Confirming suspicions that stoners going to laugh at the fake baby are only one subgroup contributing to American Sniper’s box-office success, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee now claims that the film has led to a threefold increase in people talking about killing Muslims on social media. (The group has apparently already compiled hundreds of such messages, examples of which we will decline to reprint here.) “The last time we saw such a sharp increase was in 2010, around the Ground Zero mosque,” Abed Ayoub, the group’s national and legal policy director, tells The Guardian, tastefully refraining from adding that he assumes these dumb fucks are racist all the time, but are emboldened to say as much when a high-profile film or news event can be misinterpreted as an endorsement of said views.
Ayoub says that his group is not calling for a boycott of the film, saying, “If we boycott it, it will only cause people to want to see it more.” But the ADC has reportedly sent letters to American Sniper director Clint Eastwood and star Bradley Cooper, asking them to explain to the more nuance-challenged members of their audience that firing the symbolic bullets of racial slurs from the faraway vantage point of Twitter does not make them American heroes just like Chris Kyle. “It is our opinion that you could play a significant role in assisting us in alleviating the danger we are facing,” the letters say, asking Eastwood and Cooper to speak out and help “reduce the hateful rhetoric.” Eastwood and Cooper have yet to respond, but a spokesman for Warner Bros. says, “Hate and bigotry have no place in the important dialogue that this picture has generated about the veteran experience.” Kid Rock, presumably, is a lost cause.