, and this was just another classic joke.

I say this because the closest any Egyptian woman is to ever becoming the President of Egypt these days is for the current President to have a sex-change operation. Yet you have a whole national debate erupting over the proper Islamic ruling over whether such an eventuality is legitimate in the eyes of God. The comedy here is in the concocted distraction from the real issues facing Egypt and the Arab world by indulging in yet more woman-bashing by a group of very disturbed individuals.

Indeed, who on earth decided that the Egyptian people should give one second of their undivided attention to the question of whether to have a woman head of state, when such prospects are as probable today as the Egyptian people reincarnating Tut Ankh Amun to life while having the Sphinx stand up and start tap-dancing? But you can understand why these debates are springing up by digging further.

In the same week that his colleagues went ahead and issued this unprovoked opinion that women should never be presidents (unprovoked in the sense that it was not related to something about to take place in Egypt), the top man at Al Azhar decreed that those who buy newspapers spreading false information about the government shall burn in hell. Aha, now it makes sense. You would have thought that Hillary Clinton was running in the Cairo Primaries, or that Argentina or Germany – or some other country with a woman chief executive – was about to annex Egypt. But there was none of that. There was just a whole lot of journalists being sent to prison for the most trivial of charges, and Al Azhar came to the rescue by posing an absurd question about women presidents while Byzantium was burning.

Such frequent obscenity about breast-feeding from female co-workers and the other gibberish about a woman ruling Egypt is definitely not a result of a fresh conspiracy. Nor for that matter was Ibn Baz’s famous fatwa that the earth is flat with the sun revolving around it, and that no one really landed on the moon. These amusing by-products of Wahabist genius are purely home-made, I believe.

On the other hand, a fatwa ordering Muslims to donate billions of dollars to American banks by refusing to receive the interest due on their huge deposits is not. The latter was a fatwa commissioned directly by the Federal Reserve, because US banks cannot legally refrain from paying interest on deposits, so they do issue the interest and receive it back from these unlikely Muslim benefactors, which the banks then record in their books as donations or unclaimed funds, boosting the US banking sector in most unexpected twists of fortune.

The point I’m making is that a conspiracy is a very convenient business. When you neuter a dog, you pay for just one operation, so that you don’t have to keep restraining the poor animal afterwards. The sterilization is complete by the initial intrusive surgery, and you can rest assured thereafter that the animal will always be shooting blanks. And the Islamists will always entertain us with their sick jokes, because ignorance breeds ignorance by itself, seldom needing outside help.

I must say that the mother of all conspiracy theories is the belief that, since conspiracies are abound in the shaping of every corner of our region, then the conspirators must have exerted every effort to flood the minds of our people with so many other ridiculous conspiracy theories in order to increase the confusion and add to the congestion of fiction with truth and the mixing of fantasy with reality. That way, the real conspiracy gets lost in the mayhem, as conspiracies become discredited before they are even articulated.

For example, if you walk the streets of downtown Amman, or any other Arab capital, the worthless literature being sold on the pavements along with the falafel sandwiches is overwhelmingly dominated by the kind of books that insist that Saddam Hussein and his sons are still alive, along with illustrated versions of the famous hoax of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In a region where reading is a foreign practice and almost an extinct habit, this is what our intellectual capacity and literary output have been reduced to.

In addition to the usual host of the prevalent Wahabist manuals on how to become the quintessential ignoramus in this life and in the one after – disguised for the masses as religious books – you have quite an array of non-illustrated books about the unattainable and forbidden joy of sexual intercourse. With so much garbage floating around, the real conspiracy to keep us feeding on superstitious nonsense gets neatly disguised.

In other words, a conspiracy to conceal a conspiracy, if you like, is underway (this is what happened after 9/11 in the US as all sorts of implausible wild theories were circulated to hide the major and scandalous flaws in the official version of events). But the original plot is too damn obvious in our case. A British army spy in the name of John Philby (father of another famous spy, Kim Philby) did more permanent damage to an entire nation in his desert trips to Wahabist villages in the early 20th century than the Mogul and Crusader armies combined could have inflicted throughout our history.

