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Lawmakers in Congress this week passed a bill to rein in the federal government’s sweeping surveillance program — both Democrats and Republicans found common ground in support of the USA Freedom Act, the first real reform of the Patriot Act since President George W. Bush signed the surveillance law 14 years ago.

Though the law represents a marked step forward, New York City Congressman Jerry Nadler says more needs to be done to protect Americans from government overreach.

"The bill, of which I’m a co-author, is a very good start — but it's only a start,” he says. “It does end most of the bulk collection of data, and it makes a number of very substantial and very positive changes. But it leaves a number of other things undone.”

Congressman Nadler says that Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, which authorizes the government to spy on the electronic communications of foreigners, also needs to be reformed.

“If someone abroad communicates with an American and we pick up that conversation or that information … you could have the backdoor spying of Americans,” he says. “We really have to rein that in to make sure that doesn’t happen, and we have such an amendment, which we will be offering to the military appropriations bill in about two weeks.”

Congressman Nadler believes that reform also goes beyond the passage of new laws. He argues that government officials need to be held accountable, especially Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who lied to US Senator Ron Wyden about the bulk collection of data during a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing on March 12, 2013.

"He was worse than disingenuous — he committed perjury and should be prosecuted," Nadler says.

Rep. Nadler says that bulk collection of data by the NSA “was a gross misinterpretation” of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, something the new law corrects.

“Under the bill we just passed, you couldn’t get a warrant at all unless you had a particularized suspicion about an individual or small group of people, and you defined that by a specific selection term — someone’s name, or perhaps a location,” he says. "We tightly defined it so it can’t be all phone calls in one zip code. You have to show a particularized suspicion.”

Congressman Nadler says lawmakers have also taken steps to target the mechanism that has allowed the NSA to keep its mass surveillance practices both secret and legal: the FISA Court.

“We made two major changes to the FISA Court,” he says. “Number one, we provided for a corps of amici — security-cleared people who will be in court and who will be privy to everything that happens in the court and whose sole function is to argue against the government when it makes a legal argument. So the court will hear from both sides for the first time — for the last 15 years it’s only heard from the government.”

“Secondly, we provide that any novel or significant opinion must be made public within a few days. Had these supervisions been in effect back in 2006 when the government said to the FISA Court that Section 2015 of the Patriot Act authorized the bulk collection of data without a court warrant, the amici would have argued against it and the court might have decided differently. Had the court decided as it did, we would have known about it in a few days, instead of having to wait until Mr. Snowden’s revelations seven years later.”

Thanks in part to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, opposition to the Patriot Act has gone from the margins to the mainstream.

“I think this [bill] is a victory for Edward Snowden,” says Congressman Nadler. “He revealed illegal, and I would say unconstitutional, actions by the government that have been secret for years. Because of his revelations, people found out about this and Congress reacted to it. We changed the law to make clear that they can’t do what they were doing.”

Not everyone celebrates Snowden, who has been accused of providing intelligence to Russian and Chinese officials. But Nadler says the leaker carried out a valuable public service on behalf of the American people.

Would he support a pardon for Snowden?

“If the facts are that all he’s revealed is what we know about, yes,” he says.

This story first aired as an interview on PRI's The Takeaway, a public radio program that invites you to be part of the American conversation.

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I met Sonita Alizadeh when she flew into town to perform her first US concert. We were talking a walk when she suddenly stopped and stared at a man playing with his two daughters.

“Here in America a dad sets aside time to take his daughters to the park,” she said. “Where I come from, you don’t see that.”

Sonita comes from Afghanistan. She’s 18-years-old, has long black hair and a small frame. If things had gone according to her parent’s plan, she’d have been married by now. “I sometimes I think about the fact that I could have been a mother right now — with a few kids. It’s not a thought I like.”

Sonita grew up in Tehran, Iran’s capital city. Her family fled Afghanistan when she was 8 years old because of war. She found a non-profit that taught undocumented Afghan kids. There she learned karate, photography, guitar, and she started singing and rapping.

