We all had a good laugh about Andrew Stiles' list of things that are "racist," according to the left. It was funny because it was true: there's a whole cottage industry of declaring things racist in order to discredit the right. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Andrew's list was out of date less than seven hours after he published it. We need to add a new item:
Take a peek at this video:
Pay special attention to Affleck's body language in the first few minutes. He seems very tense, very angry—look at the flaring nostrils, the twitching cheeks, the sarcastic "thank God you're here!" when Harris notes that the left has, broadly speaking, not gotten as agitated about radical Islam as "radical" Christianity. He's practically palpitating with rage. How dare these two people confront his ideology with facts? The first retort Affleck is able to spit out in response is extremely telling:
"That's gross, it's racist!"
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is that. Affleck, having decided that what Sam Harris and Bill Maher are saying is "racist" (and gross!), no longer has to actually tackle their arguments. It doesn't matter that "Islam" is a religion, not a race. And it doesn't matter that Maher and Harris are dealing with systems of belief and not tones of skin. The declaration of racism made, Affleck doesn't have to deal with Harris' highlighting of polls showing that a supermajority of British Muslims—not Pakistani or Saudi or Iranian, but British—believe that the Danish cartoonists who drew Muhammed should be prosecuted. He doesn't have to deal with Iran executing and flogging gays. Or ISIS trying to wipe out the Yazidis. Nope. Why bother? The real problem is bigots like Maher and Harris.
This is dumb. And, frankly, beneath a guy like Affleck, who is smarter than most on the right give him credit for. If you are interested in things like human rights around the world—freedom of religion, freedom of speech, gay rights, etc.—you have to come to grips with the fact that many, perhaps most, Muslim countries are bad on these issues. And polls show that individuals in many of these countries aren't terribly good on them either. No amount of hand waving and "That's racist!"-shouting will diminish those facts.
I have no doubt that, as Bilge Ebiri noted on Twitter when I linked to the video above, that there are racists who hate brown people. Fine. There are plenty of bigots out there, bigots who hate brown and black people and Jews.* But there's no racism in the video above. There are two liberals trying to have a discussion with three other liberals** about the problem of certain beliefs in the Islamic faith.
And one of those three liberals can't handle it. So he screams "racist" in an attempt to shut everything down.
*Interestingly, you're about five times more likely to suffer a hate crime as a Jew than a Muslim, but whatever.
**Michael Steele's basically a liberal Republican at this point, right?