Indeed, the home-grown mutilation inflicted upon Islam by forcing us and the whole world to accept Wahabist doctrines as the real thing is an irreversible process. Thanks to Philby and his MI6 masters (whose legacy was inherited by the American empire’s long alliance with despotic Islam in the campaign to counter communism), the fundamentalist cancer today is spreading all over the place, even biting the hands of its Western inventors, and there is no cure or end in sight.

A woman called in the BBC show before I arrived near my house. Yes, I was telling this story, if you remember. The caller wiped the floor, as we say in Arabic, with the Egyptian cleric on the radio. But she became part of the plot herself. She got engaged in the tragic game and started defending the capacity of mothers and pregnant women to be effective leaders, overlooking the whole farce of the hilarious context.

I then arrived in my garage, vowing to sit behind my computer and write this article. I know I’m swimming against a sweeping tide – and it is getting near the wee hours of the morning and I have a meeting at 8.30. But I must keep saying these things. I may be a staunch enemy of the conspiracy to deform Islam, but the far more shameful exercise would be to succumb to the greater conspiracy of silence. That’s not an option right now.

Take care, and if you ride, do it safely.

to cleanse that impure pedigree
And with Oprah at your side
You’re sure to glide
Tell America about your papa
the one in heaven
In one afternoon a campaign boon

A reverent scene
Beside the media Queen
Spreading the American dream
We are all one in the body of Christ
So don’t you go traveling
among the disbelievers
the Allah deceivers
they may not like your version
of the great conversion
and go after your ass
till you do the reversion
Stay safe man
You’re in America now Obama
The religious freedom nation
of personal salvation

Your name is Obama
Barack allah feek

Baruch ha shem Ya Hussein
you’re related to the Queen!!*

* – See Juancole.com for Arabo/Islamic lineage of British royalty

How exhausted am I?

Imagine:

Life as a marathon.

A sweaty marathon runner with a cramp. And someone with a terrible nasal voice nagging at her shoulder, lying to her about her shoelaces. Telling her they’ve come untied.

At every mile.

Being a lawyer, I’ve always pictured the ultimate courtroom drama to be destined to take place on judgment day. In fact, any day that shares its title with the name earthly courts give to their final verdicts pretty much deserves this legal honor.

Amongst the colorful array of evidence that would be presented by the prosecution to demonstrate mankind’s obsessive tendency to misbehave over the ages, my personal guess is that “exhibit A” is going to be the medium Al Gore (who would be biting his toenails with regret) claimed he invented. Yes, my friends, the people behind the internet are going to be the star prosecution witnesses in this mother of all trials before we get the barbecue that we truly deserve.

Before you jump to conclusions, I can tell you that my prediction has nothing to do with the fact that over 95% of the entire content of the internet is dedicated to the graphic display of the sin of fornication, although this would be sufficient reason to discredit this medium in any courtroom. To condemn us just for that would be too petty, I think.

I am talking here about a totally different sin altogether, one that has also been abbreviated into another four letter dirty word: SPAM.

Ok, maybe you’re right and I cannot claim to have a clue about how judgment day would look like, if I can even assume with such confidence that one would ever take place. But I do have my reasons for this theory.

I don’t know about you, but I feel there is something profoundly demoralizing about beginning your every day by visiting your e-mail inbox only to find it overloaded with two types of relentless and unsolicited messages. The first ones are the hundreds of different invitations to freely share other people’s money because someone out there thinks you can be gullible enough to believe that a huge figure needs to go into your bank account and make you filthy rich out of the blue.

