Opinions – on everything.

As you can see, shortly after publishing the above “joke” on Facebook, I received quite an upsetting comment.

I do believe that people should have a safe place to pray at. However, I really do not see how shops and other businesses in the vicinity stop the mosque from being a safe place.

Things are never black and white so I would like to take a few minutes to discuss this in greater detail.

“My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.”
– George Bernard Shaw

Firstly, I truly believe that the foundation of any good joke is a bit of truth – that is what makes people laugh. A good example of this is:

“Honey, here is your paracetamol!”
“But I don’t have a headache!”
“Great, then we can have sex!”

So if you found yourself laughing (or at least smiling) at the joke, you too think that it is based on something you feel is true.

Secondly, above all, the intent of a joke is to entertain.They are hardly ever intended to hurt (at least mine aren’t).

I believe many comedians see it as part of their job to work through current issues to show people, how insane some of the things are which we have accepted as part of our daily lives (e.g. political correctness, more on that later).

This is often/usually achieved by taking a real world scenario and then exaggerate it to a point where it makes you laugh.

“If you can’t laugh, then what’s the point of living?”
– my dad

Whoever wrote the joke felt that actively practising Muslim demand tolerance to their way of life, but do not grant it to others. They use our values (“freedom of religion, expression, etc.) for their own benefit, but deny them to us.

It is my firm believe that the references to Islam can be replaced with any other religion on this planet to make the same point!

I believe that in this situation, building a new “house of god” should be allowed and tolerated, covered by freedom of religion and religious expression. This was also very clearly stated in the joke!

The joke now takes things one step further by demanding the same tolerance (or be it a very extreme version of it) for our way of life from the Muslim community.

The purpose was to show that building a mosque in an otherwise non-Muslim neighbourhood suddenly means that other “western achievements ;-)” are suddenly not ok anymore, as they might offend the visitors of the mosque.

The question now is: Why should anyone accept a sign/symbol of someone else’s way of life in their vicinity, and as a consequence not be allowed to freely express themselves anymore? I would not expect or demand this of anyone.

Thirdly: the knee-jerk “hate” reaction to any “politically incorrect” expression of an opinion.

It is a joke, stop taking it so damn literally! No one is actually proposing to do it, I don’t even know if this was originally conceived in response to a real-world situation.

Also, “free market forces” would suggest that if there wasn’t any demand for such establishments before the mosque was built, as well as the additional, mainly Muslim visitors to the area, these shops will not make enough profit and close by themselves (or would indeed never be opened in the first place).
Hence the problem would take care of itself, all the hysteria was for nothing and only showed how intolerant religious people are.

But apparently, it doesn’t matter if it is a serious suggestion or not. The second anyone feels offended they start raging without, not wasting a second to think about intentions and the underlying message. They don’t accept that some people might feel differently and harshly criticise them. This by the way very much proofs the point of the joke!!!

Whether or not any of the assumptions made about religious practitioners are true or not is beside the point, as they are perceived to be true. (More on this later!)

I think there is another point to be made here. This “PC” that is constantly demanded by everyone and everywhere as well as the perception of religious extremists are a part of the reason why Trump did so well in the US and why other populists are on the rise.

All of this (and potentially some more) is needed to explain a simple joke, to make sure no one is offended, think about that!