Why Bill Maher’s Wrong About Islam

However, to smash Islam means of course to not look in the mirror, because everything they accuse Islam of doing, whites in America have done to blacks and to countrymen around the world and then some.

The debate on Islam quickly became a fiery battle with Maher and Harris on one side, actor/director Ben Affleck on the other, and in the middle playing the sympathetic moderators (though partial to Affleck): New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof and Michael Steele, former chair of the Republican National Committee.

In the end, Maher and Harris turned out to be on the wrong side of the divide. Claims of their seriously flawed argument are broken down here.

1. Liberals Believe People Can Practice Any Religion.

Maher opened with: “Liberals need to stand up for liberal principles… Like freedom of speech, freedom to practice any religion you want without fear of violence, freedom to leave a religion, equality for women, equality for minorities including homosexuals. These are liberal principles that liberals applaud for, but then when you say: in the Muslim world, this is what’s lacking, then they get upset.”

The problem with many liberals is located in that very excerpt, buried in hypocrisy and paternalism. You can have the freedom to practice any religion you want. But let me tell you why the religion you want to practice is bad. In other words, you’re free to choose, unless you choose the wrong choice.

Liberals want to give you the impression that they are allowing you to make a choice, that you are free to do as you please. But actually, they want to define what is acceptable based on their value system. It is their hope that you will take the right path; that is, after they safely guide you to their beliefs.

In the same breath that Maher and Harris say people should be able to practice any religion they want, they argue why people shouldn’t practice Islam, it’s bad. Again, practice any religion, just not the one we don’t like. (And by the way, since they are atheists, they don’t like any religion. But in this episode, they consolidated their energies squarely on Islam-bashing.)

Sam Harris said: “We have to be able to criticize bad ideas…Islam at this moment is the mother lode of bad ideas.” And Maher added: “That’s just a fact.”

Sam Harris: “We’re not condemning people, it’s ideas.”
Bill Maher: “And people who believe in those ideas.”

So just for the record: You’re free to say what you want, practice what religion you want, and so on. But if you make the wrong choice in your freedom, we are not condemning you, just your ideas. Oh wait, and we’re condemning people who believe in those ideas. So you’re free to believe what you want, but if you don’t agree with our ideas, we’ll condemn your ideas first and you second.

Are these the liberal principles of freedom we all need to stand up for?

Even Sam Harris was confused about his own argument: “Liberals have failed…We have been sold this meme of Islamophobia where every criticism of the doctrine of Islam gets conflated with bigotry towards Muslims as people.”

But aren’t you condemning ideas and people who believe in those ideas?

2. Liberals Going After ISIS Are Concerned With Human Rights.

According to Bill Maher and Sam Harris, when the subject of radical Islamists is broached, liberals transform into freedom-seeking human rights activists. They are concerned, as Sam Harris said, with “the treatment of women and homosexuals and free thinkers and public intellectuals in the Muslim world.” Harris also said: “Conservative Muslims hold views about human rights, about women, about homosexuals, that are deeply troubling…They also keep women and homosexuals immiserated in these cultures and we have to empower the true reformers in the Muslim world to change it.”

It’s quite puzzling to be concerned with, on the one hand, global human rights issues like radical Islamists, but not the global human rights issue and public health crisis that is the Ebola virus debilitating thousands of people in West Africa.

They similarly cannot claim to be concerned with immiseration, or economic impoverishment. Surely not with the millions of young, food insecure children in their own countries.

Slavery was a human rights issues. Did they find the treatment and dehumanization of African Americans deeply troubling? Do they want to empower those who have been oppressed by the system with reparations, land, and remunerations?

Were they concerned when free thinkers and public intellectuals like Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, and Stokely Carmichael were silenced, murdered, or exiled?

Are they troubled by the human rights beliefs that people must hold in order to incarcerate 25 percent of the world’s prisoners and commit mass atrocities like the War on Drugs that has single-handedly incapacitated African American communities?

If liberals are truly concerned with human rights, before crossing vast expanses of ocean waters, there is a lot of weeding to take care of in their own backyard.

3. Islam Is Harmful To A Majority Of People.

Maher argued that the majority of Muslims hold “pernicious beliefs,” pernicious meaning gradually having a harmful affect on people and presumably the world. Maher asked Ben Affleck: “you’re saying the idea that someone should be killed if they leave the Islamic religion is just a few bad apples?”

Affleck of course explained the obvious problem of blaming the majority for the acts of a few. He replied that the majority of the world’s Muslims would not actually go forth with executing someone for leaving the religion.

According to a 2012 Pew Study, in 2010, less than 20 percent of the world’s Muslims resided in the Middle East/North Africa region, only a small fraction of whom could be labeled as terrorists.

All Muslims are not ISIS.

Affleck: “ISIS couldn’t fill a AA-ball park in Charleston, West Virginia and you want to make a career talking about ISIS, ISIS, ISIS.”

