Below is professor Reza Aslan answering (liberal) Zionist bigot Bill Maher’s claim that there is something peculiarly violent about Islam. He explains that you can’t lump all predominantly Muslim societies together. He’s right enough in what he says, but what he should have said is something along these lines:

“Muslim people are particularly violent? You want to explain the violence in some Islamic societies by their religion? You can’t be serious. Consider history:

“Let’s go back to the founding of this country, and the genocide carried out against the Native Americans. And did you know, by the way, that some of the European settlers – Christians all – justified their slaughter of entire Native American villages by saying that God had ordained it? And how about the slave trade and slavery in the US – one of the most brutal slave systems in history? How about the fact that the slave owners found passages in the Bible to justify slavery?

“How about the two World Wars – giant convulsions of violence if there ever were such? Who carried out those wars? Continue on down through history – the holocaust against the Jews, and now the Zionist violence against the Palestinians, whereby they are steadily stealing their land and water, and where openly fascist groups are growing inside Israel itself?

“You, as an American, Bill Maher, are one to speak. As Stokely Carmichael said, ‘violence is as American as cherry pie,’ and as Martin Luther King said, the US is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. Has anything changed since those days? Maybe, in the sense that violence in US society has increased. How about all the numerous cases of what seems to be senseless serial or random murders? How about the violence that is peddled by Hollywood every single day?

“Sorry, Bill Maher, but violence in a society is explained by social conditions, not some peculiar mentality that is inherent in any one religion. And in this society, capitalism means exploitation and therefore repression and therefore violence. And the more decadent it becomes, the more violent it becomes.”