As part of her coverage of the recent spike in American Islamophobia, CNN’s Carol Costello invited Hamtramck Mayor Karen Majewski onto her show and then subjected her to Islamaphobic questions. Everything about this interview is extremely bleak.

Media Matters caught the exchange during today’s show, during which Costello asks Mayor Marjewski if she’s “afraid” of her own city’s “majority-Muslim” population. This is a deeply insane and outrageous question, to which there would only be one decent reply: “No, because there’s nothing to be afraid of. If anything I am afraid for them because of people like you asking questions like that.”

And Marjewski did take issue with Costello’s query—not because it was awful, but because it was inaccurate: Her city is NOT full of scary Muslims, thank you. Also, her name was mispronounced

KAREN MAJEWSKI: No, I’m not afraid. And actually, I’d like to make another correction. We have, as of our last election, which was a couple weeks ago, we elected a Muslim-majority council. Whether the demographics of the city would say we’re a Muslim majority city, I don’t think that we’re there yet. I think we’re probably somewhere in the 40 percent Muslim for the city overall. But our city council that will take office in January will be a majority-Muslim council.

Very brave.

Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: E93A 40D1 FA38 4B2B 1477 C855 3DEA F030 F340 E2C7