Brief but pointed commentary from my friend Jonathan McKeever:
“I think Bill Maher’s whole Islamaphobia trajectory is shameful. I like it when people challenge the status quo in general, and overtly condemn as unacceptable (harmful) things which a majority of – as he calls them – ‘Liberals’ tend to accept out of a misguided sense of cultural permissiveness.
Mao Tse Tung, for example, was a mass murderer on a scale that dwarfed even the excesses of Stalin. 78 million deaths by some reckoning. And yet some championed (and continue to champion) him as a revolutionary. So I support dissent from the White Liberal Guilt establishment which rubber stamps everything foreign as deserving special protections. But Maher’s condemnation of Islam as a religion seems pompously misinformed, and leads to gross inaccuracies about Muslims. I wish he’d go and hang with a few Muslims and step down off the soap box. (And stop tempting me to identify certain monsters within his own religion who don’t and who should never be allowed to bring down the whole religion by their barbarism as extremists.)
I do wish, however, that Islam had a better spokesperson than Ben Affleck.”
“October 3, 2014 – Ben Affleck, Bill Maher, Nicholas Kristol, Michael Steele, and author Sam Harris got into what could only be described as a tumultuous continuation of Maher’s comments on Islam from last week, with Maher and Affleck tearing into each other over the influence of fundamentalists in the Muslim community. “We have been sold this meme of Islamophobia, where criticism of the religion gets conflated with bigotry towards muslims as people,” Harris began. “It’s intellectually ridiculous.”
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