Showing posts with label Ben Affleck. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ben Affleck. Show all posts

Sunday, June 28, 2015

Unintended consequence

June 28, 2015 Ben Affleck , Inquisitr 0 Comments
Ben Affleck Gets PBS Show 'Finding Your Roots' Suspended For Censorship [Video] 

By Inquisitr, Jun. 27, 2015

Finding Your Roots, which airs on PBS, has been suspended following an investigation in which the network found that embarrassing details about Ben Affleck’s ancestors were censored. Finding Your Roots traces the family histories of celebrities, and, in accordance with network policy, is supposed to be devoted to revealing the truth, even if show guests aren’t happy about it.

When Ben agreed to be on the show, he hoped to find “the roots of his family’s interest in social justice,” reports the Washington Post. Instead, researchers divulged that he had an ancestor that owned slaves. According to the Washington Post, Benjamin Cole, a great-great-great grandparent on Affleck’s mother’s side, was the “trustee” of seven slaves, as well as a sheriff in Chatham County, Georgia, in the 1850s.

Watch the video and read the full story: www.inquisitr.com

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Saturday, April 25, 2015

The SonyHack Gift That Keeps Giving

April 25, 2015 Ben Affleck , Daily Mail 0 Comments
Affleck's MOM Reveals Mistakes In The Documentary--She Did NOT Take Part In Freedom Summer 

Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
By Shekhar Bhatia, Apr. 24, 2015, Daily Mail

The documentary that censored Ben Affleck's slave-owning ancestors is now facing questions over its accuracy as his mother denied to Daily Mail Online that she was involved in Freedom Summer.

The episode of Finding Your Roots is already being investigated by its broadcaster, PBS, over whether its editorial code was breached by having the truth about Affleck's relatives censored.

Now another key element of the exploration of the Oscar-winner's past is under question over the assertion by PBS that Chris Affleck had been a 'Freedom Rider' in 1964 and taken part in Freedom Summer

On PBS's Finding Your Roots website, the episode guide states: 'Ben Affleck's mother was a Freedom Rider in 1964.'

And in the show itself, the documentary's host, Harvard academic Henry Louis Gates Jr, says Mrs Affleck had been part of 'Freedom Summer'.

As pictures of Mrs Affleck - then Chris Boldt - were shown juxtaposed with pictures of a group of Freedom Riders, Gates tells of the murder of three activists, one of the most notorious attacks on the Civil Rights movement in 1964, calling them Mrs Affleck's '

In fact, she told Daily Mail Online she was not a Freedom Rider - and was not in the South in 1964, but a year later.

Read more:  www.dailymail.co.uk

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Friday, April 24, 2015

Now, Ben, apologize for the racist history of the democratic party!

April 24, 2015 Ben Affleck , MyFoxLA.com 1 Comments
Ben Affleck Apologizes For Attempting To Hide Slave-Owner Ancestry

Credit:  WikiMedia
By Sadie Gennis, Apr. 23, 2015, MyFoxla.com

No one can hide from their past. Ben Affleck has learned that the hard way.

The actor recently came under fire for requesting that PBS not reveal that one of his ancestors owned slaves on the genealogy show Finding Your Roots. In a message posted to Facebook on Tuesday, Affleck acknowledged it was a mistake to let his shame at his ancestor influence the program in any way.

"I didn't want any television show about my family to include a guy who owned slaves. I was embarrassed. The very thought left a bad taste in my mouth," Affleck wrote.

Ultimately, Affleck "lobbied" to have the fact not included in the show because it made him "uneasy." However, he insisted the decision not to include the ancestor in question wasn't censorship, as many have declared it. The slave-owning ancestor didn't make the final cut "because there wasn't much detail - a name and no details, so he wasn't going with it to begin with," Affleck explained.

The actor admitted he regrets ever wanting the issue to not be included in his episode and that he hopes this can help breed more honest conversations about race in America.

