“Our intention was to be satirical”

This is preposterous: to the best of my knowledge, no Iraqi has EVER wished death upon Jews, lusted after Japanese schoolgirls, shunned regular bathing, or been intimate with a quadruped. What were they thinking?

an official for the Clear Channel Communications station, KFI-AM, said she would read an apology on the air for the March 10 broadcast by morning-show host Bill Handel, which triggered the Federal Communications Commission complaint.

“The Handel show was attempting to make a satirical point about the extremist Iraqis in Iraq (news – web sites),” KFI Program Director Robin Bertolucci told Reuters. “In the process, we unwittingly offended a lot of people, and for that we are very sorry. That was not our intention. Our intention was to be satirical.” [Reuters]

Oh, you didn’t mean it literally.

Sabiha Khan, a spokeswoman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said her group filed the complaint after KFI and Handel initially refused to apologize.

“We’re tired of being stepped all over and being made fun of over airwaves,” she said. “No American should ever have to take this type of treatment.”

The skit featured Handel with an unnamed performer who put on a mock-Middle Eastern accent to pose as an “Islamic constitutional scholar” and read from the “new Iraqi constitution.”

According to the fake scholar one section of that document read simply: “death to the Jews, death to the Jews, death to the Jews.”

Another part, he said, granted Iraqi men 72 virgins when they entered heaven, adding: “the virgins, however, will not be hairy Iraqi women but lovely Japanese schoolgirls.”

A third section banned Western teachings from the country, including “the infidel custom of bathing on a regular basis.”

And the performer said Section 9 of the document read: “All homosexual marriages are expressly prohibited and are punishable by death. However consenting civil unions between Iraqis and loving camels and goats will be recognized.”

I don’t think this was very good “satire” when such broad stereotyping of Muslims was involved: there certainly wasn’t anything particular to Iraq or their actual new constitution, and broad stereotypes serve very little purpose other than to denigrate. Imagine if the target of such a broad attack had been black or Jewish – damn, I sound like the Council on American-Islamic Relations. But this time the complaint is legitimate – they could have done the exact same skit using Osama bin Laden as the target rather than generic Iraqis and no one would have complained.