Bill Maher and John Cleese have a mostly enjoyable rap on “political correctness,” which of course they don’t care for. I agree with about 90% of what they have to say, but when Bill brings up his take on Islam—the “piece of you here” bit alluded to in the head—I felt a certain disenchantment.
It’s very true that of the billion or so adherents of Islam in the world a disproportionate, and disappointing, number of them support, with varying degrees of devotion, a retrograde faith that emphasizes intolerance, suppression of women, and general suspicion, often amounting to hatred, of virtually all the “modern”, secular values that I, and many other people, regard as constituting “civilization.” But if you simply look at the body count, I think you’d find that Uncle Sam is ahead of all the caliphs, Mahdis, and ayatollahs put together.
Furthermore, to get a little more detailed, perhaps Bill could recall back in the eighties and nineties, when the U.S. let the IRA engage in essentially unlimited fund-raising activities to finance such capers as the attempted assassination of Margaret Thatcher. Dublin at that time was virtually an extension of Manhattan, with the flow of money, arms, and terrorists subject to not the slightest check at the local, state, or federal level.
The power of the “Irish lobby” in those days was all the remarkable because it was almost entirely informal. The Irish equivalent of AIPAC did not exist. It wasn’t needed. The entirely implicit threat of angering ten million Irish voters was more than enough to intimidate both Democrats and Republicans. So were all these voters supporters of terrorism? Well, they weren’t exactly against it.
So it’s entirely right to denounce the lies and crimes of Islamic extremists. But convicting an entire religion is a tall order, even for a standup.
