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Having failed to make their intended satire clear to the George Washington University campus, seven students felt the need to come forward late last night to take responsibility for those "anti-Muslim" posters we told you about yesterday.
The Hatchet published parts of the letter after receiving it last night. Among the seven students who admitted their involvement was ubiquitous IVAW poster boy and current GWU graduate student Adam Kokesh.
"It is to our great dismay that the student body and the media missed the clear, if subtle, message of our flier: the hyperbolic nature of the flier was aimed at exposing Islamophobic racism," the e-mail said.
Nothing like having to explain, in detail, why your joke was funny to make it clear you have no future in comedy.
And nothing like having someone famous for getting arrested while protesting with the ANSWER Coalition to make the conservative blogosphere start foaming at the mouth. The Young America's Foundation, the intended targets of the posters and hosts of the real, upcoming "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week," put up a statement on their web site accusing "Leftist administrators" at the school of going on a "rampage" to crack down unfairly on the group. Mike Licht has a fast-on-the-draw summary of all the events leading up to this morning, pointing out that "YAF has a $20 Million annual budget, a director who earns $360,000 a year, buildings in Herndon and California and big-time media and donor backing."
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A day without a Kokesh photo is a day with sunshine.
Come on over to the dark side, Kokesh. I'll show you some real male bonding.
Oops. Meant to day 'without sunshine'.
A dumb stunt, but he's still a hottie.
Of course, we'd have to find something better to do than get arrested for putting stupid ANSWER posters up.
But, still, I'd Free his Mumia.
Not that it's the funniest thing in the world, but "Lazer Eyes" should generally be a tip off that a joke is in the works.
NPR made a fantastic showing of failing to get that last night (or maybe it was just WAMU).
I'm urging GWU to sentence the Ugly Poster Seven to a combination of community service (cleaning up all the old expired posters in the GW campus neighborhood) and compulsory humor training.
For the latter I was thinking about Comedy Sportz(tm) or a GWU writing or literature class (is Kimberley Stern still teaching Victorian Comedy and Satire?).
Let me know if you're aware of other humor courses and I'll pass the list on. Wise guys: I mean intentional humor courses - save the jokes about your TA.
I liked the poster? Am I the only one?
"Not that it's the funniest thing in the world, but "Lazer Eyes" should generally be a tip off that a joke is in the works."
Well, I got it. But I could see why someone might misread that to think that all muslims have had lasicks surgery.
The thing is, when you're trying to mock someone for making outlanding claims, making slightly more outlandish claims can easily backfire.
Frankly I think the whole affair is just stupid. The were stupid smug posters mocking a stupid smug group. In a perfect world, they'd cancel each other out and dissapear into the ether; but we're not in a perfect world and all they do is feed into each other's stupid smugness like some perpetual motion machine.
The poster said that you can recognize a muslim because they have laser eyes and a peg leg for smuggling babies/heroin!
Granted the fact that Islamo-fascist Awareness Week is a real thing means that there are layers of reality and satire here, but I anyone who didn't realize that this was satire is pretty dense.
Good on these students for exposing the racist, xenophobic nature of "Islamo-fascist Awareness Week"!
Looks like another Froggy Butt Broseph to me.
Another fantastic example of evenhanded reporting Ms. Mathis.
[Good on these students for exposing the racist, xenophobic nature of "Islamo-fascist Awareness Week"!]
Good for these students for exposing the rascist, stupid humor of the left. Why actually talk about car bombs, terrorists, and countries where women have few rights when you can come up with silly caricatures and call conservatives dumb?
I'll take the "dumb" conservatives over the "funny" liberals any day.
"In a perfect world, they'd cancel each other out and dissapear into the ether"
Man, but what a beautiful world it would be.
Conservatives are infuriated by the Satire of a racist event they promoted on campus because, they say, the YAF is rich and well-connected.
Meeg - please explain just how "Islamo-facist Awareness Week" is of a "racist" and "xenophobic" nature, esp. considering the fact that Islam is not a race. Please provide a couple of facts (preferably verifiable) to back up your conclusory statement. And no, opposing Islamic fundamentalism is not per se evidence of xenophobia (no more so than protesting against Pro-Lifers is evidence, without more, of Christophobia or a pro-infanticide stance).
My point: Whether left or right, labeling people/groups as [insert "ist" term here] is rather odious (and intellectually lazy), at least without proper evidence to support such a claim.
I have to disagree w/Mike Licht's point about the funding of the YAF. Pretty much everyone at GW is a rich SOB...otherwise they wouldn't be going there. Mike, it seems that your mad b/c you're worried the YAF, having substantial financial backing, will go after the creators of the spoof poster. I don't think that seems to be the case. However if you had invested money into something you strongly believed in, and said event was being undermined and possibly threatened by an outlandish stunt, wouldn't you be pissed?
