A Merry Joke.

Editor,

Shooting people who make fun of you is wrong and crazy.

As is not ridiculing people and institutions who have so much money and power they are able to shape events to give themselves even more money and power.

But in a white-male dominated world one has to wonder what is gained by metaphorically kicking racial, class, and other demographic underdogs while they are down.

It is easy for a satirist to laugh at his own joke and fault an already scapegoated minority for not having a sense of humor if he doesn't laugh at himself when picked on cleverly. But just whose interest does this humor serve?

Insulting stereotypes of African-Americans are deeply offensive to all but the committed white supremacist. Taunting insults about Holocaust victims or American servicemen killed in the Pacific Islands during WWII would infuriate people for good reason.

Maybe the difference when it comes to Islam is that Westerners don't know anything about the history of the colonization of North Africa: families kicked off land that had sustained them for generations when colonists took it from them; brutal dictators friendly to colonial powers installed to enforce Western dominance; resisters jailed, tortured, and killed to maintain control.

Carving up the Middle East resulted in much the same, the end result being that for angry young men not willing to accept the subordinate role assigned to them by the Western powers, being insulted on top of being downtrodden is not a merry joke.

Re: "In an Unequal World, Mocking All Serves the Powerful" (1/10/2014)