>> Earlier this week, Reza Aslan argued with CNN hosts about some of the recent comments that Bill Maher
had made about Islam and about the rights and roles of women in different Muslim countries.
Reza Aslan feeling that Bill Maher was being overly generalizing and unfair to many Muslim countries that do allow
many rights to women living there, including running those countries.
And now he's getting attacked by other CNN hosts for the things that he said.
Before we go to the news stuff, let's give you a little sample of some of what Reza said earlier this week on CNN.
>> He says that in Somalia --
>> Yeah, and that's actually empirically faculty actually incorrect.
Eritrea has almost 90% female genital mutilation.
It's a Christian country.
But again, this is the problem.
Is that you make these facile arguments.
>> Reza, be honest, for the most part, it is not a free and open society for women.
>> I mean, again, this is the problem.
Is that you're talking about a religion of one and a half billion people.
You know, this is the problem is that these kinds of conversations that we're having aren't really being had in
any kind of legitimate way.
-- to justify a generalization.
That's actually the definition of bigotry. did you hear what you just said.
You said in Muslim countries.
To say Muslim countries as though Pakistan and Turkey are the same.
Is frankly, and I use this word seriously, stupid.
>> So he was pretty fired up there.
>> CENK: Damn.
I love it every time.
>> I love how CNN refuses to take stands on almost any issue.
But condemning Islam -- ah, they're willing to get behind Bill Maher on that one.
>> CENK: They would never disagree with the pentagon, but you want to
insult 1.6 billion people in the world?
Yeah, we're behind that.
Let's be honest, though.
I love how they say to Reza -- he's got all the facts, they've got none of the facts.
But let's be honest.
But you're not being honest.
And now they're gonna follow up with it.
By the way, profile encourage here.
They don't invite him back on.
They just have one of their other anchors come in to take a potshot at him.
>> Exactly, yeah.
So they began attacking him.
And we've got two clips for you.
In the second one, they had something about his tone that's awesome.
But here's them attack Reza Aslan.
>> Okay, we had a very heated controversial conversation here this week.
>> He was in a way, playing off the last story we did.
He was playing the race religion card on you guys.
He was saying, you're calling everybody the same.
You're calling everyone bad.
>> I was simply asking the question in order to get an answer.
You know, Reza, he apologized on Twitter.
>> He apologized because in the course of it, he said that the question was stupid.
And it implied that I was stupid.
And he immediately apologized.
And I don't actually need an apology.
I think that we need to be able to ask the questions, even controversial questions,
even questions that you might deem as stupid, because then it allows for the conversation.
But I also want to say that it was interesting that Reza used the example of Indonesia,
where he was saying they treat women fairly.
Because it was just last weekend that one province in Indonesia,
Aceh, allowed legally caning of homosexuals.
>> CENK: Who are not women necessarily.
But anyway, okay, so they had to go and stretch for an example.
Because Reza came in with all these facts about how female genital mutilation doesn't normally happen in Muslim countries.
It happens more in African countries.
Some of those countries happen to be Muslim.
And some are Christian.
He had all these different facts.
So they're like, oh, yeah?
There's caning in Indonesia in one province.
Indonesia's gigantic.
The largest Muslim country.
It's enormous.
So they got one province, which is a little more fundamentalist.
And you got the caning going on there.
For example, great fact that Reza had was, seven Muslim countries have had women as their leaders.
U.S. has had none, right?
So, okay, so they hate women.
And look, if you're talking about Islam itself and some of the fundamentalist interpretation of it,
then I'm gonna be with you.
But if you just say all one and a half billion people, all of those countries,
well, it's not factual.
>> And it's especially dangerous when we're in a time right now where the media and perhaps some elements
of the government are trying to lay the foundation for another extended deployment in the Middle East to
attack the people that they're demonizing there.
And if you are successful in getting the American people to think of Muslims around the world as a dangerous
different sort of people, then historically, that has been how you go out and you kill a lot of people.
And so I'm glad that Reza is trying to fight against that and making sure that people know that yes.
there is extremism and extreme violence in the Middle East right now.
And many of those people perpetrating it are Muslim,
but that does not mean that Muslims around the world are that sort of people.
>> So when they say -- I don't know what the next video's gonna be.
But when they say -- the case is always made.
Muslims are extremists and they're killers.
They're fanatical, unlike Christians.
