Israel/Palestine
Related: About this forumWhy Jeremy Corbyn Scares British Jews So Much
Source: The Jewish Daily ForwardUnntil he became leader of the British Labour party on September 12, Jeremy Corbyn — a crumpled, bearded 66-year-old socialist — had had an unremarkable political career. He was first elected to Parliament in 1983 and has represented the Labour Party in the safe seat of Islington North in north London ever since. Corbyn has never held a cabinet position nor pioneered a significant piece of legislation. He remains aligned with the far-left wing of the party, whose stature and influence has only diminished since the 1980s.
His politics are that of principled rebellion. Between 2005 and 2010, when Labour was in government, Corbyn voted against party lines 25% of the time. Known for his anti-war politics, he has publicly supported both the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Irish republicans. In 1996 the Guardian editorialized that his ill-timed meeting with Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein made him “a fool whom the Labour Party would probably be better off without.”
Now, with the party in disarray, Corbyn has come out of obscurity to become Labour’s next leader — and British Jewry is worried.
In a recent Survation poll, 67% of British Jews said they were concerned about his possible victory. “The JC rarely claims to speak for anyone other than ourselves,” The Jewish Chronicle’s August 12 editorial stated. “But in this rare instance we are certain that we speak for the vast majority of British Jews in expressing deep foreboding at the prospect of Mr. Corbyn’s election as Labour leader.”
Read more: http://forward.com/news/320934/why-jeremy-corbyn-scares-so-many-british-jews/
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Agnosticsherbet
(11,619 posts)Paul Eisen, the Holocaust denier whose foundation Deir Yassin Remembered Corbyn has supported
Corbyn's a racist.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)Racism is a right-wing phenomenon. The left is driven by opposition to all forms of racism and has proven this over and over again, while hawks and militarists, all of whom oppose human equality, are naturally against the end of racism. And it's not racist to refuse to unquestioningly take the side of Israel against the Palestinians.
Agnosticsherbet
(11,619 posts)And other Holocaust deniers shows a link to racism.
Reread the article.
And please, the left is no more immune racism than is the right.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)The only thing he and Eisen had in common was that he supported a foundation Eisen played a role in starting that is called Deir Yassin Remembered(which is named for the innocent Palestinian victims of an Irgun attack on a Palestinian village during the War of Independence/Nakba). It goes without saying that Corbyn opposes Holocaust denial.
Are you saying that Deir Yassin shouldn't be commemorated? It was a militarily unjustified attack on a village that was no longer playing any role in the conflict(the Zionist forces had already essentially won at that point). There was no need to attack(and destroy)Deir Yassin.
Agnosticsherbet
(11,619 posts)Deir Yassin should be remembered.
Eisen should not.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)leftynyc
(26,060 posts)about that in the slightest. It's just what you wish to believe.
Little Tich
(6,171 posts)Don't take my word for it, this is something you can easily find out for yourself. Also, I'm sure there are others in this thread who can help you out if you want.
It has one, prominent, holocaust-denying member. Corbyn does not deny the holocaust. Corbyn is not an antisemite.
Little Tich
(6,171 posts)He's no Holocaust denier, nor is he an anti-Semite. My post wasn't intended to crap on him in any way.
FarrenH
(768 posts)leftynyc
(26,060 posts)Perhaps in fantasyland racism is merely a right wing phenomenon but in the real world there are plenty of racists all over the political spectrum. Very, very few people have zero bigotry.
T_i_B
(14,738 posts)As such I couldn't really call him a friend of Israel. At some point this will be used to attack him by his many opponents.
shira
(30,109 posts)I wouldn't call that pro-Palestinian.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)By itself, getting rid of Hamas(which isn't possible, as you know) wouldn't make anything better. If Hamas were crushed, the only thing that could lead to(as you know) would be the emergence of an even more extreme group arising to avenge Hamas' defeat. What needs to happen is that the whole vocabularly of "winning" and "losing" needs to be abandoned in discussing the Israel/Palestine situation. It doesn't do any good to TRY to "win".
What is needed is a face-saving plan that spares any faction any humiliation.
If you really cared about fighting Hamas, shira, you'd call for the end of the West Bank occupation, you'd call for letting Gaza import all the food they need, and you'd call for the removal of the illegal and totally indefensible Israeli settlements.
Instead, you go on and on with your useless refrain about how nothing can be changed until Hamas goes away.
