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Donald Trump makes Aziz Ansari 'afraid for my family'

Jayme Deerwester
USA TODAY

After Omar Mateen shot 49 people at Orlando's Pulse nightclub, actor Aziz Ansari called his parents, who are Muslim, and begged his mother not to "go anywhere near a mosque" out of fear of reprisals.

"The overwhelming number of Muslim Americans have as much in common with that monster in Orlando as any white person has with any of the white terrorists who shoot up movie theaters or schools or abortion clinics," Aziz Ansari wrote in a 'New York Times' op-ed piece.

Ansari, who was born in South Carolina, writes in an essay for the New York Times that he was struck by the realization of "how awful it was to tell an American citizen to be careful how she worshiped."

Things in the USA were already less than ideal before the Orlando shootings, the star of Netflix's Master of None says. "In our culture, when people think 'Muslim,' the picture in their heads is not usually of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or the kid who left the boy band One Direction. It’s of a scary terrorist character from Homeland or some monster from the news."

When Ansari was a student at New York University, a cab driver called him a terrorist shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, which he felt in his dorm room.

"The vitriolic and hate-filled rhetoric coming from (Donald) Trump isn’t so far off from cursing at strangers from a car window," he writes. "It’s visceral, and scary, and it affects how people live, work and pray," Ansari confesses. "It makes me afraid for my family. It also makes no sense."

He pointed out a noteworthy statistic: that if every single person on the FBI's list of 1,000 homegrown extremists were Muslim-American, that figure would amount to .03% of their population. "The overwhelming number of Muslim Americans have as much in common with that monster in Orlando as any white person has with any of the white terrorists who shoot up movie theaters or schools or abortion clinics," he says.

"(Trump) has said that people in the American Muslim community “know who the bad ones are,” implying that millions of innocent people are somehow complicit in awful attacks." So by that logic, Ansari writes, the best way to protect the U.S. economy after the 2008 financial crisis "would have been to ban 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."

He also calls Trump out for continuing to claim that Muslims celebrated in the streets following 9/11. "There was absolutely no cheering," Ansari says. "Only sadness, horror and fear."

Contrast that to Trump's tweet immediately after the Orlando shootings, in which he crowed about having predicted the attack, writing, "Appreciate the congrats.”

"It appears that day he was the one who was celebrating after an attack," Ansari notes.

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