Last night Bill Maher had Glenn Greenwald on his show. Maher, a self-professed atheist who thinks religion is poison but thinks Israel is wonderful got a big surprise.
Much has been written about Maher and his special loathing of Islam and much of it is fair. But this segment is especially telling. The whole 9:00 piece is worth watching but things really get rolling around the 5:00 mark. Greenwald thoroughly takes Maher to task for his blatant disregard of history and his “my side is better therefore we can do what we want to whomever we want” attitude. The video speaks for itself so I won’t say much more about it except that Greenwald’s deconstruction of Maher proves that the essence of Maher’s thinking is as irrational as the religions he so often disparages.
Maher is a dick in so many ways, it’s not even funny.
Watched that last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. Greenwald was his usual self, grounded in logic and the facts, and he picked apart Maher, who was also his usual self, pretending to be a voice of reason while spewing his weekly Islamophobic rhetoric.
Glenn is amazing as always.
Greenwald effiectively put Maher down, just look how angry Maher is, trying to gaze at the audience to get applause but get nothing back.
Nicely played by Greenwald. I find Bill Maher painful to watch though. He’s basically just a clown, egged on by the more idiotic portion of his audience which seems to worship his smugness.
I think there is more that could be said about the U.S. government playing both sides, including some possible historical ties between CIA and the Muslim Brotherhood, but I haven’t looked at that closely enough to be sure. I can say for sure that without the U.S. government’s involvement in organizing extremist Islamist guerillas/terrorists as proxies, the phenomenon would be much weaker. Afghanistan, Gladio B (see Sibel Edmonds), and recent surprisingly open instances of U.S. backing for Salafists in Libya and Syria.
Greenwald has something up now about he Maher segment:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/11/bill-maher-muslims-islam-benghazi
I do think Islam, as conceived by its founder, lends itself to more repressive, less open societies than Christianity; Jesus was not about taking the reins of political power, even if it didn’t take long for Christianity to merge with state power. The fact that all major schools of Islamic law endorse the death penalty for apostasy is unforgivable in my view.