More:  www.myfoxla.com

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Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Poor, Ben, he's a little slow

October 21, 2014 Ben Affleck , Examiner.com 0 Comments
The Pew Poll And Ben Affleck

Ben Affleck / HBO
By Larry Hart, Oct. 19, 2014, Examiner.com

A couple of weeks ago, Ben Affleck appearing on Bill Maher argued vociferously with atheist philosopher Sam Harris about the direction Islam is taking in the world and more importantly as the Muslim population grows in the west, its influence on all of us.

Affleck in his prime time, liberal, Hollywood form, naively defended those that pose a clear and present danger to our existence.

Both Harris and Maher disagreed and Affleck was just incensed. Harris tried to explain to Affleck but if body language is any judge, he didn’t seem to, or want to understand how wrong he was.

Affleck insisted he knew that the bad guys are only “a few bad apples” insinuating that the vast overwhelming majority of the Islamic world is really no different than us. He regarded the positions of Maher and Harris as racist and bigoted.

Harris argued his point this way. Using a paradigm of concentric circles with the smallest in the middle growing out like rings on a tree, he explained the inner most circle is the violent Jihadist, which comprises all of the most vicious extremist terrorist groups, cutting heads off, dropping buildings in New York and blowing up kids in Pizza parlors. The second smallest circle is the Islamists, those that think like the violent Jihadist, want the same things, probably have no problem with killing children and other living things but for them their mission is to achieve Jihad through the system, to turn democracy against us.

Read the full story:  www.examiner.com

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Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Ask Bill Maher

October 14, 2014 Ben Affleck , Bill Maher 0 Comments
Islamophobia: Fact & Fiction

Source:  www.ridzdesign.com
By Seth Leibsohn, Oct. 10, 2014, Townhall.com

The blogosphere and cable channels are all atwitter over a discussion Bill Maher had with Sam Harris, Ben Affleck, and Michael Steele last week. The topic? Whether too many Americans are engaged in Islamophobia in their criticism of Islam. At one point, Affleck said, “We've killed more Muslims than they've killed us, by an awful lot.” At another, he called the criticism of Islam “ugly,” “gross,” and “racist.” He compared the criticism of Islam with someone calling a Jew “shifty.” Is he right?

He is not—and neither is the decade-plus shutting down of this important discussion. The shibboleths used to shut down these discussions, the very labels Affleck used, are what cow too many of us into silence and prolong and delay the serious conversation that is long overdue and long misunderstood.

Let us start with the notion that America has a problem with Islamophobia, and that we have killed more Muslims than have killed us. To be sure, we have killed more Muslims. But, then again, we also killed more Germans than killed us in World War II. Why did we kill Germans? The same reason we’ve killed Muslims: when America goes to war, a war that is declared on us and that we rarely have ever initiated against an enemy, we go to liberate, not colonize, torture, or maim. Indeed, as Wolf Blitzer of CNN pointed out about a decade ago, “[A]lmost every time U.S. military forces have been called into action to risk their lives and limbs, it’s been on behalf of Muslims….[T]o assist the Afghan mujahaddin . . . during the Soviet invasion in the 1980s, to liberate Kuwait following the Iraqi invasion of 1990, to help Somali Muslims suffering at the hands of a warlord in Mogadishu, to help Muslims first in Bosnia and then in Kosovo who faced a Serb onslaught, and more recently to liberate Afghanistan from its Taliban and al Qaeda rulers.” Since then, one can add the attempted liberation of Iraqis from the thumbscrew of Saddam Hussein, and now Africans facing an Ebola pandemic, and those targeted by ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

We do not kill Muslims because of our religious, nationalist, or patriotic motives, we do so to protect civilization and save innocent Muslims—and Christians and Jews and others. And we do so regrettably and with the most precision we can. Let us recall: We did not declare war on Islam; rather, a substantial part of Islam, call it Radical Islam if you like, declared war on us and civilization. And, as no less than President Barack Obama said recently: “Our Armed Forces are unparalleled and unique. And so when we’ve got a big problem somewhere around the world, it falls on our shoulders. And sometimes that’s tough. But that’s what sets us apart. That’s why we’re America. That’s what the stars and stripes are all about.” Who else is going to stop the scourge of civilization abuse Radical Islam has been waging? And how else, other than militarily, do we defeat those who slit throats, use civilian airliners as missiles, stone apostates to death, and have brought back killing fields?

