Western civilization collapsed Tuesday evening following an appearance on Comedy Central's fake news program The Daily Show by real-life ComicsAlliance blogger Chris Sims. The topic of discussion was the fictional character Batman -- specifically, a make-believe French, Paris-based Batman of Muslim persuasion whose recent introduction to the fictional DC Comics superhero universe inspired ferocious aggravation among some real-life right-wing, racist bloggers.
Already compromised from more than a decade's worth of desperately fraudulent and cynical political cycles, unspeakably violent, wholly invented wars and ceaseless psychic attacks in the form a duplicitous media fueled by ruinous prophets masked as journalists and a relentless celebration of the depravity and wastefulness of the nouveau riche, the structural integrity of western culture had no chance of withstanding a new reality in which these two things are irrevocably true: there are people who are genuinely furious that there is a fictional Muslim person running around a fictional version of Paris wearing the grim mantle of the greatest fictional superhero, and there is a real-life person who makes a living as a "professional Batmanologist."
Society's collapse was foreshadowed in December when we were alerted to the particularly ugly remarks of right-wing bloggers like Warner Todd Houston against Nightrunner, a new member of Bruce Wayne's Batman, Inc. initiative, whereby the fictional billionaire franchises Batmen to many of the world's major cities. Houston and his comrades believed that Nightrunner -- fictional real name Billai Asseiah -- was an illegitimate fictional protector of Paris on account of the fictional facts that he is of Algerian Arab descent and a Muslim. To Houston and his reptilian kind, such a fictional man is by definition unsuitable for the job of being a fictional superhero because the fictional child of fictional Arab immigrants is not a proper Frenchman and Muslims are congenitally evil.
DC Comics has decided that the "French savior," the French Batman is to be a Muslim immigrant. The character's name is Bilal Asselah and he is an Algerian Sunni Muslim and an immigrant... Apparently Batman couldn't find any actual Frenchman to be the "French savior."
...it is pretty condescending to France, too. France is a proud nation. Yet DC Comics has made a foreigner the "French savior." This will not sit well with many Frenchmen, for sure.
Houston's abominable chorus was joined by right-winger Avi Green, who wondered whether the fictional Muslim Batman would "bring justice to the streets by setting disabled women on fire," among other similarly cretinous thoughts.
Naturally, ComicsAlliance published a brutal and passionate take-down of those bigots and their hopelessly stupid views, asserting the inherent idealism and progressive nature of the superhero genre, as we'd done with the hilarious white supremacist meltdown over the casting of The Wire's Idris Elba as a Norse deity in Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of Thor and the Islamophobic media's paranoid condemnation of The 99 (a painfully benign, multicultural children's superhero cartoon inspired by Islamic myth).
The article, "Racists Totally Freak Out Over Muslim Batman of Paris," quickly became one of our most popular posts, earning more than 150 thousand page views, a prominent feature at Google News, copious linking at Digg and other aggregators and thousands of "Likes" on Facebook. As the author of the piece, I was interviewed by The National, the English language newspaper of the United Arab Emirates, about comic books and the American media's perception and treatment of Muslim people and themes. Finally, as the culmination of years of work writing humorous Batman essays and truly earning the title of "professional Batmanologist," our own Chris Sims was invited to speak to the nation's most influential current events, humor and culture resource, The Daily Show, itself a self-confessed fake news show.
Unfortunately, as I said, our Muslim Batman piece was written at approximately 11:59 on the Doomsday Clock of western culture, and we received a massive shipment of Haterade from the trolls of America who walk among us now freely and without fear. "A good muslim does not exist... except when they have blown themselves to hell!" was one of several very nasty real-life responses we received to our advocacy of a fictional superhero. Here are some other comments from real-life human beings with whom we share this planet's precious natural resources, unedited except for cases of NSFW language:
Some responses to "Racists Totally Freak Out Over Muslim Batman of Paris":
-- so, he rob and kill, as any average mudlsim in france?Some responses to "Racists Totally Freakout Over Idris Elba Playing Norse God in 'Thor'":
-- Having the "French Batman" be a towlhead who moved to france is about as offensive as having the American [insert hero name] be an illegal immigrant from mexico
-- Muslims are nothing to look up to. Being a submisive woman or a terrorist is hardly a role model. I live in Auburn Maine where we have a large segment of Somalians, 90% are on welfare, they are rude, un-curtious drivers, and all around aweful people. I hope this Muslim spiderman will force this company out of business due to the offense that is sure to come from turning losers into superhero's.
