“I know most Muslim people would not have carried out an attack like this,” Bill Maher of HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher told Jimmy Kimmel on the day of the massacres in Paris. “But here’s the important point: hundreds of millions of them support an attack like this. They applaud an attack like this.” Kimmel was skeptical. That many? “Absolutely.” replied Maher. “That’s mainstream in the Muslim world. When you make fun of the prophet all bets are off. You get what’s coming to you.”
It was a strange subject for a comedy show–and oddly Kimmel seemed in no hurry to move it along. (The segment is nearly six minutes long.) Maher claimed a lifetime of liberalism and of championing the downtrodden. At one point, Maher even felt compelled to say he was “for Mexicans.” In an odd (perhaps instructive?) parallel, large segments of the world’s population claim to know what “hundreds of millions” of Americans think and believe–even though Americans pretty much agree on very little. Just saying.
