Don Lemon to Prominent Muslim Human Rights Lawyer: “Do You Support ISIS?”


After Arsalan Iftikhar, a prominent human rights lawyer and editor, explained at length to CNN’s perpetually clueless Don Lemon why it’s dangerous “to conflate the actions of a very few to a population of 1.7 billion people” when discussing the attack on Charlie Hebdo, Lemon followed up with a stat claiming 16 percent of French citizens support ISIS.

“They obviously have sympathies for that ideology,” Iftikhar said. “I don’t think that would mean they would justify the killing of innocent civilians or murdering people on the streets.”

Unsatisfied with Iftikhar’s response, Lemon says, “I just want to get more specific. Do you support ISIS?”

“…Did you just ask me if I support ISIS?” Iftikhar asked in apparent disbelief. 

“Mmm hmm,” Lemon nodded in confirmation, yet again blinded by the sheer offensiveness of his question.

“I just answered your question. I said that obviously these 16% of people support the ideology, but I don’t think that would necessarily extrapolate to supporting of killing of innocent people. You can have sympathy for an ideology and not support the mass murdering of people.”

Watch below:

(h/t Mediaite)

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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