Liberal television personality Bill Maher is again expressing his disgust with the political correctness of fellow liberals regarding Islamic terrorism, noting that he never hears someone scream "Merry Christmas!" before a bomb explodes.
In a Friday panel discussion on his show Real Time with Bill Maher, the 60-year-old atheist comedian took issue with the charge that Christianity and Islam are essentially the same when it comes to religion-spawned terrorism.
In the wake of the attack outside of the Parliament building in London where a British-born Muslim man named Khalid Massood rammed his car into a crowd of pedestrians killing four, including one American, Maher said people ought not "pretend this has nothing to do with Islam, the religion."
Louise Mensch, a former Conservative member of the British Parliament and a columnist for Heat Street, disagreed.
"It has nothing to do with Islam the same way Timothy McVeigh had nothing to do with Roman Catholicism," Mensch said.
Maher, agitated, persisted: "Every time some bomb goes off, before it goes off, somebody yells 'Allahu Akbar!'"
"I never hear anybody go 'Merry Christmas! This one's for the flying nun!'"
But fellow panelists Chris Hayes of MSNBC and Timothy Snyder of Yale University backed Mensch's contention that this has nothing to do with Islam per se.
"When Christians do anything like this, do we ever say, 'Christian terrorism'?" Snyder asked.
Hayes noted that the IRA that "blew up London for 15 years," spurning Maher's argument that he was making a "false equivalency" between McVeigh and the London attacker.
Maher fired back: "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? ... Can we get real?"
Maher has frequently hosted Muslim and ex-Muslim reformers on his show such as Irshad Manji of the Moral Courage Project and former Wall Street Journal reporter Asra Nomani, both of whom are liberal Muslims. In May of 2015 he interviewed his "hero" Somali-born turned Dutch parliamentarian and now American citizen Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an atheist who was once a Muslim. She does not hesitate to say that Islam is not a religion of peace and whose book Heretic argues how the Islamic faith should be reformed.
During overtime on his show, Maher posited the following question to the panel: "If a European country sometime in the future became 51% Muslim, would it be the same country, would it have the same values, the same laws, would the laws change?"
"Would you ask that question about Jews ... about Catholics?" Mensch replied, arguing again that Islam itself not the problem.
Mensch brought up the Westboro Baptist Church, based in Kansas, infamous for their hateful protests of military funerals and homophobic signs.
"Again, this false equivalency," Maher said, exasperated, doing a face palm.
In 2008, Maher made a documentary film titled, Religulous, which challenges religion and religious belief of all kinds.