An argument that totally ignores the reality of the situation:
Hamas won't go away BECAUSE the Israelis won't allow anything to change.
And because apologists for Likudism(if not the Likud party itself, which you claim to oppose)continue to pretend that Palestinians have no legitimate grievances against the Israeli government but are instead driven solely by bigotry...as if it was bigotry to hate a state that has done nothing to your people but crush its hopes into the dirt. How about admitting that Palestinians are human beings and that it's unfair to punish ALL of them for what the violent among them do? How about admitting that there is nothing ordinary Palestinians could do to stop the violent from being violent? How about admitting that there is no reason for Palestinians to do what you want to do and pretend that Israelis still have it worse than they do, that it's the Israelis who are the victims and the Palestinians who are the oppressors? How about even just thinking for yourself about this, just for a moment, rather than simply taking everything AIPAC and Camera/Flame spew out as unchallengable truth?
If the Israeli government had never settled the West Bank and Gaza(they had no right to do so while the area was under their military occupation)Hamas would probably still be in its roots as nothing but a charitable organization formed by the old Muslim Brotherhood. If the Israelis had agreed to negotiate with Arafat when he was at the height of his power in the Eighties(rather than insisting that they would only negotiate if he recognized Israel BEFORE talks began rather than at the moment they began-a meaningless difference)rather than waiting until he was weakened and in political decline in the Nineties, the power vacuum that Hamas moved into would never have emerged.
shira
(30,109 posts)....& very sympathetic to some of the worst warmongering, fascist, holocaust-denying, misogynist homophobes on the planet.
He can promote dialogue without considering them close friends who really want peace....
Corbyn sucks.
Your list of strawman arguments in that rant of a post do nothing to prove any of the above wrong.
T_i_B
(14,738 posts)Still, this is the I/P dungeon.....
shira
(30,109 posts)....& pro-Hezbollah. They're bigoted to the extreme & all want the Jewish state gone, destroyed....another genocide in the making.
6chars
(3,967 posts)to go along with the recent acceleration of such immigration from France.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)There is no other way forward. There is nothing that can be solved by force anymore and nothing that can be solved by anathemizing anyone and refusing to work for an end to conflict.
In speaking out against the injustices meted out to Palestinians, Corbyn is trying to end everyone's suffering in the I/P conflict. His objective is peaceful co-existence for all...something Netanyahu supporters(and remember, the Likud Party can only survive in Israeli politics if the Israel/Palestine conflict never ends)don't want.
The only way to protect all people from bigotry and oppression is to end all wars. War can only keep hateful systems going...it can only preserve oppression now...no war can ever liberate anyone again. No war can ever be fought for progressive or life-loving reasons ever again.
Jeremy Corbyn was the only candidate for the Labour leadership that wants the world's conflicts to end, and the only one who wants all people to live free from oppression or misery. No one who still supports war wants either of those things.
leftynyc
(26,060 posts)his history of hanging with holocaust deniers, that's your right but don't expect everyone to close their eyes merely to focus on what you think is important. Please don't tell me you think isis can be defeated if we merely would just understand why the poor little darlings are so pissed off. It's an unfortunate reality that some groups contribute zero to society and should be crushed.
FarrenH
(768 posts)proximity of someone once or twice who happens to be one of your actual constituents, who you barely know, is a member of an organization you had quite legitimate and defensible involvement in (and that only involving attending some events out of respect for the people it remembers) and holds views diametrically opposite to yours, somehow tars you by association, then you're adopted the same MO as James O' Keefe and Breitbart.
Really, it's EXACTLY the same MO as James O' Keefe. And reasonable people will reject it with the contempt it deserves, for the same reason.
leftynyc
(26,060 posts)There is nothing saying Corbyn couldn't STRONGLY denounce the person - not at the event but sometime later - and clearly say the person's views are anathema to him. If you can't do that with a holocaust denier, you're pretty useless as a human.
FarrenH
(768 posts)then actually check whether the smears are factually correct, or whether your assumptions about the person being smeared are factual
Jeremy Corbyn:
“Fifteen years ago (Eisen) was not a Holocaust denier. Had he been a Holocaust denier, I would have had absolutely nothing to do with him. I was moved by the plight of people who had lost their village in Deir Yassin,” he told Channel Four news.