As for Islamophobia and Islam, America has a record of exquisite decency and non-racism that belies everything Mr. Affleck implied. Just how racist are we as a nation? The FBI tracks crimes based on race, religion, and other characteristics, and the numbers it reports are rather striking, even laudatory. Throughout the long war we have been in, the American civilian reaction has been anything but “gross” or “racist.” In 2012 (the latest year statistics are available), there were 1,340 hate crimes based on religion. Too many to be sure. But how many were against Muslims? 11.6 percent. How many, by contrast, were there against Jews? 62.4 percent. These numbers have been fairly consistent since 9/11. In 2002, for example, one year after 9/11, just under 11 percent of the anti-religious bias incidents in America were anti-Muslim, in contrast to the 70 percent of anti-Jewish incidents constituting religious bias reported that year. Yet would anyone today say “America is anti-semitic” or has a Jewish problem? Of course not. Every hate crime is a wrong, but the idea that America has a problem with Muslims is discounted nearly ten-fold by the obviously false statement that America has a problem with Jews.

Which gets us to the absurd comparison Mr. Affleck made about “shifty Jew”s. Do thousands or hundreds of thousands of Jews commit acts of grotesque or any other kind of violence in the name of their God? Of course not. Do Muslims? Of course. And they cite religious tracts and tell us they are doing it in the name of Allah. Burying or ignoring this fact does exactly the wrong thing: it refuses to acknowledge the obvious and lets off the hook the moderate Muslims who have a duty to confront the violent aspects of and within their religion. Is Radical Islam a minority position within Islam? To be sure, but it’s a rather large minority, isn’t it? Estimates of the size of Radical Islam vary from seven to 20-plus percent of the world Muslim population, but even at the low end, that number may constitute over 100 million followers throughout the world. But let’s assume that number is too high by half for just a moment, and the number is 50 million? Say that’s wrong, again by half, 25 million? We can keep downplaying and cutting those numbers, but even if the number is one million, that is an awful lot of people—and we know what 19 can do with less than the annual salary of most college presidents.

Here’s the point: So long as this serious discussion keeps getting shut down, it will be ignored and the radicals as well as the moderates will get a pass in confronting what they must confront among their co-religionists. We would tolerate that pass of no other religion where millions in the name of their God committed truly gross and racist acts. Our local Muslim leader, Zuhdi Jasser, of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, has it right in confronting his religion and its false prophets head on. Perhaps he is also right that discussing “moderate Islam” is folly and we should talk more of a “reformed Islam.” But the point, the point of the sword, is in front of all of our eyes: Islam has a problem and it needs to be confronted—not those of us who point it out.

Source:  www.townhall.com

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Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Maher Vs. Affleck On Islam: Maher Should Apologize To Christians And Jews By Larry Elder

October 08, 2014 Articles by Larry Elder , Ben Affleck 0 Comments
Ben Affleck on Real Time With Bill Maher / HBO
By Larry Elder, Oct. 9, 2014

Actor Ben Affleck, star of the hit film "Gone Girl," recently appeared on Bill Maher's HBO show along with Sam Harris, author of the book "Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion." Maher and Harris accused Affleck of ignoring the extent of intolerance within Islam.

Maher said: "Liberals need to stand up for liberal principles ... like freedom of speech, freedom to practice any religion you want without fear of violence, freedom to leave a religion, equality for women, equality for minorities -- including homosexuals. These are liberal principles that liberals applaud for. But then when you say, 'In the Muslim world, this is what's lacking,' then they get upset."

