Anti-ISIS Satire Lampoons Militant Group's Hypocrisy

Published November 10, 2014 at 5:06 PM EST

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

Throughout the day, you've been hearing this headline about ISIS - U.S. airstrikes targeted key commanders of the militant extremist group over the weekend. It's not clear who was killed or wounded in those attacks. Now, this is a pretty serious subject - ISIS. But in parts of the Middle East, they're also the subject of ridicule.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Singing in foreign language).

MARWAN KRAIDY: I became aware of anti-ISIS is parody through Twitter mainly. So there's videos. There are the TV shows. There are all kinds of digital compositions online.

CORNISH: Marwan Kraidy is a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication.

KRAIDY: I have been writing and studying Arab media and politics for about 15 to 20 years.

CORNISH: We asked Professor Kraidy to walk us through some examples of anti-ISIS satire, and we'll start with a show that's produced by the Iraqi government which is fighting the militants on multiple fronts. The show's title translates as "State Of Myths."

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "STATE OF MYTHS")

KRAIDY: It is set up like a musical so it reminds me of older Lebanese or Egyptian musical where you have an entire village - a very diverse cast of people. You have a young man smoking shisha in a cafe and suddenly Mr. al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliphate - the head of ISIS - is hatched from an egg.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "STATE OF MYTHS")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (Singing in foreign language).

CORNISH: Al-Baghdadi, (laughter) like, with his arms spread triumphantly coming out of a tiny, like - looks like a bird's egg.

KRAIDY: And so here you go - what you do is the commander of the faithful - this gigantic, super important character becomes a tiny hatchling. A couple of minutes further, the caliph takes out his guns. He shoots all his men. He shoots his own fighters, and at the end, he runs out of people to kill. He - there's this kind of apotheosis where he blows himself up, and the scene ends.

CORNISH: The criticism here is at the blood-thirstiness of ISIS. And do you get the sense that this is something that's happening 'cause people are afraid or is there an attempt here to - again, this is just Iraqi government propaganda trying to minimize the problem?

KRAIDY: I think people are very afraid. And this is, I think, where parody is very important because if you listen to the interviews that the writer, the director, some of the actors in that specific show gave, all of them said we want our children to feel better. We want our children to be less afraid. And in a way, this is how parody works, right? So you have the original. You have this very scary thing called ISIS. And what you do - you create a funny copy of it. And between the original and the copy, you have a gap, right? People see the two images. And within that gap, what you do is you explore the hypocrisies - the gap between what ISIS claims to be and what it is in fact or what people - the way people perceive it to be.

CORNISH: And as we move further into the show, tell us what people are saying. There's a lot of scenes here.

KRAIDY: So one of the scenes - the caliph is holding a press conference.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "STATE OF MYTHS")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS: (Foreign language spoken).

KRAIDY: There's a foreign journalist - it's actually one journalist. The caliph is sitting. She's facing him, and she asks him, did you slaughter a sheep in my honor, because in some parts of the Arab world if you have an important guest, you slaughter a sheep. And he was very surprised. He said, a sheep? I slaughtered 300 men in your honor.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "STATE OF MYTHS")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (Foreign language spoken).

KRAIDY: And so one of the things that the parodies do is it portrays ISIS as this global death cult. They're like a third warrior, a third religious fanatics and a third pirates or ninjas - these really weird creatures. You never know what to expect when they show up in a town. You know, you can get killed for smoking a cigarette, and this is something that all the parodies seem to mention.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO, "KURDISH TV PARODY OF ISIS")

CORNISH: Not all of the anti-ISIS satires are coming from official sources, right? Things also show up on YouTube, and in particular, we have an example here - a Kurdish music video.

KRAIDY: Yes. It aired on a satellite channel which means a lot of people throughout the region could watch it.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO, "KURDISH TV PARODY OF ISIS")

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: (Singing in foreign language).

CORNISH: Let's talk about the images here. We have these guys with these giant, obviously fake beards and they're wearing flak jackets or camo jackets just filled with weapons.

KRAIDY: Yes. They're singing, you know, we will bring the past into the present. They're saying things - we are stupid - we are dirty. And they're dancing in a kind of a very grotesque way. And what that does - I think the reason that's very important is - so ISIS claims its own definition is heroic. They even claim to be sacred when they start speaking in the name of Islam. And what you do here - what anti-ISIS parodies do is they move the image from the domain of the heroic to the grotesque.

CORNISH: Marwan, I want to go to one last parody, and this one actually is Palestinian.