Bret Stephens on the Coming Global Disorder.

Bret Stephens: The Coming Global Disorder. Video. Tikvah Fund, June 13, 2014. YouTube.

Bret Stephens Dishes Candidly about Jews, Israel, and Withdrawal. By Eli Clifton. LobeLog, May 28, 2015.





Bret Stephens and Ari Shavit Debate the Future of Israel, Zionism, and the Middle East. Video. Hadassah, July 22, 2014. YouTube.

What’s the Difference Between ISIS and Al Qaeda? By Bret Stephens.

What’s the difference between ISIS and Al Qaeda? Video. Bret Stephens interviewed by Don Imus. Imus in the Morning. Fox Business, November 19, 2014.

Ben Stein: America’s Real Race Problem Is a “Pathetic, Self-Defeating Black Underclass.”

Ben Stein: America’s Real Race Problem Is “Pathetic, Self-Defeating Black Underclass.” By Matt Wilstein. Mediaite, November 10, 2014. Video at YouTube. Also at Breitbart. Salon. Daily Caller.



Stein:

You would think, if you read the liberal mainstream media, that the main problem with race in America was poor innocent black people being set upon and mistreated by the police. That’s just nonsense. I mean, the real problem with race in America is a very, very beaten-down, pathetic, self-defeating black underclass that is, uh, just can’t seem to get its way going in the way that blacks were able to before the scourge of drugs and the scourge of gangs.

I mean, it’s an amazing thing — blacks were on their way in this country, even after the horrors of slavery, and then drugs came in, the destruction of families came in, and the crisis in the black community is just absolutely unbelievable. And that, it seems to me, is something that Mr. Obama could have addressed, and he has ignored it completely.

Kirsten Powers: Ben Stein’s Comments on Black Underclass “Racist.” By Josh Feldman. Mediaite, November 11, 2014. Video at YouTube.

The Democratic Party’s Civil War Is Here. By Daniel Greenfield.

The Democratic Party’s Civil War Is Here. By Daniel Greenfield. FrontPage Magazine, November 6, 2014. Also at Sultan Knish.

Obama Has Destroyed His Party. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, November 10, 2014.

Two Midterm Elections Have Hollowed Out the Democratic Party. By Dan Balz. Washington Post, November 8, 2014.

Boss Rangel and the Spirit of 1876. By Walter Russell Mead. The American Interest, March 5, 2010.

Syria Expert Joshua Landis: Partition Syria Between Assad and a Sunni State.

Fareed Zakaria goes 1-on-1 with Syria Expert Joshua Landis to discuss and innovative solution to the ongoing Syria crisis. Video. Syria Comment, November 8, 2014. Also at CNN Video and Farred Zakaria GPS.




GPS Transcript:

ZAKARIA: To most American officials, pundits, scholars, Syria is a problem with no good answers. I for one have never heard a sensible solution until now. My next guest is in my opinion the top Syria scholar in the United States and he is a man with a plan. Joshua Landis is the director of the University of Oklahoma Center for Middle East Studies. Josh, let’s go through this because everybody has heard so much about Syria. Let’s start with the map of what Syria looks like right now, and explain to us what those colors mean.

JOSHUA LANDIS: The colors are that the government led by Bashar al Assad in Damascus in the South rules over this purplish color in the South. The ISIS, this new big state that has formed, dominates the east and the north –

ZAKARIA: But a lot of that is just desert, right?

LANDIS: Yes, much of that is desert, it’s not the big populated areas. And then you have the blue which has also rebel activity. Now, you’ve got to remember, that there are over 1,000 militias in Syria according to the CIA.

ZAKARIA: So, let’s understand why you think that the solution that so many people keep pushing, which is that the United States supports those rebels in the blue areas and that they will, therefore, win, they will establish control, create perhaps a Democratic Syria, why is that not going to work?

LANDIS: Well, it’s not going to work because most of the blue area are dominated by the big rebel groups which are al Qaeda and the Islamic Front, which are Jihadist, very anti-American groups. The pro-American militias just got wiped out in the northern blue spot Jablazawi (ph). They just got pushed aside by al Qaeda, and so they’re very small. They may own perhaps one or two percent of Syria today, the rebels that are being backed by the United States. So to turn those two percent into winners that would not only wipe out ISIS, but take on Assad would be a gargantuan undertaking.