Her music quickly got recognition. Sonita met an Iranian director who helped her polish up her style and make music videos, and that led to a few awards. Everything was perfect. Until it wasn’t. “One day my mom told me, ‘You have to return to Afghanistan with me. There’s a man there who wants to marry you. Your brother’s engaged and we need your dowry money to pay for his wedding.’”

Sonita was devastated. So she wrote the song "Brides for Sale." The song starts “Let me whisper, so no one hears that I speak of selling girls. My voice shouldn’t be heard since it’s against Sharia. Women must remain silent… this is our tradition.”

The video shows Sonita wearing a wedding dress — with a barcode on her forehead. Her face is bruised. She pleads with her family not sell her off.

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Sonita was worried what her parents would think about the video — but they actually loved it — and they also told her that she didn’t have to get married.

“It means so much to me that my family went against our tradition for me. Now I’m somewhere that I never imagined I could be.”

The attention around Sonita’s music landed her a full scholarship to Wasatch Academy a college prep school in Utah, and that led to the concert here in the San Francisco Bay Area. But before the show, Sonita needs to rehearse. We hop into my car and drive to nearby West Oakland.

The rehearsal studio is in a neighborhood covered in graffiti. Both sides of the street are lined with homeless people. Sonita is shocked — because it reminds her of home.

“I grew up in a neighborhood where everybody was poor and the houses were run-down,” Sonita says. “I couldn’t go outside at night because it was really dangerous. Are you telling me in America there are places where you can’t walk alone at night, too? Then where else can a person find refuge?”

Not long after the concert, Sonita read about a woman named Farkhondeh who was stoned and beaten to death in Afghanistan for allegedly burning a Koran. Sonita was heartbroken. So she did what she knew best: wrote a song about it.

“Rap music let’s you tell your story to other people. Rap music is a platform to share the words that are in my heart.”

And sometimes rap music is a way to express a sadness, an anger, that Afghan women are told they’re not supposed to show. Even though Sonita now lives over 7,000 miles away from home, she says she’ll always sing about what’s closest to her heart: The people of Afghanistan.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Without a registered birth certificate, Sonita's previously recorded age was an estimate. Since the report, background research has confirmed that the proposal was in September of 2013, when Sonita was approximately 16 years old.

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I first met Karam Al Hamad in May 2013 in the battered Syrian city of Deir al-Zor. He helped me out as a translator, guide and protector — and then as a friend.

Hamad, who now lives in Turkey, called me up last Sunday with good news: He had been accepted for a fellowship at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Public Affairs as part of its Leaders for Democracy program, which is sponsored by the US Department of State.

Hamad had picked up his visa and was booked on a flight to New York the next day.

We met up at the airport on Monday morning and stood in line for the first security check. Hamad hadn't gotten any sleep the night before. He had plenty of reasons to be anxious: Turkey is the only foreign country he's ever been to; he's has barely been on a plane; he was asked to pack a couple of suits, though he’s never really dressed up before.

But at that point, those were the least of his troubles. The US Consulate in Istanbul delivered his visa on a piece of paper from the State Department and told him he was good to go. The immigration officer at Atatürk airport wasn't so sure.

“Are you sure you don’t have any other travel document with you?” he asked.

“No,” Hamad replied. “I only have a Syrian ID. I don’t have a passport.”

“I need consult the police,” the officer said. “I need to ask them if you can get out of Turkey with this card.”

He came back a few minutes later with a stern look on his face: Hamad wasn't allowed out of Turkey wth just a US visa. We went to the airport’s police station to double-check, but the officers there said the same thing: “No passport, no flight.”

For about an hour, Hamad barely said a word. Passports seemed like his curse. Two years ago, trying to get one landed him in jail.