The other kind consists of messages extolling the virtues of the happiness that a few added inches can bring into a man’s life, by offering to sell us products that demolish the comforting myth with which men console themselves about size not mattering (it seems the jury is still out on whether it does, since, like on many other issues where they enjoy keeping us guessing, women don’t seem to make up their minds and give a unanimous ruling to put this matter to rest).

Some people just delete these spam messages and never think twice about them. But I find both types of these daily solicitations to be particularly revealing of the folly of civilization in the 21st century. For here you have a remarkable tool, which represents the pinnacle of human genius and which could be utilized to engender boundless benefits for the people of this world, being exploited instead in the most debased manner: either to manipulate people’s need for money by luring them into financial destruction, or to manipulate every guy’s fantasy of going as deep as no man has gone before.

It is true that only total idiots respond to such emails and that such certified fools deserve what they get. But this doesn’t change the fact that the internet has allowed these crooks to enter my and your private daily lives whether we let them in or not. Maybe I’m not using the proper repellent filter or software, but I personally feel that the sheer volume of such messages and the persistence of those who send them is a constant reminder to all of us – which I don’t particularly need with my morning coffee – that no matter how far civilization can reach, the same old dirty rotten scoundrels are destined to accompany us hand-in-hand on this journey wherever we go.

This reminder eats away at the core of our sense of progress as a species as it belittles everything else we have achieved and can achieve. For example, for each odd email you receive about a heroic stand of a human rights activist, or about a closer step towards curing cancer, there are forty emails offering you to inherit the money of an African dictator, or asking whether your partner would savor a little more width and length. So then, is that what we’re are all about after all: just money and procreation? Surely, there must be more to life than loads of unearned cash and a huge appendage to go with it, wouldn’t you have thought?

On another note, I personally feel sorry for all those other genuine thieves and money launderers who do sincerely want to entrust you with the fruits of their labor but now find that their messages get lost in between all the fake ones. How frustrated must you be if you’re really working with a trust fund in the Bahamas and did actually stumble upon a dormant account that you need to secretly funnel and share with an email user you have diligently researched and chosen to help you out with your heist?

What must you do to convince your potential partner that you are not one of those daily thousands of pretenders and imposters, and that you are truly a family member of imprisoned Russian oligarchs seeking the discreet movement of funds outside Russia, or that you are in fact the confidant banker of a diamond-mining family who perished in a plane crash leaving behind unattended tens of millions in a secret account? Life must be difficult if your name is really Abdul Falafel Precious Stone from the Republic of Moon Islands and after discovering you have terminal testicular cancer you decided to donate all your family’s wealth from decades of banana farming to your dear brother in Islam whom you have chosen to administer the plundering of your fortune on charitable causes.

I feel your pain, Abdul. With all these cry-wolves in abundance, truly unique opportunities to make a nice buck have gone down the drains, all because of dishonest spammers who have ruined it for everyone.

But seriously, you’ll be surprised to find out the type of people that do fall for these email offers of instant riches. A former colleague of mine in Geneva, a former vice-president of a major company, fell for the scam and even attempted suicide in the aftermath, despite my numerous warnings to him to laugh at these jokes and then delete them, and his assurances that he wouldn’t reply to them. I guess this is the price we pay for living during the zenith of capitalism, right at the centre of the greediest period in human existence, when more people are given incentives to dream of easy money than in any other time in history, and with no end in sight to the vast market of luxurious lifestyle previously only affordable to Kings and Agha Khans.

With its burgeoning mass consumerism – facilitated also by the internet – this is by far the most materialistic century of all, and this is an undisputable fact. Al Pacino acted out an unforgettable scene in The Devil’s Advocate as he revealed himself as the Devil impersonate to Keanu Reeve’s character when he rightly claimed the twentieth century as having been his own. Indeed, Satan rules supreme today.

