UC Berkeley to dump Bill Maher as commencement speaker?

Ironic that at UC Berkeley, where the campus Free Speech Movement was born in 1964, there's now a campaign to rescind Bill Maher's invitation to speak at UC's commencement.

Maher gets in trouble with the Islamists and their liberal enablers for riffs like the above video and for this. 

The online anti-Maher petition accuses him of being a racist for criticizing Islam, much like the dumb Board of Supervisors resolution on the anti-jihad ads on the side of Muni buses back in 2013. 

This bulletin just in: Islam is a religion, not a race.

See the stories---and the interesting comments---in the Daily Cal and in Berkeleyside.

Nothing yet in the progressive Berkeley Daily Planet, but commencement isn't until December. [Later: the Daily Planet's story. See also the column on the issue by Debra Saunders in Thursday's Chronicle.]

Brandeis rolled over and dumped Ayaan Hirsi Ali as a speaker earlier this year.

Islam fails Sam Harris's Book of Mormon test:

Let’s take a trip to the real world. Consider: Anyone who wants to draw a cartoon, write a novel, or stage a Broadway play that denigrates Mormonism is free to do it. In the United States, this freedom is ostensibly guaranteed by the First Amendment—but that is not, in fact, what guarantees it. The freedom to poke fun at Mormonism is guaranteed by the fact that Mormons do not dispatch assassins to silence their critics or summon murderous hordes in response to satire. 

As I have pointed out before, when The Book of Mormon became the most celebrated musical of the year, the LDS Church protested by placing ads for the faith in Playbill. A wasted effort, perhaps: but this was a genuinely charming sign of good humor, given the alternatives. What are the alternatives? Can any reader of this page imagine the staging of a similar play about Islam in the United States, or anywhere else? No you cannot—unless you also imagine the creators of this play being hunted for the rest of their lives by religious maniacs.

Thanks to Jihad Watch.