Bill Maher, Affleck and Islam – a problem

10 October 2014 - 13:22 By Bruce Gorton
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Bill Maher and Ben Affleck recently got into an argument about Islam - and neither side came off well.

Affleck for his part came off as a bit of a hypocrite, claiming that criticising religion is “gross" and "racist”.

Affleck acted in the movie Dogma, a satire mocking Christianity.

But that wasn’t really the thing that really bothered me, and nor were the various things Maher said for that matter.

The thing that bothered me was this: On a panel about Islam and Muslims, there were no Muslim or even former Muslim speakers.

This I see as unacceptable.

A similar sort of thing often happens when atheism is a topic of discussion on American TV – the worst and least productive discussions involve a bunch of religious people trying to figure out what is in the heads of those darn atheists.

It produces an echo chamber where atheists sitting at home are told they should “shut the hell up.”

And I found that deeply offencive, because when you get right down to it they could have just had an atheist on the show to answer all of that.

Now here is the thing, I can’t take offence at that if I don’t take offence at an atheist TV show host pulling the same trick regarding Muslims.

It is not that doing so would introduce “balance” – but rather that it is much, much easier to paint a group of people as being monsters when none of them are there to contradict you.

It is like a panel discussion on feminism – made up entirely of men.

Obviously that would never happen, it would just be ridiculous.

Even if the panel were entirely complimentary, there would still be something innately off about that sort of set-up.

There is an old Central European saying that goes “Nothing about us without us” - spreading to South Africa’s disability rights movement and then on to most rights movements.

It is a basic and fundamental principle that you cannot truly discuss any given population without that population being part of the discussion.

And I think this is the feeling Affleck was getting at – this feeling that this is wrong on a deep, basic and fundamental level.

One cannot exactly call it racist, because it is an issue that crops up all over the place in ways that aren't strictly about race.

It is a strategy that always carries a stink in and of itself quite apart from whatever issue it is attached to.

For the sort of discussion Maher was hosting - well you can’t talk about Islam without at least having someone with a Muslim background involved.

And yet that seems to be the default for a lot of Western media.

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