ABC/Randy HolmesReal Time With Bill Maher returns to HBO tonight—and we got a sneak preview of pressing topic No. 1 during Maher's appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live Thursday night.
The fellow comedians got right into discussing this week's terrorist attack on the satirical French publication Charlie Hebdo, and Maher immediately said that there should be no beating around the bush as to who—or what—was responsible.
"It's not a presume!" he insisted. "No, no, it's Muslim terrorists. This happens way too frequently. It's like Groundhog Day, except the groundhog keeps getting its head cut off. Let's give some credit to this newspaper," he added, to much applause. "These guys had the balls of the Eiffel Tower. Their balls were bigger than Gérard Depardieu. 'Cause they kept doing it [publishing provocative cartoons that spoofed Muhammad and other religious imagery]."
Twelve people were killed at the paper's Paris office, including eight staffers and two police officers who were outside, one of whom was there guarding Charlie Hebdo's editor, who had received death threats in the past.
They were murdered "for the crime of being satirists, for the crime of drawing cartoons. This has to stop," Maher continued.
"A lot of the liberals—my tribe, I am a proud liberal—I'm not turning on them. I'm asking them tot turn toward the truth as I have been for quite a while. I am the liberal in this debate. I'm for free speech. To be a liberal you have to stand up for liberal principals. "It's not my fault that the part of the world that is most against liberal principals is the Muslim part of the world. There have been studies, we have facts on this...In 10 muslim countries you can get the death penalty just for being gay... If they were chopping the heads off of Catholic gay people, wouldn't there be a bigger outcry among liberals?"
Maher of course famously got into quite the on-air argument with Ben Affleck when the actor was a Real Time panelist last season, Affleck heatedly defending the Muslim world at large from what he perceived to be the host's generalizations.
"We should be able to insult whatever we want. That is what free speech is like," Maher told Kimmel. "There are certain people in the world who want waivers on free speech. Kim Jong-un, in Korea, says 'you cannot make jokes about our country.' And there's a lot of Muslim people in the world. I know most Muslim people would not have carried out an attack like this—but here's the important point. Hundreds of millions of them support an attack like this. They applaud an attack like this. What they say is, 'Oh, we don't approve of violence but, you know what, when you make fun of the Prophet all bets are off.'"
"Do you think hundreds of millions actually support this?" Kimmel asked, somewhat incredulously.
"Absolutely," Maher insisted. "That is mainstream, in the Muslim world."
And speaking of free speech, they talked about Bill Cosby, too. Watch the whole interview right here: