Maher: ‘The Left Is Often Not Helping’ With Its Rhetoric on Islam, The KKK Is Not An ‘Equivalent’ to Jihad

During a discussion on Islamic extremism with author Sam Harris on Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher remarked that while banning Muslims isn’t the solution, “We’re trying to find ways to disempower Donald Trump, and the left is often not helping.”

Harris said that Maajid Nawaz, a converted extremist is “now demonized by some subset of the Muslim community and the left as an Uncle Tom, right?” And “that’s the kind of thing that only empowers Trump.”

Maher added, “We’re trying to find ways to disempower Donald Trump, and the left is often not helping.”

Harris agreed, and pointed to Hillary Clinton’s reaction to the Pulse shooting in Orlando “talking about gun control only, and then admonishing the whole country not to be racist, right? Now, you can’t say that jihadism has no relationship to Islam, right? …. And the president has been lying for eight years about this. … [P]resumably, he’s been — he has not been bombing the Amish, right? So, he knows that this has some relationship to Islam.”

Maher then said that Obama “said in his final address, he said, we’ve taken out tens, or 10,000 terrorists, and I’m sure most of them, not all of them, were ones who believed in the Koran. That seems like an awful lot if you’re just saying this is the fringe.” He clarified that the fringe is probably just people who are violent.

Maher further stated that “[S]ize matters. I mean, there are entire terrorist armies. ISIS, obviously, Boko Haram, al Qaeda. I mean, this just doesn’t — people talk about the KKK like it’s an equivalent.”

Harris agreed that the KKK is a “fringe” group, and that there has to be a war of ideas with Islamists, and “You don’t fly drones to solve this problem.”

Later in the discussion, Maher stated that burqas are “not normal.” And “If you think that’s normal, you are so part of the problem. There is a human being in there who might want to feel the sun on their face, or make eye contact, or register a smile. … I mean, why are they covering women like that? Because, otherwise, men might get aroused. So they’re blaming the women for the men’s horniness. I mean, if you — I mean, you couldn’t create in a lab a[n] idea that should be more opposed by liberals.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett