Bill Maher joined forces with an unlikely ally Friday night in speaking out against liberals coming to the defense of Islam while also begging for equality of women and criticized those on the Left for failing to condemn the religion despite growing violence.
Maher and conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza duked it out with Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington and comedian Baratunde Thurston on HBO’s “Real Time.” Maher began his segment by discussing Boko Haram, the terrorist group that kidnapped young Nigerian girls, and went on to discuss Islam.
“There’s no mention here of connecting this to the religion, which is always what I am seeking to do because I think that’s the elephant in the room,” the “Real Time” host said. “And that in the religious at large, women are seen as property, second-class at best, often as property. Shouldn’t that be brought to light in this debate as well?”
Reason editor-in-chief Matt Welch argued that many in the media are highlighting the group’s religion, and noted that instead of it being just a “few bad apples,” Islam “is providing a disproportionate share of radical nut bags killing people.”
Thurston, though, argued that Islam does not have a “monopoly on darkness and nut bags and crazy rhetoric and violence,” to which Maher disagreed.
“Kind of they do,” he refuted. “Not a monopoly, but perspective is important … It’s the Titanic hitting the iceberg compared to Whitney Houston dying in her bathtub.”
Maher also noted that if this had been the 14th Century, he would have come down on Christians for their acts of violence. However, “religions and cultures change,” he said.
“There sometimes is a broad indictment of a religion in general,” D’Souza joined in. “But if you look today, you do see that while the vast majority of Muslims that I know means terrorist, it does seem that the vast majority of terrorist incidents do involve some aspect of the Muslim world. You don’t see a whole lot of Buddhist suicide bombers.”
Huffington warned, though, that it “becomes dangerous” to “put all that together” and stereotype all Muslims as terrorists.
“Where it becomes dangerous is that liberals like yourself do not stand up for liberalism,” Maher fired back. “Liberalism means, one, mostly, equality of women. Free speech. No death threats. … I’m the bad guy because I’m against the people who cut your arms off for not praying.”
D’Souza agreed with Maher and said there was a “civil war going on in the mind of the liberal.”
“On one hand, you’re a defender of civil rights and minorities. If this were the Catholic Church, you’d be all on it,” the filmmaker said. “But on the other hand, you’re committed to multiculturalism, and Islam is a victim and we don’t want to make the Muslims feel bad.”
Huffington, though, argued it was not fair to say that “all Muslims are guilty” — what she believed D’Souza and Maher were saying — but they refuted, and instead said “Islam is the problem.”
Watch the segment below, courtesy of HBO.
h/t Mediaite
