Last Friday, October 3, the cranky comedian, aided by atheist author Sam Harris, enraged actor Ben Affleck by calling Islam, in Harris’s words, “the mother lode of bad ideas.” Then, on Monday, Maher condemned liberals for being so afraid of being called Islamophobes that they won’t denounce brutality committed in Islam’s name. “We’re liberals!” Maher declared about himself and Harris. “We’re liberals…we’re trying to stand up for the principles of liberalism! And so, y’know, I think we’re just saying we need to identify illiberalism wherever we find it in the world, and not forgive it because it comes from [a group that] people perceive as a minority.”
Arthur Schlesinger would have been able to relate. In his 1949 manifesto, The Vital Center, the Harvard historian and future Kennedy administration aide, attacked what he called “doughface” liberals. Borrowing a term for pre-Civil War northerners who had refused to denounce slavery, Schlesinger deployed it against liberals who refused to denounce Soviet communism. “The infiltration of contemporary progressivism by Communism,” he wrote, “has led to the same self-flagellation [that prevented doughfaces from denouncing slavery], the same refusal to take precautions against tyranny.”
Source: Atlantic Online, October 9
Eric Koch’s new book, New Beginnings, was launched on September 20. The book is available from 
The challenge is to distinguish between Islamic terrorists and extremists and the masses of moderate Moslems who don’t support the terrible havoc which the ferocious fundamentalists wreak on the world. This requires speaking very carefully about “the enemy” and not condemning Islam in its entirety because of the actions of those who endorse, support and practise violent extremism. Maher may have painted the entire Islamic world with the same brush, with no nuance, and without sensitivity to the much broader and multi-faceted reality.
Could it be that, for historical and cultural reasons, not Islam but Islamites are more vulnerable to fanatical militancy than others?
That’s a false and selfish challenge. There’s so much more wrong with the teaching of Islam than merely violent extremism. There’s also not much in the way of nuance involved in the bad ideas that Islam promulgates once one goes beyond sticking safely and politically correctly to using violent extremism as the sole metric.
Check out jonolan’s blog: http://blog.jonolan.net/
Talk about false.
When considering extreme Islamists is it valid to look at the communities from which they emerge?
Could the real problem be the`extreme views, or the tolerance of extreme views, found in many if not all of what we like to think of as moderate Muslims?
Arranged marriages; families determining where young women will go and who they will see; face covering; education and careers for girls; honor killings; genital surgery and the general conviction that Islam is the one true faith and that followers of all other religions are misguided at best and evil at worst, are traits found to a greater or lesser extent within these `moderate’ Islamic communities.
The violent Islamists we fear and revile come from those communities.
Do we blind ourselves into believing these communities are to be accepted, encouraged and supported only because their extremism is pallid when compared with the likes of ISIS?
As a poster being circulated around the net wisely points out, ISIS is as representative of Islam as the KKK was/is of Christianity. Painting ISIS and Islam with the same brush is Islamaphobic and racist, pure and simple. The majority of the worlds Muslims live under “moderate”, many even democratic regimes. Think about Indonesia, Philippines, Morocco, Bosnia…..
I deplore Bill Maher’s comments in the most unequivocal terms. His faulty reasoning, which allows him to lump all Islam together, must be evident. There is plenty of murder and blood and anachronistic belief to go around in the writings of all three monotheistic religions; one cannot single out Islam. The problem here is the degree to which Islamic extremists have taken power and become the face of Islam among people who know very little about it — not so different, if you go back to the Middle Ages of Europe, to the insanity and violence of the Crusades. The West eventually outgrew it (but read the history of the 30 Years War to see how recent murder and mayhem based on religious fanaticism was).
And I would like to point out that in Rwanda, during the horrible genocide that took place there 20 years ago, the only safe place was the Moslem quarter of Kigali (the capital city) where the Moslems refused to take part in the killings because it was against their religion.
Of course I agree that one cannot find any excuse whatever for the extreme form of Islam — Wahabi islam — and America’s support of Saudi Arabia, where that sect rules the nation, raises eyebrows, as it must. But to compare those of us who know something about Islam with faint-hearted liberals is grotesque.
I agree with Styra.
With the ISIS wing of Islam in focus, according to this source, ‘In essence, the United States — along with the major European powers — seems intent on enforcing political structures that were planned and implemented nearly 100 years ago. These political solutions – the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Treaty of Sevres and the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923 — were designed to dismantle the Ottoman Empire. They were effective in achieving that goal, but highly ineffective in establishing a stable political landscape through much of the Middle East’. The author concludes by claiming that ‘ISIS is not an aberration. It is a legitimate part of the Middle Eastern political landscape.’
Source: http://www.theglobalist.com/
I agree with Steven. Except the problem is that we in the ‘west’ perceive our world as normal - we’re in charge, right - and anything that attacks our world view is wrong.