Omar Baddar "... bigotry puts entire communities under attack from the outside, thus distracting from their fight to advance and tackle problems within."

5 Things Bill Maher Got Wrong In Latest Islam Rant

1. "Not a Few Bad Apples"
Bill Maher insists that extremism and intolerance are problems that afflict Muslims at large, and not just "a few bad apples." Of course, if anyone compiled a list of violent acts by Muslim extremists, the list would undoubtedly be troublingly long. But the Muslim world is far too vast and diverse to collapse into Maher's narrow perception of it. It is a world of 1.6 billion Muslims, so even thousands of extremists would be a fraction, and would in no way justify an indictment against Muslims in general. To think along analogous lines, there are more than 10,000 murders and 80,000 rapes every year in the U.S. The Ugandan fanatical Christian LRA group is responsible for the kidnapping of some 66,000 children (a lot more than Boko Haram). In the West Bank, hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers live on stolen Palestinian land, and many carry out acts of vandalism and violence against Palestinians. But just as none of these facts justify broad indictments of "The Americans," "The Christians" or "The Jews" as being terrible people (that would be transparently bigoted), the same applies to Islam and Muslims. The acts of a relatively small group of extremists, even when they're more frequent than we'd like them to be, should never taint entire societies.

Omar Baddar  

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  Political Scientist, Human Rights Activist

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