The Baskin Robbins Social Flavour Of The Day

Very popular with those liberals who are bored with gays, blacks, the disabled, feminism, indians, etc. and their committment is based on distance from the problem.

THE LITTLE MOSQUE THAT COULDN'T

Excerpt from Mark Steyn below:

The other day I was giving a speech in Washington and, in the questions afterwards, the subject of Little Mosque On The Prairie came up. "Muslim is the new gay," I said. Which got a laugh. "That's off the record," I added. "I want a sporting chance of getting home alive." And I went on to explain that back in the Nineties sitcoms and movies began introducing gay characters who were the most likeable and got all the best lines, and that Muslims were likely to be the lucky beneficiaries of a similar dispensation. In both cases, the intent is the same: to make Islam, like homosexuality, something only uptight squares are uncool with.

At the time I hadn't seen so much as a trailer for Little Mosque. But it seemed a reasonable enough assumption that nine times out of ten the joke would be on the "irrational" prejudices and drearily provincial ignorance of the Saskatchewan hicks. And sure enough, if you settled down to watch the first episode, it opened up with some stringy stump-toothed redneck stumbling on a bunch of Muslims praying and racing for the telephone. "Is this the Terrorist Attack Hotline? You want me to hold?"

Well, of course, the local Anglican vicar tries to explain that he's just rented the parish hall to a harmless group of local Mohammedans. "This is simply a pilot project," he says reassuringly. "Pilot?" gasps the redneck. "They're training pilots?" And off he goes to the talk-radio blowhard who is, naturally, a right-wing hatemonger.

Meanwhile, the mosque's dishy new imam is waiting to board his flight and yakking into his cell phone about how taking the gig in Mercy, Saskatchewan is going to be career suicide. Another passenger overhears that last word and the cops pull the guy out of line and give him the third degree: "You lived for over a year in Afghanistan?"

"I was volunteering for a development agency," says the metrosexual cappuccino-swilling imam, who's very droll about his predicament: if my story doesn't hold up, he cracks, "you can deport me to Syria." "Hey," warns the bozo flatfoot sternly, "you do not get to choose which country we deport you to."

Fair enough. Never mind that, in the real Canada, the talk-radio guy would be off the air and hounded into oblivion by the Saskatchewan Humans Rights Commission; and that, instead of looking like Rick Mercer after 20 minutes on a sunbed and being wry and self-deprecating and Toronto-born, your typical western imam is fiercely bearded, trained in Saudi Arabia and such linguistic dexterity as he has is confined to Arabic; and that airline officials who bounce suspicious Muslims from the flight wind up making public apologies and undergoing sensitivity training; and that, in the event they do bust up a terrorist plot, the Mounties inevitably issue statements saying this in no way reflects on any particular community in our glorious Canadian mosaic, particularly any community beginning with "Is-" and ending with "-lam"; and that the most prominent Canadians "volunteering" for good works in Afghanistan were the Khadr family, whose pa was sprung from the slammer in Pakistan by Prime Minister Chretien in order that he could resume his "charity work" and, for his pains, he had to suffer vicious Islamophobic headlines like "Caught In A Muddle: An Arrested Aid Worker Appeals For Chretien's Help" (Maclean's).

Never mind all that. There is after all no more heartwarming tradition in Canadian popular culture - well, okay, unpopular culture: it's the CBC, after all - than the pleasant frisson induced by the routine portrayal of rural Canadians as halfwit rednecks. One would characterize it as Canadophobic were it not for the fact that the CBC's enthusiasm for portraying us as a nation of knuckle-dragging sister-shaggers reinforces our smug conviction that we're the most progressive people on the planet: we celebrate diversity through the ruthless homogeneity of CBC programming; we're so boundlessly tolerant we tolerate an endless parade of dreary sitcoms and dramas about how intolerant we are. In that sense, the relentlessly cardboard stereotypes are a way of flattering the audience. In the second episode of Little Mosque, for example, the non-Muslim gals of Mercy, Sask stage a protest against the mosque: every single woman in the march is large and plain and simple-minded. The only white folks who aren't condescended to are the convert wife of the Muslim patriarch and the impeccably ecumenical Anglican minister (though his church, unlike the mosque, is dying).

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