ZAKARIA: So, they have to beat al Nusra and al Qaeda and Khorasan, then they’ve got to beat ISIS, then they’ve got to beat ...

LANDIS: It’s not going to happen. And we’ve – we’ve only – President Obama has given them half a billion dollars. Now, that, you know, at the University of Oklahoma we have an endowment of much more than $1 billion and we can’t even pay the students to go for free. So, they’re not going to build an army for that kind of money. This is just chump change that's there to satisfy, I presume, people who are criticizing the president.

ZAKARIA: So, let’s go to what you think the – the reality is emerging toward and what could be a stable outcome.

LANDIS: What could be an outcome is leaving Assad in southern Syria. Assad, although he owns less than 50 percent of the territory, he owns over 60 – about 65 percent of the population because Damascus, in the big cities and all the cities on the coast are still under his control largely. So if you just left him there, these lines, battle lines have been more or less static for the last two years. The north is the problem. That’s where we’re bombing. That’s what’s dominated by ISIS and al Qaeda. What one would have to do if they want to solve this problem and not just make a narrow counterterrorism approach to it, would be to try to draw the Turks into Syria with Saudi, American backing, and NATO backing to try to disarm the militias and set up a government that was a good government that everybody could get behind and pour money into for development and try to fix this problem so it wouldn't be a festering, radical ...

ZAKARIA: But recognize that the forces who support Syria are simply not going to live under that Sunni north and the Sunni north is not going to live under Assad.

LANDIS: No.

ZAKARIA: And so create a clean break.

LANDIS: Because what people are talking about now and are emerging is autonomous regions with a political solution where the Alawites and us ought to sit down with rebels who are very Islamist and come up with some agreement. That’s just never going to happen. These different groups have radically different visions of where Syria should be.

ZAKARIA: And then we look at the map that shows us what would happen to the Kurds over there. So you keep them in autonomous region which is much like the one they have in Iraq and then finally where the Alawites are already clustered, right? So, this is what Syria would look like. It would be stable. The Kurds would be – would have their area. The Alawites would have their area

LANDIS: No, the Alawites would be under Assad. Alawites – Bashar al- Assad, the president is an Alawite. And he dominates today. You wouldn’t – you couldn’t build an Alawite enclave. People thought of that in the beginning, but it’s indefensible. If Bashar Assad loses the rest of Syria, they are going to storm – and conquer the cost. That’s why he’s kept these cities.

ZAKARIA: So, finally, the map of 1919 that the British and French drew was wrong. This is a map that reflects the realities of sectarianism and is possibly more stable.

LANDIS: Yes, it is. And what we see today if you were to pan back and look at a map of what the Islamic State has built from Baghdad, which stretches from the edges of Baghdad all the way to Aleppo today, is a Sunni state, and it’s already emerged, and what America is doing by bombing it is trying to destroy this state that is there, and it’s going to be a very hard thing to do from the air.

ZAKARIA: So you say, you know, accept reality, don’t try to ...

LANDIS: Accept reality, accept that state, but try to get better rulers for it, not ISIS.

ZAKARIA: Joshua Landis, as I say, the single best solution to the Syria problem I have heard.

Joshua Landis on ISIS, Syria & the“Great Sorting Out” in the Middle East – Interview with Danny Postel. Video. Syria Comment, October 17, 2014. YouTube.

The Great Sorting Out: Ethnicity & the Future of the Levant. By Joshua Landis. Qifa Nakbi, December 18, 2013.

What Would a Post-Assad Syria Look Like? Video with Joshua Landis. DU Center for Middle East Studies, February 4, 2013, YouTube.




Joshua Landis Speaks at the World Affairs Council of Houston. Video. World Affairs Council Houston, October 22, 2014, YouTube.

The Myth of Religious Violence. By Karen Armstrong.

The myth of religious violence. By Karen Armstrong. The Guardian, September 25, 2014.

Nobody Can Govern America from the Left. By Robert W. Merry.

Nobody Can Govern America from the Left: The Real Midterm-Elections Lesson. By Robert W. Merry. The National Interest, November 5, 2014.

The Psychology of Barack Obama. By Robert W. Merry. The National Interest, November 6, 2014.

