Posted on January 12, 2015

Bill Maher Doubles Down on Islam

Marlow Stern, Daily Beast, January 9, 2015

The TV host and political satirist had more harsh words for Muslims in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre and two other shootings that rocked France.
“Look who’s back,” proclaimed Bill Maher.
The outspoken satirist hosted the 13th season premiere of his HBO talk show Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday night and doubled down on the comments he made on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live where, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre that saw 9 fellow satirists, two policemen, and a maintenance worker be murdered by gun and RPG-wielding jihadists, the comedian said, “hundreds of millions of [Muslims] support an attack like [Charlie Hebdo].”Following two more shootings in France by Islamic terrorists, including a hostage situation at a kosher grocery that left four civilians dead, Maher, flanked by political commentator Paul Begala, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, and author and activist Salman Rushdie, went on the offensive.“We’re Americans so we don’t want to single out people, but when you look at that list just since 9/11, then we had the Madrid bombings in ’04, London in ’05, Mumbai, the Kenyan mall, Benghazi, which was one of 20 cities that erupted when that movie Innocence of Muslims was on the Internet, ISIS, Boko Haram who killed an entire village this week, Pakistan last year killing all those kids at the school, Canada parliament, Australia,” said Maher. “What we’ve said all along, and have been called bigots for it, is when there’s this many bad apples, there’s something wrong with the orchard.”

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Maher then addressed the Ben Affleck on-air fracas that went viral, where the Oscar-winning filmmaker and author Sam Harris got into a tussle over Harris saying, “Islam is the motherlode of bad ideas.” Affleck lost his cool, claiming that such criticisms of Islam were “gross” and “racist,” and likening them to someone calling Maher “a shifty Jew.”

“Obviously, the vast majority of Muslims would never do anything like this,” said Maher. “But they share bad ideas. This is the thing that caused the big ruckus when Ben Affleck was here. Sam Harris said, ‘Islam is the motherlode of bad ideas,’ and everyone went fuckin’ nuts on this side of the panel. But it is. These two guys who shot up the cartoonists the other day, they were avenging the prophet, they said? A bad idea. Martyrdom? A bad idea. Women as second-class citizens? A bad idea. And unfortunately, the terrorists and the mainstream share a lot of these bad ideas.”

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Maher, of course, has sounded off on Muslims before–even to this very publication.

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