--That people in France no longer feel any real need to procreate, has created a situation where more white people in every European country are dying than being born. Thus, they bring in low-skilled rabble from North Africa and Western Asia, who fill the housing estates, oppress the local population by blocking entire streets for their disgusting rallies. If anything, representatives of this community should be the villains in a comic book.
-- It does look funny to see a n*gger in there ;)
-- 100 white women are violently raped by black men EVERY DAY here in
America. Who hates who?
Most impressively, I received via my personal Facebook account the following message from a human being called Sergio E. Redigolo Gusella of New York City:
hey what's up you f*cking piece of sh*t, it isn't racist to speak the truth, unlike you who is calling the norse gods "a bunch of drunks"
I hope you will defend anybody who makes a movie that stars Brad Pitt as Malcolm X..
I wonder what the black reaction would be to that..
That's what piss me off from f*cks like you, people like you are the reason the white race and culture are deteriorating, the white blood of the world have built the most civilized cultures in history and gave most of the world's progress..
I just hope you will have a daughter and she will marry a member of the bloods gang and have a bunch of half bread gang member children.. you f*cking minority lover white hater"
ps:always remember this, most crimes in this world (not all) are caused by the so called minorities, also for most part, those minorities live like dogs.
One of our first instincts is to laugh at the outrageous horribleness of remarks like these -- a paradox that increasingly defined our society as it pranced spastically over the precipice of oblivion -- but they're also a grim reminder that these people still exist in the 21st century. That subjects as innocuous as Idris Elba portraying the medieval fever dream that is Heimdall or a culturally inclusive version of Batman (who's appeared in only two comic books) prompt these Morlocks to crawl out from the sewers and protest superhero fiction's slow progression into the future says something about the pervasiveness of bigotry in the United States, the new ascendency of comic books' influence in our culture, or both.
The Daily Show had its fun with Bosch Fawstin, creator of the silly anti-islamist superhero Pigman, and we've had our fun with the Grand Dragons of the Council of Conservative Citizens, but the fact is that the people who wrote those hateful comments are not that funny. They take the time to visit this site, they write us personal correspondence, and they do so every time we mention ethnicity -- on a comic book site, where we write about fictional superheroes like they were real people; where we pay artists to draw those superheroes repeating things said by Charlie Sheen; and where we spend a lot of time and money interviewing and photographing people who have sex while dressed up like those superheroes (stay tuned!).
Right now someone is being paid to warn us of the dangers of a fictional Muslim dressed up like a Bat. Chris Sims is on television talking about Batman. ComicsAlliance is the most popular comic book website in the United States. It's 12:01.
Comments:
(86)Add a comment
Wednesday 02 March
By Phil
I like how Sergio is implying that the Norse Gods are real and were definitely not drunk.
It amazes me that some people can be this small minded and petty. Good job taking them down a notch guys.
Reply
Wednesday 02 March
By Michael P
I like how Sergio lives in New York City, and yet is apparently oblivious to the mountains of direct evidence within that city that directly contradict his view of minorities.
And by "like," I mean "am eternally depressed by."
Thursday 03 March
By bd62469
I can't believe the french need another foreigner to come to their soil and save them. When will they ever learn? They do have some beautiful women though. Its a shame all their faces and body parts will soon be covered.
Wednesday 02 March
By Eidolon
I understand both sides of this argument, and there's merit on both sides.
The reaction that comes from people when they hear about the "French savior" character being a Muslim immigrant is the same immediate, gut reaction that other people have to similar issues on the other side -- when they see a movie where all the bad guys are dark-skinned and the good guys are light-skinned, such as 300. We all read the articles of hand-wringing about that, people complaining about the ethnicities and their roles in 300 even though it really happened that way. If you didn't read anything like that, then you didn't read many reviews.
