Bill Maher’s call for genocide in the Middle East and the objectification of women and homosexuals for political gain

Bill Maher’s call for genocide in the Middle East and the objectification of women and homosexuals for political gain

Yes. This text is biased — anyone looking for an objective take on anything, will have a very hard time finding someone who isn’t immersed in society and culture — I still can’t force myself to take a neutral position on ethnic cleansing. Those high and mighty pacifists, who lift their heads proud and declare that both the oppressor and the oppressed are to blame; that the murdered has as much fault as the murderer, they’re the biggest fascists of all. 

Ben Affleck’s recent appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher sparked a debate on Islam, atheism, racism and liberalism that has caught a lot of people’s attention, yet, a very important thing has been missing from the discussion: Bill Maher and Sam Harris were completely tokenizing of women and homosexuals in their arguments, and no one has called them out on it. In their blatant anti-Muslim rhetoric, Maher and Harris insisted that Muslims oppress women and homosexuals and that this is why Islam is “the motherload of bad ideas”. Furthering their ongoing campaign for the genocide of Muslim people, Maher and Harris took up the quintessential American sermon of ‘good versus evil’ — which conveniently places white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, rich men as the good guys; the messianic saviors, and pretty much everyone else as evil — they decided to make their arguments about defending the weak: flaunting their demagoguery, and ignoring the irony of their discourse. 

Just weeks after tweeting about slapping crazy women, Bill Maher became an unforeseen, and uncalled-for, “advocate” for women’s rights. He and Sam Harris, neither of whom identifies publicly as anything other than cisgender-straight-white-atheist-male, and both of whom live in America, explained to the rest of us how the lives of women and homosexuals are lived in Muslim countries. Which brings me to question if this also means they think that women and homosexuals (and perhaps even the trans women of color who never cross their minds) have equal rights in western countries. Perhaps they think there’s no rape of women in America or homophobia in Europe. Perhaps they even think that countries where the State has fomented Anti-Theism (which seems to be what they think will ultimately free us from all oppression), such as the Soviet Union, have been paradigms of human rights. And let’s not speak of democracy, because democracy is a destructive system that perpetuates violence against those whose voices are silenced by the will of the powerful. 

ISIS is an example of this overly-romanticized American style of democracy. Al-Qaeda is a political movement. Much like the cartels in Mexico. The LRA in Uganda. And the American oligarchy. All of them. They’re all political. They’re all immaterialities trying to materialize themselves through force and power. They’re all subjectivities that recognize themselves, each, as the one objective truth. They’re all ideals failing to understand that which is different from them, and how much it actually has in common with them. They’re the ideas of men, sprung from a thousands-of-years-old-patriarchy. And while some women and homosexuals are privileged in different ways within patriarchal, racist, capitalist and ableist structures, and some may even subscribe to their ideals, these structures still belong to cisgender-heterosexual men, as do the conflicts between them.

Perhaps atheism was once a radical idea carried by critical thinkers — though equally submerged in a western narrative — but now, it is nothing but the dogma of a bunch of pretentious, egomaniac, white, cisgender, heterosexual men, following the words of a charlatan intellectual in HBO who fails to recognize the complexity of conflicts in the Middle East within cultural, social, political and historical contexts, colonialism and white supremacy. And who fails to see the racism in his discourse (Islam is a religion, not a race! — yell them atheists into the abyss).

What Harris and Maher’s arguments ultimately fail to see is how ironically violent are the murders of Muslim women and homosexuals in the name of their own rights, as conceived by others. Or will they pretend that no women and queer people are killed, as are many other — civilians — by the US Military in these “campaigns”? This is if we buy their bullshit: that they really care about us; about them. That they’re not just privileged assholes who want to keep their privileges at all costs but also don’t want to seem desperate, and so they promote their holy war in the names of those whose voices are silenced, who won’t be heard as they call bullshit on their, well, bullshit.

Marifer Chávez is a small town trans girl living in Mexico City. She likes to sing.

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