When it comes to radical Islam, Bill Maher believes his fellow liberals and leftists look the other way.
The Real Time with Bill Maher talk show host on HBO usually spends a lot of time stereotyping conservatives, Republicans, and Tea Party members as uptight, bible-thumping, ignorant, racist hillbillies.
On Thursday night’s broadcast, however, he suggested that otherwise nonjudgmental liberals, multi-culturalists, and others who express outrage when Jonah Hill, Donald Sterling, Rush Limbaugh, or Mel Gibson say stupid or offensive things, or when a baker refuses to make gay wedding cakes, remain silent “while gross atrocities are ignored across the world.” He also called attention to the fact that a group of Yale students recently tried to prevent Islam critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali from speaking on campus.
Maher, a self-described atheist, declared, “If we’re giving no quarter to intolerance, shouldn’t we be starting with the mutilators and honor killers?”
In his monologue, Maher also recalled that President Obama insisted that ISIS is not Islamic. The Real Time host countered that the Muslim world “has too much in common with ISIS.”
Maher specifically called out liberals for their politically correct-driven silence in the face of extremism.
There’s so much talk about wiping out ISIS; you can’t, not with bombs. You can only expose that something is a bad idea… cultures are different. It’s okay to judge that rule of law isn’t just different from theocracy. It’s better. If you don’t see that, you’re either a religious fanatic or a masochist; one thing you are certainly not is a liberal. To count yourself as a liberal, you must stand up for liberal principles — free speech, separation of church and state, freedom to practice any religion or no religion, without the threat of violence, respect for minorities, especially homosexuals, equality for women…”
In July, Bill Maher referred to liberals as acting like “useless Obama hacks without a shred of intellectual honesty” for similarly clamming up about NSA spying under Obama, a constitutional and privacy violation that would have made them “apoplectic” if it was taking place during the G.W. Bush presidential administration.
For reasons related to political correctness and other factors, many on the left in the U.S. and in Europe have also denounced the state of Israel and supported its enemies, even though that country is the only functioning Western-style democracy in the Middle East.
Earlier this month, Bill Maher generated some buzz when he strongly disagreed with an attempt by a visibly uncomfortable Charlie Rose, a liberal journalist, to compare Islam with Christianity.
Said Maher during the Rose interview, “Vast numbers of Christians do not believe that if you leave the Christian religion you should be killed for it. Vast numbers of Christians do not treat women as second class citizens. Vast numbers of Christians… do not believe if you draw a picture of Jesus Christ you should get killed for it.”
An outspoken advocate of gun control and a foe of “gun nuts,” Bill Maher has previously admitted that he owns firearms for personal protection even though he has referred to the Second Amendment as “bullsh*t.”
Is Bill Maher accurate in his contention that politically correct liberals are unwilling to criticize radical Islam? Does Bill Maher misunderstand the Islamic faith?
[image via Randy Miramontez / Shutterstock.com ]