Everyone’s out to milk you dry, conveniently leaving any semblance of scruples at home, and they are coming up with the most sophisticated techniques to do so by evolving with the times and accommodating with technology, no matter how many lives are destroyed in the process. I guess a lot of the blame also has to rest with Hollywood who has consistently glamorized outlaws in thousands of movies, from Bonnie and Clyde all the way to the latest Ocean’s 13, great films in which bandits and robbers are always made out to be either misunderstood souls or the coolest people on earth.

The honest and likable thief is indeed a character that got so much more than it deserves from the producers and directors of Tinseltown, so I might as well add these culprits to the list of the accused on the day when we’re all going to Hell. Objection, yells the defense. Overruled. We find the defendants guilty on all counts. This court is adjourned.

Take care, and if you ride, do it safely.

Fine, I exaggerate. However, sometimes I wonder if she is more emotionally committed to the latest installment of “Grand Theft Auto” than to me. Of course, I was the one who irritated her with my obsessive devotion to “Final Fantasy.”

Revenge is sweet.

I would like to see some type of statistical study on the kind of damage that video games can do to a marriage. Forget setting up romantic dinners or remembering her second cousin’s wife’s birthday: the real challenge to many committed couples today is making sure you don’t kill each other while arguing about whether or not “Assassin’s Creed” lived up to its hype (I say yes, she says no).

It chokes me, but I have to admit that my wife is a better gamer. To be perfectly honest, she even has a better relationship with my parents than I, their son, do (“why can’t you be more like Dina*, son?” – a question I hear almost as often as the “when are you going to give us grandchildren?” inquiry). Maybe, she is better at living.

Does my wife have to make a mockery of my high scores? My knowledge of elaborate cheats? My commitment to the art of gaming?

The answer, I am discovering, is affirmative.

I have no one to blame. I created this situation. Once, I made a horrible blunder. I became competitive with her. I forgot that in relationships, excessive competition is not healthy. Before we were married she knew that I was the better cook. The sight of a kitchen makes her confused, while I navigate everything from the stove to the juice-maker easily. This didn’t trouble her.

It didn’t trouble her that I could touch the tip of my nose with my tongue and she, by contrast, could not. She could be humble about such life-and-death matters.

I had lost my humility, however. Perhaps now it is time to find it again.

Men are jealous of women who excel in a “boy’s” field, and gaming is still dominated by the boys. There is nothing manly or natural about the jealousy. It’s simple stupidity. Even as one’s friends point out that one’s wife is more fun to play “Halo” with when we visit them (we have steered clear of buying an Xbox, if only because we don’t want to die, covered in mold, while attempting to play every good game the world offers), one must remain committed to the idea that she has the right to the praise she receives.

Let her continue the Playstation affair.

I’ll console (pun intended) myself with my secret shrimp recipe.

What? I have to be good at something.

*- Name changed to protect the innocent.

My profound problems with this so-called holiday run deeper than that.

Consider, for instance, the candy:

Too sweet, too artificial, inevitably heart-shaped, and always stuffed in a ridiculous box that no grown man (or woman) should be seen carrying in public. Indulge in a few of these, and you can actually feel your teeth rotting in your head for the rest of the day. No amount of toothpaste can quite erase the sticky film on the enamel. Drinking ten soft-drinks in a row is probably much, much healthier.

Then, of course, there is the rest of the merchandise:

I was in a store this week, searching for clothes for a formal occasion, when the salesman decided to force me to buy a sky-blue tie patterned with pink hearts and chubby cherubs. “Special promotion, sir.” At first I thought it would make for a nice joke-gift, until I realized that this “special promotion” actually cost approximately one hundred British pounds.

Of course, come February 15th, it will be lying in the bargain bin next to the pink, heart-shaped cuff-links, and God-knows-what-else.

On my way out of the store, a saleswoman with an evil grin sprayed me with something that came out of a (surprise!) pink bottle, and smelled like roses doused in sugar. She claimed that this was a cologne for men. Well, no woman should have to wear something like that either. It was more like perfume for chihuahuas.

