Islam row with Ben Affleck, Bill Maher responds: 'We're not bigoted people'
As debate rages on across social media following Ben Affleck's angry exchange with TV host Bill Maher over Islam, Maher has defended his position and argued it has won over a new audience.
The
pair clashed angrily on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher show on Friday, after Maher's sweeping statements about an entire religion, with Affleck calling comments "gross and racist" and "broad brush".
In response to the outrage ongoing since Friday, Maher told
Salon.com: "We're liberals."
"We're not bigoted people. On the contrary, we're trying to stand up for the principles of liberalism. And so, you know, I think we're just saying we need to identify illiberalism wherever we find it in the world, and not forgive it because it comes from [a group] people perceive as a minority."
Maher had argued on his show that "it's the only religion that acts like the mafia, that will f---ing kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture or write the wrong book".
He told Salon.com that he didn't care if he was being forced out of the contemporary liberal community and said his arguments were part of a "healthy" debate.
He said his studio audience had come around to his line of thinking. "When I used to talk about it, it was just either stony silence or outright booing and now I notice quite a shift," he said, adding that some of his audience had cheered.
"I think it's just how you frame it. And there's a knee-jerk reaction sometimes among liberals – Oh, we need to be protective of a group that certainly does face prejudice and bigotry in America (and I'm certainly against that) - but we need to understand that it's a wider issue."
On the show last week Maher, who has a long history of criticising organised religion and Islam, hosted a panel featuring Affleck and atheist author Sam Harris.
Harris claimed that people had been sold the "meme of Islamophobia, where criticism of the religion gets conflated with bigotry towards muslims as people".
Affleck reacted with horror and waded in, saying their talk was "gross and racist". "It's like saying, 'Oh, you shifty Jew,'" he said.
Harris continued to argue that Islam was currently the "motherlode of bad ideas", and Maher agreed, which led Affleck to counter, "It's just an ugly thing to say", before launching into a tirade.
"How about more than a billion people who aren't fanatical, who don't punch women, who just want to go to school, have some sandwiches, pray five times a day and don't do any of the things you're saying of all Muslims. It's stereotyping," Affleck said.
He went on to say: "What is your solution? To condemn Islam? To do what? We've killed more Muslims than they've killed us by an awful lot."
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Islam row with Ben Affleck, Bill Maher responds: 'We're not bigoted people'
Yes, Bill Maher Is Boorish. But We Shouldn't Be Afraid to Criticize Islam.
By Eric Sasson
Last Friday, controversy-generator Bill Maher made some remarks on his HBO show that suggested that liberals needs to stand up for liberal principles and that on so many issues (LGBT rights, freedom of speech and religion, etc.) the Islamic faith is “lacking.” First his views on Muslims
were called “racist” and “gross” by
current Box Office champ Ben Affleck, then noted religious scholar Reza Aslan
told CNN's Don Lemon that Maher “is not very sophisticated in the way that he thinks” on religion, and that opinions conflating extremist Muslim countries with all Muslim countries are “frankly stupid.”
Several outlets joined in to decry Maher, saying his attack on Islam “comes from the same shallow thinking he generally accuses the average American population of engaging in.”
It's true that Maher, who is notoriously opposed to organized religion, often condemns with broad brushstrokes. His statements on Islam in particular are crude and overly simplistic, crafted to antagonize or get an easy laugh rather than enlighten. And yet, it seems a bit facile to dismiss his central points simply by claiming he's stereotyping or generalizing. Sure, Maher's a loudmouth who
seems to take particular glee in riling up liberals who might otherwise agree with him. But his lack of nuance should not be met by an equal lack of nuance.
Maher's three main points, as I understood them, were:
1) Liberals who advocate equal rights for women and LGBT people at home are often too reluctant to condemn cultures that oppress those groups.
2) Criticism of Islam should be allowed, and should not be conflated with bigotry toward Muslims.
3) “Extremist” views are not held by a small minority of Muslims, but rather by a plurality of citizens in many, if not most, Muslim countries. (Likely Maher states this as “fact” based on studies such as
this one from Pew Research.)
The question of a double standard on equal rights has much to do with the left's longstanding devotion to multiculturalism and cultural relativism: that we must respect the value systems of cultures different from our own, and that, since we are all morally compromised, we shouldn't cast stones. As Aslan points out in his CNN interview, Saudi Arabia may be the most extreme Muslim country in the Middle East, and still it's the United States' closest Arab ally. Too often we have funded extremist regimes in the region at the expense of fostering democracy, creating an environment for radical Islam to thrive.
But this doesn't negate the argument that there is a double standard. Even if we admit complicity in the rise of militant Islam, we have every right to condemn the values of Islamic fundamentalists. Fears of cultural imperiousness cannot allow us to ignore or, worse, justify beliefs and behavior in other cultures that we would never accept here at home. What's more, the closer we keep to countries whose values we abhor, the better chance we have of influencing those values for the better.
As for criticizing Islam, it is certainly true that, given the post-9/11 demonization of Muslims by many Americans, we must be careful about choosing our targets. Moderate Muslims exist the world over—Muslims who oppose extremism, who hate the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, who oppose sharia law. There are even Muslims who agree with liberals on issues such as abortion and gay rights.
But the fact is, Islam includes troubling teachings—just as many other religions, including Christianity, do. While certainly subject to interpretation, the Q'uran does refer to many regressive-sounding ideas, including a
husband's right to discipline his wife by striking her, and, as Maher mentioned on his show,
proscribing the death penalty for apostasy.
But if you make this point in America, knee-jerk liberals will call you Islamophobic. If you slight Allah, either unintentionally (
Katy Perry) or for comedy (
“South Park”), you'll be hounded until you remove the offending material. And if you're Somali-born writer and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has said “violence is inherent in Islam” and “Islam is the new facism,” a university will
refuse to confer an honorary degree to you. I cannot defend Ali's statements, but they don't discredit her wholesale. She has done important work exposing "honor violence" against women and genital mutilation, issues which most liberals would agree with her on.
Maher's final point—that many Muslims do hold extremist views—proved the most incendiary. Affleck equated Maher's remarks with those who describe “shifty Jews” and “black people shooting each other.” Aslan cited statistics about how female genital mutilation is not a Muslim-country problem but a Central African problem. Aslan also noted that seven Muslim countries have elected women as their leaders, emphatically holding up Malaysia, Indonesia, and Turkey as prime examples of countries where women are treated equally to men.
But
recent reports from Human Rights Watch suggest a “significant rollback” of rights for women in Indonesia. Malaysia is
proof that female genital mutilation is indeed a problem outside of Africa. And Turkey is a misleading example, as the advances in women's rights there occurred under the secularist regime of its first president, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and those who followed in his footsteps. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey's current Islamist president, has
come under fire from Human Rights Watch for “a series of human rights violations including the weakening of the rule of law, pressure on the media, crackdowns on peaceful protests and the rolling back of democratic gains the country has achieved in previous years.”
Most telling: Azlan made no mention whatsoever of LGBT rights in any Muslim nation. Polls show that the
majority of people in Muslim nations think homosexuality is morally wrong, with the numbers hovering near 90 percent in most countries. The punishment for homosexual activity in
the majority of these countries involve prison sentences, while some include hard labor, forced psychiatric treatment, whippings, and death by public stoning.
It should not be considered “generalizing” to cite these statistics. But neither should pointing them out—or labeling Islam “the mother lode of bad ideas,” as one of Maher's other guests, Sam Harris,
did—convince us that we are somehow solving the problem. Maher's boorishness succeeded in bringing these issues back into the spotlight, but if we are to approach a criticism of Islam in a thoughtful way, we must be judicious while remaining honest. It's just as easy to say that Islam itself is the problem as it is to say that criticizing Islam is tantamount to bigotry. Neither are true, and neither advance the liberal cause in any way. If we're going to have the courage—or the gall, depending on your perspective—to demand that other cultures be more progressive, our domestic debates ought to reflect the best of our own progressive culture. We must show them something worthy of emulation.
When Ben Affleck and Bill Maher Debate Islam, Everyone Loses
Any reforms are most likely to come from people who are Muslims themselves.
October 8, 2014 It was a long and meaty debate by talk-show standards, which is to say it was short and stupid.
Ben Affleck, Bill Maher, Sam Harris, Nicholas Kristof and Michael Steele spent several minutes debating Islam on Maher’s HBO show last week, and the debate among the liberals in the bunch got pretty heated. (Steele didn’t contribute much.)
I don’t subscribe to the old rule that you should never argue about religion, but watching this exchange you begin to see the point of it. Both sides illustrated how these arguments often go wrong.
Maher and Harris were saying that their fellow liberals don’t criticize Islamic radicalism and illiberalism enough. Harris, an author of atheistic polemics, said that criticism of “the doctrine of Islam” shouldn’t be “conflated with bigotry against Muslims as people.”
These comments led to some predictable offense-taking. Affleck jumped in to say that criticism of the Muslim world was “gross,” “racist” and “stereotyping.” Kristof, a New York Times columnist, said that there was “a tinge” of “how white racists talk” in the criticism, and that it amounted to “caricaturing” places like Malaysia.
Islam is not, of course, a race, and Harris wasn’t claiming that all Muslims held the views he was criticizing — such as the beliefs that adulterers should be stoned and apostates from Islam killed, which appear to be held by small majorities of Malaysian Muslims.
Maher overstated his point: It isn’t true, as he asserted, that 90 percent of Egyptians support the death penalty for leaving Islam. But the true number, 64 percent according to a Pew Research Center poll, is bad enough. That these views are much more widely held among Muslims than among Christians, Jews or Buddhists is simply a fact, and it isn’t bigotry to say so.
But Harris and Maher went off track themselves: At no point did either distinguish between criticizing beliefs common among Muslims and criticizing Islam itself. Harris started things off, recall, by attributing these pernicious beliefs to “the doctrine of Islam.” Later on, he defended himself by saying, “We have to be able to criticize bad ideas, and Islam is the mother lode of bad ideas.” Maher, absurdly, chimed in: “That’s just a fact.”
I don’t find it offensive when people criticize Islam (or, for that matter, Christianity) as a font of bad ideas. But I think it’s more likely to be counterproductive than useful in countering illiberalism and radicalism among Muslims. And it’s not a stretch to treat an attack on the Islamic religion as a criticism of all or most Muslims.
Liberals, and others, need to be able to keep in their minds two things simultaneously: Much of the Muslim world is in need of reformation, and any reforms are most likely to come from people who are Muslims themselves — not from people who dismiss their religion as the “mother lode of bad ideas.”
SAM HARRIS RESPONDS!