This Man Is an Island: Obama Stands Alone. By David Rothkopf. Foreign Policy, November 5, 2014.

My American exceptionalism fantasy is over: How these midterms sealed the deal. By Andrew Cotto. Salon, November 6, 2014.


Merry [Nobody]:

Much has been written, and more will be, about what the 2014 elections mean, and most of it will focus on the small stuff—whether it was a “wave” or not, whether it was an anti-incumbency or anti-Obama phenomenon, what the president does now, what happens to gridlock and so on. Place all that to the side for the moment, and let’s get to the big picture on what this election demonstrates.

It demonstrates that nobody can govern America from the left, because the country doesn’t want to go there, and because whenever it has been tried in recent decades, it has failed. While the elites of the media, academia and the managerial class can’t seem to absorb this fundamental reality, the American people know it.

This reality comes into focus with a review of the country’s history since the emergence of the Great Depression of 1929-1942. Franklin Roosevelt attacked the problem from the left, marshaling governmental power as never before and rolling over traditional views, going back to Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, about small government and strict construction of the Constitution. Many conservative thinkers—for example, in recent years, Amity Shlaes—have argued that FDR’s policies failed to address the persistent economic dislocation. But in political terms, Roosevelt was a great success. He spurred substantial economic growth year after year and demonstrated that, in times such as those, governing the country from the left was not only acceptable, but probably necessary. The country loved the guy.

But we should be mindful of what happened to Roosevelt’s New Deal—the greatest aggrandizement of governmental power in our history—after his 1936 landslide reelection and his ill-conceived effort to aggrandize his power further by “packing” the Supreme Court. The voters concluded that Roosevelt had gone far enough, and they placed a clamp on his presidency. Republicans picked up eighty House seats in 1938 and six Senate seats. There was no New Deal reversal, nor would there be one, because the American people liked the country’s new power alignments. But further significant governmental expansion now wasn’t in the cards.

That was the state of play in American politics through the Republican presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, who never sought to dismantle the New Deal, because he knew the voters wouldn’t stand for it. At the same time, he also knew the voters weren’t looking for any serious expansion.

But the country faced a huge agenda of unfinished business in the area of civil rights, and Lyndon Johnson leveraged the civic emotions of the Kennedy assassination to address that lingering necessity through the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In the process, he fostered a further expansion in the scope and reach of the federal government, then extended this expansion further with his Great Society initiatives to fight poverty, establish Medicare and Medicaid, and address housing, education and nutrition issues. Again, the American people generally accepted this expanded governmental role, over the loud objections of conservatives, but then resisted efforts to expand it further.

That has been the state of play in American politics ever since. The great fault line has been on the question of governmental aggrandizement. And, while there have been some initiatives along these lines over the years (creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, for example, and the Education and Energy departments), the country generally has resisted building upon the New Deal and Great Society in any serious way. That means little prospect for presidents to succeed while seeking to govern from the left.

Consider the history. Jimmy Carter tried to govern from the left—and failed. Bill Clinton tried it for his first two years—and had his head handed to him in the 1994 midterm elections, when the country gave both houses of Congress to the Republicans for the first time in more than forty years. At that point, Clinton brilliantly defaulted to a carefully calibrated governing philosophy designed to place him just to the left of center. It worked handsomely, and his presidency generally is considered to have been a success.

Then came Obama, whose grand aim was to achieve historical greatness by building upon the governmental structures created by Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. This was seen in his big economic stimulus program, his Affordable Care Act, his “cap and trade” energy initiative, his Dodd-Frank bill with its new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and expansive bureaucratic meddling into markets, his plans to use the tax code for income redistribution, his expansion of the country’s regulatory apparatus and his exploitation of executive powers far beyond anything seen before in any president. His aim was to establish a new era of big government. As the New York Times’ David Brooks has written, “Capitalism is just a feeding trough that government can use to fuel its expansion.”

It didn’t work. It didn’t work in part because the American people never gave him a mandate for that kind of governmental expansion. This is reflected most starkly in the way his congressional allies pushed through Congress the Affordable Care Act—by distorting traditional procedures, without collecting a single vote from the opposition party. Neither Roosevelt, nor Johnson would have dreamed of embracing such a politically dangerous tack when they sought to take the country into new territory of governmental expansion. They knew such initiatives had to be undertaken with a broad national consensus or shouldn’t be undertaken at all. They mustered the requisite mandates before proceeding. Obama didn’t.

