Bill Maher's dangerous critique of Islam

The second lesson from the Cold War is that while anti-totalitarianism is important, it can become an excuse for America’s own misdeeds. In 1954, eager to prove their anti-communist bona fides in the face of McCarthyite attacks, liberal stalwarts Hubert Humphrey, Paul Douglas, and John F. Kennedy introduced legislation banning the American Communist Party—thus using America’s crusade against Soviet repression to massively repress free speech here at home. America’s war in Vietnam, justified as a struggle for freedom and human rights, took close to a million lives.

When Affleck told Maher that America has “killed more Muslims than they’ve killed us by an awful lot … and somehow we’re exempt from these things because they’re not really a reflection of what we believe in. We did it by accident,” he was making a crucial point. As the great liberal Cold War theologian Reinhold Niebuhr stressed, nations, like individuals, are often unable to acknowledge the degree to which selfish interest infects their supposed pursuit of high principle. Restraining the evil that lurks within our own culture requires facing our own history of, and ongoing capacity for, terrible crimes. It requires trying to see largely Christian America the way we are seen by the Muslims whose cities we have bombed. By contrast, declaring that the essential barbarism in today’s world lies elsewhere—not even just in a foreign regime or movement but in an entire religion—lets us off easy.