Shikha Dalmia on Bill Maher's Attempts to Make Muslim Bashing Hip
Bill Maher has turned Muslim bashing into a hip sport on his HBO show. What's more, he berates liberals as too PC for not joining in. However, they are right and he is wrong. His constant accusations that Islam is a fascist religion and Muslims are extremists is both false and dangerous, writes Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia.
For starters, she notes, such accusations ignore the 300 million Muslims—the size of America's population—in the world who are Sufis, a mystical form of Islam that is essentially pacifist and believes that the path to God is through music and dance.
Worse, Maher doesn't understand that one can't characterize a whole faith as extremist without also legitimizing the idea that extreme measures are necessary to control it.
