General

Finding Comedy in the Muslim World

For all the seriousness of the charges, the trial of Momin Khawaja has provided some moments of great hilarity. A lot of it comes from the attempts by the  Crown attorneys and Justice Rutherford to come to grips with the peculiar mix of hip-hop and jihad that is emerging from the emails of MMK to the main witness, Mohammed Babar.

Early in the day, Rutherford expressed a certain amount of confusion over the meaning of the word “nigga”:

After the e-mail was presented in court, Judge Douglas Rutherford noted that the references to niggas “seem to cover a broad ambit.”

Mr. Babar told the judge that it’s a slang word whose use is difficult to explain: “In one sense, niggas means everyone involved,” he testified. “But to understand which niggas are niggas, you have to know the people and understand from the email who he was referring to.”

The judge replied: “That clears up how unclear it is.”

While the defence does not question the authenticity of the emails, one possible point of  contention is over the meaning of some of the coded terms used. In his testimony  Babar gave his interpretation of the coded messages contained in the emails. For example, “porn vid” = terrorist training video, “Yahoodiland” = Israel. The day ended with this exchange, beginning with the reading of the quoted passage from a final email:

From Khawaja to Babar: “next time, nigga, I’ll make sure to get your Mountain Dew ahead of time. I’ll bring some in December. inshallah. Keep in touch. Yas.”
Asked by Crown attorney Bill Boutzouvis what ‘Mountain Dew’ means, the U.S.-raised Mr. Babar said it means Mountain Dew. “I like Mountain Dew,” he said, explaining it it wasn’t available in Pakistan.

I swear, these guys should be given their own talk show.

From Andrew Duffy

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