THE CUTTING EDGE: Peace Between Arabs, Jews On One Point: Qaddafi Is Cuckoo
Arabs and Jews can agree on one thing, reports The New York Times - a YouTube remix by Israeli journalist Noy Alooshe that mercilessly ridicules Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s speech in which he vows to hunt down protesters “inch by inch, house by house, home by home, alleyway by alleyway”:
“He was dressed strangely, and he raised his arms” like at a trance party, Mr. Alooshe said in a telephone interview on Sunday. Then there were Colonel Qaddafi’s words with their natural beat.
Mr. Alooshe spent a few hours at the computer, using Auto-Tune pitch corrector technology to set the speech to the music of “Hey Baby,” a 2010 electro hip-hop song by American rapper Pitbull, featuring another artist, T-Pain. He titled it “Zenga-Zenga,” echoing Col. Qaddafi’s repetition of the word zanqa, Arabic for alleyway.
By the early hours of Wednesday morning Mr. Alooshe had uploaded the remix to YouTube, and began promoting it on Twitter and Facebook, sending the link to the pages of young Arab revolutionaries. By Sunday, the original clip had more than 400,000 hits and had gone viral. …
Surfers soon discovered that he was a Jewish Israeli from his Facebook profile - Mr. Alooshe plays in a band called Hovevey Zion, or the Lovers of Zion - and some of the accolades turned to curses. A few also found the video distasteful.
But the reactions have largely been positive, including a personal message Mr. Alooshe said he received from someone he assumed to be a Libyan saying that if and when the Qaddafi regime falls, the liberated Libyans would dance to Zenga-Zenga. …
As one surfer wrote in an Arabic talkback early Sunday, “What’s the problem if he’s an Israeli? The video is still funny.” He signed off with the international cyber-laugh, “Hahaha.”
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