I love how Maher is a so-called liberal. A guy hyper critical of police, pro-drug legalization, pro-LGBT, pro-choice, anti-gun etc. etc. is somehow not liberal enough for you and some other liberals. But I know why, because he's actually critical of Islam just as he is with every other religion. He took a ton of shit from the right for once saying that in America you can justify any form of discrimination if you source it to "God's big book of bad ideas". But he made an excellent point about liberals when he talked about how in Rome nude statues were covered for a visit by the president of Iran. He said
"I wish they (liberals/progressives) would have the same enthusiasm for intolerance elsewhere in the world as they do for Christians"
And he's spot on. If you want to start making things better for Muslim's throughout the world then shutting down conversations that are critical of the more problematic aspects of the religion is absolutely the wrong way to go about it. In America we never would've made it where we are now in terms of LGBT rights if the left acted the same way toward Christianity as they do toward Islam right now. But that's not how things went here. The left didn't care about the excuses that were made from Christian's to justify discrimination. And as such we slowly marched toward a point where things have gotten better for the LGBT community. It's not perfect by any means, but it's made significant strides specifically because the left/progressives didn't relent on pushing back on a critical reason why homophobia was/is so prevalent in this country.
Nothing positive is being accomplished by the left/progressives avoiding having conversations about the issues within Islam. Issues that progressives within the religion are fighting against. All that's happening while silence is occurring on the left is the far right is getting stronger. They build their entire campaigns around attacking Islam and painting the entire religion as being a danger. Their ideas of how to "fix" what they see to be the issue are blatantly discriminatory and extreme as we've seen with Trump. And that's why it's important for the left to not just stand up to that bigotry, but also standup for the Muslim's within the religion that are pushing back against the problematic aspects within it. The left needs to stop creating this atmosphere where criticism of Islam makes you an Islamaphobe because that literally only helps the far right.