Now, do we not get credit for being Christian when we invaded Iraq and stole their resources and killed their people
and ordered war crimes and torture to cover it up?
Does that not cover it up?
'Cause George Bush is a born-again Christian.
Christian, Christian.
they even said crusades during -- so what.
I would say that probably the biggest terrorist country in the world is going to make sure I'll never be president
when I say this, would be the United States if you go from that kind of a --
well, who's been blowing up the most people and killing the most people illegal?
That would be the United States.
I don't know.
Since 9/11, we've bombed seven different Middle East countries now.
So you tell me, how many times has a Muslim country bombed the United States?
Maybe just one time, and it with airplanes.
They had to buy a plane ticket to do it.
So this --.
>> CENK: And it wasn't a country.
>> And it wasn't a country.
You're exactly right.
It wasn't a country.
It was just some group of people.
So did we not have to take responsibility as Christians for doing that?
Isn't that considered Christian?
>> CENK: So that goes to two really important points.
One is, whatever Christians do it, they say, well, that's not fair.
I mean, it was America and we had good reason.
That doesn't count as Christian.
Whenever a Muslim does it, they're like, you see how it always is the Muslims?
But wait, that's not logically consistent.
So if you say every time a Muslim does it, it is because of Muslim,
it is fair to ask the question jimmy's asking here.
Every time a Christian person does it, is it because of Christianity?
You can't no, it's never because of Christianity and it's always because of Islam.
That's not logically consistent.
So the real answer, you go case by case.
Did that person act for religious fundamentalist reasons?
Did he not do it -- or did he do it for other reasons?
And oftentimes we start war for greed, not religion.
So those are two main reasons fundamentalism and greed is why we start the wars.
Now, there's a good argument to be made that Bush did it mainly for greed.
But there's an argument to be made that it was also made partly because of fundamentalism.
He told the leader of France Gog and Magog are supposed to come out of Iraq and I have to go fight them.
And they had to look it up and France didn't know what Gog and Magog was.
It was in the Bible.
They couldn't believe the president of the United States had lost his mind.
>> That's not a necessarily Christian thing.
I saw an episode of cosmos about that.
[LAUGHTER]
.
>> CENK: One more thing what both John and Jimmy said.
So they have desperate power in terms of weaponry.
So when we drop bombs on people, when we shock and awe them and we do tomahawk missiles and drone strikes,
those don't count as terrorism, jimmy.
But they don't have as big of weapons.
So when they use a knife or box cutters or whatever they have in their disposal,
we say, goddamn terrorists.
So again, let's be logically consistent.
So you kill civilians.
We kill civilians.
What is it when you kill civilians.
For us, it's collateral damage.
For you, you're a dirty terrorist.
So you kill people one at a time because that's all you have the resources for.
We kill them thousands at a time.
But you're worse than us, because we saw you do it.
We saw the video of it.
When you see the video of my bombs, you don't actually see the kids blowing up.
It just seems like a cool video game. But in reality, there is a lot that is similar.
And there are things that are different.
You have to be logically consistent.
>> When you look at the press, you think, okay, the press had been targeted by Muslim extremist organizations
to radicalize them.
If you look at 9/11, where did it happen?
It happened in New York City, meaty capital of America.
Two weeks later, anthrax was sent out.
Who was it sent to?
Journalists.
If somebody was reporting over in the Middle East and they had been kidnapped,
Laura what's her name in Egypt who got sexually assaulted in Cairo.
Cutting journalist' heads off.
It specifically targets the press, because the press can be counted on to overreact and get people crazily upset.
>> So this is a great point, wes.
>> But all in the same.
I think there's an essentially difference between Islam and Christian.
And it's a fact.
If you look in organizations.
You don't have the same kind of -- let's not kid ourselves --
the KKK was a Christian organization.
>> CENK: Ha!
>> I mean, it was.
That's the closest analogy you can have for most of the extremist Muslim organizations.
Their kind of culture's equivalent of the KKK at that time.
They would come in the middle of the night.
They harass you.
They burn your house down.
Sometimes they plan to bomb there.
That's exactly what it is for them.
But we don't look at it that way.
We look at it as monolithic, because on a certain level,
the terrorists want you to look at it as monolithic.
Because they know it's like when the wars happened and they began in Yugoslavia.
There's a big peace march in Sarajevo.
And what happened?
Well, the Serbs used snipers to kill people in the peace march.
