Thursday, December 11, 2025

Simple Questions Requiring a Simple Answer



In a law class (but not in law school) a few decades ago, the law professor periodically would pose to my class a yes/no question and ask for a response. Before he got one, he would answer it himself: "it depends."

And so it was that Bill Maher on his podcast asked Ana Kasparian of The Young Turks "if you had to live in the Middle East, so, tomorrow, where would you live?" He mentioned several cities and countries, Pakistan, Karachi, Cairo, Amman/Jordan, Beirut/Lebanon. Syria, Tel Aviv, West Bank/Ramallah, even name-checking the Houthis.  He added "Where would you live/ What city would you live in? Where would you be comfortable- in that dress?

Kasparian would have flunked Professor Rose's class. Instead of defaulting to blaming USA policy on the Middle East, she should have replied "it depends." (The complete discussion of the topic, according to this blogger, is below.)

A rudimentary search for information regarding clothing permissible in the Middle East reveals a confusing array of laws and rules. What can be worn depends upon the country, the sex/gender of the individual, and, to a lesser extent, circumstances. There is no "one size fits all," especially because the government of each nation determines its own regulations.  Regrettably, the clearest explanation, and an objective one, comes via artificial intelligence, Google's Gemini:

A woman can wear a dress in nearly all Muslim countries, but the style and modesty required vary greatly, from Western-style dresses in fashion-forward cities like Dubai or Istanbul to modest, loose dresses in more conservative areas, with countries like Turkey, UAE, Qatar, and Central Asian nations being generally relaxed, while places like Saudi Arabia (which recently relaxed mandatory abayas) and Iran still have strong cultural expectations for covering shoulders and knees.

Kasparian could have explained that whether she'd be comfortable in a Middle Eastern country wearing her dress depended on several factors. But of course she didn't.

She didn't do so because she would be acknowledging something the left is loathe to concede.  Islam is different than Christianity or Judaism, the other two major monotheistic religions. And although Jewish extremism and Christian extremism present their own particular issues at times and places, in the modern world, Islamism represents both a broader and more serious problem.

Imagine someone being asked whether a normal dress- not even one especially revealing could be worn in Israel, currently being governed by a coalition of the ultra Orthodox; in the USA, in which the base of the governing party is composed of evangelical Christians; or in the white supremacist nation of Russia. The woman would be incredulous that even such a question would be asked.

But being unable to dress as one wishes without threat of punishment is widely, though not universally, prevalent in Muslim countries of the Middle East. And it could not be admitted to Bill Maher by a fairly prominent individual of the left. (Neither, truthfully, is it admitted by most centrists and, yes, conservatives.)

Clothing can be a complicated issue. Nuclear weapons not so much, thus this hypothetical is at least as telling:

MAHER: “Well, they have nuclear weapons, which they don’t use. If Hamas had a nuclear weapon, how many seconds would it take before they used it on Israel?”

ANA: “I don’t know.”

MAHER: “Three. Three’s the answer. Three seconds.”

ANA: “How do you know that, Bill? Come on.”

MAHER: “Because it’s in their charter.”

"I don't know?"  A living, breathing human being, co-host of  The Young Turks podcast, with 6.7 million subscribers, doesn't know whether Hamas would launch a nuclear weapon at Israel if they had one.  

That can't be stupidity or naivete. No one can be that stupid or naive. There is a glaring absence of honesty in political discourse in this country, and failure to recognize the danger of radical and militant Islamism is one of the most dangerous.



ANA: “You wanna get exhilarated right now? I can exhilarate you.”

MAHER: “I know you’re gonna say genocide, and I’m gonna say, well, you don’t know what the word means… Hamas is the bad guy. If you don’t get that, you don’t get much.”

ANA: “What Hamas did on October 7th was disgusting killing.”

MAHER: “Well, that’s the easiest thing in the world to say… If you hate oppression… Hundreds of millions of women have basically no freedom in the Muslim world.”

ANA: “So we should slaughter them instead, which is what’s been happening.”

MAHER: “Well, you should prosecute a war to the end. That does involve slaughter in every war.”

ANA: “Civilians get killed in wars.”

MAHER: “Especially when you hide behind them.”

ANA: “But when 83%, according to the IDF’s own data… 83% of the people that they’ve killed are civilians—”

MAHER: “Because they hide behind them.”

ANA: “But Bill, do you understand that by killing so many civilians, they are essentially multiplying extremism.”

MAHER: “I do understand that. Do you understand that there’s very often in the world two very bad choices… You don’t have a good choice. You have the bad choice and the even worse choice.”

ANA: “Israel has nuclear weapons, Bill. They have nuclear weapons.”

MAHER: “Well, they have nuclear weapons, which they don’t use. If Hamas had a nuclear weapon, how many seconds would it take before they used it on Israel?”

ANA: “I don’t know.”

MAHER: “Three. Three’s the answer. Three seconds.”

ANA: “How do you know that, Bill? Come on.”

MAHER: “Because it’s in their charter.”

ANA: “You have a difficult time at least acknowledging the atrocities that have been committed against innocent civilians in Gaza.”

MAHER: “Well, it depends on what you call an atrocity. All wars are going to have atrocities… During the Civil War, a lot of people would say, especially in the South, that Sherman did not have to burn Atlanta quite as badly as he did. I mean, we were pretty brutal. But would you also then just say, well, we don’t know who the good guys were in that war? No, I think it was the North.”

ANA: “I think much of the problems we have in the Middle East are due to the enabling of this expansion. Look, it’s an expansionist policy.”

MAHER: “They’ve never been trying to expand.”

ANA: “They’re trying to annex the West Bank right now. And Lebanon—southern Lebanon—and Syria, which they’ve succeeded in.”

MAHER: “Excuse me, these are all places that they were attacked from. When they became a country in 1947, they said, ‘Okay, we will accept half a loaf.’ They had as much right to that land as anybody. There was a continual presence there since 1000 BC, when King David had a kingdom.”

ANA: “I don’t care about that at all.”

MAHER: “But it’s relevant!”

(MAHER AND ANA TALK OVER EACH OTHER)

 MAHER: “You’re calling them colonizers. They’re not colonizers.”

ANA: “They’re expanding, and they’re annexing land. That’s what colonizers do.”



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