Harris concurred: "Liberals have really failed on the topic of theocracy. They'll criticize white theocracy. They'll criticize Christians. They'll still get agitated over the abortion clinic bombing that happened in 1984. But when you want to talk about the treatment of women and homosexuals and freethinkers and public intellectuals in the Muslim world, I would argue that liberals have failed us. ... The crucial point of confusion is that we have been sold this meme of Islamophobia, where every criticism of the doctrine of Islam gets conflated with bigotry towards Muslims as people. That's intellectually ridiculous."

Affleck, who informed us that our rights came from our "forefathers," called this analysis "racist." He sniffed: "Are you the person who understands the officially codified doctrine of Islam? You're the interpreter of that?"

For the record, Affleck dropped out of University of Vermont after one semester, and Occidental College after one year. Harris has an undergraduate degree from Stanford and a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from UCLA. On the other hand, Harris never starred in "Argo," a film about rescuing American hostages held in Iran, which apparently makes Affleck an expert on Islam and Middle Eastern politics.

Harris agreed that not all Muslims want to strap on bombs and blow things up. But he said: "Just imagine some concentric circles. ... At the center, you have jihadists -- these are people who wake up in the morning wanting to kill apostates, wanting to die trying. They believe in paradise; they believe in martyrdom. Outside of them, we have Islamists -- these are people who are just as convinced of martyrdom and paradise and wanting to foist their religion on the rest of humanity, but they want to work within the system. They're not going to blow themselves up on a bus. They want to change governments. They want to use democracy against itself. Those two circles arguably are 20 percent of the Muslim world. ... But outside of that circle you have conservative Muslims who can honestly look at ISIS and say, "that does not represent us; we're horrified by that." But they hold views about human rights, and about women and about homosexuals that are deeply troubling."

Affleck grimaced as if he'd just seen the box office returns for "Gigli."

Maher added: "One reason (Muslims who oppose jihadists and extreme acts) don't get exposed is because they're afraid to speak out, because it's the only religion that acts like the mafia -- that will f---ing kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture or write the wrong book. There's a reason why Ayaan Hirsi Ali needs bodyguards 24/7."

"It's racist," Affleck insisted, no different from stereotyping Jews or blacks.

Maher responded: "I can show you a Pew poll of Egyptians. They are not outliers in the Muslims world. It's like 90 percent of them believe death is the appropriate response to leaving the religion. If 90 percent of Brazilians thought that death was the appropriate response to leaving Catholicism you would think it was a bigger deal."

Poor Affleck -- not so easy without a script.

Conservative pundits have praised Maher for "telling the truth" about Islam. Maher, they applaud, effectively explained how Islam -- at least how many followers interpret Islam -- makes their religion disturbingly different than any other dominant religion.

But Maher's made a career out of attacking all believers as equally moronic and manipulated, steeped in superstition and hocus-pocus whether Jew, Christian or Muslim.

Just six years ago, Maher made a documentary called "Religulous." In an almost Borat-like fashion, Maher interviews and then mocks Christians and other believers, but mostly Christians. Maher mocked the Christian belief in the rapture as intensely as he mocks Osama bin Laden for his belief in a global caliphate.

Maher ends his film with an exhortation for rational thinkers of the world to disavow all religions as vehicles used by bad people to exploit the mindless for their own purposes: "The plain fact is, religion must die for mankind to live. The hour is getting very late to be able to indulge in having key decisions made by religious people, by irrationalists. ... And those who preach faith and enable and elevate it are intellectual slaveholders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction."

Note the distinction Maher made between Christianity and other faiths and radical Islam? What, no distinction?


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Sunday, October 5, 2014

But, hey, he's a decent actor...

October 05, 2014 Ben Affleck , Bill Maher 0 Comments
Ben Affleck Just Got His Butt Kicked About Islam--It Was Awesome 

By Joshua Riddle, Oct. 4, 2014, Youngcons.com



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