Ansari comes out swinging against Trump’s hate-mongering.
AB Wire
Comedian, actor and director Aziz Ansari, the creator of ‘Master of None’ on Netflix, is afraid for his family under a Donald Trump presidency, and has accused the Republican Party presumptive nominee of creating a dangerous environment for American Muslims with his “vitriolic and hate-filled” campaign rhetoric.
“It’s visceral, and scary, and it affects how people live, work and pray,” Ansari wrote in a New York Times op-ed. “It makes me afraid for my family.”
Ansari, the son of Muslim immigrants, wrote that the current political climate creates “a strange feeling that you must almost prove yourself worthy of feeling sad and scared like everyone else” after a terrorist attack like the one in Orlando.
Trump’s remarks that Muslim Americans should do more to police their own communities, Anzari wrote, implied “that millions of innocent people are somehow complicit in awful attacks. Not only is this wrongheaded; but it also does nothing to address the real problems posed by terrorist attacks.”
In a June 13 speech in New Hampshire, his first after the Orlando nightclub massacre, Trump largely pinned the responsibility for the December San Bernardino terror attack on the killers’ Muslim neighbors, reported CNN.
“They didn’t turn them in,” Trump said, “and we had death and destruction.”
In his op-ed, Ansari dismissed those suggestions, cheekily arguing that, by Trump’s logic, “after the huge financial crisis of 2007-08, the best way to protect the American economy would have been to ban white males.”
Ansari points out that there are approximately 3.3 million Muslim Americans.
He writes: “I asked a young friend of mine, a woman in her 20s of Muslim heritage, how she had been feeling after the attack. “I just feel really bad, like people think I have more in common with that idiot psychopath than I do the innocent people being killed,” she said. “I’m really sick of having to explain that I’m not a terrorist every time the shooter is brown.”
Ansari also recounts a personal anecdote, after the 9/11 attacks.
“…A few months after the attacks of Sept. 11, I remember walking home from class near N.Y.U., where I was a student. I was crossing the street and a man swore at me from his car window and yelled: “Terrorist!” To be fair, I may have been too quick to cross the street as the light changed, but I’m not sure that warranted being compared to the perpetrators of one of the most awful incidents in human history.”
He writes: “According to reporting by Mother Jones, since 9/11, there have been 49 mass shootings in this country, and more than half of those were perpetrated by white males. I doubt we’ll hear Mr. Trump make a speech asking his fellow white males to tell authorities “who the bad ones are,” or call for restricting white males’ freedoms.
1 Comment
Of course it’s always a white man’s fault, right?