Hamad was only 20 when protests against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad broke out in 2011. For months, he marched in the streets of Deir al-Zour with thousands of others. Some of his friends later took up arms and joined the Free Syrian Army, but Hamad picked up a camera instead. By 2013 he was running Deir al-Zour’s media center, an activist organization that documented the war and helped foreign journalists with coverage. That’s how we met.

Like hundreds of thousands of refugees, rebels and activists, he couldn’t just show up at the Syrian passport office and apply. But there were other ways: One of his relatives on the regime side told him he could get him a passport, one that’s authentic but isn’t registered on the regime’s database.

The ploy, carried out through corrupt officials, wasn’t unusual. Hamad knew people who had gotten passports that way, and his own broker was family. It didn't seem too dangerous.

Hamad was with that same relative when the regime arrested him. The passport scam was a set-up.

Police officers took him to his house. “They barged in. I didn’t even hear them coming," remembers Hamad's brother, who was there. "I was playing the guitar. They told me to freeze and searched the house, every inch of it. They were looking for computers and hard drives and mobile phones. Then they said, '[Put on] some clothes and come with us.'”

The two brothers were taken to the local military prison. For a month, they were separated, interrogated, beaten up and interrogated again.

After a couple of weeks, Hamad found out he and his brother were on a list of 70 names given to the regime by a high school friend of his. The pair were accused of working with Mossad, Israel’s spy agency.

The charge was ludicrous, but it was also a blessing: Hamad realized the regime had no record of him as an activist. He figured his best chance was to play along with the Mossad nonsense.

“Everybody lies in jail,” says Hamad. “Most of the guys who are taken by the police are forced to confess something they didn’t do, so it was okay for me to tell them about the Mossad and not about the other stuff.”

Then the investigator asked for the names of his Israeli network.

“I told him Iker Casillas, and he started writing,” remembers Hamad. Casillas is a goalkeeper for Real Madrid, the Spanish soccer club. He then gave the name of Wesley Sneijder, another soccer player. “His name is pronounced SHH-neider, and when he heard it, he thought that guy must be Jewish. So he kept writing. I told him David Copperfield, and he wrote that name too!”

It did the trick.

Hamad says the investigators were jubilant, as if they’d cracked some big case. They sent him and his brother to Damascus, where Hamad hoped officials would see through the masquerade.

The brothers arrived in Damascus a month after their arrest. The interrogations started all over again.

The sessions weren’t as rough as in Deir al-Zour, Hamad says, but the real torture there was detention itself. He and his brother were crammed in a single room — bathroom included — that held 120 people. The inmates slept head to toe, or on top of each other. Seventy-three of them died.

“There were many kinds of dying,” Hamad said. It could be hunger, beatings, or something else. Hamad remembered one old man having a heart attack in the middle of the night.

“I knocked on the door calling the guards to come and get him out to the hospital," he said. "After an hour or more, he came and said. 'Let him lose his breath and die. You will give me his dead body with the rubbish tomorrow morning.'”

The brothers didn’t know it at the time, but their mother had moved to Damascus after their transfer. She was showing up in court everyday, camping out for hours on end in the hopes of hearing about them. She would show pictures of them to any prisoner being set free.

One day, a former cellmate recognized them and told her her sons were fine, hanging on to life in jail. She was at the court on the day last June when the judge finally dropped all charges against them.

Hamad moved to Turkey in the fall, sneaking across the border like tens of thousands of other refugees. He has been working with Syrian dissidents, but says he feels mostly powerless to change anything back home. And he’s still scarred by his time in jail. He'll try again to go to the US because, he hopes, that might help him move on.

“You might laugh, but I think it could be something like psychological treatment for me after being out of jail," he said. "I’m still shy, I’m still having bad dreams. Over there, it’s another land with other faces, other people. I don’t want to miss it."

He paused and sighed.

"I hope I won’t.”

Update: Karam made it to the Maxwell School at Syracuse University over the weekend and has already started classes. He sent us this picture posing with, and quoting, Abraham Lincoln: "I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong."

