DECEMBER 2012
Legend has it that the only populist power in the country were the Islamists and that the “others” were merely a weak minority. We were the “others.” We were the ones the Muslim Brotherhood needed to win the election by a mere 1 percent. We were used as a tool for them to get the presidency, and when they won they broke every promise they made us.
Islamists were fighting for a divine cause but we liberals were viewed as wusses who had nothing left in us to fight for our cause . . . maybe because other than not wanting to be ruled by religious dogma or a military dictatorship and seeking equality for all and other hippie principles, we hadn’t really settled on a clearly defined cause. How can you compare trivial causes like human rights and freedom with a divine cause like fighting for Allah (whatever the fight was) or fighting for the country (even if the ones claiming to fight were in bed with all your enemies)?
The “true” liberal powers saw that they were duped and started calling for nationwide protests. (I use true because later we will discover that many so-called liberals turned out to be fascists. They just preferred the whip of the military to the sword of the Islamists.)
Anyways, hundreds of thousands of disgruntled anti-Islamist protestors organized in front of the presidential palace. They had had it with the manipulation of the constitution and how Islamists were breaking one promise after another. Many of the demonstrators left at the end of the day and went home, but a few hundred stayed behind for a sit-in. When the numbers began to dwindle, the Muslim Brotherhood sent their militias to attack them.
Many were killed that night, but the violence wasn’t between citizens and police. It was between protestors and Muslim Brotherhood militias. Even when the Brotherhood were in power, they couldn’t get the militia mentality out of their mind. This happened a few hours before taping our episode.
Egypt was living through one tragedy after another. People were killed every day because of something. This became our own Columbine reality on a weekly basis. There was always this challenge of trying to make people laugh amid such terrible circumstances. But what could we do? If we closed up shop every time Egypt lived through another tragedy or unrighteous killing, we might as well not have a show at all. Nonetheless, my team implored me to cancel the show. They were worried about how we would be perceived. I was already stressed out because I still wasn’t used to the timing of a live program and found myself shouting in the control room, “I can’t just go and cancel the show every other episode! This is the country we are living in. Death has become a mere statistic. You will always find trolls who will say to you, how dare you laugh at whatever tragedy is going on in the country. Well, guess what, the tragedies are about to get worse and the trolls will watch us in secret anyways. There are people out there who need this. I am doing the show.”
The footage from the night of the attack was horrific. Many of the demonstrators were tortured by the Muslim Brotherhood militia, and the scenes were graphic and bloody. The anti-Islamic talk shows opted for the sensational angle. They got the most graphic scenes and ran them on repeat. When my researchers were looking for material, they thought they were doing a good job by getting even more graphic and horrific material to show how truly bad the Muslim Brotherhood were. I stopped all of that. “This is a comedy show,” I told them. “This is not another talk show where we aim to be sensational. We need to deal with the worst tragedies and find a way to deliver our message in a way that doesn’t repulse people.”
They looked at me in bewilderment. How are we going to find a funny angle in this?
But we searched again. And this time we were not looking at the news. We were looking for what was behind the news. I directed them to look into the mentality that made these people do what they did. With the police and the army, it was always easier to find their motives. You are armed to the hilt and you receive an order from above to assault, to beat, and to kill. The excuse will always be national security, or the sovereignty of the nation, or any other nationalistic bullshit. But what makes people, normal people, who go with us to the same universities and schools, and even share the same workplaces, view us, the non-Islamists, as targets to be tortured and killed?
We followed the Brotherhood’s and the Salafis’ shows and their media and aimed to show our viewers what they thought about us. This was not an easy task. Their programs went on for hours. No one actually watched them except their followers. Yet we had to watch the endless hours of bullshit to show the country what kind of sick minds these people had. My team had to endure the same agony Jon Stewart’s team had to go through while watching Fox News. Now that’s truly torture.
The same sheikhs who would insert and recite Quran verses every couple of sentences in their news reports as a sign of piety were now reporting finding condoms, bottles of Russian vodka, and vaginal douches in the tents of the protestors. “The boys told me they found some of the most expensive liquor called ID 10%,” a sheikh said. “Condoms were found in the tents. That’s the kind of people we are dealing with.”
Hey! Look on the bright side, sheikh: Doesn’t that at least mean they are practicing safe sex? Better than having angry protestors running around with herpes!
It’s interesting how these “men of God” get worked up about alcohol and sex while they promise their followers unlimited access to rivers of wine and sex with seventy-plus virgins in heaven. It seems you can have fun in the next life but never in this one.
One video after the other with “live coverage” from the battleground showed the Islamists ransacking the tents of the defeated protestors and then holding condoms and empty bottles of alcohol to the camera. It would really take a moron to go out to protest the president while bringing this stuff with them. And it would take an even bigger moron to believe the Islamist media’s lies.
I was happy with what we did with the episodes that followed this disaster. We didn’t show a single graphic scene. We didn’t play the victim card. We didn’t show the horribly violent clashes. We were true to the message of sarcasm and comedy, and yet we did what no other “serious” show or news outlet dared to do: we exposed those people for who they were. We showed the sick mentality that was driving these insane actions. It was easy to make people hate them, but more important, we showed how absolutely trivial they were.
After those attacks, and with the continuous exposure of their hateful media, the reign of the Islamists seemed to weaken, at least in many major cities, whereas previously any Islamist figure with an al-Qaeda-style beard was considered untouchable. But now those “men of God” were losing their credibility and people were waking up. Now a common name was given to them—“religion dealers.” It was a degrading term used to describe all those with religious authority who profit from religion. Think of your typical crooked televangelists, à la Jimmy Swaggart, and you get the picture.
I went after them in every episode and they didn’t like it. They in turn dedicated most of their airtime to attacking me. They used whatever religious fatwas they could to deem my show as haram. (Hey! Look at you understanding two Arabic words in one sentence now. Way to go!)
In one episode I showed another aspect of how these Islamist minds worked. Part of being a good Muslim was to be decent and respectful and not insult other people, even if they smeared you or called you names. That whole “do unto others” mentality. Yet, it was a constant spectacle to hear and watch the worse kind of smear campaigns and the lowest kind of behavior of these Islamists toward Christians and even other Muslims who didn’t follow their dogma.
The way I ended the episode helped many people see things differently.
I said, “You keep calling us infidels, unworthy of being good Muslims. You know what? We are fine with that. We are through trying to make you happy because there is actually no point in doing so. We will not be put through your guilt trips anymore. You see, it’s a very simple equation: if we are not Muslims in your eyes, well, you are not sheikhs, scholars, or men of religion in ours. You are preaching a religion that we don’t know and don’t want to be part of. Keep that religion to yourself and we will keep ours.”
Those couple of minutes of the show were replayed over and over again on television and online. They offered emancipation for many young people looking for a way out of this eternal religious struggle. As simple as it might seem, this was new for our region to stand up to the tyranny of the religious mafia. Despite being in power, they had no power over us anymore. Whatever respect they had was diminishing in the hearts and minds of the people. And the people “in charge” didn’t try to make it better. They just kept on doing what they did best: becoming more arrogant, alienating everyone, and in the process heading full speed to their own demise.