New Qatari Comedy Show Imagines BDS Caring About Arab Slavery

“It’s a realm no one has really ventured into before, and that’s what provides the whole comic gestalt.”

Doha, August 4 – Producers of a new series slated for the Al-Jazeera network hope to make audiences laugh with the absurd premise that the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement might target countries other than Israel with its righteous outrage.

Al-Jazeera picked up the contract to air a pilot and at least three episodes of “BDS,” which takes place in an alternative reality where the activists who work so hard to demonize Israel for real or imagined violations of Palestinian rights show some consistency and employ similar strategies to pressure the far more egregious human rights offenses of Arab states.

Producers Dissis Absourd and Fatt Chanss, both of Egypt, pitched the series to the network this past spring, and aim to explore the outrageous notion of Social Justice Warriors who care about human rights when a Western democracy is not involved, and when the cause does not lend itself to antisemitism hiding unconvincingly behind opposition to Israeli policies.

“We were sitting together one day last September and brainstorming, and Dissis said to me, ‘What would happen if people actually cared about the values they claimed to care about?'” recalled Chanss. “First we discussed nuclear disarmament, the environment, and Russian imperialism, but none of those topics had the emotional resonance we were looking for. Then I threw out the idea of human rights activists showing actual courage to go as far in combating Arab countries’ flagrant crimes – just as a joke; it was too absurd, you know? – and then boom. We knew we had something.”

According to Absourd, the first season will mainly explore the world of what amounts to modern-day slavery in the oil-rich countries of the Persian Gulf, with occasional forays into the human trafficking and sexual slavery prevalent in Egypt. “It’s a realm no one has really ventured into before, and that’s what provides the whole comic gestalt,” he explained. “The first couple of network representatives we spoke to at Al-Jazeera didn’t understand at first. They just stared. But a few moments later the penny dropped, and security came rushing into the room because they got spooked by the executives’ howls of laughter. I knew then we had the contract in the bag.”

The series will star several relative unknowns in the Middle Eastern entertainment industry, but the producers voiced confidence that quality alone will carry the day. “We all need some escapist fantasy once in a while,” offered Absourd. “It’s not as if the region we live in is a worker’s paradise, or a paradise of any sort.”