Meet Andy Khouri, a showbiz writing variant on Edward Said

People with long memories may recall the case of the late Edward Said, a Columbia University professor and contributor to The Nation, not to mention an anti-Israelist, whom Prof. Justus Weiner discovered a decade ago had faked his autobiographies. Said was an Arab of Christian faith, and sadly, left-wing faith, who took the side of the Islamic entity that wants to destroy Israel and refused to recognize the Jewish inheritance of the Land of Israel.

I thought about this while looking at the works of a writer for the AOL-owned Comics Alliance named Andy Khouri, who wrote an obnoxious, unhinged rant a few months ago where he seethed with rage he probably won't admit that people like me and Warner Todd Huston would ever dare criticize his favorite other religion (which he rather predictably confuses with race) when DC Comics and British writer David Hine did their propaganda stunt in Batman, and this week has written another entry for them where he talks about a podcast they have of an interview one of their writers did with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show. His current blather is actually amusing in a sense, since it's fairly erratic as his seething apparently got the better of him. For example, he says:

Already compromised from more than a decade's worth of desperately fraudulent and cynical political cycles, unspeakably violent, wholly invented wars and ceaseless psychic attacks in the form a duplicitous media fueled by ruinous prophets masked as journalists and a relentless celebration of the depravity and wastefulness of the nouveau riche, the structural integrity of western culture had no chance of withstanding a new reality in which these two things are irrevocably true: there are people who are genuinely furious that there is a fictional Muslim person running around a fictional version of Paris wearing the grim mantle of the greatest fictional superhero, and there is a real-life person who makes a living as a "professional Batmanologist."

There are some interesting things to ponder in this part, which was surely written while steaming like a train smokestack with hatred. For example, I assume he's alluding to the war in Iraq as invented. And then, he makes it sound like 2 things at once: on the one hand, he's complaining that conservatives are up in arms about a fictional character. While the character is fictional, and even I realize that really, it's the writer who's to blame for anything wrong, he fails to consider that what we're bothered about is how he's characterized as a follower of a religion that contains verses like Sura 2:223, but which he'll probably deny. If Nightrunner were characterized as a Christian or an apostate, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Khouri even acts as though, because this is allegedly a fictional version of Paris, we're wasting our time too. How naive. It's not that simple. Whitewashing a violent religion and then appointing it the "savior" of a people it's sought to persecute is not an especially nice thing to do.

At the same time, I can't help but wonder if he's suggesting we should be worried about real Islamofascists, suggesting he really is attempting moral equivalence and contradicting his pro-Islam bias. Alas, maybe not.

At the end of the article, he even says:

Right now someone is being paid to warn us of the dangers of a fictional Muslim dressed up like a Bat. [...] ComicsAlliance is the most popular comic book website in the United States.

No kidding. I'm sure not getting paid for this, and don't want to. I'm doing this all for free, because I care about the cohesion a once great art form has lost as today's contributors succumb to political correctness, and dhimmitude. And if Comics Alliance doesn't have any visible stats on their site, I'm not sure they can lay claim to being the numero uno comics site so easily either.

I found Mr. Khouri's own website and discovered another very telling item, giving a clue what he's like: he describes a conversation with his father supposedly about a casino, and this comes up between them:

I negotiated the sea of sad bastard gamblers and old Asian waitresses with their trays-on-wheels and found my father at one of the Texas Hold ‘Em tables. Right away, he announced to his opponents that i was his son, and they quite rightly didn’t give a shit. “You know,” Dad began in his whispered I’m-About-To-Say-Something-Fucked-Up voice. “This casino is owned by a Jewish doctor—”

“Oh, God…” I moaned.

“This Jewish doctor takes all his profits and sends them to organizations in Israel that buy up Palestinian land in Jerusalem!”

“Oh, shit, really? That is pretty fucked up, I guess…”

“Pretty fucked up, huh? You’re damn right it’s fucked up!”

Wow, now that is really startling, to say nothing of foul-mouthed! Is he saying that Jews swindle money? Oh dear. I think he's alluding to Irving Moskowitz, an American Jewish businessman who owns and is developing property in eastern Jerusalem. If this tells anything, he clearly denies the Jewish right to Jerusalem, and I won't be surprised if he harbors the same ill sentiments towards Rami Levy, who thankfully secured the deal on Nof Zion.

But there's another something here that really amazes me: as Bob Spencer notes here, "khouri" is Arabic for "priest", and as I realized, Mr. Khouri, who may have lived in the UAE, is surely of a Christian background, very much like Edward Said was.

When I realized this, I almost felt sorry for him, for being a dhimmi type who would ally himself with the very religion that long-term would wish to force him to bend to their will. But not sorry enough, as he displays only so much hostility towards conservatives to boot. But it does raise a facinating mystery that's long puzzled me: why would someone as hateful of Israel as Mr. Khouri may be ever want to have anything to do with the products of the Jewish community by its members in the United States? Specifically, the comic books he reads, and that can even include Batman, whose co-creators Bob Kane and Bill Finger are Jewish too? Why would he ever want to read the works of Julius Schwartz, Stan Lee, Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster, the former who can be seen with his family in the picture above, Jack Kirby and Marv Wolfman, among plenty of others? Kirby for one, while far from being a conservative, was never hostile to Israel, nor is Wolfman, and if not, why Mr. Khouri would ever want to read their contributions to a once fine industry is beyond me. Isn't that otherwise legitimizing a society he may despise? Why indeed would he want to honor our creations by buying, reading and promoting them if he's biased against us?

I've also noticed that Mr. Khouri writes about video games at times, and wonder, if he plays games from Taito Corp, why would he want to play games from a company whose founder, Michael Kogan, was a Russian Jew, and which designed the classic Operation Thunderbolt? Like I said, isn't that legitimizing those he despises? And if Citroen, whose own founder was Jewish too, ever decides to sell their cars and trucks in the USA again, will he buy their foxy automobiles? Oh wait, if his stance on the Bat-muslim issue is any indication, he's probably so biased against the French, he wouldn't even buy from Renault, whose own founder by contrast was a traitor during WW2.

And when he signals his hate for conservatives and opponents of Islamofascism as badly as he does in the article for Comics Alliance, one can only wonder: do his negative sentiments extend towards 9-11 Families for a Safe & Strong America and the brave Debra Burlingame? Do they extend towards the Armenians who wish of Congress to recognize the genocide Turkey's Ottoman empire committed during WW1, or even the Copts persecuted by Islam in Egypt? Do they extend towards gays and lesbians who were attacked by Muslims? And, does he deny Malik Nidal Hasan's own actions stemmed from devout worship of the RoP?

Why someone with leftist opinions as venomous as Mr. Khouri's got would ever remain one of comicdom's most stalwartly reliable customers is beyond me, but like I said, it's one of life's biggest mysteries.

Mr. Khouri's done people like me and Warner Todd Huston as much an honor by calling us "right-wing racists" as the Daily KOS has for Pamela Geller by calling her the same, while simultaneously suggesting he cannot distinguish between religion and race. Imagine that, and after all I wrote in past years where I tried to help slaves in Africa, including Egypt, by writing about their horrifying situation...and people like Mr. Khouri simply cannot appreciate it. A real shame. But that's the sad world of leftism, where they spend much of the time with their heads in the sand.

And if that's how he's going to act, maybe that's why someday, I should buy a house in Nof Zion.

On a side note, I'd like to say that, while Comics Alliance does have a few writers who're okay and decent, for the most part, they're just not worth it, and are little different from Comic Book Resources, which is just as knee-jerk in their support for industry establishment, not to mention boilerplate leftist. So I really don't see much need to bother about them for the most part.