"We are never going to defeat terrorism if we are not going to reform Islam," Maher ended on. "And we are not going to reform Islam if we can't talk about it."Sam Harris, in conversation with Bill Maher on HBOs Real Time.
A lot more in the discussion that makes sense of the otherwise puzzling alliance between Islamists and the Left in the west.
Muslims in the west, when polled, do show attitudes -- about women, gays, minorities, free speech -- that are deeply inimical to ours, and which number in the majority or large minority (see my "Islam in figures" page above). They are deeply inimical to views on the Liberal Left. But still they hew to Islamists: mainly because they hate the US, and because they are (mostly) brown skinned, so to oppose them is "racist".
Another quote:
"When you take jihadists and Islamists who want Sharia law, they just want to use the leverage of a state that are not committing violence immediately, and then you have a larger subset of conservative Muslims who may not have any alliance to jihadists they still have attitudes about free speech and the rights of women and the rights of gays that are deeply at odds with our own and we have to win a war of ideas with these people. This is not -- we don't fly drones to solve this problem. And so this is why we need to empower real reformers."Video and transcript here.
