Sunday, February 27, 2011
Arabs Love Khaddaffi Video Satire, Then Discover It Was Made By An Israeli Jew!
Truth is certainly stranger then fiction.
Noy Alooshe is an Israeli hip hop musician and journalist who saw Khaddaffi’s televised speech last Tuesday in which the Libyan leader vowed to hunt down protesters “inch by inch, house by house, home by home, alleyway by alleyway,” and realized he had a hit on his hands.
“He was dressed strangely, and he raised his arms” like at a trance party, Mr. Alooshe said in a telephone interview with the New York Times on Sunday.
Alooshe went to the computer to set the speech to the music of “Hey Baby,” a 2010 hip-hop song by American rapper Pitbull. Alooshe called it “Zenga-Zenga,” using Khaddaffi's repetition of the word zanqa, which is Arabic for alleyway. And then posted it on YouTube, sending the link to the pages and tweets of some of the young Arab protesters. By Sunday night, the original clip had received nearly 500,000 hits and had gone viral.
Alooshe started receiving enthusiastic messages from all around the Arab world, but some of those messages turned to curses once the Arabs found out that it was a Yahud behind it all from his Facebook profile. That's a detail Pravda-on-the -Hudson glosses over with a quick mention, of course. Just as they would also never report on the wide-spread graffiti over images of Khaddaffi labeling him as a Jew.
The version shown above is the original, which features a dancer grinding away to the beat dressed about as revealingly as the average club dancer in shorts and a bare midriff top. According to Alooshe, he got a number of requests for a more 'Islamic' version of the video without the dancer, so he put one up.
That says a great deal, actually. To many Muslims who saw this, the scariest image was not the violent dictator threatening to annihilate his opponents, but that little blond dancer at the bottom of the screen.
That's a large part of the whole problem with 'Arab Democracy'. Whenever the prison doors get opened a bit, there's the initial embrace of Western freedom and norms as Muslims experience, just for a moment what it's like to live like free human beings. And then ,almost like clockwork, years of programming kick in and we see the hatred and fear of the infidels, the jealousy and the resentment kick in.
Here's another ironic fact: Noy Alooshe grandparents were from Tunisia, which means they were almost certainly part of the almost 1 million Jews ethnically cleansed from the Arab world after 1948 with the clothes on their backs if they were lucky.
(via Memeorandum)
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In your second to last paragraph, you made my case for me as to why no one should support democracy in the Muslim world in general and the Arab Muslim world especially. The things they will put up with from their religious leaders, and gladly, are the exact same things they claim is oppression from the like of Qaddafi. And in some cases the imams and ayarollahs are undoubtedly, measurably worse. But that's different, you see, because that's "God's will."
It's hard as hell to have any sympathy or respect for people like that, especially when I know they gleefully look forward to the day when they can oppress me to their black little hearts content.
It's also why I don't put much stock in the Declaration of Independence as an article of faith. I know the ideology insists that all people are born to be free and all that crap, but people can and do willingly choose to trade their freedom in everyday, and who decides what defines freedom anyway.
George W. Bush made a grave tactical error when he insisted on free elections in the Gaza, and now we are compounding that mistake. That's exactly why I choose to cut Obama some slack in his reluctance to come out heavily in favor or one side or another, though admittedly he should either pick one side and stick with it, or stay the hell out of it. I would prefer the latter course of inaction.
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