Bill Maher got into a heated argument with members of his panel on his HBO show Real Time and ended up destroying their argument with one well-placed punch.
The panel was discussing the recent terrorist attack in London — an attack embraced by ISIS and carried out by a Muslim convert.
“This is another example where we take one group of people and we demonize them,” said Louise Mensch, a Heat Street columnist and former Conservative member of the U.K. Parliament.
“The guy was British-born. His name was Adrian before his converted. And partisans of Russia were out in the streets saying it was an illegal immigrant who did it, trying to turn the London people against our Muslim friends and neighbors. And you’re not going to do that.”
Maher, who often clashes with guests on his program regarding radical Islamic terrorism, disagreed with Mensch’s take.
“Let’s not pretend this has nothing to do with Islam, the religion,” he said.
“It doesn’t,” Mensch responded. “It has nothing to do with Islam the same way Timothy McVeigh had nothing to do with Roman Catholicism.”
McVeigh carried out the 1995 bombing of a government building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people.
“Every time some bomb goes off, before it goes off, somebody yells ‘Allahu Akbar!’” said Maher. “I never hear anybody go ‘Merry Christmas! This one’s for the flying nun!’ ”
“When Christians do anything like this, do we ever say, ‘Christian terrorism’?” asked Yale professor and author Timothy Snyder.
“No. But is Christian terrorism as big a problem?” asked Maher in response.
“If you lived in Oklahoma City in the 90s,” injected MSNBC host Chris Hayes. “We’re talking about London here.”
“That’s a false equivalency,” Maher shot back. “Are there Christian terrorist armies like ISIS?”
“The IRA that blew up London for 15 years!” Hayes exclaimed.
“Yes. But that’s the past! We’re living in the now. There was also the Inquisition,” retorted Maher.
“Are there Christian terrorist armies now. .. like ISIS, Al Qaeda, al-Shaabab, Boko Haram? Are there armies like that in the world that aren’t Muslim?” he asked. “Let’s not f–k around anymore! Can we get real?”
“I literally don’t agree with you,” Mensch said. “Russia is sending Chechen militants into ISIS trying to leverage this against a billion people.”
Someday, someone is going to explain to me — rationally and logically — why apologists for violent Islamists bring up Timothy McVeigh when trying to draw parallels between Christianity and Islam. It just doesn’t make any sense. McVeigh was not invoking Christianity in his attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. He was invoking the memory of Ruby Ridge and Waco — two questionable actions by the federal government that resulted in numerous innocents being killed. Neither one of those incidents had anything to do with religion either (the ATF raid on Waco was for illegal weapons and the FBI assault on the compound was ostensibly because the children were being sexually abused).
On the other hand, Islamists believe fanatically that they are at war with Christianity and they constantly invoke Islam as a justification for their acts of terror.
This false equivalency is delusional thinking. And the attempt to link Islamic terror with Christianity fails on many levels. It is the thinking of people desperate to validate their worldview and not a reflection of reality.
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