The entire episode made me wish I could barricade myself in my house until February 15th had safely arrived, and avoid the bargain-bins henceforth for at least another week.

So, am I in favor of banning this ridiculous debacle of a holiday?

No.

As a matter of fact, I think that certain religious authorities have gone a trifle too far in banning the color red this week. They are only making the forbidden fruit that much (artificially) sweeter. Now there will be people who will celebrate this holiday simply because it is a rebellious thing to do. And we don’t need anything like that.

The minute that Valentine’s Day becomes a cool, “alternative” holiday for people who “oppose the system” and “question authority,” will also be the minute that I officially decamp to another planet. Or, at the very least, a deserted island somewhere.

A few days ago, walls were punched in frustration and hair was being pulled out all across the Middle East. The Internet had simply failed. Sites were either not loading at all, or else loading at the approximate speed of the dreadful dial-up era. Entire businesses were said to have stopped functioning.

I don’t know about you, but I felt as though I had been transported back into a primitive Dark Age. I opened the curtains half-expecting to see a street full of carts pulled along by donkeys.

Things are better now; for me and my ISP, at the very least. I am no longer pulling out my hair. But my fingers are still twitching from the initial shock. Any momentary lapse in my browser’s functions has me wanting to crawl under my desk, whimpering in horror at the thought that “ohnoohnoohno, it is about to start again.”

So, what happened? Apparently an underwater cable was cut somewhere in the Mediterranean, affecting a number of Arab countries, not to mention India. The initial news inspired me to picture a battle between rival armies of giant squid, with a hapless cable as innocent bystander.

Letting one’s imagination run wild is certainly one way to spend the time, particularly if one has been cut off from both Facebook and Google.

I have heard many a speech on how Internet infrastructure is The Best Infrastructure Ever. After this week’s events, I am no longer so sure.

Yet, what truly frightened me about the Great Internet Outage of 2008 was how empty and bereft my life appeared to me the minute the dreadful error messages began showing up. I felt cut off from the universe. Alone like Will Smith in “I Am Legend.” It didn’t matter that all around me were thousands of living, breathing human beings. Technology had taken me to that place where human interaction had been compressed to fit a browser screen. It lured me there, and then it abandoned me.

Looking back on it, I certainly could have spent the Outage in a better and more productive manner. Instead of banging my head on my desk, I could have taken a walk. Or a nap. I could have read a poem. Or even written one.

I could have discovered myself to be good at writing poems. I could have used the moment to launch down a path of becoming the second Shakespeare. After all, we do not know much about Shakespeare. Perhaps he became a great writer by accident: a broken-down carriage, some unexpected downtime, a sudden flash of self-discovery…

Instead, after I was done banging my head, I sat and complained to everyone I knew about what an awful time I was having. It was somewhat of a bonding ritual, even if it was a deeply unsatisfying one.

I couldn’t insert little frowning icons in conversations, and was actually forced to arrange and re-arrange my facial features. Finally, my forehead cramped up.

I then entertained myself by cleaning out my fridge, expecting it to conk out any minute now as well. Or else just conk me over the head with the freezer door.

After all, once technology starts down the path of mischief, you never know where it might all end up.

With these distressed words, art expert Zoja Finci implored the late Bosnian President, Alija Izetbegovic, to save the Islamic relics of her beautiful city from destruction, despite the fact that she is Jewish herself. This was back in 1995, soon after the end of the Bosnian war, and she was referring to the Begova Mosque in Sarajevo, the largest Islamic monument – and arguably the most ornamented – in the former Yugoslavia. The vandals she was denouncing were not Serb militias, but none other than the Wahhabist hordes who traveled all the way to Bosnia to complete the destruction they started in Mecca.

As if the desecration of the graves of the Prophet’s wife and companions, and the complete demolition of every single remaining vestige of Islam in Mecca and Medina were not enough, the Wahhabist bulldozers set their eyes on Europe. Since 1995, a post-war crime of a different nature has been ongoing to erase the beauty of Islamic architecture in the Balkans under the guise of Islamic Aid.

You wouldn’t have thought for a minute that Wahhabis were particularly concerned with architecture to bother themselves with such expensive restoration efforts in far away lands, until you discover that their aim has nothing to do with restoration and everything to do with obliteration. All across the Balkans, even the slightly damaged structures were not repaired, although it would have been the easier thing to do, but were razed to the ground to be rebuilt from scratch in the ugliest form imaginable, and as far off from the original shape and design as humanly possible.

Then came the end of the war in Kosovo in 1999, and the architectural vultures immediately went after the corpses there as well. Harvard University Fine Arts Librarian and expert on Balkan Islamic architecture, Andras Riedlmayer, goes so far in condemning the grotesque defiling of ancient mosques in the Balkans to pronouncing that “the Wahhabis, with their wealth and fanaticism, are a menace to heritage, in some ways more dangerous than the [Serb paramilitary] Chetniks, since about the latter, at least, no one harbors any illusions regarding their uncharitable intentions.”

One foreign expert described one of the architects involved whom he had interviewed (and who never practiced the profession) by saying that “his ideas for mosque design involve knockoffs of Saudi-modern shopping mall architecture with odd touches inspired by the décor of the Love Boat, including portholes! He is the very model of the modern zealot, narrow minded, arrogant, and so dumb he doesn’t even realize it.”

Centuries old Ottoman mosques, libraries, schools and graveyards were knocked down for no reason except to implement Wahabist doctrines attacking any semblance of architectural splendor by inventing sayings of the Prophet decreeing that the ornamentation of mosques or tombs is a crime in the eyes of God. Reidlmayer recalls that prior to the War in Kosovo, “when the Wahhabis took out sledgehammers and set about smashing the 17th century gravestones in the garden of Peja’s ancient Defterdar Mosque, angry local residents beat them up and chased them out of town. I was shown the damaged gravestones, beautifully carved with floral motifs and verses from Qur’an. That was in the late summer of 1998. Six months later, in the spring of 1999, Serb paramilitaries came and burned down the mosque. Unlike the fundamentalist missionaries, they were not interested in the gravestones.”

So why do these Wahhabist scavengers travel the globe to implement the uglification project, you may ask? Who ultimately benefits if our culture and civilization is made to look as ugly and primitive as possible in the eyes of the world?

The plot thickens when you enter the domain of politics and consider the urgent need to reverse a natural human emotion called sympathy. It is well known that nations across the world sympathize more and develop a closer affiliation with a people whose contribution to humanity is materially felt and seen to be one that is positive, refined and sophisticated.

Americans, for example, still revere the Japanese culture, admire their history and savor their food, despite having incinerated two of their cities with atomic bombs. So how do you make sure that Arabs and Muslims remain reduced to a barbaric, uncivilized and useless people, who deserve what comes their way in terms of occupation and dehumanization? By working very hard to ensure that the association in people’s minds is always automatically connected with ugliness. Not with Samurai or with Sushi, but with filth and depravity. For the world is less likely to be bothered if a few more ugly terrorists get killed or robbed of their land, because all what the world can see coming out of their culture is repulsive and unattractive.

When the words ‘Arab’ or ‘Muslim’ are mentioned, no one should recall anything as miraculously breathtaking as the Dome of the Rock or the Taj Mahal, lest they rethink their apathy towards these apparent savages and, God forbid, sympathize with their suffering. The world should always conjure up images of Bin Laden and other Wahhabist creations when thinking about our lot. That way, it becomes much easier to dispossess a few million ‘nomadic’ Palestinians for the sake of saving a chosen race of European achievers, scientists and artists, who have no where else to go, and who would likely turn ugly deserts into lands of milk and honey.

