Actress Criticizes Islam, Loses Her Career

“The brands I worked with were gone within a day,” Blair recounted. “A few partnerships I’d spent years building were shelved. My agency was gone. My lawyer was gone. My publicist was gone. My book agent was gone. My book publicist was gone. My social media manager was gone. My son’s godmother was gone – my best friend. While some friends in the business quietly stood by me, most of them were gone. And of course, my manager, my supposed friend of 30 years, and a Jew, was gone too. I still don’t know what any of them were thinking. No one returned my calls.”
Once the inevitable outrage mob got going, Blair hastily backtracked, saying: “In my comment, I mistakenly and inadvertently conflated Muslims with Radical Islamists and fundamentalists, a terrible err [sic] in my words and resulted in hurting countless people I never meant to, and I deeply regret this. As soon as my error was brought to my attention, I deleted the comment.”
That certainly toed the standard line, although there was a glaring logical hole in her statement, and in that conventional wisdom as a whole: “Radical Islamists and fundamentalists” do not magically become non-Muslims because they don’t conform to the West’s fantasies about Islam being a religion of peace. They are as Muslim as other Muslims, and indeed, they base their appeal to the larger Muslim community upon their claim to be authentically following the teachings of the Qur’an and Muhammad.
Blair’s self-incrimination statement continued: “Hate and misinformation are amplified so easily these days. This time by my own hands. In this instance, I erred in my writing and I fully recognize how I contributed to the Muslim community being understandably very upset. I respect and love all peace-loving communities, all over the world.”
Well, all right. But what if she was right the first time? Should the U.S. not deport “terrorist supporting goons”? All Islamic countries are authoritarian regimes, with the partial and diminishing exception of Turkey, and all are economic failures except those that have struck oil. So is it not at least arguably true that “Islam has destroyed Muslim countries and then they come here and destroyed minds”?
Related: Iran Touts Islam’s Teachings of Equality. Reality, As Always, Is Different.
But Blair wasn’t interested in defending her own statement, so I won’t do so here. She was just trying to stave off ostracism and professional ruin. “In February of 2024,” she said recently, “just mere months after Oct. 7, I posted a comment online. It offended people, and I did apologize right away. No conditions, no fine print. I meant it then and I mean it now, and I’m leaving the comment there, because the comment was not the story. I’m not up here for sympathy. I know I’ve had a lucky life, and I’m working again. And of course we know that life is better now than it was then. I have a team now I’d walk through fire with. It’s small, and it is my team. I want you to know that before I tell you the part that isn’t better. It left a mark.”
The mark, she said, was that her son suffered with her: “The fear got into me, and fear is contagious in a house. He’s a teenager now. He’s supposed to be embarrassed by me, not frightened for me. Careers come back. Years of his childhood do not.”
That’s a shame. It’s an even greater shame that the left operates this way, and that we still cannot have the societal discussion about the nature of Islam that we need to have.
