"Real Time" host Bill Maher called out the left's hesitancy to criticize China, declaring the foreign adversary as "the new Islam" in political discourse.

During Friday night's panel discussion, Maher sounded the alarm on China's AI advancements with the launch of DeepSeek, echoing references to the "Sputnik moment" for the US. He also cited comments from former FBI director Christopher Wray, who said the Chinese Communist Party was positioning "malware" against civilians and is development of Salt Typhoon that can "read the texts of every single American."

"And it is kind of an evil empire, you know," Maher said. "And this kind of gets back to the DEI thing because when you make everything about race, not good!"

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"I mean, we couldn't look into the origins of COVID being from the lab, which now the CIA, this week, has joined the FBI and many other organizations saying it probably did come from a lab. I said it from the beginning. It's being studied in this lab where it breaks out. Really? We're gonna even wonder about this? Now, maybe it was a bat… [but] we couldn't say that because the New York Times said to even look into that is racist," Maher continued.

In 2021, A New York Times science and health reporter tweeted that the "lab leak" coronavirus theory had "racist roots" and was not "plausible."

Maher went on, "China's like the new Islam. We can't be honest about them because they're not White. And China, okay, I'm sorry, kids, they do some bad things, China. And we should just recognize that."

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"This is one of the broader problems with this obsession of all of these ideologies from the left," British writer Dan Jones reacted, "is that it hamstrings you in terms of thinking common sense pol-"

"Thinking!" Maher blurted out. 

"Thinking," Jones said in agreement, "because you know if you're framing it in terms of a war, you're fighting with one arm tied behind your back. You're just not thinking about the world as you see it, you're optimizing the signifying to the group around you."

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Author Max Brooks went on to pan what he calls the "guilty Honkies" who are "only interested in assuaging their guilt."

"Now the good news about this country, we have people of every ethnicity. If you want to take on not China but the Chinese Communist Party, start with Chinese Americans who fled China, right, because they'll have honest conversations, and they're much American as all of us and they don't have guilty honkiness," Brooks said.

"Same with Muslims who fled Muslm countries," Maher responded. 

"You want to talk s--- about Fidel Castro? Go down to Miami. You'll find plenty of people willing to have that conversation," Brooks added.

– Fox News Digital's David Rutz contributed to this report.

An Iraqi man who carried out several Quran burnings in Sweden has been killed in a shooting near Stockholm, authorities said Thursday.

Salwan Momika, 38, staged several burnings and desecrations of Islam's holy book in Sweden in 2023. Videos of the Quran burnings got worldwide publicity and raised anger and criticism in several Muslim nations, leading to riots and unrest in many places.

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The Stockholm District Court said a verdict scheduled Thursday in a trial in which Momika was a defendant was postponed because one of the defendants had died. A judge at the court, Göran Lundahl, confirmed that the deceased was Momika. He said he didn't have any information on when or how Momika died.

Police said they were alerted to a shooting Wednesday night at an apartment building in Sodertalje, near Stockholm, and found a man with gunshot wounds who later died.

Broadcaster SVT reported that the victim was Momika.

Prosecutors said five people were arrested overnight on suspicion of murder. They said all were adults but gave no further details.

Prosecutor Rasmus Öman said the investigation is still in its early stages and that the suspects and others still have to be questioned.

Momika came to Sweden from Iraq in 2018 and was granted a three-year residence permit in 2021, according to SVT.

Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said Sweden's security service was involved because "there is obviously a risk that there is a connection to a foreign power," Swedish news agency TT reported.

Momika argued that his protests targeted the religion of Islam, not Muslim people. He said he wanted to protect Sweden’s population from the messages of the Quran. Swedish police allowed his demonstrations, citing freedom of speech, while filing charges against him.

Last March, he was arrested in neighboring Norway after stating that he would seek asylum there, and was sent back to Sweden, TT reported.

Momika and a co-defendant were charged in August with incitement to hatred because of statements they made in connection with the Quran burnings. A verdict was supposed to be handed down on Thursday morning.

Bill Maher called "Two and a Half Men" star Jon Cryer "crazy woke" after the actor refused to criticize Islam over its strict dress code for women while on Maher's "Club Random" podcast on Sunday.

The show was off to a rocky start after Maher brought up the presidential election and Cryer dismissed Maher's point that the illegal immigration issue hurt the Democratic Party.

Maher moved on to address the decline of western standards in areas like London, where nearly 4 million people self-identified as Muslim in the 2021 census.

He referenced a "60 Minutes" report where a woman was "screamed at" for walking through a Muslim neighborhood in London while wearing a skirt.

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"The point of it was that there are places in western civilizations that are not run by western standards and that doesn't mean they're just different," he told Cryer. 

"We should agree that women should be able to wear what they want," Maher continued. "If you don't agree with that, you're not a liberal to begin with."

Cryer pushed back on Maher's point, saying that while he agreed that women should be able to wear what they want, there were many places around the world where women didn't have the freedom to dress how they'd like. 

"In many places they used to get catcalled all the time," Cryer argued, which Maher scoffed at.

"A lot of s— used to happen but what's going on now in the world?" Maher replied. "Would you really want to have your wife live in Gaza or [somewhere else] where she would have to cover up?"

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Cryer was reluctant to criticize the strict rules for women in these places, saying, "it's not my culture."

"You won't judge it?" Maher asked. 

"I'm not going to judge it," Cryer replied. "No."

"That's crazy woke to me," Maher remarked.

The talk show host, who frequently rails against the far-left, said liberals who accept intolerance in the name of diversity had gone "off the rails."

"That's where it went off the rails, when we became so tolerant that we tolerate intolerance," Maher said. "You would never allow something like that to happen in this country."

Later, the pair argued over "woke" politics within the Democratic Party and illegal immigration hurting Democrats in the election.

Maher argued that "stupid wokeness" got Trump re-elected along with the open borders policies of the Biden administration.

Cryer, who quipped he was "stupid woke" at the start of the show, claimed the real reason why President-elect Donald Trump won the election was because Americans hated inflation, Black women and transgender people.

"I think Americans hate inflation. They hate inflation, they hate riots, they hate Black women, and they hate trans people. They just spent hundreds of millions of dollars demonizing trans people and that's disgusting," Cryer remarked to Maher's dismay.

"Oh Jon," Maher sighed heavily. "We shouldn't talk politics."

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