Richard Dawkins & Bill Maher Still Baffled Why So Many Liberals Think They're Bigots - Alternet [View all]

[flamingdem]

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/richard-dawkins-bill-maher-still-baffled-why-so-many-liberals-think-theyre-bigots

Bill Maher and his good friend, Richard Dawkins, sat down on his show Real Time last night for the fifth time in almost eight seasons. Their discussion, per usual, was an agreeable, tedious mix of self-victimization and indignation about why so many on the left - specifically the Twitter left - think their obsession with "radical Islam" makes them bigots.

"It's so dumb, because all the people who are accused of being Islamophobes like you and me and Sam [Harris], we're liberals." Maher said perplexed. "When I was a child in my home, I was seven and my parents said 'we're for Kennedy, we're for him letting black people go to college in the south" Maher fumed, as Dawkins nodded enthusiastically along with Maher's notoriously sycophantic audience.

"Why don't liberals love us?", they ask. "We're so goddamn liberal but for some reason our critiques of Islam are seen as hateful". And while Maher is correct that he's generally good on taxes and calling out Republican bigotry, this doesn't give him a free pass on his rank Islamophobia (a term he thinks is "meaningless".)

Firstly, no one thinks "Islam is a protected species" as Maher put it. This is a typical strawman New Athiest employ. Dawkins doesn't go after "all religions" equally. Quite the opposite, he has said that Islam is uniquely sinister, referring to it as "unmitigated evil", on numerous occasions. Accusations of bigotry against Dawkins, therefore, are not selective in favor of Islam, they are a reaction to his selective, repeated highlighting of it - fair or not. Secondly, this position is dripping with libertarian false equivalency. The "I criticize all religions equally" is the close cousin to "I criticize all races equally" -- a principle that sounds cute in theory but willfully ignores the burden of history and imperialism.

To the Mahers and the Dawkins of the world, the connection between America's wars in the Middle East is cosmetic at best, and "silly liberal" relativism, at worst. That President Obama - who Maher gave $1 million to in 2012 - has bombed seven Muslim countries in as many years is seen as irrelevant. Western panic and outrage over "women in beekeepers suits" (what Maher calls burkas) is entirely divorced from the convenient "civilizing mission" of America's wars in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. America is always the reluctant warrior who is forced to bomb, occupy, and invade those hot-headed Muslims, the inverse - that Muslims may become radicalized because of our bombing, occupying and invasions - is never truly entertained much less factored in. It was fitting that around the time their self-indulgent interview was being recorded, the US was shelling a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing 19 - including three children.