This report from the British think-tank Demos is getting a bit of play:
The Demos think tank recommends that shows - such as Jihad! The Musical or the film Four Lions, by the Brass Eye satirist Chris Morris - should be used to highlight the failings of violent philosophies.
The report says that satire could be used to strip the "al-Qaeda brand" of its glamour and mystique.
I wish that were true, but it's not. For a start, Jihad! The Musical was all pulled punches. Despite its title, Looking For Comedy In The Muslim World had to be set in, er, India because majority Muslim countries refused Albert Brooks permission to film there. I could go on, but you get the idea.
Kathy Shaidle, a peerless mocker, has a terrific response to the Demos thesis. She divides the target audience into two: On the one hand, jihadists and their sympathizers are unlikely to be susceptible to this pitch because to be hot for jihad in the first place makes one almost by definition a humorless plonker. On the other, there's a long and honorable tradition of using ridicule as a morale-booster for your own side.
Except that "our" side has pretty much internalized the Ayatollah Khomeini's ruling that "there are no jokes in Islam". The Danish cartoonists attempted some very mild satire and as a result now live in hiding. The only publisher in Canada willing to report on the cartoon story without kowtowing to the Islamic bullies wound up with a six-figure legal bill. A Vancouver courtroom under the eminent jurist Commissar Heather MacNaughton, Jokefinder-General of British Columbia, devoted the best part of the day to examining "expert witness" Khurrum Awan about the "tone" of my jokes. John Miller, Professor of Ovine Fornication at Ryerson University, sought intervenor status in the case for the purpose of supporting a statutory penalty preventing me from ever again being published in Canada, because of a line of satirical mockery. Only the other day Ann Coulter made a camel joke and gave the Dominion's multiculti spinsters a fit of the vapors - and Fatima Al Dhaher, the young lady who was "traumatized" by the camel joke, became the new pin-up gal for a hate-free Canada even though she's a member of a group that wants every last "subhuman" "Zionazi" "kikeroach" removed from the Middle East.
In essence, PC enforcers like the wretched Allan Rock (see below) have gone a long way toward criminalizing ridicule and mockery. Given that a lot of comedy is mere pandering, most "satirists" understand that when you wander on to this terrain you're lining yourself up for far more trouble than it's worth. Better to stick to mocking those dumbass fundamentalist Christianists, right? When they're waiting for you outside the stage door, it's with a placard not a death sentence.
And Kathy's right, too - that the jihadists shrug off jokes as a sign of western decadence, or at any rate an inability to understand what's at stake. As I write in Lights Out:
Take the most devastating rapier wit you know - Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward - and put him on a late-night subway train up against a psycho with a baseball bat. The withering putdown, the devastating aphorism will avail him naught.
The quality of your argument is only important if you want to win by persuasion. But it's irrelevant if you want to win by intimidation.
I've learned that the hard way. One day the Demos lads will figure it out, too.
[UPDATE: See here. Jihadist halfwit Abu Talhah Al-Amrike actually confirms Matt Stone and Trey Parker's point for them. That and twenty bucks'll buy you a nice wreath.]