[R-G] "The Truth about Islam from an Ex-Muslim Lady"

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

The New York Times says that the most discussed video on YouTube is
MEMRI's clip of "The Truth about Islam from an Ex-Muslim Lady." --
Yoshie

<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/magazine/04wwln-medium-t.html>
November 4, 2007
The Medium
God and Man on YouTube
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

The lost art of pantomime seems to be making a comeback on the
Internet. Videos of wordless spectacles — natural anomalies, freak
accidents, fistfights, dances, stunts, sleights of hand, animal antics
— now attract enormous polyglot audiences to sites like YouTube. A
silent clowning routine, "Evolution of Dance," is YouTube's all-time
most-viewed video. In it, a guy hams up a series of dance moves. It
has been played 62 million times.

But while short performances that combine vaudeville and the
avant-garde may have made YouTube's name, they're not the videos that
users of the site talk about. Instead, viewers seeking interaction and
discussion turn to polemical clips about religion or politics,
including incendiary hits like "Macedonia Is Greece," "Atheist" and
"The Truth About Islam From an Ex-Muslim Lady." These videos draw
smaller but infinitely more voluble audiences than the dumb shows.
About every seven times "The Truth About Islam From an Ex-Muslim Lady"
plays, for example, someone talks back to it, posting a comment. (The
comments section to "Evolution of Dance," by contrast, is like a ghost
town. Someone posts a lazy remark — "Funny!" — about every 840 times
it rolls.)

"The Truth About Islam From an Ex-Muslim Lady," YouTube's
most-discussed video ever, shows a woman on a TV-news program
delivering a fearsome disquisition in Arabic on Samuel P. Huntington's
clash-of-civilizations idea — the concept that global politics are now
determined by potentially apocalyptic cultural collisions. The woman,
identified as an Arab-American psychologist, celebrates the
"civilization" of the West and denigrates the "backwardness" of Islam,
according to the English subtitles. Since "The Truth About Islam"
first appeared in the spring of last year, something about this video
clip has inspired viewers to lay bare their ideological ids. It has
prompted 200,000 comments.

Similarly, "Atheist" (No. 10 most-discussed ever), which intersperses
anti-atheist Bible passages with images of illustrious nonbelievers,
has occasioned a sprawling argument about superstition, eschatology
and scientism among viewers with screen names like tylenolalcohol and
blindedbynoise. The historical pedantry on display in another
much-discussed clip, "Macedonia Is Greece," in which placards of
factoids and photos of regional maps are marshaled to contend that no
part of the former Yugoslavia should call itself Macedonia, has
triggered a flood of responses in Serbo-Croatian and Greek. Ancient
vendettas evidently thrive in new media. A cruder video, "Kuran ve
Tuvalet Kagidi (My FREEDOM of SPEECH)," apparently created and posted
by a secular nationalist Turk now living in the Ivory Coast, proposes
that toilet paper is more useful than the Koran. The 60,000 responses
to the brutish video are almost exclusively in Turkish.

Christendom, for its part, now has its own clip-sharing venue, GodTube
("Broadcast Him"), which in August was the fastest-growing Web site in
the United States. (JewishTVNetwork.com and Muxlim.com offer Jewish
and Muslim counterparts.) GodTube invites users who are called to
upload videos to post and discuss clips of, say, preachers or evidence
of divine mercy. One of its biggest hits shows a little girl lisping
Psalm 23. Tens of thousands of GodTubers weigh in on the most popular
videos, often discussing how best to proselytize with new media.

But even the most lively discussions on GodTube are drowned out by the
ceaseless shouting match kicked off by "The Truth About Islam" on
YouTube. Part atavistic race riot, part religious disputation and part
earnest effort at enlightenment, the expansive commentary is fast
becoming a full-blown novel of world religion, one that dramatizes the
fascinating and often shocking preoccupations of today's desk-chair
ideologues.

The clip itself has a complicated provenance. A title sequence
indicates that the video is a presentation of a presentation of a
presentation — YouTube clips often come in double, if not triple, sets
of quotation marks — and the presenters are not exactly politically
neutral. The segment originally appeared on Al Jazeera, after which it
was excerpted, subtitled in English and posted to the Internet by the
Middle East Media Research Institute (Memri), an organization founded
by a former Israeli national security adviser. (While the American and
European media rely on Memri's conscientious translations of documents
from the Middle East, critics complain that the organization
disseminates only alarmist material about the Arab world.) The video
was uploaded to YouTube by someone whose blog is unsubtly titled
BanIslam.

After the video's title sequence, the "ex-Muslim lady," a dour-looking
brunette named Wafa Sultan, begins an incantation: "The clash we are
witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions," she says,
according to the subtitles. "Or a clash of civilizations. It is a
clash between two opposites, between two eras." Praising Jewish
accomplishment and Buddhist pacifism and heaping scorn on Muslim
barbarism, she speaks in a voice that literally resounds; the Al
Jazeera set echoes like an amphitheater. She praises Western culture
in the ferocious cadences usually associated with the mullahs who
condemn it. "They started this clash!" she says of Muslims. "And began
this war!"

After a wave of approval from commenters when the video first
appeared, skeptics soon arrived, and debate raged. Some commenters
wondered aloud: was Sultan a paid propagandist? An anti-Muslim poster
named Crusader18 (no less) stirred the pot, flaunting a kitschy
18th-century prose style and challenging others to justify the Koran.
As he put it, "I judge Islam by it's original Texts and the actions of
the Salafists . . . Poison Fruit from a Poison Tree." He continued,
"DEFEND ISLAM you Cutthroat! CAN YOU?" While some commenters responded
by delving into Koranic exegesis, a viewer named MassLax pushed back
from another direction, suggesting that Crusader18 and his ilk
secretly envied Muslim solidarity: "One billion people from a vast
range of races, nationalities and cultures across the globe — from the
southern Philippines to Nigeria — are united by their common Islamic
faith. The Kufars are jealous. God willing they will die in their
jealousy."

This level of bombast, along with the anachronistic locutions, is not
uncommon on YouTube. "The Truth About Islam" seems to have attracted
Internet buffs who savor the theatrics of formal debate. From their
cultural allusions, it appears that many of them grew up on science
fiction and courtroom dramas, as well as the Bible or the Koran.
Several boast of owning, enslaving and burying their opponents with
wit. They also call each other "fools," "zygotes," "sophists,"
"tumors," "ghouls" and "voles." In one wounding exchange, Crusader18
says to budavol, a tenacious spokesman for secular values: "Your
bigotry towards Christians leads me to believe you may have been
molested by a priest . . . I hope he didn't catch anything from you."

Harsh. Certainly this is not for all audiences. But as a commenter
named AuraX says of the message board, "this is the battlefield" — a
rabbley showdown that positions itself along the fault lines of the
world's great debates.

The commentary may come to seem enervating — hundreds of
micro-arguments effectively under the schoolyard heading "Whose
Religion Is Better?" Certainly the anarchy of the Internet can cause
disorientation: no final arbiter, no master author, will settle even
the most trivial matter of fact, let alone summarize the terms of an
argument or furnish an illusion of finality. But isn't commentary on
commentary on commentary always the way of religion? On "The Truth
About Islam," there are always more comments, and they were — last
time I hit refresh — still piling up by the hour.

--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>