Oh, This is Rich

You might remember media mogul, 'Reptilian Rupert' Murdoch, as the guy who denied any personal responsibility whatsoever for the criminal enterprise he operated, the deservedly late News of the World.  For Rupe, the buck stopped just short of himself.  Right, you rotten old bugger and why haven't you taken a dirt nap by now anyway?

Now the crotchety old fart has come out to contend that all Muslims - the lot of them, the overwhelming majority of peaceful Muslims included - must share responsibility for the Paris massacre at Charlie Hebdo.

Bill Maher last night took his own shot at blaming the entire Muslim world for this outrage.

“Obviously, the vast majority of Muslims would never do anything like this,” said Maher. “But they share bad ideas. This is the thing that caused the big ruckus when Ben Affleck was here. Sam Harris said, ‘Islam is the motherlode of bad ideas,’ and everyone went fuckin’ nuts on this side of the panel. But it is. These two guys who shot up the cartoonists the other day, they were avenging the prophet, they said? A bad idea. Martyrdom? A bad idea. Women as second-class citizens? A bad idea. And unfortunately, the terrorists and the mainstream share a lot of these bad ideas.”

I guess by Maher's logic that would make him personally responsible for every Afghan wedding brought to an abrupt end by a Hellfire missile launched by some bored guy sitting in an air-conditioned trailer 20-miles down the road from Vegas.  Of course Maher is quick enough to criticize that sort of thing but he seems not to hear the criticism of moderate Muslims who denounce atrocities like the Paris massacre.  To him they're all steeped in these same extremist ideas. Except that, if they were the people Maher makes them out to be, he wouldn't be alive today.

Bill Maher's Anti-Islam Smear

On his RealTime programme last night, Bill Maher couldn't wait to get into his shopworn, anti-Islam theme about the Muslim faith being unique in promoting violence.

As I listened to his diatribe I so wished I could ask him just one question.  Since the turn of this century, how many innocent Muslims have died at the hands of Christian forces and how many innocent Christians have perished at Muslim hands?

My guess is that the ratio would be at least several hundred to one and would utterly reduce Maher's endless rant.

The fact is we've been putting the boots to the Muslim world since the days of Napoleon.   We've carved up their territory without the slightest regard to their national, tribal, religious, linguistic and ethnic differences, dividing them up and herding them behind straight line borders to suit our convenience, creating instant minorities cut off from their own people to be set upon by the power structures we have also installed.

We have taken their wealth and ensured our domination by toppling any leader who stood against us while propping up the worst despots just so long as they were willing to do our bidding.  We have not hesitated to rain violence down upon them, to leave their women and children dead in countless numbers.   Winston Churchill even ordered the use of chemical weapons against unruly Kurdish tribesmen in villages in northern Iraq (1920) and castigated his critics for lacking a suitable appreciation of modern military technology.

All these things and more we have done to them, repeatedly, for two centuries and yet we seem mystified and enraged at their periodic, feeble attempts to strike back.

Had some other people - of alien ethnicity and religion, from an alien culture, speaking an alien language, wielding alien weapons against us punitively, taking control of our homelands, appointing and propping up brutal despots to oppress us and robbing us of our heritage and assets for generation upon generation upon generation, how would we react?   Would we not find those who struggle against those aliens truly noble?   Of course we would.  We make popular movies about that very premise.   We absolutely love it.

But, when we're the alien oppressor and they rise against us and dare to lash out, well - they're monsters, sub-humans, not worthy of being considered humans much less civilized.

Bill Maher lays this at the feet of Islam.   Would we need the Prophet Mohammed to fight back if we were on the receiving end?  I doubt it.