Watch Samantha Bee Explain Just How Dumb Islamophobia Is
In Monday's episode of Full Frontal, Samantha Bee visited Dearborn, Michigan, to quell two misconceptions about Muslims: that they hate America and that they aren't doing anything to combat terrorism.
Bee spoke with Kassam Ali, the leader of the largest mosque in America, and police officer Mike Jaafar, and learned that American Muslims have continuously been working with authorities on combatting extremism.
The segment also showed an infographic of known sources of terrorism from 2001 to 2015. It revealed that the American Muslim community has given nearly three times more tips to the U.S. government than foreign governments, and is nearly on-par with the number of tips the FBI and CIA have given.
Later on, Bee asks Ali if there's something he'd like to say "1001 times for people to ignore, but this time on national television?" It was a clear jab at the right-wing media and anti-Muslim figures that continuously — and falsely – claim that American Muslims aren't condemning terrorism and don't love America.
"American Muslims love America," Ali said. "We love what our country stands for, we are proud of our country."
There were several key reasons why Bee decided to travel to Dearborn. The Detroit-area suburb — often referred to as "Dearbornistan" by anti-Muslim activists — is the city with the largest population of Muslims in the United States. It was also a hunting ground for another group of "extremists": Islamophobes.
For example, in 2012, swarms of anti-Muslim protesters (who called themselves "Bible Believers") held up signs that said Islam was a "religion of blood and murder" and carried a pig's head on a spike.
In her segment, Bee spoke to the protester who carried the pig head — while hilariously referring to him as a human manboob and a bearded uncooked ham:
Bee: People just want to eat ice cream cones and buy tube socks, and do the things people do in festivals. Why are you doing this?
Despite how confident he seemed to be in what he was saying, the "human manboob" is wrong: Nothing in the Qu'ran states that dying with pig's blood will condemn them to an eternity in hell. Muslims are just prohibited from eating pork.
The anti-Muslim protester then went on to boast about an American general using bullets dipped in pig's blood to kill Muslims in combat in the Philippines — rhetoric eerily similar to that of Donald Trump.
The timing of Bee's segment on anti-Muslim sentiment is significant. On Friday, Britain voted to leave the European Union, which many experts say was spurred by anti-Muslim and anti-immigration sentiment. Now racial tensions are rising, and the value of the British pound is at the lowest it has ever been in more than 30 years.
If there's any lesson to be learned from Bee's segment, it's this: Hating Muslims isn't just evil, it's also pretty ridiculous.
Watch the segment in full here:
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