“Holocaust denial is vile and wrong. The Holocaust was the most vile part of our history. The Jewish people killed by the Nazi Holocaust were the people who suffered the most in the 20th century.
“I have no contact now whatsoever with Paul Eisen and Deir Yassin Remembered.”
leftynyc
(26,060 posts)But not the truth. Eisen has always been holocaust denier. He just didn't care because of his cause.
FarrenH
(768 posts)he does not share the beliefs of Hamas or Hezbollah, but at the same time, it is impossible to bring about peace in the region without engaging such organizations.
That he is opposed to Israeli occupation and pro-Palestinian is not in dispute.
And in all honesty I do think that he is in that part of the left that allows advocacy on behalf of an oppressed people to cloud their judgement when it comes to how much slack he gives their more unsavory representatives.
But I believe the primary reason for the fear described is simple. A majority of Jews in the UK are committed Zionists, in roughly equal proportion to the numbers claiming fear above, and Corbyn is clearly anti-Zionist. Israeli lobby groups have for the longest time held considerable sway in both Labour and the Conservative party and I think it's something of a shock to realize that if he does lead Labour to victory, it will be the first time in forever that the UK has a leader that is actually somewhat hostile towards Israel's occupation of Palestinian land and oppression of Palestinians.
I have an old friend who is Jewish, Zionist and lives in London and it's been interesting debating Corbyn with him on facebook because before his ascent, Corbyn's political positions roughly matched his own on almost every domestic issue, but now that someone of his rough political stripe is actually labour leader, my friend is trotting out every specious criticism tendered by both the man's right-wing critics and those in his own party.
leftynyc
(26,060 posts)People whose views match my own but lose their minds over the I/P issue. But I also think the populace of Great Britain and the US is different. This country and its citizens - and this is proven time and time again in polls - strongly support Israel. Is 9/11 part of that? I do think so but many feel the same ideology that made barbarians fly planes into buildings here is something Israel has to deal with every single day - that makes a huge impression on Americans.
FarrenH
(768 posts)at claims, by implication or direct statement, that most or all Palestinians - an entire ethnicity - are "barbarians", "savages", imbued with qualities like monstrous, murderous intolerance, collectively guilty of the crimes of any one of them, not worthy of the right to self-determination that other people consider inalienable and unconditional - unless they meet some special condition, culpable in the theft of their own land, and so on, from people who scream "bigot" when someone even once tenders a personal criticism of an individual Jew as a person, not a Jew, that the screamer infers, by some tenuous route, to be related to some anti-semitic trope. Voicing blatant bigotry out of one side of the mouth, while decrying bigotry inferred on the most tenuous grounds out of the other. There is a staggering lack of awareness of the ethnic exceptionalism, the application of completely different standards, the blatant moral inconsistency such an attitude rests on. That, my friend, is ethnic supremacism.
leftynyc
(26,060 posts)that freak out Americans, it's their religion. They're just as freaked out by American Muslims as they are at middle eastern Muslims. - I'm sure by now you've seen what happened to that kid in TX that brought a freeking clock into school. That poll that showed how many Muslims supported suicide bombers, support sharia law, think men should control their womenm think execution is proper for those who leave Islam - just freaked everyone out. I was pretty stunned (and horrified) by the poll myself. The numbers are there to cause concern.
http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-overview/
FarrenH
(768 posts)Last edited Thu Sep 17, 2015, 02:01 PM - Edit history (7)
started throwing around numbers from that survey, I was immediately struck by the inherent orientalism in how they were parsed by people who agreed with them. We talk like there's a world of difference between homophobic Christians in Uganda and liberal Christians in the USA, but, you know, Islam is just this monolithic mass and all that matters is % who believe X, cuz distinctions between an Azerbaijani and a Malaysian don't matter. And lol, what do you mean "distinction between a liberal Malaysian and a conservative Malaysian - that's just splitting hairs man". Oh, and whatever X is? If it's bad then it's True Islam (tm).
Before I even get to the responses themselves, and how people interpret them, I should say that conducting such a survey in some of the countries named, where there is currently an oppressive and violent imposition of regressive Islamic values, is highly vulnerable to the problem of people responding in a fashion that is less likely to result in them suffering significant consequences. How reliable do you think a survey of people's attitudes to Kim Jong-un that was conducted in North Korea would be? But never mind government, consider how in many of the same countries women respondents might respond when always under the watchful eye of a controlling man?