But, if Obama’s program didn’t work in political terms, it also didn’t work in structural terms. The stimulus program didn’t stimulate. Obamacare quickly went awry and has not worked as advertised. The president’s energy program—particularly his opposition to the Keystone XL Pipeline—is widely seen as stifling economic growth. His redistributionist plans can’t spur growth. His jobs performance is mediocre at best. His promiscuous use of executive authority is edging the country toward an unnecessary constitutional crisis.

The Obama presidency constitutes one of the great missed opportunities in American political history. He assumed office with an immense reservoir of goodwill at a time when the country was beset by an economic crisis that rendered voters highly receptive to bold action. The opposition party was in disarray as a result of its own failed presidency. Voters were ready for a new direction based upon a new matrix of political thinking that could foster new coalitions of citizens weary of the old fights and hungry for a new national coalescence.

No such national coalescence was possible by building upon the New Deal and Great Society foundations of old. They may have been right for their time, but they aren’t right for ours, as the American people have declared this week with emphatic bluntness. The folks over at MSNBC will never get it, but the next Democratic president should give it some serious thought.

In the meantime, while the country can’t be governed from the left, it has to be governed. And the challenge of new thinking and new coalitions applies to Republicans as much as it does to Democrats. The voters didn’t turn to the GOP this week because they have any particular faith in that party. They turned to the opposition because that’s what they do in our two-party system when they are grappling with a failed presidency.

And so the struggle will continue until one party or the other—or perhaps even a new party—will finally exploit the opportunity born of crisis to lead us out of the current mess.

Campaigning for ISIS in the West. By Clarissa Ward.

Campaigning for ISIS in the West. By Clarissa Ward. Video. 60 Minutes. CBS News, November 2, 2014.

Sam Harris Discusses Religious Violence and Islam with Cenk Uygur and Fareed Zakaria.

Sam Harris and Cenk Uygur Clear the Air on Religious Violence and Islam. Video. The Young Turks, October 23, 2014. YouTube. With commentary at SamHarris.org.




Fareed Zakaria vs. Sam Harris on Radical Islam: “Islam Has Been Spread By The Sword For Over 1,000 Years.” Video and transcript. Real Clear Politics, November 2, 2014. YouTube. YouTube. Breitbart. Haaretz.

Sam Harris on GPS “Islam has been spread by the sword.” Video and transcript. Fareed Zakaria GPS. CNN, November 2, 2014.

Harris on inter-spiritual struggle vs. holy war. Video and transcript. Fareed Zakaria GPS. CNN, November 1, 2014.




Fareed Zakaria GPS Transcript:

One month ago the celebrated atheist, author, and neuroscientist Sam Harris appeared on “Real Time,” Bill Maher’s HBO show. The conversation about Islam that ensued created quite a bit of controversy. Harris said, among other things, that, quote, “Islam at this moment is the mother lode of bad ideas.” Unquote. He went on to say that more than 20 percent of Muslims are either jihadists or Islamist who want to foist their religion on the rest of humanity. That comes out to about 300 million people.

I beg to differ and said as much when I responded with my own thoughts on the show. But I wanted to talk to Mr. Harris in person so here he is. He’s the author of a new book Waking Up, and we might get to it.

SAM HARRIS, AUTHOR, WAKING UP: Yes.

ZAKARIA: But first I want to ask you about that number.

HARRIS: Sure.

ZAKARIA: Which struck me as sort of pulled out of a hat. If you do have, you know, something in the range of 20 percent of all Muslims who are either jihadists or Islamists and, you know, which implies condoning violence and such, I’m just doing the math, that comes to about 300 million.

HARRIS: Correct.

ZAKARIA: So there’s – there were 10,000 terrorist events last year. Let’s assume that 100 people – let’s assume all of those were Muslim. Let’s assume each event was planned by 100 people, neither of those assumptions is right but I’m being generous.

HARRIS: Right.

ZAKARIA: That comes to about a million people who are jihadists. So that still leaves us with 299 million missing Muslim terrorists.

