The Camel weighs in on the Maher, Harris, Affleck debate/debacle.

I have been asked by a good friend to give my perspective on the Bill Maher, Ben Affleck, Sam Harris "debate" about Islam that has been hyped allover the media.  I won't belabor it because my views on Islam, so called "Islamophobia",  and fundamentalist Muslim accommodation have been pretty well covered in my books and blog articles.  So here's my position in a nutshell and a half.


Maher has always impressed me as being a world class asshole The week after 911 when he said in (so many words) "... the terrorists weren't cowards, they were brave...it takes guts to fly a plane into a building. Americans are the cowards..." I lost all respect for him and discounted everything else he had to say from then on. His subsequent apology following public outrage meant zero to me.

Sam Harris takes a position that's a little extreme, but I understand it and the reasoning behind it. Liberals are way too accepting of Islam as "just another religion like yours or mine."  It would be like a 12th century Muslim (or Jew) saying "Christianity is a religion just like yours or mine, there are good and bad in them all" while the Pope's Crusaders are slaughtering fellow [Coptic] Christians, Jews, Cathars, and Muslims wholesale across two continents... and later when Jews and "heretics" were being tortured and killed during the Inquisition.  Bullshit to that.

We are now dealing with an Islam where they were dealing with Christianity 900 years ago. The fact that the average Christian peasant who tilled his fields and killed no one wasn't part of the problem doesn't permit us to look back at that era and say "Christianity wasn't so bad. They were being "Christian-phobic'. " 

Now this isn't to say that every Muslim is bent on killing the infidel, or installing sharia  law to replace the Constitution.  But it doesn't have to be every or even most Muslims. If Harris' harsh position helps bring about a realization that we are engaged in a global war with Muslim fundamentalists and that the US could well become like Europe where some countries have 5%, 10%, 17% Muslim populations that are growing exponentially (the US has 0.8% Muslims),  many of whom are demanding very special considerations and accommodations; who see those governments' accommodations as Western weakness; and who are going to fight along side terrorists in Syria and Iraq in significant enough numbers to be a concern  when they "come home" to their adopted country ... then his efforts will have made a difference. If it is ignored then we will be in the mess that Europe has been experiencing and will soon experience to a much greater degree.  

When the time comes that European parliaments pass  laws against criticizing Islam, or drawing pictures of Mohammed then you'll know they have utterly and totally acquiesced to those demands, and surrendered their birthright.  Harris doesn't want that to happen there or here, and activist Islam has every intention of doing precisely that...and more.

If it takes Harris' kind of rhetoric to jog the Far Left - Politically Correct - "Anti-Islamophob" - Head in the Sand-Liberals (AKA The Ben Afflecks of the world ) to move slightly more to the middle and see the handwriting on the wall & potential horror that Muslim fanaticism on our own turf will bring, then I support Harris 99%.

As for the cry of  "racism" against Harris by Affleck, that's just stupidity. Islam is a religion, not a race. But then, to the warm and fuzzy Far Left, that doesn't make much difference.

And that's my position. Like it or hump it.