Meet your newest nemesis, Batman: the right-wing American blogosphere.
First, a little back story. In the December issues of the Batman comics, the superhero has set up Batman Incorporated to recruit an ally in cities across the globe, the AFP reports.
Enter Nightrunner — the alter ego of Bilal Asselah — the 22-year-old Muslim son of immigrants who seeks to make things right in his riotous neighborhood of Paris. He’s trained in parkour acrobatics, and his Muslim upbringing encourages him to reject hate and fear.
But the right-wing blogosphere can be a superstitious and cowardly lot — and Nightrunner is a creature who strikes terror into their hearts.
“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,” wrote Warner Todd Huston on Publius Forum.
And you thought the right wing freak out over a black actor playing a Norse god in the upcoming Thor movie was bad. But wait, there’s more.
“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,” an anonymous author wrote on the blog Angry White Dude.
And another: “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,” wrote Avi Green at The Astute Bloggers. “And this is a guy whose very parents were murdered at the hands of a common street thug!”
While critics claim the Batman series has submitted to political correctness, the author of the comics, David Hine, told Death and Taxes he simply wanted “to come up with the kind of hero I would want to see in a comic book if I were French.”
