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This reminds me of my tenure on the Atheism+ forums, back before my redpilling/blackpilling (I don't know what to call it, since I didn't really change my beliefs, I just realized the people I thought were on my side, aren't).
A+, as you know, was woker than woke before "woke" became a thing. And one of my "WTF?" moments when I realized these people are fucking crazy is when they went hard on defending... Muslims. Not against general racism and bigotry, but against criticisms that the "New Atheists" had no problem applying to every other religion.
At one point, the forum got trolled hard by a poster from one of the hater-forums who monitored them, a set of people running an account that adopted the persona of a gay man who proceeded to post long effort-posts about the connection between homophobia and Islamophobia, and how seeing the latter "triggered" him, as a gay man, despite the fact that he was an atheist.
The mods on the A+ forum proceeded to take him very seriously and started modding comments that were too "Islamophobic."
He also declared that the term "homosexual" was homophobic. The mods proceeded to mod anyone who used the word homosexual.
I was one of the few people who pushed back and kept getting in arguments with him, until he eventually DMed me and let me know what the game was. I already suspected something of the sort, because to any sane person his arguments were so transparently nonsensical. But the mods and the other SJWs on the forum ate it up.
As to your broader point, I think liberals like Maher and Harris suffer from a misapprehension that I had myself until recently (my beliefs have changed on this one): that Islam is just another religion and that, like Christianity and Judaism and other bronze-age religions that were once full of barbarism and genocidal ideology, the civilizing effects of modern Western liberalism will eventually secularize them until they are just like the rest of us, and we'll have a big joint Christmas/Hannuka/Ramadan holiday season.
This does happen to an extent. Moderate Muslims in the West are... mostly like the rest of us. I hesitate to say that Islam is fundamentally incapable of undergoing some kind of "Enlightenment." (Leaving aside the arguments from some of our resident Christians that post-Enlightenment Christianity isn't real Christianity at all.) I don't think Islam is some sort of unique Neal Stephenson mind virus that turns its followers into violent p-zombies even if many of Islam's critics do.
But I am pessimistic about Islam, in its current form, being capable of coexisting long-term with other ideologies. I have a lot of other uncharitable and blackpilling thoughts I've been tossing around and trying to decide how much of it is Chinese Cardiology and selection bias.
I do think a blanket "Muslim ban" is stupid (and clearly unconstitutional). But a ban on importing large numbers of people from countries that just happen to be dominated by Muslims of an uncompromising, anti-Western, pro-jihadist bent does not seem irrational or bigoted to me, but it would be hard to frame it in a way that would be acceptable to those who believe Islam is "just another religion."
Whatever about the Enlightenment, what made me laugh (I don't see it so much these days, if it's still going around) is the notion that what Islam needs is the Reformation.
Dude, (1) have you any idea what the Reformation was all about and (2) Islam had its Reformation, just like the European one: go back to the bare word of the holy books, no intermediaries, strip away all the accretion of worldly ideas, pull down the images and luxurious living. The Taliban who blew up the Buddhas were Reformers in the same vein as those who smashed the statues in churches all across Europe.
This pop-culture notion of the Reformation being all about 'freedom of conscience' and 'the church can't tell me what to do' is one that comes very long after the aftermath of the Wars of Religion and the fissiparous nature of Protestantism, particularly in America, where denominations split and split again over disputes as to interpretation of the Scriptures and godly living, so that eventually through exhaustion, Western societies were "we won't have a state church, and where we do, it will be subordinate to the civil government and not the other way round". Calvin tussled with the civil authorities as to who would have authority in Geneva and won in his lifetime, but after his death the civil authorities gradually pulled back power into their own hands.
It also had its own Enlightenment. The Golden Age of Islam and the whole Abbasid Caliphate was very loosey goosey with its Islam, with a focus on education, science, and (often Greek) philosophy for a few centuries until everything got buttoned up during the Middle Ages and especially after Al Ghazali. There's a reason that, of what wasn't from the Greeks, a lot of the recovery of mathematics and philosophy in the European Renaissance was recovery of texts from the Islamic world (which was simultaneously becoming less interested in these things).
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