In the wake of yesterday’s terrorist attacks against the staff of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical newspaper in Paris, political comedian Bill Maher fired off a tweet that almost immediately incited controversy:

Condemning attack is not enuf: unless U strongly endorse the right of anyone to make fun of any religion/prophet, U r not a moderate Muslim — Bill Maher (@billmaher) January 7, 2015

Maher, of course, is an avowed atheist and outspoken critic against all organized religion. He is also a true liberal in every sense of the word.

That being said, this isn’t the first time he’s managed to rankle certain members of his tribe with remarks he made about Islam. During a heated discussion on his show with Ben Affleck in October, he asserted that Islam was the “only religion that acts like the Mafia, that will fucking kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture or write the wrong book.” The subsequent backlash bled into personal engagements when students at University of California, Berkeley—historically a bastion of liberalism and free speech—launched a petition on Change.org to prevent Maher from speaking at the school’s winter commencement. The comedian was maligned as a “blatant bigot and racist,” and suddenly, the sentiment became fashionable.

Still, the incident in Paris has reignited the issue, which, at its core, is really about a larger dilemma: What does it mean to be a liberal?

The ideology comes with a certain set of values. On the one hand, there is the First Amendment, and on the other, there is the notion of equality, or rather a stance that is strictly anti-discrimination. Those who accuse Maher of being racist believe he is betraying the second value, which is more righteous than the first, and therefore betraying liberalism in general.

But they’re wrong. Liberals who accuse Maher of racism are actually betraying themselves and demonstrating a very peculiar kind of hypocrisy, putting those values at odds with each other. Like Charlie Hebdo, Maher is a provocateur, and therefore impolite; you can criticize him for expressing himself crudely, but you can’t conflate the crudeness with racism.

Like all religions, Islam is a belief system, not a race. Maher, as a rule, takes issue with any belief system that is antithetical to the values of liberalism, most specifically equality and free speech. The massacre in Paris was an affront to the latter. When Maher compares Islam to the Mafia, he’s referring to his friend Salman Rushdie, the novelist who wrote The Satanic Verses and then found himself on the other side of a fatwa. When the Mafia has an enemy, similarly, it puts a price on his head. When Maher is criticizing Muslims, he’s criticizing a belief system that he thinks perpetuates anti-liberal behaviors.

This is pretty much his problem with all organized religion, only when he picks on Christians, for instance, liberals more or less unanimously applaud him. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that, in America, Christianity is associated with conservatism. Maher once said, “I love Jesus. I just don’t like the Christians who don’t believe in what he says,” meaning Christians who don’t believe in a pluralist society. That statement did not make its way into the Berkeley petition, though. And those who drafted it are perhaps not old enough to remember that Maher once famously said, “We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, that’s not cowardly.” That comment was made a week after Sept. 11, 2001, on Maher’s show Politically Incorrect, and cost him his job.

When it comes to Islam, liberals don’t have to agree with Maher, and it’s certainly correct to point out that it’s worth making distinctions between good and bad religion, since the great majority of Muslims practice peacefully and don’t condone terrorism or bigotry. But calling Maher racist is about as thoughtless and kneejerk as it gets. If you have a problem with him, you also have a problem with The Book of Mormon (the play) and anyone who criticizes Israeli settlements. The latter certainly doesn’t make you anti-Semitic, though plenty of conservatives would say otherwise.

It seems Maher’s only sin is his willingness to challenge orthodoxy, forcing other liberals to examine themselves. That’s also the job of a satirical newspaper like Charlie Hebdo. To punish Maher is to subscribe to another -ism entirely. It’s the one that starts with the letter F.