'The Muslims are Coming!' Judge overturns NYC subway's ban on ads for Muslim comedy movie

A federal judge says a New York transportation agency was wrong to label some funny subway posters for a documentary on Muslim-American comedians as "political," so they could ban the posters from the NYC subway.

One of the six ads for "The Muslims Are Coming!" included the statement: "The Ugly Truth About Muslims: Muslims have great frittata recipes."

Photo: themuslimsarecoming.com

Another one of the unfairly banned posters read, "Muslims hate terrorism! They also hate: People who tell you they went to an Ivy League school within 10 seconds of meeting them … When the deli guy doesn't put enough schmear on your bagel … Hipsters who wear winter hats in the summer … the pickling of everything …"

The judge said it was "utterly unreasonable" for an MTA official to decide an advertisement including the word "Muslims" was political for that reason alone.

Photo: themuslimsarecoming.com

In the movie, comedians Negin Farsad and Dean Obeidallah lead an all-star Muslim comedy troupe performing in "big cities, small towns, liberal enclaves, conservative hotbeds, rural and everything in between to explore the issue of Islamophobia."

The film also includes comedy bigshots Jon Stewart, David Cross and Lewis Black.

From The Guardian's coverage of the MTA ad brouhaha:

The ads for the film The Muslims Are Coming! were rejected this year by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the subway system and the rest of the nation's largest mass transit network. The MTA, which had first approved the ads, later concluded they violated its new ban on political ads.

Judge Colleen McMahon said the advertisements, created by two Muslim comedians, were not primarily political.

"That the advertisements at issue gently mock prejudice and employ Islamophobia as a comedic device does not make their message 'prominently or predominantly' political," she wrote.