Ben Affleck Angrily Defends Islam Against Bill Maher/Sam Harris

In The Young Turks on YouTube by Hlarson20 Comments

 

“Ben Affleck was quick to call out what he felt was Bill Maher’s “gross, racist, disgusting,” ideas about Islam during a heated debate.

The “Gone Girl” star appeared on “Real Time with Bill Maher” Friday and things got heavy when the late night talk show host continued his conversation about Islam, which he started the week before.

“You and I have been trying to make the case that liberals need to stand up for liberal principles,” Maher said to fellow panelist, author Sam Harris.”* The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur breaks it down.

*Read more here from Zayda Rivera / NY Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv/ben-affleck-calls-bill-maher-views-islam-gross-racist-disgusting-article-1.1963961

Comments

  1. Pingback: Perspective | The Secret Muhajaba

  2. i’m cancelling my membership, I’ve had it with cenk making an ass of himself with the whole sam harris thing… unless tyt gets sam on the show to clear things out, or demonstrate a rational analysis of the whole argument, I’m just done… and it just hurts so much cuz i love tyt, and it’s obvious they agree with sam, they’re just being jerks about this!

  3. Like much of Maher’s commentary, it starts with a correct premise and quickly devolves into misdirected drivel. Liberals are much quicker to vilify the religions of white folks than those of our darker brethren. Hilariously, Maher has historically been one of the biggest offenders in this regard. But all of the discussion past that point in this clip is neither applicable or useful and it is bigoted (though, to be fair, not hate driven),

  4. As my first comment I’m not polite, sorry about that, but have to say that you Cenk are kind of pussy. Leaving your religion because of what? Because you can’t take the best out of it and grow as a man? And there is 99% good stuff in Quaran! Because you live in such environment where you are not totally welcome as a muslim? Because you want sex without marriage? Because you want to make a fortune (and with every fortune comes a crime)?
    If life supposed to be easy and smooth, we all should be cold heart atheists..

  6. Bill Maher never says that 1 billion muslims are evil….

    Look at the context and not the two lines taken away from the rest, when Bill Maher begins to speak he is using the 1 Billion estimate to generalize all muslims in the world under the same context that Ben Affleck did. He is saying 1 Billion and then is corrected to 1.5 Billion to mean all the muslims… then continues to his question where he said “Out of those people [the 1.5 bil] NONE of them are evil? He is speaking to his point about a few bad apples when they use rough numbers to come up with a 20% figure just a minute or two later…

    How do you not see that?

  7. One big problem with it, whether you agree with either “side” – what are you going to do about it? What should we, as a nation, do about it?

    I think many people are waking up to the fact that “nation building” doesn’t work. A country has to find it’s own way, for better or worse, their own people have to rise up and make the changes, no one can do it for them.

    We need to stop trying to fix the world and focus on fixing ourselves – then maybe more people around the globe would think we were great again and look to us as a “shining light” instead of as a plague.

  9. Cenk, excellent interpretation as usual
    ;-).
    Religion should be a private matter. It’s just a cesspool for unauthorized judgment.
    Ethics are important & essential. Religious extremism throughout human history is vicious. Great point about all religions embracing an Armageddon.

  10. I believe that Affleck mad the best point and its certain key words and phrases that identify bigots. Cenk noted the same points that I noticed about Maher. When Affleck pointed out that no one could speak for the beliefs of 1B Muslims, Maher cut in and implied that he COULD speak for the beliefs of 1B Muslims. And when Affleck asked Harris what polls he was quoting, Harris dodges that answer cuz the answer was, “the ones I made up in my head.’ When ppl start making up stats and say, “I know what those ppl think,” then they lose all credibility. For those who have traveled around the world and seen other cultures, you know that most ppl are moderate and want the same things, security, peace and a safe environment for their kids to grow up in. Claiming that ALL Muslims are radicals and want to overthrow Christianity is BS. How many Muslim countries have invade Christians ones and left armies of occupation behind? ZERO. How many Christian nations have invaded/bombed/shot missiles at Muslims countries? As for Muslims killing ppl who don’t believe the same thing they do, perhaps Maher and Harris have forgotten the Spanish Inquisition, the witch hunts and the genocide of the indigenous ppl of N, S and Central Americas.

  11. I tend to agree with Sam Harris, Cenk misrepresented what was said, his own figures showed over 20% of Muslims holding extreme views but chose to misrepresent the numbers. :(
    All Bill Maher and Sam Harris said was that Islam led to more objectionable / violent acts. Not that the majority of Muslims were extremists.

    1. Actually if you watch the video carefully, Harris goes on to say that moderate Muslims do not in fact take the faith seriously.

  12. I wish you guys would figure out your captions. I cannot understand any of the story with the captions you have, they are just nonsense.

    1. being a hearing impaired, viewer, proper captioning is vital. the panel speaks over one another so some narrative is understandably lost, but i agree with you Lemajn,, proper captioning seriously needs to be addressed. i didn’t think i was alone in thinking so
      .

  14. I think both Cenk and Affleck are misunderstanding/misrepresenting the point that Maher and Harris are making here. Neither Maher nor Harris are asserting that all Muslims support violence. That’s obviously absurd, and Harris says so explicitly in this very exchange. Maher and Harris are simply making the point that according to opinion polls, a significant percentage of the population of Muslim countries support the death penalty for apostasy, adultery, and homosexuality, and that such views are not, as Affleck asserted, limited to a small number of extremists who couldn’t fill a ballpark.

    1. Just came across this article with Pew results from 38,000 Muslims about some of the stuff that Maher was talking about, and the results are interesting. Harris said that there are millions of Muslims that do not take the faith seriously, the way that he said it leads me to believe that he thinks that moderate Muslims are not serious in their faith and therefore Muslims who are violent are the ones that are truly religious. That’s just what I noted…http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/10/06/ben-affleck-and-bill-maher-are-both-wrong-about-islamic-fundamentalism/

    1. Me too. I had many issues with Cenk’s nonsensical breakdown of the exchange. Even in the 2013 Pew Research Center’s poll of shortlisted Asian and African countries, about 60% said they supported stoning for adultery and over 45% said they support the death penalty for leaving Islam. These are no small numbers. It’s a religious issue in general. They’re (religions) dangerous because they enable and encourage irrational and immoral behavior (something humans already struggle with innately which is apparent because we invented religion!) and liberal or “good” people of faith only help keep the bad ideas alive. I have Christian and Muslim immediate family members who I love dearly but that doesn’t make what they believe in untouchable or defensible, no matter how loosely they read it.. We shouldn’t be encouraging people of faith to stand up and defend a western/secularized version of their fiction, we need them to leave it altogether.

Leave a Comment