Posted in: Comics, Recent Updates | Tagged: Batman, david hine, dc, islam, muslim

The Batman Islam Wars Turns Up A Notch

Published Thu, 30 Dec 2010 07:00:03 -0600

Last updated Fri, 10 May 2013 06:54:20 -0500

So the Batman franchise runner in Paris, France is an young man of Algerian Muslim descent. How did DC expect the blogosphere to react?

Warner Todd Huston wrote;

Unfortunately, readers of Batman will not be helped to understand what troubles are really besetting France. In this age when Muslim youths are terrorizing the entire country, heck in this age of international Muslim terrorism assaulting the whole world, Batman's readers will be confused by what is really going on in the world. Through it all DC makes a Muslim in France a hero when French Muslims are at the center of some of the worst violence in the country's recent memory.

It's PCism run amuck, for sure.

Avi Green wrote;

How about that, Bruce Wayne goes to France where he hires not a genuine French boy or girl with a real sense of justice, but rather, an "oppressed" minority who adheres to the Religion of Peace. And this is a guy whose very parents were murdered at the hands of a common street thug!

I'm guessing that the writer, David Hine, is taking out his leftist anger on France for finally taking steps to fight back against creeping shariah and Islamic supremacism, by banning the niqab for starters.

While Angry White Dude told us;

Nightrunner? I thought it was written in the Koran that every Muslim's name has to be Muhammad…including women. Or is that just the savage terrorists? Or is that redundant? Nightrunner the Muslim sidekick will have strange new powers to bury women to their waists and bash their heads in with large rocks. Batman has been needing that skill for a while ever since Catwoman went out to check the mail without wearing her cat burqa. Well, I guess AWD will have to go another 49 years without reading Batman comic books to protest!

And now comic book creator Bosch Fawstin has responded with his own comic book take on the situation.

Fawstin states;

I personally don't think Batman is built to take on butchers like al Qaeda, since DC Comics thinks having Batman kill would kill the character. (Heroes don't kill? What of our heroic soldiers?) But I sure as hell don't think Batman should be used to sell the Big Lie that "Islam means peace." And, believe it or not, this is the second time in two months that Batman has been used in Islamic propaganda, the first being in the unreadable JLA/the 99 #1. At this rate, Superman converting to Islam is inevitable.

Well, David Hine, writer/creator of Nightrunner talked to Emma Houxbois back in November, saying;

"Rather than use the obvious choice of The Musketeer as the new French Batman, I wanted to come up with the kind of hero I would want to see in a comic book if I were French. The process of developing a story is complex and there are all kinds of things I looked at. The urban unrest and problems of the ethnic minorities under Sarkozy's government dominate the news from France and it became inevitable that the hero should come from a French Algerian background. The Parkour element was maybe a little obvious, but it fitted very well with the concept of a hero from the streets. Clichy-Sous-Bois, as you point out, is the flashpoint for rioting in Paris, so again was the obvious location for Bilal."

Death And Taxes runs through the origin of the character – which seems miles away from that features in the previous blogs. Possibly because Death And Taxes has read the comics in question.

Nightrunner's story goes like this: raised by a single mother in Clichy-Sous-Bois, he and his friends remained, to use his word, "neutral" in the ongoing clashes between their Muslim neighbors and French police. On day, however, Bilal and best pal Aarif got caught in the crossfire, leading to increased anger within them both.

Though Bilal swore not to take revenge, Aarif decided otherwise, and torched a police station an incident that led to his death, which only inflamed protests. It was then that Bilal began practicing Parkour, or free-running, and listening to a peace-mongering Muslim singer named Leni, who inspires him to take up the Nightrunner mantle.

He knows the danger, but it's for the greater good of the nation he loves. "Even if stopping these murders damns me," he says, "doing nothing damns everyone else." Like a true hero, Nightrunner realizes he has to risk life and limb to save his nation from civil war.

Thus, he begins to track down the Le Portail D'or (the Golden Portal) cult, which has been programming people to assassinate key political leaders—a Marxist union organizer, a white supremacist and a Muslim diplomat—to spark social unrest. "I have taken murder and purified it. Peace will come through violence," the cult's leader tells another crime fighter, lesbian hero The Question, whom Batman also recruits to take down the assassins. The team, including Nightrunner, is ultimately successful.

The site concludes that;

Right-wing anger over Nightrunner's introduction isn't based solely in anti-Islam attitudes, nor is it only about how DC eschewed a native—read: white —Frenchman. It's based in an increasingly firm belief that only natives know what's best for their country. Outsiders, real or imagined, can't uphold a nation's particular ideals.

Though Bilal swears his allegiance to France, and will defend its honor at all costs, to right wingers, he's still an impotent stand-in for a "real hero." Such a concept helps explain conservative opposition to the defeated DREAM Act, which would have allowed children of illegal immigrants to gain citizenship by either enlisting in the military or enrolling in college, two moves that would ultimately benefit the United States.