Karam told us that when he arrived at JFK Airport in New York, officials there had already heard about his story. "Guys were nice, you know, and they started asking some questions about my travel, about the story [on The World]," he said. He wasn't frightened. "Actually after four times being arrested by the Syrian regime, [those questions] would not be making me afraid."  

Karam says his stay here is not an "escape to the US. I'm here for Syria and I'm going back to Turkey after I finish this fellowship."

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Less than a year after a war in Gaza, and with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's recent Congressional speech about Iran's nuclear program ringing in their ears, you might assume national security is dominating the minds of Israeli as they prepare to vote for a new government on Tuesday.

But a recent poll by Israel's Channel 10 shows something very different: 53 percent of voters are most concerned with the cost of living in Israel and with other social issues. Only 24 percent named national security as their number one priority.

That's true even in Sderot, a city near Israel's border with Gaza that's often bombarded by rockets. As one Sderot resident told Sheera Frenkel, a Middle East correspondent for BuzzFeed News, "I’m more in danger of losing my house because I can’t pay the mortgage than losing it to a rocket fired by Hamas."

“It’s not necessarily that the Israeli economy is bad — for the very rich, it’s great,” Frenkel says. “They get tax benefits, and there’s monopolies on a lot of the big businesses, so they’re having a great time. The problem is there’s a huge disparity in Israel between the rich and the poor. That gap is growing every single year."

Many middle class Israelis say they can't afford to buy houses or send their children to better schools, and those economic troubles are spilling over into the election in a way never before seen in Israeli politics.

“It’s those people who are speaking up and saying, ‘We need our politicians to talk more about the economy’ and more in general about socioeconomic issues,’” Frenkel says. “[The Zionist Union] has been talking about socioeconomic issues for a long time now. They really capitalized on these protests that happened in Israel from 2011 to 2013 — tens of thousands took to the streets and pitched tents in some of Israel’s biggest cities to decry the cost of living here.”

Frenkel says Zionist Union — an alliance of the Labor party and Hatnua, two center-left parties — viewed those leading the protests against economic inequality as a new, younger generation of political leaders, and worked to incorporate these individuals and their ideas into their campaign.

It seems to have worked: Polls going into the election show the Zionist Union likely to win at least two more seats in the Knesset, Israel's parliament, than Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party.

“A lot of the young voters that I’m speaking to who are now going to vote for the Zionist Union are doing so because of those young leaders,” Frenkel says. “The Likud party is really just seen as Netanyahu’s party, and these elections have boiled down to Netanyahu or not Netanyahu. He is seen as someone who really supports big banks and monopolies, and someone that’s been living in three fairly luxurious homes for the last six or seven years. Israelis see him as someone who’s detached from the modern day-to-day realities that they face.”

While young voters do believe a nuclear Iran or Hezbollah and Hamas pose a threat, she says, they also want their leaders to be focusing on the rising price of everything from a bag of groceries to monthly rent.

“They see a party that’s spoken about nothing but security issues for so long,” Frenkel says. “Likud, at the very last minute, has struggled to incorporate some socioeconomic issues into its platform. But political strategists that I’ve spoken with here say that it might just be too little, too late.”

Other voters are displeased by Netanyahu's controversial address to Congress earlier this month.

“A big surprise for Netanyahu was actually how badly his speech to Congress played here in Israel,” Frenkel says. “He had a brief bump in the polls … but the average Israeli didn’t want to watch the speech to Congress and wasn’t interested. It sort of fell flat.”

She says even the voters she spoke with who did watch the speech came away unimpressed.

“They’ve heard Netanyahu speaking about this for five or six years, and overall he’s talked about the threat of a nuclear Iran even longer — for most of his political career — and nothing’s changed," she says. "What they want to hear about is what he’s going to do about taxes and the price of housing.”

