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I think it’s more Sam Harris than it was Maher. Afflick was just flailing in cognitive dissonance, not bothering to listen to the actual points being made.

On the liberal sites, they are celebrating and lionizing Afflick and Reza Aslan on CNN.

All depends on your perspective. IMHO, Affleck pwned.

Daily Beast:

Reluctance to criticize the failures of other cultures has been a problem within contemporary liberalism, with negative consequences

~~~

we have seen in recent years from liberalism, or at least from some liberals (a crucial distinction, in fact), an unwillingness to criticize the reactionary aspects or expressions of other cultures, expressions that these liberals would have no hesitation whatsover in criticizing if they were exhibited by, say, Southern white Christians.

The most obvious example that comes to mind is that of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Muslim-African-Dutch-and-finally-American feminist intellectual. She of course is famous, now mostly for some of her more incendiary comments, but recall how she first became so: She and her collaborator, Theo van Gogh, had made a film critical of the oppression of women in the Muslim world. He was murdered, and she received death threats. She fled to the United States.

Now, here was a key moment: When she came to America in 2006, where was Hirsi Ali going to plant her flag? As she tells the story in her book Nomad, she met with liberal and conservative outfits. She says the liberal ones were “tentative” in their support for her and her ideas, but the conservative American Enterprise Institute embraced her totally, even though on certain issues (like abortion rights) she’s no conservative.

Hirsi Ali, of course, has subsequently gone on to say, quite controversially, that not just radical Islam but “Islam, period” must be “defeated.” But here’s the question: Before she started talking like that, why was she unable to find a home within American liberalism? It should be, and should have been, a core part of the mission of liberalism to support secular humanists and small-d democrats from all over the world, but from the Muslim world in particular. Most of these people are themselves liberals by Western standards, and they are desperate for the United States to do what it can to oppose the theocracies and autocracies under which they’re forced to live.

Maher, and certainly conservative critics, overstate the extent to which liberals fail to make common cause with such folks. Christian evangelicals who do work on, say, genital mutilation (which Hirsi Ali suffered) get a lot more attention in the media, because it’s more “interesting” that white conservatives give a crap about something happening to nonwhite women halfway across the world. But as the writer Michelle Goldberg pointed out in a review of Hirsi Ali’s Nomad for the journal I edit, Democracy, numerous women’s organizations and feminist groups do work to advance women’s rights in the Muslim world.

Goldberg wrote: “A few years ago, I visited Tasaru Ntomonok, which is the kind of place Hirsi Ali would probably love—it’s a Kenyan shelter that houses and educates girls fleeing female genital mutilation and forced marriage. Among its supporters are the high profile feminist Eve Ensler, the feminist NGO Equality Now, and the United Nations Population Fund, a bête noire of many conservatives. There are similar grassroots organizations working toward women’s liberation all over the world.”

Even so, Maher has identified a problem within Western liberalism today. Debates about multiculturalism are appropriate to a later stage of development of the infrastructure of rights and liberties than one finds in some other parts of the world. That infrastructure has existed in Western countries for a century, and it is the very fact that it was so solidly entrenched that opened up the space for us to start having debates about multiculturalism in the 1970s and ’80s.

But in much of the Arab and Muslim world, that infrastructure barely exists. So—and how’s this for a paradox?—to insist that our Western standards that call for multiculturalist values should be applied to countries that haven’t yet fully developed the basic rights infrastructure constitutes its own kind of imposition of our values onto them. A liberated woman or a gay man who lives in a country where being either of those things is at best unaccepted and at worst illegal doesn’t need multiculturalism. They’re desperate for a little universalism, and we Western liberals need to pay more attention to this.

Love how Maher doesn’t think liberals should pile on him for having the same opinion of radical Islam as conservatives because he’s not a conservative. In other words, when a conservative says the same thing he says, it’s racist or Islamphobic, but if a liberal says it, it’s insightful.

Hahaha! Watched this train-wreck a couple of days ago. Afleck wasn’t even arguing the points Maher was making; he was just spouting-off knee-jerk, Islamophile talking-points. He obviously did not listen to Maher’s points at all. Of course, Ben is 1) completely full of himself, 2) grossly misinformed as to the Truth about Islam and, 3) used to shouting-down other people. That’s why he does more directing than acting; his arrogant sense that he knows better than everyone around him, and that they should defer to his opinion on ALL matters.

Never watched the video on this although I have read about it on several conservative blogs…Watching that much liberal stupid in one video tends to make my eyes bleed…

Hopefully we will figure out the Muslim threat to this nation sooner than Europe, they for all intents and purposes are a lost cause with nobody to blame but their own political correctness..