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Who's Afraid of the Muslim Joke?
The question was simple, the answer, direct: You joke about Islam, we will kill you. So was the pronouncement of a man calling himself "Kabli," a former board member of Amsterdam's Assoenna Mosque, who acted as an interpreter for the imam during an interview with a Dutch student newspaper, Folia.And the response? Furor in the press. Silence from the comedians. The fear has grown so tall. The catalyst for the entire event was the comedy act of Ewout Jansen, a 24-year-old law student, and his comic partner, Etienne Kemerink, though it is Jansen who has been at the center of the tale and of the fury. Ewout and Etienne, as the duo is known, perform regularly throughout the country, basing their act largely as many comedians do on current news and trends. In Holland, where stories about multiculturalism, Islam, and Dutch-Muslim relations blacken the country's eighty-odd newspapers, Jansen finds the topic unavoidable; and so for five minutes of his 100-minute act, he addresses it. Among his jokes is a reference to the killing of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was assassinated in 2004 after creating a documentary about the treatment of Muslim women. In the past, Jansen acknowledges, occasional performances at schools produced tense moments but nothing he ever found particularly threatening. "A kid would say something like, 'stop that, or I'll beat you up,'" he says, "but I never took it seriously (although I did sometimes think, 'well, okay, I'm prepared to take a beating.')" Posted by: ryuge 2007-03-06 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=182372 |