Steve King Makes Pork Joke When Talking Muslim Concentration Camps

Iowa Congressman Steve King attempted a joke while talking about Muslim concentration camps in China during a town hall meeting Tuesday morning.

“The Uighurs in China, a million of them, they’re being put into camps and they’re taking their children away and raising them, and then they’re sterilizing the women so there’s no more Uighurs to be born,” King said. “And they put a Chinese monitor in their house and they take all of their religious artifacts out and then they want them to put on Chinese clothing and eat a Chinese diet, which includes trying to force them to eat pork.”

“That’s actually the only part of that I agree with,” King said. “Everybody ought to eat pork. If you have a shortage of bacon, you can’t be happy.”

Consuming pork is forbidden in Islam.

The United States recently labeled the mass detention centers of China’s Muslim population as “concentration camps.”

Before the pork joke, King was criticizing China for their restrictive society and treatment of the Uighur minority population. It was during a discussion on trade issues, in which King argued China could never fully compete with America because their society discourages innovation and allowing people to think for themselves.

King said he estimates China is stealing somewhere between $300 billion and $600 billion of intellectual property from the United States annually.

“I ran those numbers by [Robert] Lighthizer and he said that wouldn’t include cyber,” King said “So that answer tells me he thinks it’s above half-a-trillion dollars a year in U.S. creativity that’s being pirated by the Chinese.”

The congressman also appeared to make news today on the White House’s plans for corn growers and the ethanol industry following the small refinery waivers that outraged Iowa farmers. Senator Joni Ernst noted at a forum late last week that President Donald Trump was going to offer something to help ease the anger and economic hardship for farmers after siding with the oil industry on the waivers.

King seemed to offer up details of that deal.

“I and a number of others have raised the issue on this,” King said of the waivers. “And what we got back was – I’ll say a back-channel message, I haven’t seen published yet, but I think this is going to happen – I better phrase it that way, maybe someone has seen that it’s certified to be true. They are going to add 500 million gallons of ethanol to the RFS total. That’s about a third of what they took away from us in those 31 waivers. And they were going to use government resources to promote year-round E15. That’s not enough.”

by Paige Godden
Posted 8/27/19