Lets consider the issue of Sharia law: The majority of Christians I have ever known would like the law to be constitutionally based on Christian values. They want Christian law. They're not dominionists. They don't expect it. But if asked in the form of multiple choice, that would be their choice. Now I don't know if the majority of Christians I know represents the majority of Christians, but I have no way of knowing because neither Pew nor anyone else has done such a global survey. Why is that? I suspect the reason has something to do with the Pew survey being concerned with quantifying Western fears, not providing comparative information.
Aside from that, what do the respondents mean by wanting Sharia law? It turns out they mean a whole lot of different things. Because there isn't a single conception of Sharia in the putatively Muslim world. It varies in form: Some mean they want religious courts to handle family disputes - divorce and so on. Some mean they want the entirety of the law to be Muslim canon and precedent, without any formal body of legislation as we recognize it, a la Saudi Arabia. Some mean that they want the underpinnings of law to be Sharia, so that laws are made by the same secular process seen in the west, but cannot directly contradict Sharia jurisprudence, a la the short-lived Islamist constitution of Egypt. Furthermore, in different regions, the prescriptions of Sharia are actually different. It varies in content: The "Sharia" many of the respondents want is close enough to the moderate law of secular states as to not represent something peculiarly exotic to westerners.
Yet especially some of my fellow atheists accompany the same link you've posted above with simplistic commentary that is of the form "Look, a majority want Sharia!!??one" and implications or direct statements to the effect that this means the worst excesses found in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. Which is actually, factually, bullshit. Prejudiced, orientalist bullshit too, because it relies on a conception of the Islamic world as monolithic and homogeneous when it contains immense variety.
There is the parsing of numbers "OMG in a majority of Muslim countries a majority want X!!". But what significance does the sum of countries have when some of the countries listed have populations of 5 million and some of 200 million? The count of countries is useless information, but a majority of people who have laid this same survey on me seem blithely unaware of this - because most people are shit at statistics. Lets look at two regions described by the survey and support for murdering people for apostacy: South Asia (+-200 million Muslims) - 76%. South East Asia (+-500 million Muslims) - 27%. When you look at population, not count of countries, the picture looks radically different.
Another dimension is the profoundly short-sighted reading of history in comparing these numbers to say, nominally Christian nations. Consider attitudes to homosexuality, for example. Literally a few decades ago, it was illegal, in one way or another, in a majority of Christian states - and that had popular support among Christians. In Africa today predominantly Christian states are overwhelmingly intolerant and there have been a rash of *new*, more severe laws passed that persecute LGBTQ people (my own country, South Africa, seems to be the sole exception to this trend because such discrimination is prohibited by our remarkably progressive constitution and because prominent clerics, like our beloved "Arch" Tutu are fearless defenders of the LGBTQ community). But in 2015 just because a majority of western and predominantly Christian states have developed some tolerance in law for LGBTQ people (often only in law, with majorities still holding deeply prejudiced views), westerners read about LGBT persecution in Muslim countries and say "OMG, these people are living in the 13th century!" - they're not, they're living in nominal Christendom, circa 1970. And the prejudice in this parsing is as plain as day.
But the most interesting thing about the Pew survey is how it reveals enormous variations in opinion, by region. Not only attributable to local cultural predispositions but also directly linked to the constitutional order that Muslims live under. Muslims living in avowedly secular states (most likely to accurately report their feelings) reject all of the things that get guys like Maher and Harris and some of my friends a-flutter by large majorities. In fact in avowedly secular states the number that cling to regressive and violently intolerant beliefs roughly matches the size of the Christian Taliban in the USA- often less.
This tells us something very obvious: Islam is not monolithic, either temporally, if history is examined, or spacially. The interpretation of Islam is contingent on and in a feedback loop with regional culture, economics and regional political arrangements, just as the other religions of the book are. There is not some True Islam that is represented by it's most violent, intolerant and regressive adherents like ISIS, with more progressive forms just being some kind of facade. People respond to what they're exposed to, and how that serves their welfare. And, as Reza Aslan has pointed out, they interpret their canon and tradition through that lens. Which is exactly why fear and intolerance of Muslim minorities as some fourth column in secular Western countries is the exact opposite of intelligent behaviour. It's f*cking stupid.