HARRIS: Yes. Right. Well, there are a few distinctions, I think, we have to make. One is there’s a difference between a jihadist and an Islamist. And there I was talking about Islamists and jihadists together. And so Islamists are people who want to foist their interpretation of Islam on the rest of society and sometimes they have a revolutionary bent, sometimes they have more of a normal political bent, but they do want –

(CROSSTALK)

ZAKARIA: But the fact that somebody may believe that, for example, Sharia should obtain and women’s testimony should be worth half a man's in court.

HARRIS: Right.

ZAKARIA: Doesn’t mean that they want to kill people.

(CROSSTALK)

HARRIS: Well, no –

ZAKARIA: Being conservative and religious, which by the way is not my orientation at all, but it’s different from wanting to kill people.

HARRIS: Yes, yes. Well, we should – again, you have to this on specific points like, do you favor killing apostates? Do you think adulterers should be killed? And even among Islamists you’d find more subscribing to one versus the other depending on the poll you trust. But I didn’t just pull the number out of a hat. There’s a group at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill that looked at 40 years of parliamentary elections in the Muslim world. Literally every election that has occurred and found Islamists got 15 percent of the votes.

So I would say that – if you take that number 15 percent who will vote for Islamist parties and then you look at the poll results on specific implementation of Sharia law, so do you want adulterers and thieves given the traditional punishments or should apostates be killed, you find – you never find the number with very few exceptions. You never find the number as low as 15 percent voting in favor of those punishments. It’s often 60 percent depending on the society.

ZAKARIA: Right. And –

HARRIS: So I was – I believe nudging that up to something around 20 percent is still a conservative estimate of the percentage of Muslims worldwide who have values relating to human rights and free speech that are really in zero sum contest with our own. And I just think we have to speak honestly about that.

ZAKARIA: Clearly Islam has a problem today but there have been periods when Islam was at the vanguard of modernity. You know, it was the place that preserved Aristotle and preserved science. So if it was Islam that was the problem, how come it was OK then? In other words that would suggest that it is the social and political conditions within Muslim societies or – you know, the people – in other words clearly Islam has been compatible with peace and progress and it is compatible with violence I would argue just like all religions.

HARRIS: Yes. Well, up to a point. I would say that specific ideas have specific consequences, and the idea of jihad is not a new one. It’s not an invention of the 20th century. Many people are now spreading a very PC and sanitized history of religious conflict.

Islam has been spread by the sword for over 1,000 years, and, yes, there are – there’s been an intensification for obvious political reasons of intolerance in the 20th century, but the idea that life for Christians and Jews as Dhimmi under Muslim rulers for 1,000 years was good doesn’t make any sense and certainly life for Jews when you –

(CROSSTALK)

ZAKARIA: Wait a second –

HARRIS: When you compare it to medieval Christendom then OK it might –

ZAKARIA: But that was the main alternative.

HARRIS: Yes.

ZAKARIA: I mean, that’s why when the Jews left Spain and were expelled they went to the place that they thought was most hospitable to them which was the Ottoman Empire.

HARRIS: Yes. OK. But so –

ZAKARIA: Which is the caliphate, right?

HARRIS: You know, I criticize Christianity as much as anyone. I wrote a book Letter to a Christian Nation.

ZAKARIA: Right.

HARRIS: Which just say a vilification of the history of Christianity, the influence of the beliefs in the modern world –

ZAKARIA: I would have thought having written that book you would recognize that there are elements of Christianity that, as you point out in that book are –

HARRIS: There are. There are.

ZAKARIA: -- compatible and celebrate slavery and violence.

HARRIS: Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely.

ZAKARIA: And, you know, all these very, very backward attitudes, and yet there are times when Christianity represented that and at times when it represented peace and modernity.

HARRIS: OK. But there’s a few things we have to distinguish here. One is, specific ideas have specific consequences. So when you ask why Jews aren’t living out of Leviticus and Deuteronomy anymore and not – they’re not sanctioning genocide, they’re not sanctioning killing people for working on the Sabbath, there are several answers to that question. One is that there is no Sanhedrin. But the fact that they don't have a Sanhedrin makes –

ZAKARIA: Explain what a Sanhedrin means.

HARRIS: It’s a consecrated body of elders in the community that can judge whether or not somebody should be killed for working on the Sabbath. So the details matter. And one of the details here is that a belief that in Islam that the one true faith has to conquer the world through jihad essentially and that free speech –

ZAKARIA: But jihad means different things to different people.

HARRIS: I agree with you that we have to convince the Muslim world or get the Muslim world to convince itself that jihad really just means an inner spiritual struggle. But that is the end game for civilization but the reality is an honest reading of the text and an honest reading of Muslim history makes jihad look very much like holy wars.

ZAKARIA: So in that sense, the problem is you and Osama bin Laden agree.

HARRIS: Well –

ZAKARIA: Because after all you're saying this is – his interpretation of Islam is correct.

HARRIS: Well, his – this is the problem. His interpretation of Islam is very straightforward and honest, and you really have to split hairs and do some interpretative acrobatics in order to get it look – get it to look non-canonical.

ZAKARIA: But do you really think that the path to reforming Islam is to tell Muslims that their religion is the mother lode of bad ideas, that they should become atheists or symbolic followers or nominal I think was the word you used. These nominal followers.

HARRIS: Right.

ZAKARIA: I mean, do you really think that 1.6 billion devout Muslims are going to go, oh, damn, of course, Sam Harris is right, my religion is crap and I should just abandon it?

HARRIS: No. No. Well, and I slightly misspoke there. I didn’t mean nominal followers in the sense that only Muslim atheists could reform the faith. What I meant is followers who don’t take these specific dangerous beliefs very seriously and want to interpret jihad as an inner spiritual struggle as opposed to holy war.

ZAKARIA: But do you think you're helping them or you’re making it harder for them by, as I said, adopting the Osama bin Laden interpretation?

HARRIS: I’ll tell you who's making it harder for them. Liberals who deny the problem. I get e-mails every day from atheists and secularists living in the Muslim world who say I can’t –

ZAKARIA: Forget about others.

(CROSSTALK)

HARRIS: No. I'm telling –

ZAKARIA: I do help –

HARRIS: I’m telling you the only metric I have for that is I hear from people living in Pakistan, for instance, who say if a liberal like you can't even speak honestly about the link between ideology and violence, what hope is there for me?

I can’t even tell my mother what I believe about God because I would be afraid of my own family or village killing me.

Bill Maher Debates Rula Jebreal on Islam and Free Speech.

Maher vs. Muslim Guest on Berkeley Speech. Video and Transcript. Real Clear Politics, October 31, 2014. Also at Haaretz. (cached).

Bill Maher Spanks Berkeley Students as Commencement Speech Flap Continues. By Lisa de Moraes. Deadline Hollywood, November 1, 2014.

Rula Jebreal to Bill Maher: “When you talk about Islam in a certain way… some people feel threatened.” Salon, November 1, 2014.

The hypocrisy of Rula Jebreal. Elder of Ziyon, November 2, 2014.

Rula Jebreal sounds off on Bill Maher Islam spat: “What he is doing is un-American.” By Luke Brinker. Salon, November 3, 2014.

Wake up and oppose theocracy: Bill Maher, Rula Jebreal and the urgent Islam debate. By Jeffrey Tayler. Salon, November 15, 2014.

Muslims’ beliefs are “untrue” and “ridiculous,” Salon author says, offering support for Maher’s intolerance. By Philip Weiss. Mondoweiss, November 18, 2014.

Political Correctness Is Back. By Peter Beinart. The Atlantic, October 31, 2014.

Don’t Muzzle the Clown: Berkeley Students Shouldn’t Censor Bill Maher. By Timothy Egan. New York Times, October 30, 2014.

UC Berkeley students organize to block Bill Maher from speaking on campus. By Aleister. Legal Insurrection, October 28, 2014.

Berkeley on offense for Bill Maher. By Amy Miller. Legal Insurrection, October 20, 2014.

Bill Maher Responds to UC Berkeley Petition. Video. Real Time, October 31, 2014. YouTube.




Real Time with Bill Maher: Islam and Free Speech. Video. Real Time, October 31, 2014. YouTube. Also here. Overtime.



Transcript:

BILL MAHER: Next issue, Berkeley. Normally, I would throw out an issue and let the panel then just interrupt me, which they always do before I finish the question. But all week long I’ve had all these request for interviews about this. Let me just get out my statement about it because people have been asking. I said I would save it for HBO because they pay me.

