You think the Barack Obama one has the least comic potential, until you look at it for a little while longer. Also, when Rudolph Giuliani eats a piece of pizza, he picks it up with a napkin. He stoops to conquer, ladies and gentlemen.

It’s because of quality political analysis like this that the Brooks Caliphate received its one thousandth visitor yesterday. Thanks to complex internet traceroutes, I know that it was this guy.

He’s not actually burning anything in protest, by the way. He’s just standing in Kabul.

Because of the theme of this blog and my attempts to keep up with old classmates from the UW-M Mufti Studies program (Go Badgers! Go burn in the fires of hell, for you are unclean!) I look at a lot of Google Image Search pictures of public protests in the Middle East. I have also been known, in lazier moments, to type the words “Angry Muslim” into said image search. Every time I do, the same guy comes up. I feel that I can say with some authority that this man has become something of a celebrity among people who look for pictures of angry muslims for their blogs. Here he is again.

Notice that he’s wearing different clothes, out kicking ass on a different day for a different reason. (I like to think that the crowd of young men at left are demanding that their government tell them what a boob feels like.) I have seen this photo—which also appears in the banner atop Misanthropy Today, a blog by a guy I don’t know who wrote a nice comment about my review of the Darjeeling Limited—variously attributed to the Danish Cartoon Freakout, a burning of the Pope in effigy, and the Sudanese Teddy Bear Crisis. First of all, that’s some shoddy journalism, blogosphere. I know you’ve heard this before. Second of all, let’s be honest: when you see a picture of angry guys in the Third World lighting shit on fire and screaming because they read a 1300 year-old book written by God and then applied it to something they saw on television, don’t you file it under “assholes, religious” and sort of move on? Like the way Puerto Ricans look to your grandfather, pictures of angry foreign mobs all sort of look the same.

Here’s our man again, still angry. He’s shaved his mustache and he appears to have changed his haircut a little, but you can tell it’s him because of his eye teeth—they kind of flare out in front of his front teeth a little. It’s hard to tell from a picture, but the type of trees in the background and the quality of light suggest that all three of these photos were taken in different places. During my childhood in the the Iowa’an desert, we had a guy named Bill Horn who used to travel around protesting abortion clinics, liberal churches and funerals of gay dudes throughout the lower Midwest. Is the man we see above the Middle-Eastern Bill Horn? Has he made a life out of getting freaked out over what he sees in the news every day, then screaming as loud as he can about it until someone takes his picture? 

If that’s the case, he seems a lot less scary. I’m going to make a bold statement here and say that religious people who protest in the streets in response to cartoons, Papal speeches and other things they see on cable news shows are generally A) dumb and B) not in positions of enormous influence within the governments of their respective countries. Fox News does a great job of showing us the Arabic equivalent of Appalachian hicks screaming for our blood every night, but can those people really do anything about it? When I started this blog, Ben al-Fowlkes joked that I would receive a ticking package in the mail after about six days. But you know what the best thing about mocking religious people is? They most effective plan they can come up with for getting you back is to pray. As a thought experiment, I would like to issue a formal challenge to the man pictured throughout this blog post: Find me. Mail me a letter that tells me your name Just to give you some incentive, I’ll go ahead and insult you:

I mock your value system. Your manner of dress or comportment is comical to me. I have had sexual intercourse with your spouse or significant other.

Now it’s on.