"[H]e [Antony Flew] seemed generally uninterested in the content of his book [There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind] — he spent far more time talking about the dangers of unchecked Muslim immigration and his embrace of the anti-E.U. United Kingdom Independence Party" (Mark Oppenheimer, "The Turning of an Atheist," 4 November 2007, <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/magazine/04Flew-t.html>)
That's a type of deterioration very common these days. In the same issue of the New York Times Magazine, it is said that MEMRI's clip of "The Truth about Islam from an Ex-Muslim Lady" is the most discussed video on YouTube. A sign of the times.
<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/>