In poor taste

Popular American television host Bill Maher has once again made the headlines for all the wrong reasons. His most recent verbal onslaught targeted Zayn Malik, a British Muslim pop star who quit his band One Direction last month because of mental health concerns. In his show recently, Maher compared Malik to the Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Maher put images of Tsarnaev and Malik side by side, comparing the singer with a terrorist and suggested they looked alike. While discussing Malik leaving One Direction, the talk show host said: “And where were you during the Boston marathon?” Maher’s remarks, ostensibly made as a joke, reek of both Islamophobia and racism where all non-white men with a Muslim background look the same to him and where any Muslim could be seen as a terrorist — even if it’s a musician who may have helped many lives by his candid admission of stress problems that have encouraged debate on mental health.

Maher has previously justified his Islamophobic comments by citing his right to free speech. But what he indulges in is basically hate speech. A month earlier, he had asserted that there was a connecting tissue between the Islamic State and the broader Muslim world, disregarding the condemnation by a majority of Muslims of the brtual actions of the terror group. The fact that he is freely able to air such views is reflective of the insensitivity around this discourse. Hate crime in Europe and the US appears to be on the rise, which should be a wake-up call. Just two months ago, we saw the Chapel Hill shootings, where three Muslim students were brutally shot dead. At a time when we see world opinion already polarised on Islam, and Muslims facing large-scale discrimination, the kind of views Maher freely expounds only add to the growing intolerance on either side. Maher’s views are not only Islamophobic, they are also dangerous. Emotions run high on these matters and instigating hate has a high cost.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 13^th,  2015.

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