Teh One Who Knocks
03-04-2017, 12:45 PM
By Emily Zanotti - Heat Street
http://i.imgur.com/pcrHR2eh.jpg
Actor Riz Ahmed says that it’s a lack of diversity in movies and entertainment that is driving young Arab men to radical Islam—and worse, to join ISIS.
Speaking to the British Parliament on the topic of diversity, Ahmed, who starred in the Star Wars film Rogue One, said that if there’s no commitment to embracing minority characters—and, by extension, minority actors— then the entertainment industry is almost guaranteeing Muslim teens will flee Europe to join terrorist groups.
The connection was tenuous, but Ahmed was adamant. “If we don’t step up and tell a representative story. .. we are going to start losing British teenagers to the story that the next chapter in their lives is written with ISIS in Syria,” he told the UK government. “We are going to see the murder of more MPs like Jo Cox because we’ve been mis-sold a story that is so narrow about who we are and who we should be.”
Cox, who lost her life the week before the Brexit vote, was not, in fact, killed by a foreign terrorist, or a minority-turned-extremist, but rather a white supremacist who targeted Cox for her support of keeping the UK in the European Union.
Ahmed went on to claim that “If we fail to represent, we are in danger of losing people to extremism,” and that a lack of diversity would lead British citizens to “retreat to fringe narratives, to bubbles online and sometimes even off to Syria.”
If Ahmed’s logic seems tortured, perhaps it’s because he recently came under the influence of Girls star Lena Dunham, who, along with her producer, “basically stalked” Ahmed until he agreed to appear as her love interest on the HBO show.
“He fully had a stalker for two weeks. It was me being like, ‘I know you’re not sure and you wanted to take a vacation, but here’s all the joys of the Girls set,” Dunham confessed to People magazine. The actor will, reportedly, play an up-and-coming subversive rap artist who, like most characters on the show, winds up having sex with Dunham’s character, Hannah, in the Girls season premiere.
http://i.imgur.com/pcrHR2eh.jpg
Actor Riz Ahmed says that it’s a lack of diversity in movies and entertainment that is driving young Arab men to radical Islam—and worse, to join ISIS.
Speaking to the British Parliament on the topic of diversity, Ahmed, who starred in the Star Wars film Rogue One, said that if there’s no commitment to embracing minority characters—and, by extension, minority actors— then the entertainment industry is almost guaranteeing Muslim teens will flee Europe to join terrorist groups.
The connection was tenuous, but Ahmed was adamant. “If we don’t step up and tell a representative story. .. we are going to start losing British teenagers to the story that the next chapter in their lives is written with ISIS in Syria,” he told the UK government. “We are going to see the murder of more MPs like Jo Cox because we’ve been mis-sold a story that is so narrow about who we are and who we should be.”
Cox, who lost her life the week before the Brexit vote, was not, in fact, killed by a foreign terrorist, or a minority-turned-extremist, but rather a white supremacist who targeted Cox for her support of keeping the UK in the European Union.
Ahmed went on to claim that “If we fail to represent, we are in danger of losing people to extremism,” and that a lack of diversity would lead British citizens to “retreat to fringe narratives, to bubbles online and sometimes even off to Syria.”
If Ahmed’s logic seems tortured, perhaps it’s because he recently came under the influence of Girls star Lena Dunham, who, along with her producer, “basically stalked” Ahmed until he agreed to appear as her love interest on the HBO show.
“He fully had a stalker for two weeks. It was me being like, ‘I know you’re not sure and you wanted to take a vacation, but here’s all the joys of the Girls set,” Dunham confessed to People magazine. The actor will, reportedly, play an up-and-coming subversive rap artist who, like most characters on the show, winds up having sex with Dunham’s character, Hannah, in the Girls season premiere.