From Dr. Farah Al-Sharif, a scholar of Islamic Intellectual History, re-posted from her Substack.

Not that I want to give it any airtime, but I had not seen any intelligent responses to this so I felt compelled. I had the misfortune of watching a clip in which rabid Islamophobe Bill Maher is having a discussion with supposed “friend” of Palestine 

Ana Kasparian wherein he slings the typical gendered imperialist tropes of “where in the Middle East could you wear that dress” to which she shrinks and concedes. She agrees “jihadism” is a problem and makes a whimper about “destabilized” societies.

First of all, no one cares about your dress, Ana. I grew up in more than one Westernized postcolonial Arab city and trust me, your dress would not make anyone bat an eyelid. Even if it did, that does not give anyone license for Israelis/Americans to kill, colonize and pillage innocents as they are currently doing.

It is 2025. A genocide has been committed and you are talking about mini skirts?! Could we drop the obsession with womens’ dress? Gazan women have been sniped for their hijabs and they have been mocked for their lingerie by their genociders. Muslim men have shown more tenderness and honor than that decrepit and racist Bill Maher could ever fathom. Maybe Muslim women don’t need to dress provocatively to make a name for themselves and be heard?

You let Bill objectify you, demonize the whole Muslim world and rehearse that age old colonialist trope that literally kills people in one fell swoop as you conceded meekly?

Supremacist, civilizational tropes about “liberated Western women” vs “the barbaric gaze of the Muslim man,” are literally the pretext for the invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Gaza etc.

Unfortunately, Ana revealed her own ignorance of Islam and Muslims and played right into that colonialist rhetoric and came off as a complicit, passive, infantilized mannequin for anti-Muslim and anti-Arab tropes.

If, after all this time, you still see “Judeo-Christian values” as universal and morally superior, maybe you are part of the problem, Ana. What you should have said was:

“Who cares what I am wearing or if most Muslim women don’t dress like me? So what if these societies are more socially conservative than ours? A woman is battered every 9 seconds in the US. We kill more women abroad than any other country in the world. You have zero moral high ground to act like you care about women or any other human being you racist, smug ignoramus.”

This conversation will be studied as a textbook example of what liberals and conservatives both do best: hate on Islam.