There are some brave souls in the film industry. They just aren’t getting huge budgets and lucrative distribution deals from Hollywood’s current crop of dhimmi-embracing power brokers. In fact, they aren’t in Hollywood at all. They’re in Britain.

Some British filmmakers have decided that satire and laughter are a good way to go after the Islamic supremacists in their midst. The reborn Libertas (LFM) web journal describes two such projects, Four Lions and The Infidel.

In addition to being good medicine, laughter can be a form of resistance. Ben Lewis made this point in his 2006 documentary Hammer and Tickle. Even if folks tell jokes just to let off steam, in a Communist country that had very serious consequences. Lewis notes, in this 2006 Prospect article,

Perhaps the most emblematic story of the joke-as-resistance is a report of the prosecution of a joke-teller in Czechoslovakia in 1967, which I found in the archives of Radio Free Europe, the anti-communist cold war broadcaster. An arriving refugee brought the news that a worker in a liquor factory had been arrested for telling the following joke: Why is the price of lard not going up in Hungary? So that the workers can have lard on bread for their Sunday lunch.

Lewis recognizes that jokes were often co-opted by Soviet leadership, but the humor, as bad as it might have been sometimes, did erode support for that tyrannical system. Lewis concludes,

Jokes may not have carried the weight of the great forces which ended communism, but they were more than mere figures of speech. Jokes kept alive in the minds of the citizens of the Soviet bloc the idea of an alternative reality, and they made light of four decades of occupation of eastern and central Europe.

In the same manner, movies like Four Lions and The Infidel keep alive, for Muslims and non-Muslims alike, “the idea of an alternative reality” to that which Islamic supremacists threaten, through bullets, bombs, and beheadings, to impose on the world.

Those who suffered under communism had a ‘mere’ four decades of evil to mock. Those living under the oppression imposed by Islamic law have centuries of experience with it. It is nice to see some brave filmmakers finally take on the task of satirizing this evil. As Govindini Murty writes at LFM,

Movies like The Infidel and Four Lions . . .  show that, at least in the U.K., the indie film world is starting to open-up to treating Islamic radicalism with the derision that it deserves.

Check out the trailers and judge for yourself.