The debate triggered by Bill Maher’s comments about Islam on his HBO show Friday night, alleging that it is inherently violent and intolerant, continued on Hardball last night. Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, Howard Fineman of Huffington Post, and host Chris Matthews all condemned Bill Maher’s and Sam Harris’s comments about Islam– on a show in which Ben Affleck argued for Islam.
Robinson: “It’s only like three non-Muslims talking about Islam– with a familiarity with the religion which frankly they don’t have. So as a debate per se I don’t put much stock in it or take it that seriously.”
Fineman: “I think what Sam Harris said was outrageous. You don’t call a religion of 1.6 billion people on the planet the mother lode of bad ideas.”
Matthews: “I’m with you–”
Fineman: “You just don’t. I don’t claim to have read the entire Koran. I’ve read a fair amount of it. I have lots of Muslim friends and I know something of the religion. And I think it’s fair to say that terrorism, that ISIS, the people we’re responding to do not represent a great Abrahamic religon and if I were a Muslim I would be completely outraged, however worried I was about a bad face of my faith being shown.”
Matthews: “When you say stuff like this, you are basically condemning a religion, and that’s a loser, because all it will do is just rile up people against you and it won’t change a single person’s religious commitment.”
Fineman: “Also it’s not true.”
Robinson: “It’s not true. It’s a ridiculous statement.”
Surprise: Michael Tomasky lines up with Maher at the Daily Beast, says he’s on to something:
Debates about multiculturalism are appropriate to a later stage of development of the infrastructure of rights and liberties than one finds in some other parts of the world. That infrastructure has existed in Western countries for a century, and it is the very fact that it was so solidly entrenched that opened up the space for us to start having debates about multiculturalism in the 1970s and ’80s.
But in much of the Arab and Muslim world, that infrastructure barely exists. So—and how’s this for a paradox?—to insist that our Western standards that call for multiculturalist values should be applied to countries that haven’t yet fully developed the basic rights infrastructure constitutes its own kind of imposition of our values onto them. A liberated woman or a gay man who lives in a country where being either of those things is at best unaccepted and at worst illegal doesn’t need multiculturalism. They’re desperate for a little universalism, and we Western liberals need to pay more attention to this.
Tomasky doesn’t address Maher and Harris’s claims about Islamic violence. As for the cultural critique of traditional values, fair enough; and I can think of other societies that need some more universalism.
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While occasionally funny, Bill Maher is predominantly a sexist racist jerk.
When Affleck said that criticism of Islam was like saying ‘You shifty Jew,” my immediate thought was, “Well, there goes his career.”
On challenging the status quo, here, his good friend Clooney won’t be far behind. Not so much if he had married a Jewish Zionist girl but, as Debbie Schlussel describes the new wife:Amal Alamuddin: George Clooney’s Anti-Israel Druze Arab Chick
I agree with Fineman. I watched that painful Maher/Harris glennbecky routine on Islam and cringed at their ignorance, and the always-there-to-make-America-go-along-with-you statement about “women’s rights.”
Newsflash. The right and necessity of treating women equal to me is enshrined in the Koran, and has been there since Day One of its writing. The only Abrahamic religion to do so.
From Dr. Aftab Ahmad Khan’s explanation about Muslim women and their religious rights:
The right in inheritance, 12 centuries before it dawned on European Christians and Jews:
Ending the pre-Islamic act of female infanticide when a daughter was considered inauspicious:
Education for both men and women is a mandatory requirement in Islam:
Forced marriages, “honor” killings, and women’s confinement to the home have no endorsement in Islam:
There is no priestcraft in Islam, no hierarchy, no Pope, rabbis, pastors, or bishops. They only have scholars. Islam is the relationship between you and God (Allah) and the words of the Koran. There is no idolatry–a big no-no–which is why they get so pissed at people attempting to produce a face of Mohammed.
The myriad of different sects is the result of groups of like-minded people getting together and saying X passage in the Koran means Y. An extreme example are the camel-driven tribes of Saudi Arabia deciding to create Wahhabism, and hating the Sufis until after the start of the 21st C.
