Comedian Bill Maher is scheduled for a keynote address at UC Berkeley’s December graduation. But some students are working to stop the political talk show host from speaking after controversy over his recent comments on Islam.

The controversy heightened after an Oct. 3 episode of the HBO series “Real Time With Bill Maher,” in which author Sam Harris and Maher got into a fierce debate with actor and director Ben Affleck over the religion.

“Liberals need to stand up for liberal principals,” Maher said to Harris during a round-table discussion. “But then when you say in the Muslim world, this is what’s lacking, then they get upset.”

Harris added that “we have to be able to criticize bad ideas, but Islam at this moment is the mother lode of bad ideas.”

Affleck was immediately upset. He called the comments “gross” and “racist” and compared the viewpoints to negative stereotypes about African Americans and Jews. The exchange blew up on social media and the blogosphere, and is now playing out on the UC Berkeley campus.

“Bill Maher is a blatant bigot and racist who has no respect for the values UC Berkeley students and administration stand for,” Khwaja Ahmed, a member of the Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asian Coalition, wrote in a Change.org petition titled “Stop Bill Maher from speaking at UC Berkeley’s December graduation.”

The petition had 2,400 signatures as of early Tuesday morning.

Ahmed added, “Bill Maher’s public statements on various religions and cultures are offensive and his dangerous rhetoric has found its way into our campus communities.”

Marium Navid, a UC Berkeley student senator, told The Daily Californian, “The First Amendment gives him the right to speak his mind, but it doesn’t give him the right to speak at such an elevated platform as the commencement. That’s a privilege his racist and bigoted remarks don’t give him.”

Maher, along with Oxford professor Richard Dawkins and the late journalist Christopher Hitchens, are among a group of prominent atheists who have taken a no-holds-barred approach in their outspoken disdain for religious doctrine of all faiths.

Maher produced and starred in “Religulous,” a documentary that prods at the world’s major religions, and he has long used his comedy in social and political commentary.

Follow @evansernoffsky