So here’s what happened. A couple of months ago I was asked to deliver a commencement speech for Berkeley's December graduation. I was like great. I love Berkeley, I’m off in December and it will be a sentimental journey. Who doesn’t remember their graduation in December? But whatever, I’m happy to do it because although I never attended Berkeley, I was very aware of their place in the American debate. On the far left in a country where the Democratic party has sold out to the center and even the right, this is what is needed. This is why I wanted to accept this invitation and they invited me because it was the 50th anniversary of something that is legendary on that campus, The Berkeley Free Speech Movement. I guess they don’t teach irony in college anymore.

And then a few weeks ago, Ben Affleck was on our show and we had a discussion about Islam that I’ve had a thousand and one nights with a lot of other people, but he’s an A-list movie star so our very deep media started to care about it. It’s always easy to do a story about somebody being mad as somebody so when a few thousand people online who didn't have to do anything more than click a button, who didn’t even go to Berkeley necessarily wanted me to be disinvited as the commencement speaker, because, you know, I'm a racist. Right, because Islam is a race.

You know, this is the level of logic we are dealing with. By the way, even Reza Aslan, my most strident critics has gone to pains to say he doesn’t think I’m a bigot. Here’s what he said on HuffPost Live – “Bill Maher is not a bigot. I know him. We are friends. We hang out with each other backstage. He loves having me on the show despite the fact that he disagrees with me on a lot of things and that shows the kind of person that he is.” If even my most respectable critic who is a Muslim says this, what leg does the “protest” have to stand on? He and I disagree on some stuff but he’s always welcome on this show. That’s how it’s done, kids. Whoever told you you only had to hear what didn’t upset you?

So anyway, the university has come down on my side, saying what I hoped they would say all along, which is that we’re liberals, we’re supposed told like free speech. So I want to come. I’m planning to come. I’m planning a trip to the Redwoods the next day. My only reservation in not coming is the argument that it will be a media circus and turn which should be a day about the graduates, which it should be, you, into something else. I don’t want to do that. It’s the only reason I would ever pull out.

But let me say this to those students worried about that: I promise this will be your day. This is a commencement speech. The issue is you. My speech was, is, I hope, going to be about you and whatever tips I thought that could actually help you in life because I already lived through it. That and my funk about how Jewish women hate to have sex. So here’s my final plea to you liberal – in the truest sense of the word – college students. Not just as Berkeley but all over the country. Please, weigh in on this. My reputation isn’t on the line. Yours is.

Okay, so what do you think about this? There’s my piece.

RULA JEBREAL, GUEST: I don’t think it’s about free speech. I’m sorry to tell you this, Bill. And I’ll tell you why, it’s very simple. These same students who signed that petition actually invited you to a debate. And they said they are welcome so they can have a conversation, they can ask you a question. If they don’t like your views on television, they can switch channels. But the commencement speech, it’s a platform, actually, that doesn’t give the opportunity for questions, it doesn’t give an opportunity for push back, even for a debate. It’s a monologue, it’s not a dialogue. These same students feel offended that your views of Islam – the generalization, and they said it clearly in their declaration, they said the generalization perpetrates bigotry. This is what they said.

Look, I am all for freedom of speech. I love debates; I hate monologues. When you invite somebody to a commencement speech, you said it, it’s about the students. And The New York Times, in this piece this morning said you can’t counter a bad speech with a good speech except they don’t have that venue. They don’t have that opportunity on that day of graduation. They can’t out of that.

MAHER: I’m not coming to speak about that subject as I just said.

SEN. ANGUS KING (I-MAINE): Does that mean we never have speeches? Every speech has to be two people?

JEBREAL: But this is a commencement speech. This is a commencement address.

KING: Every commencement speech has one speaker.

JEBREAL: Listen, would you accept an openly anti-Semitic person to give a commencement speech to Jewish students? I actually would not accept that.

 MAHER: As I just said, even Reza Aslan says I’m not a bigot. So I rather resent the idea that I’m comparable to an anti-Semite. All I’ve ever done was basically read facts.

JEBREAL: What facts did you read? I’m sorry, you are comparing jihadists, Salafists, Sunni, you don’t know the difference. You are comparing all Muslims in one part –

MAHER: You are Palestinian?

