{"id":15680,"date":"2012-02-18T15:31:30","date_gmt":"2012-02-18T11:31:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/?p=15680"},"modified":"2012-02-18T15:31:39","modified_gmt":"2012-02-18T11:31:39","slug":"humour-a-potent-weapon-against-assad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/middle-east-society\/humour-a-potent-weapon-against-assad\/","title":{"rendered":"Humour: A Potent Weapon Against Assad?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u201dNo great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled.\u201d \u2013 Milan Kundera<\/em><\/p>\n

If the Lebanese don\u2019t have the blackest sense of humor of anyone in the world, they certainly have the blackest sense of humor of any nationality I\u2019m aware of. It\u2019s a coping mechanism, I\u2019m sure, and it rubbed off on me after a while. I\u2019ve found myself laughing at things in Beirut that I wouldn\u2019t have thought were remotely funny had I not spent so much time there.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never known Syrians to have a black sense of humor, but maybe they\u2019re starting to get one. (Or perhaps I\u2019ve been unaware of it until now.)<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s David Feith<\/a>\u00a0in the\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/em>:<\/p>\n

[Activists] dyed the public fountains of Damascus and Hama blood red. They scribbled anti-regime slogans on hundreds of ping-pong balls and rolled them down into the Damascene streets from a tall hill. They created phantom demonstrations by recording rallies in one city and broadcasting them from loudspeakers hidden atop buildings in another. And so they forced Assad\u2019s goons to spend time frantically draining fountains, sweeping ping-pong balls from sidewalks, and chasing imaginary street protesters.<\/p>\n

Online, activists amplified their message with darkly humorous creations such as \u201cTop Goon: Diaries of a Little Dictator,\u201d a weekly YouTube series starring a finger-puppet Assad tormented by his conscience and forced to appear on the game show \u201cWho Wants to Kill a Million?\u201d Other videos lampooned Assad\u2019s insistence that foreign \u201cinfiltrators\u201d\u2014mundas<\/em>, in Arabic\u2014are leading the uprising. In one, a toddler sported revolutionary garb and boasted of being the \u201csmallest\u00a0mundas<\/em>\u201d in all Syria.<\/p>\n

Activists also created mocking pages on Facebook. One for the \u201cHoms International Tank Wash and Lubrication Centre\u201d pretended to reflect a small-business boom created by the army\u2019s occupation of civilian neighborhoods.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But you know who\u00a0doesn\u2019t<\/em>\u00a0have a sense of humor in Lebanon? No sense of humor at all? Hezbollah. It\u2019s as humorless as the KGB during the Brezhnev era.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MICHAEL J. TOTTEN: There isn’t a lot to laugh about in Syria at the moment but try telling that to the Syrians themselves. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":15681,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[154,483,482,5,317],"tags":[982,628,114,703,39,2734,9791,18309,18330,3715,365],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15680"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15680\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}