A Lebanese Political Satirist With Hezbollah Among His Targets

In my previous post, I mentioned a Lebanese political satirist and his comment on Lebanese media freedom. The NYTimes has an interesting profile on him. Here is an excerpt from the very end of the article:

Mr. Khalil, who cites Woody Allen and Mel Brooks as two of his chief influences, concedes that satire is not a very powerful weapon in a country where politics is still largely a matter of feudal allegiance. But he seems willing to settle for making people laugh.

“When we first started, all this was new, and people resisted it,” he said. “But I discovered that people here are not so different from Europe and the United States. They accept political satire.”

I thought it was interesting that two of his big influences are American Jews.