It is with regret that I feel I must publicly object to a certain subset of jokes about Islam on the grounds that they are tasteless.

Where I’m coming from: ex-Muslim with a complicated relationship to the faith, but this means I’ve had real-world training in how to spot a problematic Islamophobia and how to differentiate between good-natured fun, fair criticisms, and just gross behavior.  My opinion should be taken as my personal opinion on the matter and not speaking for anyone else.

The format of the joke and specific examples:

• “Alhamdulillah, Dick Cheney said the Shahada and embraced the Light of Islam on his deathbed!”

or as I just saw and which inspired me to write this,

• “[these Israelis whoremovedd Palestinian hostages] need to seek the light of Allah!”

BTW I’m definitely not saying “thou art cancelled” if you’ve made this joke, it’s just a little course correction and community education as we all teach each other things

The Problems With This Joke:

1.  Accepting the premise, the idea people who are responsible for torturing and murdering thousands to millions of Muslims get to suddenly escape punishment for all the misery they’ve wrought is disgusting.  Celebrating that they would escape that is disgusting.

Now maybe some Muslims are so devout and peace-loving that they would celebrate such a converion and deathbed redemption.  But I never was even when I was religious.  My childhood prayers would be fedposts if I wrote them out.  I don’t want to imagine Dick Cheney going to Heaven, I want him to suffer in Hell.  The torment he inflicted upon his (surviving) victims will not end as long as they live.  The scars of torture last a lifetime, as do the emotional scars of seeing your family and friends be murdered over some imperialist nonsense.  If you want to dunk on Dick Cheney religiously, a simple and “burn in Hell” is way more solidaristic than pretending Dick Cheney got to co-opt the religion of most of his victims and escape justice for all the evil he did in life.

If you’re struggling with this concept, it may help to practice the reasoning in a different context.  You may ask yourself this: would you find it funny to joke about and celebrate the idea of Hitler converting to Judaism and coming out as gay and discovering he was part Roma and deciding that actually he supported Communism right before ridding the world of himself?

2.  It’s treating Islam as a punchline, something that’s inherently silly and funny, rather than something that is important to a quarter of the world’s population and a source of solace and strength for people resisting an active genocide.  A tool to be used to dunk on the conservatives, nothing more.  It feels like a more clever version of the liberalism of democrats saying shit like “lololol, D®umpf is gay for Putler” where the joke is just that they’re gay, because being gay is bad and worthy of ridicule.  What’s funny, that these bastards did something which their communities would view as heretical? No, then it wouldn’t be so specific.  The joke here is just that being Muslim is embarrassing, and that encodes Islamophobic thought.

People often use humor to cope with the uncomfortable.  I’ve done it too.  But I think this particular format, in light of SO MUCH horrific bloodshed specifically of people in this religious group, sometimes (often) even using their religion as the excuse to target them, has problems and we should be more aware of how we approach the topic.

That’s all.  There could be more to write, but I’ve got things to do and have covered everything that was easy to articulate.  Basically all the other jokes and seriousness that I’ve seen here — alhamdulillahs, mashallahs, inshallahs, others I haven’t written down — all seem supportive and inclusive.  There’s a bit of “trigger the War on Terror racists who freak out whenever they hear a bit of Arabic” coupled with “heartfelt solidarity with the victims of imperialism” to those that makes them wholesome in a way that the joke format I’m criticizing is not.