Posted on 02/27/2013 4:45:34 PM PST by nickcarraway
Salafist Muslims tried to prevent the filming of current Internet craze the "Harlem Shake" at a Tunis school on Wednesday, but were driven off after coming to blows with students, a correspondent said.
When the dozen or so ultra-conservative Muslims, some of them women in veils, showed up at the Bourguiba Language Institute in the El Khadra neighbourhood, a Salafist bastion, students shouted "Get out, get out!"
One of the Salafists, wearing military gear and carrying a Molotov cocktail he never used, shouted "Our brothers in Palestine are being killed by Israelis, and you are dancing."
The Islamists eventually withdrew, and the students were able to film their production.
On Monday, Education Minister Abdellatif Abid said a probe had been ordered into a staging two days earlier of a "Harlem Shake" by students in a Tunis suburb.
He said there could be expulsions of students or sacking of educational staff who were behind the staging of the dance.
In response, the ministry's website was hacked and a call went out on social media for the staging of a mega Harlem Shake in front of the ministry on Friday.
The incidents come as more and people around the world emulate the craze, which was sparked by a group of Australian teenagers who uploaded a 31-second clip "The Harlem Shake v1 (TSCS original)" onto YouTube earlier this month.
It has since been viewed millions of times.
Video footage, which shows participants smoking, dancing wildly in uncoordinated manner and simulating sexual acts, has spread on the Internet, with dozens of different versions attracting millions of views.
The Saturday version was purportedly staged by students from Menzah 6 district in a school compound, with some in shorts and others wearing fake beards and tunics showcasing the Salafists (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSDJJsvzpbY).
The Islamist movement has carried out a wave of attacks in the past year, including on cultural festivals and Sufi shrines.
In June, Salafists destroyed works of art exhibited in a chic suburb of Tunis which they considered "blasphemous."
That incident sparked clashes across the country that saw police stations and political party offices torched, in some of the worst violence since the January 2011 revolution that toppled president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
The secular opposition regularly accuses Tunisia's ruling Islamist party Ennahda of allowing a slow Islamisation of the society.
The education minister is a member of Ettakatol, a centre-left secular ally of Ennahda.
I swear, they ought to rename it the "Electrified Zombie."
Thanks nickcarraway.
Oh man, am I GLAD I gave up “General Business” (Music for weddings and parties etc) and just teach guitar and piano now.
As if the “Electric Slide’ and the “Chicken Dance’ weren’t bad enough, now there’s “The Harlem Shake”!
This thing makes “The Macarena” look like the Bolshoi Ballet!
OK, I am an old fogey, but this whole thing baffles me. First of all, it’s not really a dance, it’s just simulated intercourse. Slyfox, did people really do this at a wedding??? Wow, we really are reverting to being savages.
And, since this is basically wild, um, humping, kind of like what a small dog does to one’s leg, and it’s called the Harlem Shake, isn’t this considered to be racist? Whoever created this fad is implying that the denizens of Harlem behave like animals. Am I missing something here? I think the whole thing is one more sign of the decline of civilization.
The only good thing is that the Muzzies are fighting each other over it.
When the music first came I asked my brother, the father of the bride, what it was. He said it was the "Harlem Shake - something they found on the Internet." I said, because no one had moved yet, "How are they going to dance to this?" The music is really weird. Then all of a sudden they began to dance in place as if they were zombies and somebody plugged them into a 220 light socket. They liked it so much they got the DJ to play it two more times.
Needless to say, I did not get up to dance.
To borrow the term from Blazing Saddles, they look like a bunch of “Kansas City Faggots.”
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