If Hasan Minhaj Was Living in India With his Wife Beena Patel, a Hindu, She’d Have to Murder Him — Bill Maher

In his HBO show ‘Real Time With Bill Maher,’ libertarian comedian Bill Maher said if Hasan Minhaj was living in India with his wife Beena Patel, a Hindu, she’d have to murder him. It was obviously an allusion to “Love Jihad” campaigns in India in which Muslim men who married Hindu women were targets of attacks by Hindu extremists. Maher seemed to imply that Minhaj is lucky to be in America despite his claims of being a victim of anti-Muslim hate.

Maher, a libertarian comedian, made the comment during his scathing attack on Minaj who recently confirmed a New Yorker exposé that claimed that Minhaj deliberately embellished his personal experiences as a Muslim growing up in post-9/11 America.

Maher noted that Minhaj, who, “wants to build his identity around being a victim, seems to literally feel cheated by (racial) progress (made in America), which has denied him any good stories about being oppressed.”

In the final segment of his “New Rules” which centered on the former “Patriot Act” host, Maher began by equating Donald Trump and the MAGA movement’s conspiracy theories with that of liberals’ “emotional truth,” a term Minhaj has used to justify his need to embellish facts for his standup routines. 

The fact is that “the stories Mr. Minhaj tells in his act to elicit sympathy for himself as a Muslim and a person of color are completely made up.” Maher argued, “If you want to speak truth to power, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say you have to include the truth part.”

Maher also told his audience that he has personal experience of Minhaj’s lies. He said Minhaj accused him of saying “Muslims should be put in internment camps,” which he has not only ever said, but “hasn’t even thought about it, let alone say it.”

“How is that different than this guy?” he asked his audience, sharing a clip of Trump falsely claiming to have seen thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheering the terrorist attacks on 9/11.

The New Yorker story has undermined Minhaj’s chance to become the permanent host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” succeeding Trevor Noah. Minhaj was, till recently a leading candidate for the open host role for the show. However, according to Variety, the channel is “going back to square one in its efforts to find a new host for the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning program. “The decision appears to come in the wake of a recent report in The New Yorker in which some of the supposedly autobiographical stories that Minhaj has used in his routines were found to be embellished,” the magazine said.

Minhaj made a name with his unique style of blending autobiographical storytelling and social-justice commentary. He often shared harrowing experiences he’s faced as a South Asian American and a Muslim American, propelling him as a symbol of representation in entertainment. Minhaj “came of age as a practicing Muslim in an Indian family in post-9/11 America,” The New Yorker noted, adding that his Netflix series “Patriot Act” was named for “the defining law of that era.”

Speaking to the New Yorker, he acknowledged to the New Yorker that he exaggerated some of the incidents he’s included in his latest Netflix special, “The King’s Jester.” In the Sept. 15 article titled “Hasan Minhaj’s Emotional Truths,” author Clare Malone shared several “embellished” stories in “The King’s Jester.” There are anecdotes of an FBI informant who infiltrated his family’s Sacramento-area mosque; his fallout following “Patriot Act” segments on the killing of Jamal Khashoggi and Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalism; an incident with his daughter, among others. 

Although he admitted to fictionalizing certain aspects of his routine, he told Malone that he stood by his work. “Every story in my style is built around a seed of truth,” he said. “My comedy Arnold Palmer is seventy percent emotional truth—this happened—and then, 30 percent hyperbole, exaggeration, fiction.”

(Top photo, a composite of a screen grab of Real Time with Bill Maher and Hasan Minaj’s Instagram photo. @hasanminhaj)