On the other hand,
The Orientalist Stanley Lane-Poole acknowledged the great impact Moorish civilisation had on Europe when he wrote:
1. Stanley Lane-Poole, Studies in a Mosque
“ISIS is no Islam…”
Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG)
Afghan Taliban
Al-Nusrah Front
Al-Qa‘ida
Al-Shabaab
Al-Qa‘ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP)
Al-Qa‘ida in Iraq
Al-Qa‘ida in the Lands of the Islamic Magreb (AQIM)
Boko Haram
Central Asian Terrorism
DHKP/C
Greek Domestic Terrorism
HAMAS (Islamic Resistance Movement)
Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin
Hizballah (Party of God)
Islamic Jihad Union (IJU)
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL
Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM)
Jemaah Anshorut Tauhid (JAT)
Jemaah Islamiya (JI)
Kongra-Gel (KGK)
Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LT or LeT)
Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA)
Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan
All of the above terrorist groups “are not Islam”, but their members are definitely Muslims.
If one cartoon brought 200,000,000 Muslims protestors out to the street , than why radical Islamic terrorists beheading & killing other Muslims, raping women and selling them as slaves doesn’t bring 1000,000,000 Muslims protestors out to the street.
Everywhere in tweeter, Facebook and the printed media, you will find Jews against Israel action. In fact, it might seems that there are more Jews voices against Israel action than Palestinians voices. Take this blog owners/founders as example.
The question to be asked is, if Muslims as a collective, especially Muslims in the Middle east and other Islamic countries are for the action of ISIS. Not necessary, for the savagery ISIS showed, but more for the ideology of Greater Muslim caliphate in the M.E. and other places in the world.
75% of Muslims around the world believe that some form of Sharia law should be implanted in their community.
There is a collision of cultures and religions in communities around the world. Collision between Muslims and Christians mainly. As Muslims population around the world and especially in Christian dominated countries, such as UK, France Norway, etc’ grows, the impact of the collision will grow with it. There is no escape of it and “good words” or deed won’t change that fact.
Muslims in western countries should protest against savagery of ISIS and not just protest against Islamophoba.
Christians must understand that caliphate will be created in the Middle East, and it is not such a bad thing. Turkey is not far from that.
“By the end of the fifteenth century, Mu’tazilis were subjected to vehement attacks from the traditionalists on one hand, and from the atheists, deists, philosophers, non-Muslim thinkers, etc., on the other. It is important to note that the traditionalists, as opposed to Mu’tazili rationalists, were not irrationalists. Both groups operated on the basis of some synthesis between reason and revelation…
“Facing the problem of existence of evil in the world, the Mu’tazilis pointed at the free will of human beings, so that evil was defined as something that stems from the errors in human acts. God does nothing ultimately evil, and He demands not from any human to perform any evil act. If man’s evil acts had been from the will of God, then punishment would have been meaningless, as man performed God’s will no matter what he did. Mu’tazilis did not deny the existence of suffering that goes beyond human abuse and misuse of their free will granted to them by God. In order to explain this type of “apparent” evil, Mu’tazilis relied on the Islamic doctrine of taklif — “God does not order/give the soul of any of his creation, that which is beyond its capacity.” [Qur’an 2:286] This entailed the existence of an “act of god” to serve a greater good, or the existence of evil acts to prevent a far greater evil. In conclusion, it comprised life is an ultimate “fair test” of coherent and rational choices, having a supremely just accountability in one’s current state, as well as the hereafter.”
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu'tazila
VATICAN CITY (RNS) A special Vatican meeting on the Middle East ended Saturday (Oct. 23) with a flare-up in Catholic-Jewish tensions, after an American bishop declared the Bible does not give Jews privileged rights to the land of Israel.
“We Christians cannot speak of the ‘promised land’ as an exclusive right for a privileged Jewish people,” said Archbishop Cyril Bustros, a native of Lebanon who is currently a Melkite Greek Catholic bishop in Newton, Mass.
“This promise was nullified by Christ,” Bustros said at a Vatican press conference marking the end of a two-week session of the Synod of Bishops. “There is no longer a chosen people — all men and women of all countries have become the chosen people.”
Bustros’ remark drew swift and strong rebukes from Israeli spokesmen.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/25/us-bishop-says-jews-have-_n_773657.html