Jimmy Kimmel Takes Advantage Of The President Obama ‘Muslim’ Controversy

It’s obvious that most Muslims are good people, but President Obama’s critics have used “Muslim” as a pejorative to describe him. On Wednesday evening, Jimmy Kimmel took advantage of the ignorance of some who believe Obama is a Muslim, despite the fact that he is a Christian. Gossip Cop describes the segment on Kimmel’s show.

“Jimmy Kimmel asked random people on Hollywood Boulevard if they believed President Barack Obama was a Muslim on Wednesday’s ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live.’ It was all part of a recurring segment called ‘Pedestrian Question.'”

Gossip Cop then goes on to describe Kimmel’s “Pedestrian Question” segment, where a reporter usually ventures out onto the streets of Hollywood in order to poll people about a particular topic. Kimmel then plays clips for his studio audience, who has to guess what the people answered. Fifty-four percent of Republicans still hold onto the belief that Obama is a Muslim, so Kimmel wanted to find out what the average person on the streets believes. The segment was hilarious.

Just one year after his presidency began, the Pew Research Center revealed that a growing number of Americans considered President Obama a Muslim.

“A new national survey by the Pew Research Center finds that nearly one-in-five Americans (18%) now say Obama is a Muslim, up from 11% in March 2009. Only about one-third of adults (34%) say Obama is a Christian, down sharply from 48% in 2009”

There were 43 percent who said they did not know what Obama’s religion was. Perhaps that number has changed now that Barack Obama has declared to the world that he is a Christian. In 2008, CNN asked why Obama supposedly being a Muslim was even a campaign issue.

“So what if Obama was Arab or Muslim? So what if John McCain was Arab or Muslim? Would it matter? When did that become a disqualifier for higher office in our country? When did Arab and Muslim become dirty words? The equivalent of dishonorable or radical?” asked author Campbell Brown.

The reality is that Muslim and Arab became pejoratives in America ever since the events of September 11, 2011, even though most Muslims and Arabs have completely condemned the actions that took place that day. Every year, President Obama condemns the events that took place that day. He has constantly spoken about tolerance towards Arabs and Muslims, just like he has with the LGBT community. If Obama was president in the 1990s, people probably would have joked that he was gay, since that was a huge pejorative back then.

[Photo by Pool for Getty Images News]