Thursday, November 3, 2011

The Charlie Hebdo firebombing and left-wing satire

Clearly things are coming to a head in France when it comes to Muslim immigration. Not only has the government decided to ban the burqa, but some crazed fundamentalists have just firebombed the offices of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo for mocking the Prophet.

Of course we shouldn't be surprised at the reaction. Only a few years ago half the Muslim world was in uproar and many people died because of a few crappy cartoons. But what's interesting is that Charlie Hebdo is actually a left-wing newspaper. Surely that's a sign of just how fractured things are over there.

Here's a pithy description of the paper's underlying attitude from the Beeb:

The tradition combines left-wing radicalism with a provocative scurrility that often borders on the obscene.

That's a pretty good description of a lot of Australian satire, too. But I suspect that the French version is also often witty and funny -- two qualities that most such Aussie mockery lacks.

That begs the question: If lefties are openly mocking Islam in Europe, do you think it will start here? Can you imagine the Chaser boys taking the piss out of the Prophet?

Somehow I can't see it happening. It's about as likely as them doing a sketch about Julia Gillard and her former lover.

And just on that issue of provocation, and how different cultures react to it: Interesting that a few jokes can anger Islamists to the point where they're burning stuff down. Yet the mostly left-wing Occupy movement has to work really, really hard for weeks on end on a global scale to annoy democratically elected Western governments into reacting to it.

And what do these states do? Well, they basically just shift the human flotsam that has been clogging -- and stinking -- up the city centres. No firebombings there, as far as I can tell ...

Yet those same lefties are convinced that this Western social system is more destructive and unjust than the Islamist one. You'd think their tiny minds would just explode with the force of such obvious nonsense.

But nup. Doesn't seem to bother them at all. Somehow they manage never to think long and hard enough about the issue to see the idiocy of their position.

While I find their determination to deny the bleeding obvious depressing, I do have to admit to being kind of impressed by the intensity of it all the same. I mean, hell, it must take so much energy.

Hmm. Maybe that's why they're so damn shiftless and lazy?

1 comment:

  1. Leftists and their problems with clear thinking aside, I have seen very little about the Charlie Hebdo firebombing in the local media from the likes of Blair and Bolt. After the fuss over the Motoons I would have expected more interest, but most of the coverage seems to be in the blogs.

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