Because they knew if they did that, they could polarize the community faster and get people to line up faster.
So that's also part of the terrorist strategy is to change people's opinions verses the other group.
The other, so that people clash.
So when you lump them in altogether and you say Muslims,
you're actually significantly helping the terrorist because that's exactly how the terrorists want you to see the world.
All the Muslims, come to my side, because you see they blame you anyway for what I did.
They're at war with you anyway.
So join that war.
I want all one and a half billion of you to join me.
Otherwise, we're not going to be able to win anyway,
because they have more bombs.
So you couldn't help the terrorists more than when you say all Muslims.
>> So look at how personal they make it in regard to Reza Aslan in the second clip.
>> He realized the moment you call someone a name,
you lose the argument.
And that's why he apologized.
>> So his tone was very angry.
So he wound up kind of demonstrating what people are fearful about when they think of faith in the first place,
which is the hostility of it.
Do you therefore want to generalize?
Of course not.
But you do want to call a situation what it is.
It's not a coincidence that ISIS begins with an I.
I mean, that's what's going on in that part of the world.
>> So all Muslims are the same and he's as bad as all the rest.
>> Because the Muslims have a higher temper.
Unlike the Christians like Mike Ditka.
They don't have a hot temper.
>> He jihaded all of them with stats.
>> CENK: Unlike the Italians, like Cuomo.
[LAUGHTER].
The guy doesn't have a temper at all.
And then they said he personalized it and that's wrong.
And then they just personalized it.
They said look at the angry Muslim.
You see that?
But we showed you the clip.
We did a segment on it before.
We showed it to you again.
He came with facts.
So as he was giving the facts, he was a little frustrated that they kept asking the same stupid question
over and over again.
I suppose he was supposed to be a little bit calmer.
Now, I say that I'm a little emotional.
That was because I was born Muslim.
So, you know -- raaa, right?
Yeah, that's right.
That was one of the saddest things I've ever seen.
To not bring him on, to bring in Chris Cuomo there to be a character assassination of Reza Aslan because he
humiliated them by being so right.
And this is, by the way, how you get eliminated from television.
I mean, I like to see if they bring Reza Aslan back on.
I'm very curious about that, because there he burned some bridges by being so right.
>> Well, they're terrified that if they have him back on,
they might actually see a bump in ratings for the first time in years and years and years.
>> That's what I said.
I think if they think it's ratings, they'll bring him back on.
So if this gets passed around and becomes a viral clip or something --
>> But it did.
Our clip about that discussion they had gets more views than most CNN shows do on most nights.
They don't want to have that debate.
>> So look, the final thing on this is that what's driving me crazy is that they're missing the whole point.
So what I think what part of what Reza's saying, certainly what we say on this so is,
look at the root cause.
The root cause is -- well, there's two parts, two reasons why we start wars.
One is greed, whether it's financial, Halliburton gets five time increase during the Iraq war.
yadda yadda.
We've been over that.
Sometimes it's greed for a little bit more territory.
I'd like a little more territory in the west bank.
I'd like some more settlements.
Or Ukraine, Crimea, I'd like a little more territory.
That's greed too.
And the second reason is fundamentalism.
It's not that regular Christians or Jews or Muslims want to start wars.
Generally, they don't want their kids to die.
They want peace.
They want to be left alone.
They want a good job, right?
But fundamentalists think, no, no, no, my religion is better than your religion.
And I'll go to war to prove it.
So ISIS is fundamentalists to its core.
As fundamentalist as it gets.
And they think I'm gonna take this land for the Islamic caliphate.
We got some fundamentalists in our army and the air force, for example.
We had the general who said my god is better than their god.
General Boykin, that's right.
And so these guys want to drive us to war.
And you've got fundamentalist Jews who say, no, no, no,
god gave me this land, and I'm never getting off this land.
I don't care what is 1967 orders are.
I don't care about anything.
This is my land.
And then you have Muslims who say the same exact thing.
This is my land and Allah gave it to me.
We're going to war, right?
So it's not the religions.
As much as I dislike the religions.
As much as I disagree with the religions, as much as I think they are untrue in their entirety,
it's the fundamentalists of those religions who say let's go to war.
and that's what they're misdiagnosing.
Part of the reason they diagnose it wrong is because they never ever would say on American TV,
it's also the Christian fundamentalists.
They would never say that.
That's the reality.