This story is based on an interview from PRI's The Takeaway, a public radio program that invites you to be part of the American conversation.

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Like any successful activist group, ISIS understands its audience — its concerns, its frustrations, its motivations.

"Today, they are running probably the most effective propaganda machine out there," says Nasser Weddady, an analyst who studies ISIS and its strategy. "This is designed for millennials, designed for a certain age category."

“Feel out of place in the US or France or Germany?” ISIS asks in its promotional videos. Then join us. "What they in a sense have created is probably the most powerful global counter culture out there," Weddady says.

It's sort like another counter-culture organization that shook Americans — in the 1960s, he says: the Weather Underground, which took credit for bombings at the US Capitol in 1971 and the Pentagon in 1972.

Like the Weather Underground, Wedaddy argues, ISIS has created a cause so powerful that people would be willing to die — or kill — for it. 

"When you feel that you have right on your side, you can do some horrific things," said former Weather Underground member Brian Flanagan in a documentary,

But people who study social activism say there's another, more important link between the Weather Underground and ISIS: They're both fringe groups mostly interested in media hype and violence. The Weathermen did not change the course of history, and we have no idea if ISIS will either.

"They’re fundamentally a death cult, and, frankly, death cults are very compelling to lots of people who don’t feel like what they’re doing with their lives is worth the time they’re spending doing it," says Molly Sauter, who researches media and activism at Harvard's Berkman Center.

She argues that while ISIS is using the tools of activism to great effect, it's hardly a real activist movement. And she points out the historical context: Death cults generally make a big splash and then go away; activist movements unfold over decades, ebbing and flowing.

Right now, "we have Occupy, we have issues of income inequality, climate change, racial inequality, LGBT issues," she points out. "So we do have major movements happening on the ground and online right now. But I think that we’re not going to be able to tell the type of story that people want to tell about these movements for another 10 or 20 years, because that’s how long movements take."

Of course, it's that kind of turmoil that groups like ISIS can take advantage of.

"Sometimes I wake up on the wrong side of the bed and I feel that we’re sunk, we’re finished and that we in the West just don’t have it anymore," says Kalle Lasn, who runs Adbusters Magazine, a publication dedicated to social change.

He and the magazine are credited with spurring the Occupy movement, first in New York and then around the country. But with the Western world such a mess, he says, there’s just too much to focus on if you’re interested in changing things for the better. That gives ISIS the space to fan what he calls a “fire in the belly” among disenchanted kids.

"I can’t quite believe that human beings can have that much dynamism and that much absolute belief in the righteousness of their own cause," he said. "I think it’s this spiritual emptiness in the west that above all allows people to get excited about what ISIS is doing."

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Protester at anti-Maidan rally this weekend in Moscow sports a pro-Putin t-shirt.Charles Maynes

If the Ukraine conflict has left relations between Russian and the West tainted with distrust, this weekend's "Anti-Maidan" demonstration in Moscow was a reminder why.

The event marked one year since a pro-Western uprising in Kiev's Maidan Square toppled Ukraine's then-president, Viktor Yanukovich. 

Listening to speeches from the stage and conversations in the crowd, it was clear that Russians who attended the event have their own take on everythingthat's transpired since — and it often resembles a parallel universe to the one presented in the West. 

"Maidan is a festival of death," said Russian writer Nikolai Starikov, who clearly had a penchant for metaphor. "Maidan is a smile on the face of the American ambassador from his penthouse as he watches brother kill brother."

It was left to Vika Tsiganova, a well-known singer and a co-host of the event, to up the ante. "Maidan is the concentration of everything anti-Russian. … God help us if it comes here."

If this smacks of heavy-handed political theater, you might be right. The "Anti-Maidan movement" was formed just a few weeks ago, yet tens of thousands turned out for the televised spectacle. Many who showed up were bused in and marched in organized groups.  

Government critics say these people are essentially actors or props paid for by the Kremlin. Perhaps. But talk to the people who attended the rally and it becomes clear that if they're merely acting, they do it well.