JEBREAL: I am actually a secular Muslim. And when you talking about Islam in a certain way, I have to tell you, it’s offensive sometimes.

KING: But it’s okay to be offensive. That’s what free speech is all about. If free speech is only speech you like, it’s not free speech.

JEBREAL: No, but they invited him for a debate. He can go to that debate. I can accompany you on that debate if you want. I am happy to have that debate wherever you want.

KING: He was invited to be a commencement speaker and then he made a statement that people didn’t like.

JEBREAL: I don’t know what to say.

MAHER: Can you be gay in Gaza?

JEBREAL: Yes, you can.

MAHER: Really?

JEBREAL: Yes you can.

MAHER: And live?

JEBREAL: Absolutely, you can. You know what? It’s even more offensive because you are saying –

MAHER: I’m just asking because –

JEBREAL: You can be gay in Gaza.

MAHER: Really?

JEBREAL: I've traveled the Middle East.

MAHER: Is there a gay bar in Gaza?

JEBREAL: This is what I do for a living. You are comparing the majority of Muslim states with Saudi Arabia or with

KING: Should I call [Ben] Affleck and get him back here?

JEBREAL: You know – do you want to listen or do you want to –

RET. GEN. WESLEY CLARK: I think the issue is beyond Muslims. I think it’s about whether someone can be invited to give a speech and people will listen. Maybe they’ll agree, maybe they won’t. But we don’t have a situation in Berkeley where people can’t give a speech. I mean, that’s the whole essence of the American system, people can give a speech, not everyone has to agree.

JEBREAL: That’s ridiculous, I’m sorry General. The Muslim community in this country, you are treating them like Fifth Columnists, and they are not.

MAHER: No I am not.

JEBREAL: And guess what? If these people – the Muslim community feels threatened and feel offended and they were underrepresented in the media and underrepresented in political avenues. You never invite them here on these issues.

MAHER: Never invite them here? You’re here.

JEBREAL: On these issues.

MAHER: Reza is here. They’re here all the time.

JEBREAL: On these issues.

MAHER: What do you mean on these issues? I’m the one who says I want to stop talking about this. I can’t because things happen in the news.

JEBREAL: Reza Aslan was inviting to talk about something else. It was August 1st.

MAHER: Well, Reza’s been here a lot.

JEBREAL: And I'm happy that he’s been here and I’m here and I’m so happy to be invited here. However, if you want to have a serious conversation about Islam, and I’m sorry to say this Bill –

MAHER: Every time I tell you something you don’t like it’s not a serious conversation or I’m a bigot. I’m sorry, in your world either I say exactly what you want me to say or else I’m a bigot. It doesn’t work that way.

JEBREAL: Look, if you’re – you don’t have to say what I want because what I want is not a war on Islam. I want to win the war on terror. When you are repeating the same things that actual al Qaeda says, the same thing, you are doing the work for them. Al-Zawahiri used to say, bin Laden used to say this is not a war on terror, this is a war on Islam. My father was Muslim, he was Sufi. Guess what, let me tell you something. You don’t even know the difference between Sufi, Sunni, Sunni Shafi’i, Sunni Hanbali.

MAHER: Yeah, I do.

JEBREAL: You don’t. For you, we are all jihadists.

MAHER: I know that in many places in the world, if you left your religion, what would happen?

JEBREAL: Guess what, let me tell you something. Many people in Indonesia –

MAHER: You could walk inside a door in Gaza and say you know what, I’m a Presbyterian today?

JEBREAL: Maybe not in Gaza, to be honest. But you can do it in Jordan, you can do it in Lebanon. The majority of – you are blaming the majority for the criminal acts of a minority. Unfortunately, the majority are disorganized and there's a small minority that are well-organized and controlling the majority.

MAHER: I have to move on.

JEBREAL: I am happy that you’re moving on but I’m telling you, there are some people who – if you would have said some of the things you would have said about African-Americans and about Jews, you would be fired.

MAHER: But African-Americans and Jews don’t belong to a religion that wanted to kill Salman Rushdie for writing a book, if we want to get back to the free speech issue. So, I’m sorry, that’s called false equivalency. Not all religions are alike. I have to move on. I’m so sorry. (HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, October 31, 2014)