On Thursday’s broadcast of “Hannity” on the Fox News Channel, conservative commentator Mark Steyn admonished satirist reluctant to stand with the slain at Charlie Hebdo and was particularly critical of Comedy Central host Jon Stewart, who offered a statement on the incident on his Wednesday program.
Steyn did, however, applaud HBO “Real Time” host Bill Maher for not pulling any punches with his condemnation of the incident and its ties to Islam.
“Yeah, I think Bill Maher is absolutely the exception, Sean,” Steyn said. “And interestingly enough the fellows all in Charlie Hebdo, all basically men of the left, the people I mentioned a couple minutes earlier, the other cartoonists in Europe, they’re all basically all-time secular lefties who think you have the right to make the same jokes about Muslims that you make about Christians and Jews and everybody else. And the American left is not there for them. And it was to me pitiful to listen to the sort of antiseptic eunuch statement that Jon Stewart issued last night. You know, if Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are at the height of political satire in the United States, then I’ll take these guys in France any day of the week. They’re doing what real satirists do, which is offending you and challenging you over the serious questions of the day.”
“They’re not just doing lame old tired anti-Bush jokes a quarter century after he’s left office,” he continued. “And these guys learned, these Euro lefties learned that when you’re really up against it, when people are trying to kill you, that apart from Bill Maher and one or two other men of principle, I would rate Richard Dawkins, the famous atheist who nevertheless acknowledged yesterday that while he hates all religions, he actually has a bigger problem with Islam than any of the other ones for the obvious that they’re trying to kill him and the other ones aren’t. Apart from Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins, there were actually very few principled lefties out there speaking up for these poor beleaguered guys over in Europe.”
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