The comedian claims that people have confused “a terrorist mafia” with a liberation movement.
When even a confirmed and often-smug liberal like HBO’s Bill Maher of all people is rebuking leftists for make-believe history, including recent make-believe history, politics and culture have become next-level surreal.
In a monologue that was mostly about the somber 9/11 anniversary, sometimes truth-teller Maher spotlighted the “moral confusion” that he argued permeates the Democrat Party when it comes to the danger posed by global terrorism.
Fan or foe of Israel, this nonetheless might be an example of the woke mind virus that Elon Musk has talked about.
Certain influencers on the right, whether motivated by clicks, cash, or a combination thereof, or just by something more dark, have sadly also spread fabricated or uninformed storylines.
In the context of the October 7, 2023, massacre by Hamas in Israel, the Real Time host also alluded to a rant by radical rapper and “free Palestine” advocate Macklemore during a recent Ed Sheeran concert.
As part of his remarks, Maher reminded the audience that Israel withdrew from Gaza 20 years ago:
“…Because nowhere has this moral confusion become more obvious than in a place called Gaza. A little strip of land that was not part of the original Israel, but which they won in a war launched against them, but then gave back, gave back, as a peace gesture. Did they tell you that part on TikTok, kids?”
“And the people who run Gaza, Hamas, who you celebrate as a liberation movement, but a really a terrorist mafia gang, just like the one that terrorizes Haiti, only ever used it to stage attacks on Israel.
“I think Macklemore spoke for all clueless celebrities when he said ‘I know enough to know this is a genocide.’ Actually, you don’t know sh-t.
“It’s not a genocide. It’s a counterattack in a war, a war that’s been waged on Israel since 1948 based on the ridiculous premise that Jews don’t below in the one place on Earth they are indigenous and indisputably their ancestral homeland. Hey ‘geniuses’: They’re the ‘Indians’ in this scenario.”
“…Any famine that happened in Gaza is because Hamas stole the food…Israel ran 94,000 trucks carrying over 1.8 million tons of aid into Gaza, and enabled over 36,000 patients to leave Gaza for treatment abroad, which you TikTok historians might be interested to learn, are not things countries usually do for their enemies during a war. And certainly not what you would do if you were tying for a genocide. Gaza equals genocide is a lie. And a provable lie.
“And the fact that so many prominent Democrats go along with it is, to me, the party’s worst moment since they did undid Reconstruction after the Civil War…”
Ambassador Mike Huckabee quipped earlier this year in this regard that “if Israel is attempting genocide, they are really, really bad at it. I’ve never seen such an incompetent case of genocide…”
Watch Bill Maher’s monologue below and draw your own conclusions:
Even though Bill Maher, who really dislikes Republicans, has become regularly critical of the left on certain issues, you can sense that the mostly liberal-leaning studio audience still hesitates to react positively to his orations.
As a slight digression, it’s been said that every accusation by the left (and now, unfortunately, some on the right) is more like a confession, such as — but not limited to — actively participating in a domestic or foreign influence operation while denouncing others for supposedly doing the same thing.
That’s a topic perhaps to be explored on another day, but it includes bullies and bigots pretending to be victims.
According to Rolling Stone and other news outlets today, Macklemore is no longer touring with Ed Sheeran “after several venues allegedly told the trek’s promoter that they would not allow the rapper to perform.”
Prior to this development, and regardless of your positive or negative opinion about Israel, pop star and UNICEF ambassador Pink, who is most definitely no right-winger, took to Instagram to respond to receiving online heat over apparently lacking ideological purity merely for sharing a post that was critical of Macklemore:
“…Of course I don’t speak for Israel, or for any government. I never have. What I said in October 2023 is still exactly what I believe: Hamas is a terrorist organization. Palestinians deserve a future that honors their humanity and their aspirations. Protecting innocent life comes first, everywhere, and nobody should ever celebrate the death of a child…You don’t have to agree with one thing Israel’s government does to not want the Jewish family two rows down from you to be scared or targeted at a concert…”
In certain instances, smear campaigns have incited violence against innocent persons in the U.S, Canada, Europe, and Australia for the actions or perceived actions of a nation thousands of miles away.
Separately but related, a New York Post opinion piece mentioned the following on Sunday about a new film:
“The just-wrapped Venice Film Festival gave a record-setting 25-minute standing ovation to…a documentary arguing that Israel is purposefully targeting and killing Palestinian civilians. Yet the nation’s extensive efforts to warn citizens of incoming attacks and millions spent feeding hungry Palestinians suggest otherwise.”
It’s probably an understatement to anticipate that clout-chasing, ethically compromised, or deliberately ignorant, celebrities would likely be apprehensive about living under Hamas or Hezbollah rule.
And maybe they should be advocates for Palestinians to be free from Hamas, Hezbollah, or other extremist militias.
That aside, the Palestinian side of the equation has rejected a two-state framework multiple times over the years.
“While many Israelis are open-minded about eventual Arab self-rule in some of the West Bank—which exists to a considerable extent now under the Palestinian Authority—the notion of creating a Gaza-like terrorist-dominated state alongside Israel strikes many Israelis as insane,” the Washington Free Beacon noted in an article about the new U.K. import boycott of West Bank businesses.
Sectarian and territorial conflicts, and human rights violations, moreover, are raging all over the world.
Yet self-styled activists with their selective outrage have remained silent when Hamas used its own citizens as human shields, or, e.g., when the IRGC in Iran killed thousands of its own citizens, or as Christians were being murdered in Nigeria.
Armed conflict is ugly, horrible, and tragic to say the least, and those committing war crimes must be held to account.
It also must be noted that hundreds of IDF soldiers have fallen in the Gaza war because Israel’s military takes extraordinary measures to try to minimize civilian casualties.
U.S. Democrats and Democratic socialists, or whatever they call themselves, though, don’t even like their own country.
Thus, their hostility toward Western Civilization in general, let alone a small, but technologically advanced, Western-style democracy in the Middle East, which is often a messy, boisterous democracy whose interests don’t always align with the U.S., is hardly particularly surprising.
According to PJ Media, “Maher’s deeper point is that toppling the systems that built the West is the actual leftist project, and Gaza happens to be this new fashionable excuse for it.”
In addition to trolls and bots and other kinds of devious engagement farming on social media, legacy media outlets like the New York Times and the BBC, and others, and many among the political class here and overseas, have unfortunately amplified pro-terrorist propaganda which seems to have successfully manipulated public opinion to some degree.
In a paper published by Studies in Conflict & Terrorism on September 7, Yale School of Management professor Edieal Pinker asserted the following about the Times:
“Drawing on a corpus of 1,559 news articles I document a dominant narrative consistent with a framing that assigns near-exclusive agency and responsibility to Israel while diminishing Hamas’s role in sustaining the conflict. It describes Hamas’s October 7 attack followed by Israeli military violence and mounting Palestinian casualties, while largely omitting Israeli casualties post-October 7, Hamas fighter casualties, and post-October 7 Palestinian violence.”
U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance, who is a brilliant communicator, occasionally floats the strawman argument that some people too often equate mere criticism of Israel to anti-Semitism.
No fair-minded person buys into that, however. Castigating any government, including the Trump administration and its predecessors or successors, is fair game provided it is fact-based.
No one is more vocally critical of the Israeli government than citizens of Israel themselves over their country’s domestic and foreign policies.
Deep divisions exist there between the left and right, and even between the right and the right, which led to five national parliamentary elections in about a four-year time frame, culminating in 2022.
Complicating matters is that smaller political parties in that multicultural country often form, merge, splinter, and/or disband for significant and even lesser reasons, which can create governmental gridlock.
As such, there is no certainty that incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party will again be able to cobble together another contentious coalition with several smaller parties to win enough seats in the 120-member Knesset to form a government under Netanyahu in the upcoming October 27 election.
Netanyahu’s rivals face the same challenge, so the outcome is uncertain, but whoever becomes the PM – right, left, or center– will probably be vilified by the same cast of international characters.
In the meantime, Israel’s vaunted intelligence services still have a lot of explaining to do about how they completely missed the run-up to the diabolical October 7 terrorist attack.
Netanyahu has incidentally announced an initiative to de-couple his country from U.S. military aid (most of which comes back to American defense contractors anyway).
That should be welcome news for everyone who sincerely and reasonably believes that foreign aid across the board should be reined in if not eliminated altogether.
Separately, and oddly promulgated around the Jewish New Year, the U.K. has announced sanctions, as alluded to above, on so-called illegal settlements in the occupied territories.
In an opinion piece in the New York Post, Bruce Pearl, the former Auburn basketball coach and now chair of the U.S. Israel Education Association, asserted the following:
“…Jews have lived there for centuries. Israel liberated the territory from illegal Jordanian occupation in the Six-Day War of 1967, after Jordan attacked Israel. So the claim that Jewish settlements there are illegal are at best arguable and at worst flat-out wrong…”
For those who followed geopolitics back then, was anyone condemning Jordan for an “occupation” or Egypt for occupying Gaza during the same general time frame?
There has been speculation that the U.K. boycott is a method for the ruling, far-left Labor Party to pander to the Gaza First constituency ahead of an October 8 special parliamentary election for a vacancy caused by the resignation from parliament, the House of Commons, of ex-Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
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