There is this video that has been circulating Facebook for the past couple of hours where a number of actors, pretend to be ‘Fasting Police’, and prank citizens who are not fasting.
Here is what happened. One of the actors walked around with a mic attached, acting as an undercover policeman. He then started arresting people who were either eating, drinking or smoking just because they were not fasting for whatever reason. He kept interrogating them and asking them aggressively for their reasons to not fast, thinking that it was funny, but in reality, it wasn’t.
This prank received lots and lots of negative feedback, and it’s totally justified. What is even worse, having social media platforms like dotmasr post this video in their news section as if it’s normal, while it is not.
If anything at all, this prank should be stopped and here is why
#1: Everyone has the right to freedom, so even if they don’t have a valid excuse for not fasting, no one should judge them, let alone make a joke out of them and pretend to arrest them.
#2: The way he treated those people when in disguise was so demeaning and indecent.
#3: For a prank to be nice, it has to be funny and interesting. But this one is neither! It is the exact opposite.
#4: Such prank encourages people and gives them the right to invade others’ privacy, judge them and act the way they want, which kind of takes us a couple of steps backward to the 19th century maybe.
#5: Adding to point #4, it’s as if you’re teaching people to be violent if they disagree with the beliefs/attitudes of another free person.
Trying to be creative and providing people with funny content is nice, but what is not so nice is encouraging violence, invasion of privacy, being judgemental and disrespectful of different beliefs or points of view. If we want to be as developed as we say we would like to be, then maybe we should start by respecting others, irrespective of their beliefs and actions.
