Real Time with Bill Maher: Ben Affleck, Sam Harris and Bill Maher Debate Radical Islam (HBO)
Bill Maher and his guests – Sam Harris, Ben Affleck, Michael Steele and Nicholas Kristof – discuss ISIS and radical Islam during the panel portion of “Real Time.”
Ben Affleck: Sam Harris and Bill Maher ‘racist’ and ‘gross’ in views of Islam | The Guardian |
Ben Affleck has won praise for accusing TV host Bill Maher and author Sam Harris for what he called “gross” and “racist” depictions of Islam during a televised debate.
Appearing on HBO talk show Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday night, Affleck reacted furiously to claims by Maher that Islam manifested as “the only religion that acts like the mafia” and which would “fucking kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture or write the wrong book”.
Author and philosopher Sam Harris also attracted the Argo director’s ire after suggesting: “We have been sold this meme of Islamophobia, where criticism of the religion gets conflated with bigotry towards Muslims as people. It’s intellectually ridiculous.”
Sam Harris in full: court intellectual, mystic, and supporter of the Iraq war | Mondoweiss |
I wrote about Sam Harris a short while ago. I covered a number of themes that he’s discussed, primarily in The End of Faith, as well as in subsequent pieces. Among the subjects I reviewed were his support for Israel’s saturation bombing of Gaza and Lebanon, the Afghanistan war, the “humanitarian purpose” of the Iraq war, American-backed Arab despots, racial profiling, pre-emptive nuclear warfare, judicial torture, and life after death in the guise of reincarnation. In a response, Sam Harris has claimed that I misrepresent him. He does not say what part of my article, which quotes him at extreme length, is inaccurate.
It bears noting that it’s not the first time that Harris has claimed his opinions have been doctored.
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Another crucial piece of detail missing from my original article centres on the question of anti-Semitism. In his book, The End of Faith, Harris charges critics of Israel with being Jew haters. The slur is familiar to those who think Palestinians deserve human rights, but given that Harris draws his material on the subject from Alan Dershowitz’s The Case For Israel, proven to be a hoax by Norman Finkelstein, who doused the author’s reputation in gasoline and struck the fatal match, that is not too surprising.What is surprising is that after slandering critics of Israel’s brutality against Arabs as anti-Semites, Harris proceeds, with no trace of irony, to blame the monumental suffering of the Holocaust on the Jewish people.