Yet that's exactly what the Maher's of this world, armed with information like the Pew survey, inadequate statistical understanding to accurately translate it's meaning and robust dollops of un-self-aware white male Judeo-Christian privilege, do. It's what no small number of committed Zionists do, too. It's bigotry. And they all say "Islamophobia is just a way of fobbing off criticism of Islam - look at this Pew survey! Look at ISIS". Why not look at the science-loving all-American Muslim kid who just got arrested for bringing a homemade radio to school to show his engineering teacher? Why not look at the +- 3 million American Muslims who have had to endure a climate of immense fear, suspicion and hostility since 9/11?
This same simplistic, bigoted perspective is also brazenly applied to parsing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in many, many accounts I see.
p.s. I have a perspective on this that is informed by intimate personal experience. I've eaten bitter herbs and eggs with Jewish friends, with mutual Muslim friends in attendance, on Pesach. I've eaten from a buffet of food that was made entirely vegetarian in deference to me, an atheist and a mutual Jewish friend (both vegetarians) by a woman who called me her "other son", on Eid-al-Fitr. I've listened to a friend joking that we're like the gorram United Nations at one table, while sharing coffee with a Jew, two atheists, one Christian and a Muslim of different races, a fact none of us had noticed or at least commented on before in the several years we had been hanging out. I dated a Muslim hippie who had just returned from a year of running round the English countryside with scruffy travellers and liked to show off her friend's fairy paintings (she insisted he really could see them) and practise Reiki on me. Sure, her conservative dad and brother looked daggers at me every time I came to pick her up, but he wasn't about to abuse his free-spirited daughter for "bringing dishonor on the family".
I know that the clash of cultures that informs all this fear and loathing in other places is something we are actively creating and nurturing in many parts of the world, for a variety of venal motives.
leftynyc
(26,060 posts)what you wrote and thank you for such a thoughtful post. I live in NY so my positions are somewhat skewed by virtue of the fact we're a real melting pot here. It's unlikely anyone can spend any real time in NY and not associate with people of all religions so we don't get as freaked out as some do. My office is like a mini-UN. But most of the US is not like NY - many live in very homogenous enclaves of sameness. The same is true in many European countries.
But I do agree with Maher on some things. There is a viral strain of Islam that groups like isis use for such venal acts, it's up to the communities whose religion is being used and maligned to crush them - if isis is only 30,000 strong, why aren't the countries whose populations are being terrorized by them doing more? It SHOULDN'T be up to the US or Europe to take care of but it doesn't seem anyone else is stepping up to the plate. The sad fact is when there are over 1 billion adherents to a religion - even 1% represents a very large number. I do realize that most of the xenophobia concerning Muslims is only driven by fear of the "other" but it's also the internet and social media that shares blame.
FarrenH
(768 posts)Last edited Thu Sep 17, 2015, 06:15 PM - Edit history (2)
30,000 isn't "only". It's a fairly large army. The Syrian army certainly isn't up to the task and Iraq's post war army isn't particularly strong either. They're being heavily funded by some very wealthy private concerns, many of them from the gulf states. Either by capture or purchase, they've acquired a lot of serious hardware.
In my post above I didn't say it but I think it's clear that the putatively Islamic world has a much bigger problem with anti-egalitarian, anti-humanitarian and regressive values in the modern era (not eternally) than the West or non-Muslims countries in the Far East. Parts of the Islamic world have become significantly more regressive than they were a century ago.
But what galls me about people like Maher is the way they peddle a kind of essentialism - the same essentialism that violent fundamentalists embrace. Violent fundamentalists say "This is the *real* Islam. This is the *true* Islam". Other Muslims say "No!" Maher says "I'll take the word of the very guys I'm holding up as evidence of Islam's inherent violence - those other guys are just not adhering to their inherently violent religion properly". To sustain this, both he and Harris cite canon. Now any idiot can pick up a bible and see that the entire old testament is full of horrifying prescriptions - murdering your child for disrespecting you. Marrying your daughter to her rapist if she is raped and so on. And any idiot can tell that the vast majority of Christians do not believe in those things. But a lot of pretty nasty stuff was justified with reference to the OT not too long ago in history, including rationalization of invasion, war and slavery. Maher's no friend of Christianity, but he certainly doesn't believe it's inherently predisposed to savage violence or fundamentally incompatible with secular values based on the simplistic notion that religious belief boils down to canon. No, where Christianity and Judaism are concerned he's quite comfortable with the notion that interpretation of said may adapt to contingencies of economics, power relationships and prior culture. So he applies this "true scotsman" fallacy to one and only one religion.
