Muslim Comedians Are Trolling The New York City Subway With These Great Posters

Considering one of the Presidential frontrunners is gaining unprecedented support for yelling about banning them all from entering the country, it’s safe to say this is a fairly awful time to be Muslim in the United States. For every white person who’s jokingly Googling ‘how to move to Canada’ there are thousands of Muslims genuinely fearing for their wellbeing. In January, a woman was abused and kicked out of a Trump rally for standing silent in polite protest. Just this week, psychologists have spoken out about the fact Muslim children are asking when they will be exiled.

“The level of fear and apprehension in the American Muslim community has never been higher,” Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the national Council On American-Islamic Relations, recently told the Chicago Tribune. “Even after 9/11, it wasn’t at this level.”

Now, providing a sense of levity and perspective to this universally shitty situation, two Muslim comedians have pasted an incredible set of posters around the New York City subway turning bigotry on its head.

Created by Negin Farsad and Dean Obeidallah, the posters are also an advertisement for their movie The Muslims Are Coming!. The documentary follows their lives as Muslim stand-up comics and features interviews with other comedians such as Jon Stewart and Lewis Black, while also skewering the baffling outright racism that make their lives more difficult.

The posters were originally supposed to come out around the film’s original release in 2013 but have instead faced multiple roadblocks along the way. First they had to crowdfund the project (raising close to $20,000 on Kickstarter), then they had to fight the Metropolitan Transit Authority. When the designs were first submitted, they were banned as “political speech”. This was then overturned late last year when Farsad and Obeidallah filed a lawsuit to counter the ruling.

“Right now, the only message that we have about Muslims is ‘they are terrorists, they should be in registries, we shouldn’t allow them in’,” Obeidallah told the ABC. “It’s crazy. So I think having a counter-message to that, that Muslims can be delightful and fun and ridiculous, is really necessary. Because otherwise we are going to go off the deep end with this.”

For the record, Australia could always use a few of these as well.

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You can download The Muslims Are Coming! via Xbox, Amazon or iTunes. Check out the trailer here: