Juan Cole: Ben Affleck on Bill Maher’s Muslim Problem

[marmar]

By Juan Cole


Bravo to Ben Affleck and Nicholas Kristoff for telling Bill Maher off about his chronic case of Muslim-hating bigotry. (He would say he doesn’t hate Muslims, only their religion, but then those who hate gays say much the same sort of thing).

Maher and Sam Harris like to demonize Islam and by association Muslims. Ben Affleck de-demonized them by appealing to the banalities of everyday life. Most Muslims, he said, just want to have a sandwich and get through their lives. This is true.
Addressing the arguments of Maher and Harris is like nailing jello to the wall. They shift between cultural practices that are now objectionable in the US (but some of which were common here until recently) and an assertion that Muslims are unusually violent. But this latter is not true. As for Islamic law, it clearly forbids terrorism.

See Terrorism and the Other Religions
and here .

Maher’s and Harris’s charges against Muslims in general are ridiculous. Neither one has ever lived in a Muslim-majority society or knows the languages or cultures. They just retail invidious calumnies second-hand. Almost anything polemicists like Sam Harris say of Muslims can be said of others; i.e. they are just describing the human condition, unfortunate as it often is. In the 1990s an ABC poll showed that 10% of Americans sympathized with far right wing white supremacist groups like the Michigan Militia. My recollection is that polling showed that a significant proportion of Chinese sympathized with the 9/11 attacks and to this day only a third think al-Qaeda committed them (i.e. it wasn’t viewed as a fundamentalist act but as an anti-imperialist one [this point of view is execrable; I'm just reporting it]). Note that in this last instance, the attitudes have nothing to do with religion but rather with nationalism/ imperialism, a binary pair that explains the world much better than religion/atheism. The same statistics, if glibly given by Maher or Harris for Muslims, would damn the latter and their tradition; but what about the Chinese? Is Communist-Capitalism or the Confucianist heritage to blame here? ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.juancole.com/2014/10/affleck-muslim-problem.html

[el_bryanto]

1. Juan Cole has always struck me as very insightful. nt

[tularetom]

2. Remember why Maher got fired by ABC?

He said on his show that the terrorists who flew planes into the buildings were not as cowardly as the US who fired missiles from thousands of miles away.

The media jumped right in the middle of his shit and accused him of being a terrorist sympathizer. Ever since he's been trying to make up for his lapse in judgment by bad mouthing Islam and anything related to it.

I don't think Maher believes strongly in much of anything, but he does like to get right wingers on his show, so he has to act like he hates something that they hate.

Maher is a superficial self absorbed asshole and nothing he says should be taken seriously.

[leftynyc]

4. With all due respect

I think your post is a bunch of crap. Nobody says boo when Maher goes after Christianity - in fact they love it. But he and Harris were both right in saying nobody can say the slightest thing negative about Islam without being called an Islamophobe - Affleck called Bill a racist that very night just proving how right Maher was. I think Affleck looked like a deer caught in headlights.

[karynnj]

6. Many go after Maher anti-Christian (or anti-religious) comments.

Not to mention, this is not just "the slightest thing negative" about Islam. I seriously have never heard anyone say anything this negative about either Christianity or Judaism WITHOUT there being a strong negative statement made by the relevant organizations.

I think it was great that Ben Affleck had the courage to stand up against someone like Maher , knowing that Maher would cast him as a naive " useful idiot" with all the sarcasm this libertarian ably employs. He also knew that Maher controlled the microphone here.

Maher has no expertise in religion or foreign policy - and worse, he is too arrogant to care about this. Juan Cole, from the OP, was through the Iraq war on one of the sanest people to read on what was happening. Getting your opinion on either from him is no better than getting it from the equally ignorant Sean Hannity - other than Maher is perceived (incorrectly I think) to be on our side. (incorrectly because he seems more libertarian than either liberal or progressive.)

If you have read anything about what the Obama administration is trying to do here, you would see that Affleck is far more helpful than Maher. They have spoken of the need to get the Moslems to reject the extremists. One way they have done this is that there was an effort to get countries to ask their religious leaders to speak against the extremists -- and many have done so. As Secretary Kerry has said, it is better to stop an individual from joining ISIS than to fight them in Iraq/Syria. The hatred spewed by Maher is easily used to argue that the West does not believe what Kerry and Obama have said.

[leftynyc]

9. I've been here over a decade

and I've yet to see anyone trash Maher for his going after Christianity. Not...even...once. I also think Juan Cole is an asshole - as is Hannity - so perhaps we are going to agree on nothing.

[karynnj]

13. I was not speaking of DU, where I also have been for around 10 years

The fact is that I never liked Bill Maher - so I don't watch him. Therefore I never would start a thread on any anti Christian comment he has made. I would object to ANY comment against any religion and I think many others would as well. It is possible that the fact that Christianity is the dominant faith and is not really threatened in the US is likely why no one objects to idiotic comments by people like Maher.

Are you implying that I said anything favorable about Sean Hannity - if so, you really misread what I wrote. (My point there is that neither Maher or Hannity have any credentials on either religion or foreign policy - and yet both try to lead opinion on them.)

I note you did not address Maher's comments at all. Do you agree with the more controversial ones?

[leftynyc]

15. I do agree with some of what he said

I've been called an Islamophobe (as has Bill) for merely pointing out some of the more rancid parts of living in a Muslim dominated country. Perhaps it's because I'm a woman that I find the treatment of women in so many of these countries something to raise an alarm about. Is the religion more violent? That I don't know - I don't know the Koran by heart. Are many of their current adherents violent? That, without question, is true. The percentages that believe death is an appropriate punishment for leaving Islam sends chills up my spine. But there are so many moderate Muslims (and I know several) who are horrified by isil and al queda that I can't condemn all Muslims the same way I don't tag all Christians with the westboro church. I find, like Maher, that liberals have a blind spot for this religion and while I understand the desire to "root for the underdog", especially when the right wing (who I loathe) tries to tag all Muslims with violence, I can't turn away from the treatment of women, gays and other minorities in countries with majority Muslim populations.

[tularetom]

7. Nah, I don't care what Maher says about Christianity, Islam, or any other topic

He's just a crappy comedian who has no core beliefs but is really only interested in making money. I was merely pointing out that in my opinion his anti-Islam stance is overcompensation for the faux pas that got him fired from his former gig.

You go ahead and think what you want.

[joeybee12]

3. BIG KNR

[LawDeeDah]

5. A very big rec.

This:
i.e. they are just describing the human condition, unfortunate as it often is.

and this:

Maher is a consistent liberal and donated $1 million to the Obama campaign, so he is in odd company in targeting Muslims this way. So what explains this animus against Muslims in particular? The only thing he has in common with the Islamophobic Right is his somewhat bloodthirsty form of militant Zionism. He strongly supported the Israeli attack on helpless little Lebanon in 2006, in which the Israelis dropped a million cluster bombs on the farms of the south of that country. He talks about how the besieged Palestinians of Gaza deserve to be “nuked.” His interviews with Likudnik Israeli officials are typically fawning, unlike his combative style with other right wing guests.

Many thanks to Cole and Afflect.

[lame54]

8. Actually Maher and the other didn't say much on the show...

because they were shouted down

not many sentences were allowed to be completed

it got heated with many interruptions and not many points were made on either side

[Paladin]

10. And yet a Fox "News" guy expressed admiration for Maher's comments....

...and Maher did a walk-back of his statements on Salon.com yesterday.

[lame54]

12. you mean on his half-statements

[Paladin]

19. Hold your nose and check out the Maher threads over at Discussionist.com.

The right-wingers are born-again fans, based on Maher's trashing of Islam, last week. I'm wondering if he'll do any follow-up on this week's show, try to defuse things a little.....

[BuelahWitch]

18. Maher did a whole section of "New Rules" on the subject the week before

So he got to say plenty, uninterrupted.

[Gothmog]

11. Maher tends to hate all religions

I think that Maher is wrong here

[Bluenorthwest]

14. I find it disrespectful that Cole and Affleck both exploit language about gay people as part of

their rhetoric. I think it would be better if they simply left us out of this argument. At the very least, if one is going to drag oppressed minorities into a discussion in which their only part is being oppressed, then one should at least mention that oppression. To suggest that anti gay governments and religious leaders are being treated 'just like gays' without mentioning that those governments and religious leaders do in fact oppress gay people is fairly shitty and one sided verbiage. To make use of another to the exclusive benefit of yourself to the exclusion of that other is the definition of exploitation.

Cole also seems to miss that religion is a chosen thing and being gay is not. One is not born to a religion. Religious behaviors are chosen behaviors. He implies that it is also a choice to be gay, by equating a faith of profession to an inborn state of being. So his analogy fails to impress on those grounds as well.

[AngryAmish]

20. As everyone knows, being gay is not a choice

Even if it is a choice, no one has the right to tell you who to love.

[MisterP]

16. Maher, Harris, and Ali aren't here to debate issues: they're here to rile people up

should we take a theory that the Maine really was blown up by the damn Spaniards as part of a Nueva Conquista to force Papism at bayonet-point on us poor defenseless Anglos seriously?
the real issue is what'll be the *next* bogeyman: literally everything Muslims are accused of since 2001 they were saying about the Chinese in 1880

[malaise]

17. After the latest slaughter in Gaza

I decided that I would never watch another program with Bill Maher. Go and watch his comments. So I didn't see his latest racist BS.