Los Angeles: Indian-origin actor Aziz Ansari expressed his fury over Donald Trump’s “xenophobic rhetoric” in a poignant op-ed for The New York Times.
The 33-year-old “Master of None” creator started out by noting that since the shooting deaths of 49 people in Orlando, Florida, earlier this month, he has been trying to convince his parents, Muslim immigrants, to stay away from mosques, reported US magazine.
“‘DON’T go anywhere near a mosque,’ I told my mother. ‘Do all your prayer at home. OK?'” Ansari wrote.
But, he wrote in The New York Times, he “realized how awful it was to tell an American citizen to be careful about how she worshipped.”
“It’s visceral, and scary, and it affects how people live, work and pray. It makes me afraid for my family. It also makes no sense,” Aziz Ansari on anti-Muslim prejudice
“Today, with presidential candidate Donald J Trump and others like him spewing hate speech, prejudice is reaching new levels. It’s visceral, and scary, and it affects how people live, work and play. It makes me afraid for my family. It also makes no sense.”
Ansari pointed out that the the term “Muslim” is more likely to conjure up images of faceless terrorists than “Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or the kid who left the boy band One Direction”.
“I myself am not a religious person, but after these attacks, anyone that even looks like they might be Muslim understands the feelings my friend described,” he wrote, referring to his close friend’s frustration at having assumptions thrown at her based on the color of her skin.
“There is a strange feeling that you must almost prove yourself worthy of feeling sad and scared like everyone else.”