My previous post, a tongue-in-cheek “report” on imaginary “Anti-Jewish Bus Ads” appearing in major cities, satirizes a mainstream newspaper report, ‘Anti-Islamic’ Bus Ads Appear in Major Cities.
My satire appears to have been fully understood by only one of the many people who have commented on it–namely, a Facebook friend who wrote: “That’ll be the day LOL. Good one!”
Here is my own comment responding to those who misunderstood the satire:
- Wow! I guess irony and satire are no longer comprehensible tropes in this culture–even when the author explains exactly what he’s doing, and when the audience is self-selected for intelligence and skepticism. The people who believe that this “anti-Jewish bus ad” is (a) real, and/or (b) reflecting actual anti-Jewish views, must be living on a different planet from mine. If you think for one second that the municipal bus service of any major or minor US city would actually permit this “anti-Jewish bus ad” to be displayed on their buses…well, you’re living on a different planet from mine. And that, of course, is the whole point! Major municipal bus services DID allow similar anti-Muslim ads to be displayed on their buses — even though a comparable anti-Jewish ad is completely unthinkable (to those on this planet, at least). That is an unacceptable double standard and an outrageous injustice against Muslims, who have exactly the same rights as all other religious groups in the US. This double-standard is the object of my satire. Okay? Everybody got it, now?
The double-standard I’m trying to reveal (and annihilate) is so deep-rooted and emotional that most people can’t confront it or even contemplate it. The average educated American has been trained to react to any negatively-connoted reference to Jews, Judaism, or Jewishness as if he or she were kicked in the stomach. Yet the same person has been trained to feel an equally deep & visceral mistrust or animosity toward Islam and Muslims.
The 9/11 public relations stunt was designed to coercively instill Islamophobia so deeply into the emotionally-governed American subconscious that no amount of rational-empirical evidence about who really did it would make any difference.
I want to reach into your guts and drag this whole web of visceral emotional programming–this morass of raw, bleeding unconscious feelings–right in front of your face where you can see it and ask: “How did this hideous islamophobic tumor get implanted in me?”
If you noticed that you had a visceral reaction to the laughably bogus “Anti-Jewish bus ad” but not to the all-too-real Anti-Islamic bus ad, your battle against the cancer of Islamophobia has begun.