Bono Has Isis Solution: Send In The Clowns

The U2 singer Bono told the Senate subcommittee in Washington that if you laughed at the extremists, it took away their power

Bono has Isis solution: send in the clowns

What a fucking bellend ...

The U2 singer Bono has unveiled his solution to the Isis threat: halt military action and deploy comedy instead.

The 55-year-old singer was giving evidence in front of a Senate subcommittee in Washington when he made his suggestion that comedians such as Sacha Baron Cohen, Amy Schumer and Chris Rock be employed as comedic stormtroopers to ridicule the jihadists.

“Don’t laugh,” he told the panel of American politicians. “I think comedy should be deployed. It’s like, you speak violence, you speak their language. But you laugh at them, when they’re goose-stepping down the street, and it takes away their power. So, I’m suggesting that the Senate send in Amy Schumer and Chris Rock, and Sacha Baron Cohen, thank you.”

Bono went onto insist that he was “being serious”, to which one politician said that the US government was indeed considering such a strategy.

“Actually, that’s not the first time I’ve heard experts on how do we counter violent extremism talk about that,” said Jeanne Shaheen, the Democrat senator for New Hampshire. “It’s one of the things that we’re looking at.”

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Bono, who co-founded the international advocacy group ONE, was advocating for a “Marshall plan” style aid programme for the Middle East.

“When aid is structured properly, with a focus on fighting poverty and improving governance, it could just be the best bulwark we have against the extremism of our age,” the rock star and anti-poverty campaigner testified to the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that oversees foreign aid.

Previous western government attempts to undermine the appeal of Isis have met limited success. A State department campaign on social media called “Think Again, Turn Away” was started in December 2013 but was widely ridiculed and indeed parodied in the Middle East.

The French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was attacked last year by al-Qaeda linked extremists after it printed satirical cartoons mocking terrorists and depicting the Prophet Muhammad. The images also offended many mainstream Muslims. Twelve people died in the attack.

Recent opinion polls suggest that Isis may already be doing much to undermine its own appeal – at least in the Middle East.

A poll of attitudes among young people across the region, published on Tuesday, showed that support for the group is plunging.

The annual poll by the public relations firm ASDA’A Burson-Marsteller, showed 80 per cent of respondents saying they would never support Isis, even if it renounced its brutal tactics. A year ago the figure was 60 per cent.

More than half the 3,500 respondents aged 18 to 24 said that Isis was the number one problem facing the Middle East. Three quarters said they believed the group would fail in its quest to establish a “caliphate”.

Attitudes to the West were more finely balanced. Sixty per cent of respondents overall saw the US as an ally – with most positive views coming from the Gulf states. Nine out of ten Iraqis regard the US as an enemy, with strong opposition also recorded in Yemen, and more than half of Lebanese youth see America as a foe.


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