Vladimir Koneshur from Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia says he came to show his support for Putin because "he's right." Simple as that.  

Another often-repeated theme was the idea of enemies and spies within "[Putin is] surrounded by traitors," says Vera Moroz, who then lists several top Russian cabinet members. "They're all paid by the US State Department."  

Other took issue with the West's reaction to what many Russians prefer to call "reunification" with the Crimean peninsula. "You say we should give back Crimea, but we didn't occupy it and we didn't annex it," insists Vera Kuznetsova. "Crimeans chose to be with us." She adds that Wstern sanctions have only one goal: "To destroy us." 

As for Russsia's role in east Ukraine? "Yes, we side with the separatists, but we're not fighting alongside them," says Sergei Zoldatov.

Yes, but what of Russian soldiers killed in battle? "Those are volunteers," Zoldatov says. "Volunteers."

It's statements like these that flabbergast Western leaders, who argue evidence of Russian troops on the ground in Ukraine is overwhelming. US Secretary of State John Kerry also threatened a new round of sanctions against Russia last weekend for what he says are repeated violations of the Minsk peace agreement, which nominally put a stop to conflict in east Ukraine.

"We know to a certainty what Russia has been providing to the separatists, how Russia is involved with the separatists and the ways in which Russia has cynically been willing to go to," Kerry said.

But back at the anti-Maidan rally, the talk is of punishing Washington instead. Demonstrators pose for pictures while stomping on an American flag, and some burn American money. Fake money, that is — until someone offers up the real thing.

"We're burning real American money!" shouts one man. "Ten dollars!"

"How much is that worth anyway?" he asks the crowd. The answer is it changes day to day, but definitely many times more than before this crisis started.

But that was in another reality. A year ago, before all this began.

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Many governments around the world are in a tough situation these days: They want to discourage their citizens from joining Islamist groups like ISIS, but they're not sure how to handle people who go to places like Iraq and Syria and then decide they want to come back.

Just look at Cherif and Said Kouachi, the brothers who carried out the massacre at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing a dozen people. At least one of the two men had traveled overseas for training.

"I think the French are right to be afraid," says John Horgan, who directs the Center for Terrorism and Security Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. "We are facing a problem we don't fully understand. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of foreign fighters who will want to return [to their home countries]."

But he says there is a way to figure out what those returnees are likely to do once they get home. It's definitely not mass incarceration.

"It's done, typically, by a very resource-intensive, one-on-one risk assessment, typically done by a psychologist or intelligence analyst," Horgan says. The basic idea is to figure out the person's original motivation for leaving and then reverse-engineer a way to deradicalize him.

"Were they motivated by religious or humanitarian reasons? Did they just want to get a sense of adventure fighting with ISIS? Did they want to cut people's heads off?" he says. "It's critical that we understand what pushed or pulled that person into terrorism in the first place."

Horgan says there are endless steps, and huge challenges, in resocializing former radicals. There are dozens of programs around the world right now trying to do it, but not all of them are public — or successful.

"I've seen some truly remarkable programs in Pakistan," Horgan says, "and that's saying something. We're talking about a region that's absolutely wracked by civil strife and conflict and terrorism from multiple directions."

Rather than focusing on deradicalization, Horgan says Pakistan is more concerned with reintegrating people into society.

"There is this assumption that we need to somehow undo the brainwashing that these individuals get at training camps by giving them a different kind of brainwashing … making them a model Saudi citizen or a model French citizen or whatever it might be," he says. "The Pakistanis take a very pragmatic approach, which is they try to focus on giving the individual a meaningful purpose in their lives post-jihadism."

Horgan says we all have a right to be skeptical about these programs. But something has to change, and he says there's a dawning realization that there's no way to capture or kill our way out of this problem.

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Have you heard the one about a Jew and an Arab who walk into a comedy club?

