Late-night comic Conan O’Brien tweeted Friday night: “Marvel Comics is introducing a new Muslim Female superhero. She has so many more special powers than her husband’s other wives.” The predictable self-righteous firestorm ensued.
O’Brien was referring to “Kamala Khan,” Marvel Comics’ new Muslim superhero, unveiled with great fanfare last week. They are only introducing this Muslim superhero because of the hugely successful post-9/11 campaign by Islamic supremacists and their Leftist allies to portray Muslims as victims of “Islamophobia” and “hatred” — when actually the incidence of attacks on innocent Muslims is very low (not that a single one is acceptable or justified), and the entire “Islamophobia” campaign is an attempt to intimidate people into thinking that there is something wrong with fighting against jihad terror and Islamic supremacism.
Will Kamala Khan fight against jihadis? Will Marvel be introducing a counter-jihad superhero? I expect that the answer is no on both counts.
In any case, O’Brien’s tweet was just a silly quip, but as the Ayatollah Khomeini said, “There is no humor in Islam.” One of those who were offended wrote: “I didn’t know that @ConanOBrien had Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller writing for him now. Interesting.” A legion of Leftists descended upon O’Brien’s Twitter feed, accusing him of being a “f***ing racist scumbag” and “Islamophobic,” and his joke of being “kinda tasteless,” “really ignorant and terrible,” “in very poor taste,” and “f***ing gross and racist.”
“Racist”? What race is Muslim polygamy again? I keep forgetting. O’Brien’s joke has a factual basis. The Qur’an says: “And if you fear that you will not deal justly with the orphan girls, then marry those that please you of [other] women, two or three or four. But if you fear that you will not be just, then [marry only] one or those your right hand possesses. That is more suitable that you may not incline [to injustice].” (4:3)
But as O’Brien is discovering now, calling attention to uncomfortable truths about Islam is “racist” and wrong, even if they’re undeniably…truths. I am sure that Conan O’Brien will not make this mistake again: almost immediately after people began criticizing him for it, he took the offending tweet down. After all, he wants to stay on television; bringing uncomfortable aspects of Islam to light is the quickest way to be read out of polite and decent society. Just ask Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, formerly darlings of the Leftist intelligentsia — until they touched that third rail of American public discourse and dared to criticize the violence and brutality that Islamic jihadists commit and justify by reference to Islamic texts and teachings.
Polygamy devalues women, reducing them to the status of commodities, and stands as an affront to their equality with men as human beings. But none of the enlightened Leftists condemning Conan O’Brien for his little joke would dare speak out for the Muslim women who suffer in polygamous arrangements; to do so would be “Islamophobic,” “racist,” and probably “gross.”
This strange stigmatizing of those who speak out against what is manifestly a legitimate human rights issue is testimony to the effectiveness of the global campaign that Islamic supremacist groups have been carrying out for years to deflect attention away from the reality of Islamic jihad, and to clear away obstacles standing in the way of that jihad. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the largest voting bloc at the United Nations, has for years been pressing at the UN for resolutions criminalizing criticism of Islam. It routinely ignores how Islamic jihadists quote the Qur’an and invoke Muhammad to justify violence and terrorism, but cries “Islamophobia” when non-Muslims quote those jihadis quoting the Qur’an and invoking Muhammad.
They want to fool people into thinking that non-Muslim “Islamophobes” are responsible for “linking Islam with terrorism,” when actually the ones doing that linking are the jihadis. The objective is to intimidate non-Muslims into thinking that it is “bigoted” and “hateful” to discuss the Islamic motives and goals of jihadis, much less to resist them — so that those jihadis can do their work unopposed and unimpeded.
In the same way, when Conan O’Brien calls attention, in the most light-hearted and glancing way, to the reality of Muslim polygamy, the attention of the fatuous and self-important Left (but I repeat myself) focuses not on the oppression of women under Islamic law, but on Conan O’Brien as “Islamophobic.” The lesson has been reinforced so relentlessly and repeatedly over so long a period now that neither the OIC nor any other Islamic supremacist entity has to utter a word condemning Conan O’Brien before Twitter lights up with condemnations of him from Leftist non-Muslims. They don’t have to ask their instructions anymore.
They know: any negative word about the oppression of women in Islam, and indeed, any negative word at all about jihad terror or Islamic supremacism in general, is “racist” and to be rejected with all the scorn and indignation one can muster. Last year I had a very illuminating lunch with a Leftist writer who has attacked me numerous times for “Islamophobia.” In the course of conversation, I asked him if he thought there was a jihad threat at all. He admitted that there was, but claimed that I had wildly exaggerated it.
Very well, I responded, and posited a hypothetical: what would he do if the jihadis really did start mounting attacks in the U.S. with the regularity of their attacks in, say, Nigeria or Thailand? What if Islamic supremacists began demanding accommodations to Islamic law that plainly contradicted Constitutional freedoms? He responded that he thought that if those things happened, people of good will on the Left would stand up and offer resistance.
But he was wrong. They won’t. Because they have been taught for years that any criticism of Islamic jihad terror and oppression, no matter how accurate, no matter how mild, is that most abhorrent of things, “racism.” And so they will most likely accept their subjugation with bland and self-satisfied complacency: they’re subjugated dhimmis in the smoking ruins of a once-great society, but at least they weren’t “Islamophobes.” I hope that if this happens, Conan O’Brien will be ready with an apposite quip – right before he is led away to the reeducation camp.
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