If all what people see are hideous images of our people, coupled with decapitation videotapes of squealing victims, then the looting of the Baghdad museum under the nose of the Marines becomes more digestible by the world community, because, at the end of the day, what could possibly be inside this building? Surely, more ugly artifacts of an ugly civilization. Mission accomplished indeed.

But there is a huge, annoying crack in the uglification project. There is a place in Europe that Wahhabis cannot touch or destroy, and it is a source of constant irritation to the uglifiers.

Indeed, how could you put on a straight face and explain to the queues of millions of tourists who visit Andalusia each year that they are walking in the footsteps of the same people who today exemplify everything crooked, violent and evil? What if these people went back home and started believing that the Arab Islamic civilization was worthy of some respect after all? Hell, what if they started to make the link with the Dome of the Rock and attempted to criticize Israel for weakening the foundations of Al Aqsa Mosque by their useless excavations in search of a non-existing temple? Houston, we have a problem.

Not to worry, you solve it by committing the most dishonest forgery in history: by changing their name to begin with, by calling them Moors, and never refer to them as Arab Muslims. But where does this strange name come from? It doesn’t matter, just make sure to repeat it, and the world would buy it. Oh, the Moors. It just sounds ancient and exotic, like the Mayans of Latin America, and is the perfect cover up for the fact that the entire 781 years of the magnificent civilization of Al Andalus was purely Arab, not even Berber, and overwhelmingly Muslim.

This falsification plan also comes complete with troubleshooting contingencies. Whenever the endless pilgrims to that region think for themselves and ask the tourist guide why the endless calligraphy on the walls is not in “Moorish” language, they immediately acknowledge the Arab element but confuse matters by introducing a man called Maimonides, the lone Jewish figure that Westerners must always associate with the beauty of Al Andalus, although he lived all his life in North Africa and wrote his books, only in Arabic, in Egypt.

You then hit two birds with one stone by claiming that this civilization was Judeo/Islamic, despite the unanimous agreement of all historians that such claims are a load of fantastical dreaming and pure wishful thinking (along with the other embarrassing and discredited attempts to claim that Alhambra Palace was based on the design of the never-seen-before Temple of Solomon, a fantasy that fails to explain how the Arabs could borrow the designs of a temple no one has ever seen before, a temple that exists only in the imagination of the zealots who believe in its pointless excavation).

Before I go, I’ll tell to you a little story told to me by my brother about a music DVD he had bought in the Fnac store in Geneva, which shows the extent of the psychological complex suffered by the uglifiers. They cannot just relax and admit the Arabs into the league of civilized cultures. They have to always keep their vigilance, and create and employ tools from our midst, to keep us out.

The best-selling DVD he bought was of the famous Shehrezade ballet by Rimsky-Korsakov, performed by the Kirov Ballet in St. Petersburg. The DVD was produced in Europe by ART Haus, and although not mentioned on the DVD cover, the story of Shehrezade is otherwise known in English as “Arabian Nights”. Pay attention, not Moorish nights, not Hindu nights, not Polynesian nights, but Arabian Nights. The stories take place in Baghdad during the reign of Haroun Al Rasheed and his wife, Sit Zubaidah, who is one of the main characters of the ballet (Zubide).

Here we have a splendid performance, marvelous Baghdad decorations, outstanding colorful costumes, captivating music, and guess what? Zarqawi and Mullah Omar do not star in it, nor does any other Wahabi character. It takes the audience on a trip a thousand years back into a magical, mystical world. Indeed, nothing can be more Arab than Arabian Nights, now can it? But they cannot let go even for a bloody DVD. So you flip open the leaflet on the cover, and it reads:

“Shehrezade is a work filled with love and passion, guilt and deception, anger, pain and desperation. The anger of Shahriar, the Sultan of India and China, who suspects his wives of…..”

Did they just say “Sultan of India and China”? You bastards, even the Arabian Nights!

Take care, and if you ride, do it safely.