“We’re liberals! We’re liberals. We’re not crazy tea-baggers,” implored Bill Maher in response to criticism he’s received over his recent clash with Hollywood golden boy Ben Affleck.
“We are not bigoted people. On the contrary! We’re trying to stand up for the principles of liberalism!” Maher told Salon about the heated spat.
This latest argument centred, unsurprisingly, around Maher’s views on Islam.
Maher has long derided organized religion. Many of his defenders point to Religulous, his 2008 feature film which examined and mocked religious beliefs. But in post-9/11 America, the noted agitator has become an advocate for the ever-popular view that while all religions need to be criticized and identified as antagonistic to liberal principles, Islam is a singular affront to liberal values, as Muslims are uniquely oppressive and extremist and violent.
The HBO Real Time host has long been adored by the left for taking on the mantle of Defender of Liberal Principles, for gleefully tweaking the Bush administration during the first decade of the 20th century and for consistently ruffling the feathers of his supposed ideological allies.
But his rabid defense of post-9/11 liberalism is what Maher brandishes as an excuse when accused of Islamophobia. He is consistently trumpeting a false dichotomy between the western “us” and the Muslim “them”, making points based on his notions of “Muslim countries” and “Muslim culture” – creating a false entity that could be opposed to western countries and culture, denying its religious singularity.
Maher’s religious skepticism would be palatable were it not for the anti-Muslim bigotry which he wields hand-in-hand.
Maher’s views are hardly new, but they have again come to fore, as videos of both Affleck and scholar Reza Aslan challenging Maher’s views have gone viral this past week.
Affleck accused Maher and the host’s fellow “9/11 liberal” Sam Harris for their “gross” and “racist” comments on Islam during a heated debate on Real Time.
‘Islam is the only religion that acts like the mafia that will f*cking kill you if you say the wrong thing’
The round-table exchange with Affleck, was a follow-up to Maher’s statements a week earlier, in which Maher claimed:
‘The Muslim world has too much in common with Isis’
It speaks volumes about why liberal western culture is not just different. It’s better. President Obama keeps insisting that Isis is not Islamic. Well, maybe they don’t practice the Muslim faith in the same way he does.
“But. If vast numbers of Muslims across the world believe – and they do - that humans deserve to die for merely holding a different idea or drawing a cartoon or writing a book or eloping with the wrong person, not only does the Muslim world have something in common with Isis. It has too much in common with Isis.”
This ability to project a broad generalization onto more than 1 billion people, we’ve seen from Maher before. In a 2011 interview with Anderson Cooper, Maher claims this about Muslims:
‘They’re violent ... They threaten us’
Absolutely. Because they’re violent. Because they threaten us. And they are threatening. They bring that desert stuff to our world …We don’t threaten each other, we sue each other. That’s the sign of civilized people. And they don’t ... People who want to gloss over the difference between western culture and Islamic culture and forget about the fact that the Islamic culture is 600 years younger and that they are going through the equivalent of what the west went through with our middle ages, our dark ages when religion had way too much power … do so at their peril.”
Here is a clip from a fascinating round-table on his previous show, Politically Incorrect, in which he spars with academic Assad Abukhalil in November 2001, two months after 9/11:
‘I am not insulting Arabs and Muslims. I am keeping it real like I do with everybody else’
Abukhalil argues that Maher singles out Islam in his criticisms, and fails to denote the “kooks” and the “crazies” that exist in all three Abrahamic religions. In response, Maher said:
What’s fascetious about that argument is that the kooks and the terrorists in the Christian and the Jewish world are truly just a little fringe. And in the Muslim world they draw from a vast pool of support, which is not in any other religion. So don’t try and feed me that line.”
When probed by Assad Abukhalil about how he follows Al-Jazeera if he doesn’t speak Arabic, he retorts: “It’s just like the Qur’an, it’s taken out of context”: ‘Kill the infidel’ is really just ‘turn the other cheek’.
For good measure, here’s a clip of Reza Aslan’s takedown of Maher:
When Aslan was invited onto CNN to critique Maher’s views, he was later criticized by CNN morning show host Chris Cuomo who noted that Aslan’s “tone” is why people fear Islam.
