Honestly, if you read only one thing about this whole Bill Maher-Ben Affleck dust up (and please, don’t read more than one thing about it), make it this (even though most of it is an essay Prof. Cole wrote about Maher a couple of years ago):
Maher’s and Harris’s charges against Muslims in general are ridiculous. Neither one has ever lived in a Muslim-majority society or knows the languages or cultures. They just retail invidious calumnies second-hand. Almost anything polemicists like Sam Harris say of Muslims can be said of others; i.e. they are just describing the human condition, unfortunate as it often is. In the 1990s an ABC poll showed that 10% of Americans sympathized with far right wing white supremacist groups like the Michigan Militia. My recollection is that polling showed that a significant proportion of Chinese sympathized with the 9/11 attacks and to this day only a third think al-Qaeda committed them (i.e. it wasn’t viewed as a fundamentalist act but as an anti-imperialist one [this point of view is execrable; I’m just reporting it]). Note that in this last instance, the attitudes have nothing to do with religion but rather with nationalism/ imperialism, a binary pair that explains the world much better than religion/atheism. The same statistics, if glibly given by Maher or Harris for Muslims, would damn the latter and their tradition; but what about the Chinese? Is Communist-Capitalism or the Confucianist heritage to blame here?
…
It is significant that Maher tries to pin the label ‘murderer’ on the Muslims (or half of them?) Because one of the centerpieces of classical Western hatred of Jews was the blood libel, the allegation that they stole the babies of Christians and sacrificed them in secret rituals. It is hard to see what the difference is between that and arguing that some 3 million American Muslims are walking around like a grenade with the pin pulled out. Both blood libels configure a non-Christian group as homicidal, and locate the impulse for their alleged killing sprees in secret religious beliefs opaque to the normal Christian.
I can’t really get worked up about this, because for one thing it’s just kind of dumb, and for another, I’m pretty dubious about the idea that Bill Maher actually helps shape opinions. I tend to think he attracts already like-minded fans, instead. But it is exceedingly inappropriate to condemn the belief system of a billion and a half people who aren’t doing anything more than trying to live their lives in peace because a few thousand of their co-religionists are off the deep end.
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 
“Attracting like minded individuals”
I hear you. Fifteen-twenty years ago when I first jumped on this blogging jawn we were all stoked to overthrow the gatekeepers of public discourse and institute a free wheeling multilateral conservation. As they say, what a bunch of tools we were. Maher has his gang, Markos has his gang, Duncan has his gang, PZ Myers has his gang of psychotic “melt you with my brain” quasiscientists… which has been endless years of entertainment but there is precious little evidence that any of us have ever actually influenced anything. Directly, at least, for the zeitgeist is a subtle beast.
Which is a complicated thing: as much as I get annoyed at the pretend leftists in Kossackistan threatening to destroy the party so as to hasten the impending Utopia, I don’t actually fear that they will actually impact much of anything – except for such rare cases as Nader tossing the election to Bush in 2000 and unleashing all the demons of hell. That kind of thing happens once a generation, if that often.