Ben Affleck vs. Bill Maher on Islam: Bill's right. [View all]

[True Blue Door]

On HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, Ben Affleck (who I have great respect for on most occasions) sparred with Bill Maher (who I also respect) on the topic of the meaning of Islamophobia, and to what extent criticism of Islam as a set of ideas can be distinguished from bigotry against Muslims. Here is the discussion:

Affleck appears to take the position either that criticizing Islam is indistinguishable from bigotry against Muslims, or that it's a much higher priority to combat the latter than to stand up for the former - and thus implying that criticizing Islam is antagonistic to standing up for Muslims. I find this position shockingly illiberal and irrational.

Maher, however, appears to assert that fighting theocracy is an inextricable responsibility of liberalism, and that liberals can and must acknowledge how widespread theocratic opinions are in Islam. He makes the point that doing so is standing up for Muslims, since they are overwhelmingly the victims when the opinions of their communities lead to theocratic laws that punish them for either leaving or attempting to change their religion in some way.

I have to say that Maher is simply correct. There is no ethical option for a liberal to tolerate intolerance under the aegis of "cultural differences," or to pretend that an objective fact isn't true because it makes the job of fighting bigotry more complicated. Simply by the numbers, the political opinions of Muslims worldwide (though this might be different in the US) veer sharply toward legally imposing the core tenets of their religion - e.g., punishing blasphemy, punishing apostasy, etc. Maher noted one poll that found British Muslims overwhelmingly thought that criticism of Islam should be legally punished.

Another poll, reported by the Washington Post, which is far more disturbing, found that 78% of Afghans, 64% of Egyptians and Pakistanis, 59% of Palestinians, 58% of Jordanians, and 53% of Malaysians...supported the death penalty for leaving Islam. In other words, majorities in these countries were found to support killing other Muslims who decide not to be Muslims anymore.

Now, it's not a monolithic picture of worldwide Islam, because "merely" large minorities (38% and 36%) favored killing apostates in Iraq and Bangladesh, and it is actually good news that only 13% were on board with that in Indonesia (the most populous single Muslim country) and only 2% in Turkey. But it still means that in huge swaths of Islam, this is considered a legitimate or even mainstream political position to take, and the numbers are likely far more staggering if you were merely to ask about lighter punishments like imprisonment or fines.

I haven't seen the numbers for other religions, but I'm willing to bet substantial money that they're not comparable in their respective countries. So...this problem has to be acknowledged and dealt with, and the fact that bigots will exploit it doesn't change that. The current cultural state of Islam worldwide is radically conservative and authoritarian, and the only way to change that is to confront it - not be morally relativistic.

Bigots will always exploit the truth to undermine it. They exploited the atrocities of the Japanese Imperial Army in WW2 to terrify the American people into putting Japanese-Americans in internment camps, but no one would argue that that insanity meant we shouldn't have fought Japan. They exploited the horrors of the Stalin regime to wage authoritarian campaigns against the peaceful American left, but no one would argue that the madness of Joe McCarthy meant the US should not have stood firm in Europe against the Soviet empire. And today they exploit the Dark Age that Islam is currently experiencing to attack Muslims. But it would be ass-backwards to let that dictate how we respond to a very real and destructive social problem.

Liberals should be leading the charge against Islamic theocracy, not because it's Islamic, but because it's theocracy! We should be angrily telling those people who think their religion gives them the right to kill or imprison apostates or "blasphemers" that they do not have that right - that freedom of and from religion is an absolute, fundamental aspect of basic human dignity, and violating it is despicable and evil. When a Muslim somewhere decides not to be a Muslim anymore, and that leads to their being murdered; when a woman somewhere is stoned to death because she was raped; when mobs chant "death to (insert country)" because someone in that country criticized Islam; when a "blasphemer" is imprisoned...this should boil our blood. It does no service to the world, to liberal values, or to persecuted minority groups in any country to offer up these people as sacrifices on the altar of political correctness.

We can morally excuse some individuals involved in this madness because they grew up in an environment that told them this was acceptable, but we cannot excuse the vile ideas themselves, and certainly not people who grew up in Western countries and somehow still cling to gruesomely authoritarian ideological modes. At that point they are not naive people of a country with no liberal history - they are just radical right-wing conservatives exactly like the ones waving the cross in the name of hate, and should be fought with passion and contempt on behalf of all decent people of all backgrounds and religious beliefs.

Moreover, as noted in the discussion clip, it's not just jihadis that are the problem - not just people blowing stuff up and shooting people. The main problem is the sphere of political opinion that breeds such radicalism, even if it rhetorically condemns it. If it is acceptable to impose your religion on others, then the dispute between "mainstream" conservative Muslims and jihadis is merely one of degree - one believes they should immediately seek to impose Islam by just killing as many of its "enemies" as possible through terrorism, and the other that an orderly governmental process should be instituted to imprison and/or execute apostates and blasphemers. The dispute is mainly one of style and tactics - like the difference between white supremacists and white separatists, it's mostly rhetorical.

So...let's be liberals and stand up for human beings, not be the nihilistic PC priesthood the right paints us being. Say it without hesitation and without mealy-mouthed language: The current state of Islam is repugnant to liberal values. Stand up for the Muslims (or former Muslims) who say that and face brutal consequences to make life better for their people, rather than for the vile conservative degenerates in their communities who try to silence them.