this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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Don’t forget a raging islamophobe, a racist against Arabs, and an antivaxxer.
I'm pretty sure he was vaccinated. He did criticize the piss poor messaging during Covid, i.e. claiming the vaccine would keep you from getting the virus entirely, which was never true, and harmful to the effort to get people vaccinated. He made a lot of fun of incoherent mask rules. If you watch his documentary, Religulous, you'll see that he's actually anti all religion, not just Islam. As far as being a transphobe, I'm not like a huge fan or anything, so I don't see his stuff all that often, but he doesn't seem like the kind of person to care from what I've seen. That said, his fawning over Elon in particular made it impossible for me to take him seriously, along with his compulsive shitting on millennials and Gen Z.
That's not the problem. I'm against all organised religion too, including Islam. The problem with Maher is that he treats everyone who's Arab or otherwise culturally Muslim as equivalent to the worst fundamentalist preachers and also that he platforms and promotes some of the worst islamophobes from the far right, more of whom are Christian bigots than atheist ones.
TL;DR: it's not the opposition to the religion, it's the bigotry and the hypocrisy.
I am pretty sure you are wrong, he hosted many muslim speakers on his show, especially the one marginalized by their own communities, like progressive muslim Majid Nawaz. While Maher has by default a punchable face, and oozes smugness, that does not mean he did not amplifies the voices of important muslim reformists.