Don’t Miss: Bill Maher’s Powerful Monologue on Hamas Protesters – a Critical Challenge

There’s so much I disagree with comedian Bill Maher about, but when he’s right, he’s right.

Maher impressed me again with his opening monologue on Friday night’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” (his proclivity for vulgarisms notwithstanding; let the potential viewer beware).

Maher spoke for nine minutes — with multiple interruptions for audience cheers and applause, at least one of which was directly solicited by Maher himself — on the need for privileged young people in American to wake up to the fact that the radical Islamic groups for which they protest, like Hamas, are not only anti-feminist, but vehemently anti-woman.

He began his monologue by suggesting that any woman who wants to protest on the streets of America wearing a relatively comfortable keffiyeh (think: Yasser Arafat’s scarf) should first “spend an afternoon running errands wearing one of these.” By “one of these,” Maher meant the burqa, the full-body garment women in fundamentalist Muslim communities are forced to wear.

“You can’t side with the people who ruthlessly oppress women without at least getting a taste of what you’re supporting,” he said, earning his first round of interrupting applause.

Maher said he was pleased with the youthful idealism that led to the anti-Israel, pro-Hamas protests over the spring, and appreciated their devotion to a “cause in something bigger than yourself,” but had one problem with them.

“It’s just that the one you picked, you missed the boat by a f***ing mile,” he said.

Maher went on to offer young people watching his show a different, and better cause: apartheid.

He noted that the word had been used by protesters throughout the spring, but suggested that they had been using it wrongly, as Arabs living in Israel are full citizens, rather than racially segregated as blacks had been in South Africa, where the term originated.

“Here’s the thing,” Maher said. “Today, right now, hundreds of millions of women are treated worse than second-class citizens. When you mandate that one category of human beings don’t even have the right to show their face, that’s apartheid. And it goes on in a lot of countries.”

He described the state of unrest in Iran because of protests against the traditional Islamic garb for woman, and noted that Amnesty International — no more a promoter of conservative causes than Maher himself — has stated that “Iranian authorities are waging a ‘War on Women.’”

But the issue is much larger than simply wardrobe, Maher said.

“Fifteen countries in the Middle East — including Gaza — have laws that require women to obey their husbands,” he said. And he went on to list many, many more offenses inflicted against women by Muslim cultures around the world.

You can watch the entirety of his monologue below. It’s actually funnier than I’ve made out here, as I didn’t want to spoil any of Maher’s jokes by transcribing them. (They’re not all funny, of course — some are the unsurprising jabs at traditional conservative viewpoints — but some of them are pretty good.)

WARNING: The following video contains vulgar language that some viewers may find offensive.

“This is the apartheid that desperately needs your attention: gender apartheid,” Maher said, again addressing college-age protesters directly. “This is what should be the social justice issue of your time.”

Aside from the aforementioned cheap jokes at the expense of traditional conservative beliefs, Maher really nailed it here. The question, of course, is whether his message can reach the right audience, and whether that audience will pay any attention to him.

They should. Because when Bill Maher is right, he’s right.