Crushing a Contrarian

One Sears spokesperson told me, "strictly off the record, we cannot imagine who these people are, the few calling in and saying this is about free speech."

A disturbed Larry Flynt told me this week, "At least he's not walking in a lock step, like a bunch of Nazis, like the rest of the mainstream media. He feels free to give his opinion, which is what free speech is all about."

Staunch support is also coming from conservative author and radio talk show host Dennis Prager. Prager told me that squelching the previously unsquelchable Maher is "very dangerous territory. I think what he said was nuts. But if you can't say these things without sponsors leaving, then I'm in trouble for having strong views too, and then others are in trouble, too."

Sheri Annis, owner of political consulting group Fourth Estate Strategies and an occasional Maher guest, recalls how Maher called the president an "asshole" last spring when she was on the show, and was bleeped, and that was that. "I'd much rather live in a country that can criticize its politicians or even its military than one that can't," Annis told me. "The truth is, Maher's paper trail shows that he's been an unabashed supporter of our military in the past. ... Bill Maher is annoying, but he's allowed."

Ominously, among the many things that changed in this country on Sept. 11 was our capacity for what's allowed.

When it comes to the Middle East we are a nation of ignorant, sofa-bound children who, unlike the well-informed Maher, have no idea why we are despised in the Arab world. We dump on Maher while embracing the shameless, flag-draped treacle being published by pundits like the Miami Herald's Leonard Pitts, who joined in the widespread whining of why do they hate us?

Here's a quick primer, since I doubt the chastened Maher will feel comfortable fully exploring these issues now:

- The CIA funded the movement of tens of thousands of Muslim radicals from all over the world into Afghanistan to fight the Russians. We trained them and we armed them, even as bin Laden's clerics initiated them into his extreme Wahabbi sect of Islam. As the war wound down, these radicals fanned out all over the world as bin Laden's new agents, with new names and new identities.

- When Iraq invaded Kuwait, the wealthy bin Laden lobbied the Saudi royal family to be allowed to build a force against Iraq using his Afghan war vets, but King Fahd instead invited in U.S. troops. That, and not our support of Israel, is widely believed by experts to have set bin Laden's hatred for the West into stone.

- After the Gulf War, the U.S. insisted on being allowed to indefinitely station troops in Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden has effectively used this as a public relations club to persuade the Arab masses in several countries that Islam's sacred lands are being occupied by infidels from the West.

Few Americans grasp that the Arab media, in concert with bin Laden's radical clerics, have helped create a huge culture of victimology on the Arabian Peninsula. It reminds me very much of the black attitude toward the trial of O.J. Simpson. Arabs are widely convinced that the Arabs on the suicide jetliners were mere passengers, and that a Serbian or Jewish plot is to blame for the atrocities on U.S. soil.

Because we face war, we desperately need our leading cultural figures to express controversial views that give depth to our understanding of Islam, the Arab people, and U.S. policies in the Mideast that helped create this sand trap.

Larry Flynt is right, that the onethink is the biggest danger. I am begging Maher to get back in the saddle, because despite his beginnings as a stand-up comic, he knows far more about foreign policy than the misbegotten patriots who wanted him silenced.

Why do they hate us? Let me assure you, it is not, as the president strongly implied in his otherwise laudable speech last week, because we're beautiful. They hate us for a catalog of reasons that I am afraid the chastened Bill Maher will no longer have the guts to explain.