When a 'Joke' -- Isn't
Full Disclosure: I never write to shows, as I know they probably pay scant attention. They make the big bucks. Why should they listen to a groundling occasional viewer?
But I was goaded beyond tolerance by Mr. Jon Stewart's latest jibe against Israel.
His slur concerning the Paris march -- that those who assembled were hardly (I paraphrase, so annoyed that I could not bear to listen a moment longer to this once-funny Jewish comedian) paragons of free speech was initially well taken.
Stewart mocked the march for free speech in Paris by indicating that the heads of state attending included despots and those hypocritically against free speech in their own domestic domains. Can’t argue with that. Representatives of Turkey and Jordan, African despotisms and Middle Eastern caliphates, were in attendance, all clutching the arms of the likes of Germany’s Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande, leftist tete of la bellicose France. Stewart attacked Egypt by just muttering its name, hesitating in well-oiled comic timing, and reaping a huge rolling thunder of audience accommodation. I mean, laughs. Laffs.
But Egypt under Gen. Sisi is extraordinary in its efforts to rid itself of terrorists and malefactors of Islamist stripe. Sisi has in fact made an amazingly atypical (for a Muslim leader) speech urging leaders and imams of Muslim states to let go the vile bonds of violence and destruction that is besmirching their faith.
Thus citing Egypt, today, as a laughingstock re freedom is particularly... if we may use a word rendered astringent and offensive by the current uninformed and partisan resident duffer in the White House... "stupid."
Stewart gave an unearned jeer to Israel with his obnoxious throwaway alluding to Israel jailing cartoonists of the Palestinian stripe. Uh, no. Bibi Netanyahu was of course in the front ranks of the heads of state making their way down the boulevard, despite the well-bruited efforts of lefty Socialist Hollande to prevent Bibi’s attendance.
Israel among all the nations of this seething area of the atlas is known for robust freedom of speech --as well as a notable tolerance for homophilia/same sex attraction, lesbianism, untidy free speech, no genital circumcision and female independence. To castigate Israel amongst the nations that hang people for infinitesimal infractions against the hauntingly unfortunate hadith and sura of the cherry-picked mishmash known as the Quran is nuts. Jon Stewart is of course a maximally angry chap, funny as he manages to be from time to time.
Israel does not and never has arrested or slain anyone for cartoons. Including Palestinians. And if Stewart’s staff writers evidently know nothing about the caricatures that have bedeviled Jews for the past 100 years, unabated today in Der Sturmer-like precincts of the insanity-tinged Muslim knuckledraggers, the cartoons that have ceaselessly attacked Jews have been unremitting in their vileness, far surpassing anything Hebdo ever attempted. And Jews are subject 24/7 to these scurrilous and defamatory etchings, alluding to Israel as nazi-ish, as evil, as drinking blood, and all sorts of astonishing rubbish.
For Jewish Jon to add to the vilification of Jews and Israel when we have just sustained the horrific murder of four wholly innocent shoppers chosen because they were of Jewish descent is unconscionable.
I used to watch Stewart selectively, praying not to hear the puerility and delinquency of his sprinkled castigations-for-naught. Now, sadly, I shan't tune him in. I can't forget his tone-deafness when people are grieving for no cause but the savagery of those who listen, perhaps, to the inanities of the prime jokester, Jon Stewart, who reassures them in their hatred, because look! the Jewish comic is attacking Israel too; why do we have to apologize for our hatred when he says it to millions nightly?
My guess is that Stewart was proactively undercutting crit of the boho president for not attending the march, which struck the world as abdicating the usual and rightful leadership role of the U.S. -- a role Obumbler has clearly told us he’s not fond of and won’t be booster to. The march was dopey, says Stewart, so Obama’s disgraceful failure to show up or send someone to stand in for the hegemon of the globe wasn’t so atrocious.
Good bye, "comedy" writers of the Jon Stewart Leibowitz show.
Shameful "jokes" like those cheap and untrue tossed-off insults by a master of the quip deserve a correctional slap.
Especially when the "jokes" are lies.