Ben Affleck said not to focus on the few terrorists who stand by Islam, few in relation to the billion other Muslims who are not terrorists and are quite ordinary, everyday citizens.

Nicholas Kristof said: “The great divide is not between Islam and the rest; it’s rather between the fundamentalists and the moderates in each faith.”

We don’t need to look any further than the Tea Party to understand the divide between conservatives and conservative extremists.

Michael Steele said: “There are voices that are often times raised in opposition to these Jihadists and to these extreme acts, but guess what? They don’t get covered. They don’t get exposed. And they’re not given the same level of platform that we see the Jihadists get.” It’s the media that creates the imbalance, not the reality.

But Maher responded: “One reason they don’t get exposed is because they’re afraid to speak out, because it’s the only religion that acts like the Mafia. That will f*cking kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture, or write the wrong book.” (Back to that point about MLK, Jr. and Malcolm X…)

4. The Argument Against Islam Is Based On Facts.

It is surprising that Maher, who always railroads Fox News and other conservatives for not using facts, hardly has any facts upon which to base his vitriol for Islam.

Maher claimed: “It’s based on facts.” Citing that “90 percent” of Egyptians “believe death is the appropriate response to leaving the religion. If 90 percent of Brazilians thought that death was the appropriate response to leaving Catholicism, you would think that it was a bigger deal.”

Harris based most of his conclusions on “polls.” In other words, there’s studies out there that say I’m right, trust me.

5. Islam Should Be Reformed By Ye Of Little Faith.

Sam Harris: “There are hundreds of millions of Muslims who are nominal Muslims who don’t take the faith seriously…who are horrified by ISIS, and we need to defend these people, prop them up, and let them reform their faith.”

Right… let’s prop up the people who “don’t take the faith seriously” and let them become the face of the religion. Because that’s what every community needs, people who don’t take the community seriously to be its leaders.

Where have we heard this before?

Perhaps with countries whose leaders have been forcibly removed in the name of democracy.

Or ask the millions of African Americans who remain in oppressive conditions despite their fearless black leaders unloading their U-Hauls in the rich neighborhoods with the white dentists.

Remarkably, whites have been able to divide and conquer many of the world’s citizens armed with this way of thought. They whisper to one group about another, and sometimes vice versa, and eventually one or the other sells their neighbor to the highest bidder for gold or cash to buy a house in the south of France.

In So Many Words, The Other Panelists Were Appalled And Disgusted By Their Assumptions.

Ben Affleck called their reasoning “gross” and “racist.” “It’s like saying you shifty Jew!” Affleck told Maher directly that: “I’m specifically telling you that I disagree with what you think.” And “your argument is like, you know black people, you know they kill each other.” “It’s an ugly thing to say.”

Nicholas Kristof said: “This does have the tinge of the way white racists talk about African Americans.”

They’re absolutely right about one thing. Bigotry is most inconspicuous in the words of men who use big words behind big degrees. It is among them, ensconced in purported intellectualism, that it finds the most comfort and is most difficult to decrypt.

Nicholas Kristof tried to invoke reasoning using another angle: “One basic liberal principle is tolerance.”

Bill Maher: “But not for intolerance.”

Again, we will tolerate the things that we find acceptable. We will not tolerate things we don’t want to tolerate. The liberal tolerance only accepts notions based on their definition of tolerance.

It’s impossible for hypocrites to see the straw foundation supporting their own flawed logic.

They can be angered about flag burning, but not about defacing or slandering a religion.

They are standing in the forest, but cannot see the trees.

The Bottom Line

Normally when an actor or director goes on the talk show circuit to promote his latest film, it consists of a few funny jokes mixed with a heaping dose of self-indulgent praise. Usually, you wish they would have brought their script because their performance would have been strides better if only they had just stuck to the lines. But here, Ben Affleck stood up to Maher and Harris, as did Michael Steel and Nicholas Kristof.

It was quite the surprise to see Bill Maher noticeably riled, an emotional state he usually reserves solely for the most obnoxious Tea Partiers.

Harris and Maher seemed shocked run up against a brick wall of opposition in their rant against Islam, wondering: Why would people defend Islam?

Well, for one, it’s the world’s most practiced religion. Try getting into a fight with that kid who has ten brothers and sisters.

If there’s anything that bothers Maher, Harris, and other relatively well-off white Western men, it’s that no matter the amount of money they have in foreign accounts, no matter what private jet they own, they actually cannot really, truly exercise 100 percent pure and unadulterated freedom of speech.

Throughout history, white men have committed all kinds of heinous crimes, accompanied by little or no punishment.

They murder unarmed black boys. They rape women. They steal money. Many of these acts happen in broad daylight, with the world watching, and still they go scot-free.

But the one thing they cannot do is speak against Islam. That is their Achilles heel.

And perhaps that’s the unsettling fact that brings this conversation back over and over again.