Just a week after the deadly attacks on the caricaturists at Charlie Hebdo and on Jews at a kosher supermarket, a French Muslim comic and a French Jewish comic took to the stage at Le Comedy Club in Paris — and made fun of each other.

The duo is called Younes and Bambi. Younes Depardieuis, 27, is the Arab. Samuel Djian, 22, aka Bambi, is the Jew.

They begin their act with a “shalom aleikum!” That’s a traditional Jewish greeting mashed together with a traditional Arabic greeting.

I learned about Younes and Bambi when I was in a taxi in Paris. I looked out the window and saw a poster advertising L’Arabe et l’Juif. The Arab and the Jew. In the poster they’re butting heads with their mouths open, screaming.

The comedians start off their routine like many comedians do: They ask if their peeps are in the house. Younes, of North African descent, screams out, “Algerians and Tunisians here?”

“Yeah!” A part of the crowd shouts.

“Are there Jewish people here?” Bambi asks.

“Yeah!” Another part of the crowd shouts.

France has more Arabs and Jews living alongside each other than any other country in Europe; there are about 6 million Arabs and some 600,000 Jews living in France.

Even after a week of extreme tension between the two groups, Arabs and Jews came out to the comedy club to laugh. At each other. 

The comedians are equal opportunity offenders. They start off telling the audience they’re promoting fraternité. Then they begin to rip on each other.

They had this riff on the stereotype of the Arabs who populate Paris’ rough immigrant suburbs: “Arab people are much more violent. But it’s the Jews who write the statistics and control the media. So, who cares?”

There’s a history of minorities dominating comedy in France. Growing up with a different culture makes for great material.

The French African comic Dieudonné used to perform with a Jewish comedian cracking ethnic jokes, but now he’s accused of embracing anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial in his comedy.

Dieudonné popularized the quenelle, an arm gesture seen as a sort of upside-down Nazi salute that French officials have tried to ban. He was recently arrested in France after hinting that he identified with the attacker at the kosher supermarket.

On the other end of the spectrum of minority comics in France is Jamel Debbouze. He’s of Moroccan descent and a big star. He founded Le Comedy Club to showcase new talent, especially comics from North African and Muslim backgrounds. In one bit, the comedians act out a conversation with a Moroccan hotel clerk:

“We Moroccan people are smart. Americans went to the moon? We will go to the sun, hopefully, one day.”

“You’re going to get burned, it’s so hot!”

“We are going by night, you stupid guy.”

Most of their one-liners rely on these timeworn tropes: jokes about Arabs being illiterate and dangerous and lazy, and jokes about Jews being rich doctors and lawyers.

There was even this groaner about the Jews sinking the Titanic:

“You people sunk the Titanic,” Younes says.

“It was an iceberg!” Bambi says.

“Yes,” Younes replies, “Spielberg, iceberg, Rosenberg…”

The show does touch on some sensitive subjects. There are September 11 jokes that take jabs at Arabs, and even a few Holocaust jokes. Then the act descends inexplicably into impressions of Michael Jackson, which ended up being a huge hit.

You may be wondering how the comics dealt with the elephant in the room — the recent attacks in Paris. They didn’t say a word.

Djian tells me their patron, Jamel Debbouze, advised them not to, because they’re young and trying to break into the mainstream comedy scene. They don’t want to make a wrong move.

Mohamed Mesti, 31, who laughed loudly throughout the show, said after the recent events, it felt like the right time for this kind of humor.

“It’s important to be able to laugh about Jews, Arabs, and mixed people of different backgrounds, whatever religion they are — to laugh together,” Mesti said.

He said he, as a religious Muslim, follows the example of the Prophet Mohammed.

“He had Jewish friends,” Mesti said. “It’s important to mix with Jewish people.”

After a horrific week in France — where controversial humor about the Prophet Mohammed became cause for murder — this stand-up duo gave French Muslims and Jews some comic relief.

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