“It was probably not the Amish”: Bill Maher urges liberals to wake up about Islam after Paris attacks. By Sarah Burris. Salon, November 14, 2015.
Real Time with Bill Maher: Asra Nomani Interview (HBO). Video. Real Time with Bill Maher, November 13, 2015. YouTube.
Hanchett:
HBO host Bill Maher and author Asra Nomani criticized liberals for their position on radical Islam on Friday’s “Real Time.”
Nomani
told Maher, “you have honestly taken a position of moral courage. I’m a
feminist, liberal Muslim. I know, a lot of contradiction in terms there,
head-spinning, but you have dared to challenge liberals to stand by their
values.”
Both
stated that while it isn’t 100% certain who’s behind the terror attacks in
France, it probably was carried out by Islamic terrorists. Nomani continued,
“so President Obama says that he’s going to go after the terrorists, and he’s
going to go after the terrorist networks, but we don’t mention what kind of
terrorist networks.” Maher then said, “It’s crazy. That — I don’t understand
that. And I also don’t understand liberals who don’t understand, this man who
says the moderates are in jail. How could liberals who stood for black people
getting to go to college in the 60’s and then when I was in college they were
protesting apartheid in South Africa. How can they not stand up against sharia
law, which is the law in so many Muslim countries, which is a law of
oppression?”
Nomani
added, “I don’t understand it either, but what I have figured out is that they
run scared. They’re afraid of the name-calling that you’re — get targeted with,
the name-calling that I get targeted with. They don’t want to look bad. They
don’t want to act like they are intolerant of a minority community, but at the
end day, they are on the side of the aggressive Muslims, the people who believe
in sexism and bigotry.”
Later
Maher wondered, “How did we get to this place where just describing something
is demonizing? And I’m not so sure it’s a very small percentage, maybe a small
percentage who carry out terrorist acts, but it’s not a small percentage,
right, who believe in some of the illiberal ideas that support terrorists?”
Nomani
also criticized the “honor brigade,” which includes groups like the Council on
American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and people in high places of academia who
“smear somebody like you, somebody like me, for being witness to truth, because
ultimately, the truth frightens them, the liberals get on board.”
Both
also argued that true liberal values should be fought for, and what it means to
be a liberal should be questioned. Nomani added that human rights are
ultimately validated by Islam, because “while the — many of the principles that
are being practiced today are unequal and sexist, the religion came as a
progressive faith in the 7th century. We just stayed stuck in the 7th century.”
Nomani
concluded, “We have to be honest about the fact that there is an ideology of
Islam, that is our war, of our generation, and this is an ideology that we have
to address, and we have to address it with moral courage.”
Maher
added that both of them would be called bigots and Islamophobes the next day.
