Three comments
1 – He was relatively fair. I mean you knew what talking points he was going to deploy and what his conclusion was going to be.
2 – Minhaj is very American. A particular sort of American. Though the episode focuses on “Asian Americans”, Minhaj sounds like he was birthed out of The Daily Show comedy-clone factory.
3 – I don’t think it was that funny. And I don’t think the audience found it particularly funny either.
Over ten years ago I read Adam K. Webb’s Beyond the Global Culture War with some skepticism. In it, Webb outlined the future revitalization of non-Western societies and cultures and their ultimate face-off with global liberalism. It’s a really strange book, which talks positively about the Iranian Revolution and Rabindranath Tagore.
But I think elements of the thesis are coming to fruition in ways I couldn’t have imagined. For example, the Western Left has a very strong animus against Hindu Nationalism. case in point, the Western (mostly American) feminist website, Feministing, has published a piece documenting a protesting a Hindu meeting in Chicago: Why These Activists are Protesting Hindu Nationalism in Trump’s America.
Here’s a thought experiment: can you imagine left-wing activists protesting an Islamic Society of North American meeting? Curiously, the atheist ex-Muslim activist Armin Navabi, who was at the meeting in Houston this summer, observed that the people who were most hostile to the ex-Muslims were not the Muslims themselves (most of whom were curious), but philo-Islamic Communist activists. These activists were apparently shouting Islamic slogans at right-wing anti-Islamic demonstrators.
Navabi even reported that the Muslim attendees talked to him and seemed disturbed and confused by the specter of hammer & sickle brandishing Communists, and could not understand why or how they were pro-Islam.
I am not adding anything extra with this short news item, I think the news speaks eloquently and voluminously by itself. I just want to add that I feel utterly humble when I consider how much courage and determination people like Jibran Nasir possess to do what he is doing day after day in a place like Pakistan.
Labaik spokesman Ejaz Ashrafi said his party “did not send anyone to do this”, adding that people running in elections should declare their faith.
Nasir gained nationwide prominence in 2014 after staging protests against the Red Mosque, the Islamabad center of a militant network with links to Pakistani Taliban strongholds in the northwest and in neighboring Afghanistan.
The mosque was the site of a military standoff in 2007, but within two years its chief cleric was freed from detention and was once again calling for strict Islamic rule across Pakistan.
The mosque campaign earned Nasir a phone call and death threats from a high-ranking Taliban commander.
“We are doing it for the millions of Pakistanis … who right now are forced to choose amongst the lesser of evils, who are willing to embrace different political leaders with all their biases and religious bigotry,” he said.
“Every day I am carrying on with my mission, they are making a fool of themselves.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-pakistan-election-independent/rare-secular-candidate-in-pakistan-hounded-by-angry-mobs-idUSKBN1KD1L7