I don't know the specific topics that are to be covered at this event...is that information available? I beleive I read something in the GW Hatchet article yesterday stating that one topic would be the persecution of women.
Without trying to sound too right-wingish, Mike...when it comes down to the main topic, who's side are you on here exactly?
What is up with these people. Is Kokesh behind teh Whitman Condo Blog to? LOL
http://thewhitmandc.blogspot.com/
Those posters say "Hate Muslims, So Do We!" in big blod print. Then the jokes come in, but unless yu stopped to read the whole thing you would never understand that it was meant to be a joke.
Thingsg like this flyer make a liberal like me question whether or not purportedly racist attacks are bona fide.
Like how Madonna Constantine found a noose on her door at Columbia University. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/nyregion/10cnd-columbia.html?hp
Did someone put it there as a threat? Or did someone put it there to be perceived as a threat and rile up the campus?
I hear that Mike Licht Kokesh's sandy sack.
I think that what people are missing is that the posters were not put there to slander YAF, or to "frame" them. The creators intended for them to be taken as SATIRE. Their intention was to mock islamo-fascist awareness week. Obviously, they were less than successful, and many thought the posters were in poor taste. However, that is much different than if someone were to falsely claim that they were attacked because they were black, muslim, etc. Does it happen? I'm sure it does, but I don't think it's fair based on this incident to start assuming that minorities are running around "crying racism."
Sordid: What side? Is this football? I hope not; I stink at that.
The posters were awful but they were clearly a failed attempt at humor by kids who think the Onion is the height of sophistication.
There is indeed real expression of hatred on the posters - it the accurate URL of the YAF event organizers. The rationale for the event is at http://www.terrorismawareness.org/islamo-fascism-awareness-week/49/a-students-guide-to-hosting-islamo-fascism-awareness-week/
Look and tell me if you don't see a giant enterprise generating hate and fear on college campuses across the country for blatant partisan purposes. I have to admit I wouldn’t have looked without those lousy posters.
YAF is fulminating about conspiracies and plots, pretending not to see the attempt at humor. YAF members couldn't self-righteously verify their paranoid worldview if they admitted the posters were a joke.
Some young Muslim-American would-be politicians denied the attempt at humor because defining the posters as actual hate crime gave them the ability to feign outrage and fear, posturing for peers and the media.
The media do not like pranks - pranks use the media, and isn’t a real story with legs, like hate crime.
GWU administrators have to pretend they don't recognize lame kid humor because they can deal decisively with hate incidents but humor makes them look like dorks (if the academic robe fits . . . .).
So I am resolutely on the side of better humor -- the pranksters need to work on that; YAF members (like the doctrinaire Left) is hopelessly humorless, not realizing how unintentionally funny they are. I’ll poke fun at both.
Having said that, I assure you YAF is moving all the resources they can to hang those seven kids for what is just another dumb college prank, as a way of motivating their base and keeping others from revealing them as the rich, spoiled bullies they are.
So I assume you folks that think this was merely a failed attempt at humor view those "affirmative action bake sales" conservative groups were putting on a few years ago deserve the same deference?
I don't think it would have been a big deal if the people behind the posters had identified themselves, instead they tried to pass off their speech as the speech of another group. If it was satire, why did it take so long for them to finally fess up?
The students putting on the "affirmative action bake sales" were not making an attempt at satirical humor, it was a pretty straightforward protest. I'm not sure what, if anything, it has to do with the posters.
And again, I think it's pretty clear that it was satire (even if it wasn't well done). Peg legs and laser eyes? Come on.
oh, yeah, I hope no one believes I didn't think the posters were clearly a joke, albeit a bad one.
I looked at the YAF website and saw shocking hateful stuff like this:
"In opposition to this, we affirm four key principles denied by the jihadists and threatened by them:
The right of all people to live in freedom and dignity
The freedom of the individual conscience: to change religions or have no religion at all
The equality of dignity of women and men
The right of all people to live free from violence, intimidation, and coercion"
Yeah, they sound like fascist thugs to me. I sure don't support any of those things!
Let's kill some apostates!
"Nothing like having to explain, in detail, why your joke was funny to make it clear you have no future in comedy"
--ever seen Borat?
Psst, guest 25: don't look now, but WTF does YAF know about what some so-called jihadis allegedly said? Did the space aliens tell them?
Nothing like standing up to an imaginary conspiracy. That calls for real bravery . . . and immediate medical attention.