Source: Huffington Post

Hint: It involves actually getting to know Muslim Americans.

By Antonia Blumberg; Associate Religion Editor, The Huffington Post

Leave it to Samantha Bee to tear down Islamophobia and make you laugh out loud in one segment.

In Monday’s episode of “Full Frontal,” Bee traveled to Dearborn, Michigan — home to the U.S.’s largest Muslim community — to investigate why conservative pundits are so quick to label all Muslim Americans as terror sympathizers.

Shortly after the June 12 shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, presidential hopeful Donald Trump took the opportunity to incite fear and hatred toward the American Muslim community yet again. If Muslims were more diligent about reporting potential terrorists, Trump suggested, the shooting would have never happened.

The problem with this logic — as sound as it might seem to a known bigot — is that Muslim Americans actually do report threats of extremism. In fact, one Muslim man who attended the same mosque as the Orlando shooter reported him to the FBI in 2014, though the file was later closed.

Speaking with Dearborn mosque leader Kassam Ali and deputy police chief Mike Jaafar, Bee had similar findings.

“There have been instances where we were concerned about someone, but they didn’t really pan out,” Ali told Bee. “A member of our community came to the mosque and were concerned about their child. They didn’t like what they were hearing. But they’re not terrorists, and they’re not extremists. We went to the police, and asked the police to help us intervene with this child, and actually ended up getting the child some mental health therapy.”

“So, you actually paid attention to someone’s mental health issue?” Bee asked, feigning shock.

As comedian Aziz Ansari pointed out in a recent op-ed, homegrown terrorism simply isn’t an issue in the vast majority of Muslim American communities. After the Orlando shooting, Ansari noted, the New York Times reported that the FBI is currently investigating 1,000 potential “homegrown violent extremists,” the majority of whom are likely connected to the Islamic State.

“If everyone on that list is Muslim American,” he wrote, “that is 0.03 percent of the Muslim American population. If you round that number, it is 0 percent.”

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