And while he (and many like him) accounts for conflict and inhumanity in the predominantly Christian world by reference to politics, economics and so on, he accounts for every conflict or inhumane situation involving Muslims with reference to the inherent violence in their religion. The I/P conflict in particular is a example of this, and it's not just Maher that does it. Imputing that the motives of many Palestinians might just be resistance against getting kicked off their land, having their resources stolen and living under the iron boot of what is mainly a colonial enterprise for over half a century, is out of the question. No, it's because they're Mooooooooslims, and Muslims are inherently violent bastards. He and many others are literally incapable of seeing certain realities.
Now I know that in many of these conflicts that are actually about resources and land and economic decline the warring parties that arise organize under an Islamist banner and the last time putatively Christian nations did something similar was centuries ago, but it doesn't obviate the fact that the primary cause is *not* Islamic belief or dogma. Inn Northern Nigeria, in Ethiopia, it's about climate change and rapid desertification (this played a large role in Syria), which has disproportionately affected Muslim nations and a bunch of other things.
It's about the aftershocks of colonialism, since the West (specifically, the UK and France) in very recent history invaded and ruled over most of the Muslim countries on the planet and for a very long time engaged in resource extraction primarily for the benefit of the colonial power, to the detriment of those countries. It's no coincidence that predominantly sub-Saharan Christian Africa, another region that Europe exercised colonial power over for a long time without supplanting the native population, is in a worse mess than most Muslim countries of the central latitudes, and has experienced equally as much instability, dictatorship, horrific abuse of human rights and misery in recent history. And where the British Empire left off, the USA picked up the baton in the 20th century. From propping up the despotic House of Saud (ironically, via it's oil-funded Wahhabi outreach to the rest of the Muslim world, a major source of toxic fundamentalism) to arming and training the Taliban to toppling the democratically elected socialist government of Iran when Mossedagh decided to nationalize that countries oil wealth and BP went crying to it's British and American shareholders. That is the entire reason Iran is a Shi'ite theocracy today. America toppled a democratically elected, secular, socialist government and installed a hugely unpopular monarch, for unrestricted access to oil. 10 years later that brought about a revolution, and Islamic revolutionaries seized power.
I have a bunch of online friends who are political and social scientists, thanks to an American Pol Sci friend I met over here years ago and they will detail the massive, exploitative, centuries-long and very, very negative interference of the West in Muslim lands in enormous detail for anyone who cares to listen. This is factual history. These are primary causes for all the suffering and conflict, not Islam. From the perspective of the people of those lands, it is a history of Christendom f*ing up their shit for centuries and this is actually quite a reasonable assessment, even if it wasn't done under the banner of Christianity. That has played a huge role in the creation and growth of modern, regressive Islamism. It's likely in the reverse circumstance that nominal Christendom would be in the same place, if the roles were reversed in some alternative history. The history of the crusades certainly suggest as much. And as I said above, the interpretation of canon and custom is highly contingent on circumstance: regressive, violent Islamism (not all Islamism is violent) is a product, not a cause in the modern era. It didn't start with an inherent impulse to violence. The political and economic contingencies of the colonial and cold war eras created anger, resentment, militancy and the religion became an organizing force and expression of that.
So when I see the likes of Maher putting the cart before the horse and totally ignoring the entire history of the last few centuries, the actual, real historical political and social and economic causes that are not disputed among scholars of history and politics and social science, and laying it all at the feet of religious canon and the peculiar and inherent violence of Islam, I want to scream "you know-nothing, ignorant fucktard! You don't know what the fuck you're talking about!" It's not just the utter ignorance of history, the immense prejudice he brings to bear. It's the fact that people like him are part of the fucking problem. Maher, like Bush, is in reality an ally of extremists. The hostile dialog they create and how that is perceived by people who are actually living with the consequences of that history and are outraged by such hostile orientalism, especially when it emanates from the source of many of their woes, drives people into the arms of a regressive, violent extremism.
It's like being mercilessly bullied throughout your school years by a bunch of kids and having your lunch money stolen every day, so badly that it turns you into a dysfunctional alcoholic as an adult. Then the exact same kids all grow up and have successful careers and keep coming to your bedsit in the bad part of town to lecture you on responsibility and work ethic and good behaviour. You would freaking hate those guys.