After the shooting in France where 12 people were killed by Islamic extremists, Don Lemon brought a Muslim lawyer and activist on his CNN show to discuss the events. But something stood out in Lemon’s interview that had everyone talking – that fact that he asked his guest, Arsalan Iftikhar, if he supports ISIS. The question it seems was placed to Iftikhar simply because he was a Muslim.
Surprisingly, Iftikhar stayed on set and completed the interview, but he wasn’t done with Don Lemon. In an open letter written Monday, Iftikhar thanked Lemon for his “patently offensive racist dumb-ass question” that made him “famous!”
“Now to be completely honest with you, I totally thought that I had misheard him because surely there was no respectable journalist in the world who would ask a Muslim human rights lawyer whether he supports an organization which violates human rights each and every day,” Iftikhar wrote in the Islamic Monthly, where he is a senior editor.
“But then I remembered that I was dealing with Don Lemon,” he wrote.
Iftikhar — whose last piece for the magazine before Lemon invited him on was “Let’s Call ISIS The Un-Islamic State,” slamming the terror group — wrote that “such an obviously absurd question certainly deserves no response.”
He closed the letter with a flourish.
“It is a sincere honor to be added to the litany of famous ‘Malaysian-black-hole-penis-biting’ Don Lemon media gaffes which can be added to his audition tape for his next job at FOX News Channel,” Iftikhar wrote.
“So from the bottom of my heart,” he added, “I want to publicly thank Don Lemon for making me famous with his patently offensive racist dumb-ass question.”