This is the right-wing version of that kind of reaction. Left-wingers see 300 and say "Oh I see, all the dark-skinned people are bad and all the light-skinned people are good! You're a bunch of racists!" Right-wingers see a guy who comes from the group that's been rioting constantly, destroying huge amounts of property, and causing large areas of France to be considered "no-go zones" for non-Muslims (if you don't want to be beaten up) declared the "French savior" and they think "Oh I see, because he's a Muslim, he's automatically good, even though Muslims are causing huge problems in France. Political correctness!"
There's a huge double standard here. You guys didn't make a big deal of calling BS on the people complaining about 300, you just ignored their argument. But you'll call people who have a reaction to the Muslim thing a bunch of racists. That's too strong, and it's unjustified. I may as well say there are probably a very few actual racists in there, but there's a willful blindness on the part of a lot of people to anything Muslims do that's bad that makes people on the right pretty frustrated and that's really the cause of this reaction. And it's exactly the same kind of frustration that causes left-wingers to seek out racism in everything that's said.
I'm not saying there's nothing for Muslim immigrants to be upset about, by the way. But what could France really be doing to them that justifies destroying other people's property by burning thousands of cars and making it unsafe for any woman who's not wearing a burqa to walk through a neighborhood?
Let's be fair about one more thing, too: comics are extremely left-wing in general. Even Captain America and Superman have both been rewritten as left-wingers because their writers are left-wingers (taking a hippie "walk across the country" while questioning one's traditional values, fighting the Tea Party, etc.). So, while you should definitely read something before you get mad about it, is it so crazy for a commentator to assume there'd be a left-wing (i.e. the Muslims are justified in everything they do and they're really the good guys while the Westerners are racist jerks) bent to this story, when there's a left-wing bent to almost every story in comics?
Reply
Wednesday 02 March
By Mr. Komodo
"I'm not saying there's nothing for Muslim immigrants to be upset about, by the way. But what could France really be doing to them that justifies destroying other people's property by burning thousands of cars and making it unsafe for any woman who's not wearing a burqa to walk through a neighborhood?"
So we should have hated on Luke Cage in response to the Watts riots?
While you're right about there being SOME merit on both sides and the liberal lean of comics (all fields of art and creativity actually, take the corellation for what it's worth)... It's the degree those feelings and reactions are taken to and the actions taken by each side that deserve ComicsAlliance attention.
One side says: "Dude, really? Little cultural sensitvity, please."
One side says: "You dirty )(*&^%*, you don't deserve to be allowed to breathe or exist, you are completely and utterly wrong, maliciously lying to our children and trying to drag the entire world down into the gutter that exists in that mudpile you call a brain! (*&*%*&^ "
So.... yeah, I think we're calling molehills molehills and mountains mountains here....
Wednesday 02 March
By Jago
ComicsAlliance wasn't around when 300 was in theaters. Why would they comment on it?
Wednesday 02 March
By dlskeets
Uh, have you read anything written by Mike Millar lately?
Wednesday 02 March
By Ellex
"I understand both sides of this argument, and there's merit on both sides"
I stopped reading right there.
Wednesday 02 March
By Nick Jones
I can't disagree with you more. The people up in arms about a Muslim superhero - and the people who wrote those hateful comments and emails to ComicsAlliance - have zero legitimacy. None.
This is not a "left wing" or a "right wing" issue. This isn't about individual politics at all. What we're looking here is crude bigotry in all of its ugliness. Essentially, these people are saying that by virtue of their religious and/or ethnic background, an entire population of people are naturally violent, murderous, even sub-human. These people are arguing that, based upon the actions of terrorist and extremist groups, ALL Muslims are evil and they want to kill us.
Stop and think - do you accept this brand of ignorance or are you ready to judge every man and woman by the quality of their character? Are you really prepared to swallow this line of bullshit, and live your life cowering in fear of everyone who is different?
We must continue to take a stand against this poisonous way of looking at the world. I am sick and tired of watching people freely spew this racist garbage, or through sheer apathy, allowing it to take root in the first place. Talk about it, laugh at it, attack it point-by-point, but we can't look the other way.
Wednesday 02 March
By Jesse Ewiak
Superman was "rewritten" as left-wing? Go read his original stories. They involved him throwing war profiteering businessmen around. If the 1940's Superman existed today, he'd be kicking in doors at Blackwater.