Actor, writer and director Ben Affleck testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Actor, writer and director Ben Affleck testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington February 26, 2014. Reuters/Gary Cameron

Ben Affleck got agitated over Bill Maher's comment on radical Islam on Friday, October 3. Maher has defended his take on Islam.

The heated discussion between the two took place on "Real Time with Bill Maher" on HBO. According to Maher, Muslim societies highly endorse fundamentalist views. He also said that Western liberals would often try to ignore such a fact. Affleck, on the other hand, opposed Maher's remark and said that the fundamentalist ideologies Maher was referring to was practised by a minority among Muslims. He said that Maher caricatured 1.6 billion Muslims by the actions of a small part of it.

Maher was pretty candid about his views on Islam. "It's the only religion that acts like the mafia, that will f*cking kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture or write the wrong book," Maher said on his show. Affleck found Maher's comments as "racist." "It's gross. It's racist. It's like saying 'shifty Jew,'" Affleck said, "How about more than a billion people who are not fanatical, who don't punish women, who just want to go to school, have some sandwiches. It's stereotyping."

Maher later defended his views on Salon.com. He said that he was not bigoted but liberal. He said that he was only saying that it was required to "identify illiberalism" wherever possible. Such illiberalism should not be forgiven because it, according to some people, came from "a minority." Maher also said that he would not care if he would be "forced out of the contemporary liberal community." The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Maher called the debate over Islam a "healthy" one.

In line with this, The Washington Post says that the Pew Research Center had conducted a survey in 2013 among 38,000 Muslims in 39 countries. They were asked about their take on controversial topics such as honour killings that the West would often accuse Muslims of committing. In 14 countries out of 23 surveyed, at least half of the Muslims said that honour killings for premarital sex was "never justified" when committed by a woman. More than 80 percent of Muslims in Indonesia and Azerbaijan said that honour killings were never justified. In Iraq and Afghanistan, on the contrary, the number of people not justifying honour killing was less than one third of the entire population.

Contact the writer: s.mukhopadhyay@ibtimes.com.au

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