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During his show Real Time, host Bill Maher took apart the anti-Israel arguments that Hollywood voices and many influencers aired during the recent conflict between the terrorist group Hamas and Israel, where serious bombings by terrorists were carried out against innocents.
Maher set out to expose the ironies and hypocrisy of the arguments in favor of Hamas attacks after his guest, The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, implied that Israel should be held accountable for possible “war crimes” in Gaza.
The host interrupted the guest suddenly to clarify that Gaza first fired nearly four thousand rockets at Israel. “What would you say Israel should have done instead of what they did?” asked Maher to Kristof.
The columnist replied that Israel does have a right to defend itself, but that they probably committed war crimes by not preventing civilian fatalities. However, notes Maher, Hamas did place rockets in civilian locations.
The host then began to dismantle the arguments commonly used by progressives against Israel.
“But I don’t know how else to respond [in another way]. What if Canada fired four thousand rockets into America —or Mexico, which is an even better analogy because we actually did steal the land from Mexico. I would submit that Israel did not steal anybody’s land —and that is another thing that I’ve heard for the last couple of weeks, words like ‘occupyers,’ ‘colonizers,’ and ‘apartheid’, which I believe people don’t understand the history there,” Maher said.
Maher continued in his argument by saying that Jews have been in that area since at least 1200 B.C., “way before the first Muslim walked the Earth.” He went on to say that if it were a question of who came first, it wouldn’t even be close for the Palestinians.
In that case – Maher recalls – it was the Jews who suffered occupations, and proceeds to mention the Roman occupation, then the Persian, the Byzantine, the Ottoman… it was only from the 19th century that they began to return to Palestine, ” which was never an Arab country,” he takes the opportunity to clarify. “There was never a country called Palestine that was a distinct Arab country,” he reiterated to Kristof.
With irony, Maher reminds Kristof and the audience that the same people who denied “the other slice of bread” are the ones who continue to attack. He adds in the same vein that the Hamas terrorists’ only bargain is that they all die, there is no other way.
On the two-state solution – which has been raised over the decades – the presenter commented that it has been proposed several times. He stated that there could be an Arab capital in East Jerusalem right now if Yasser Arafat had accepted it in 2003. Instead, he set out to attack Israel.
Maher knocks out influencers’ double standards
Maher also attacked the way progressives approached the conflict. The presenter took a ruling from a Hamas court decreeing that a single woman could not travel in Gaza without the company of a male guardian.
With a laugh Maher says “Really? Bella Hadid and her friends would run screaming to Tel Aviv if they had to live in Gaza for one day!”
Hadid recently participated in pro-Palestine demonstrations in which she shouted “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a slogan of the Palestine Liberation Organization, another terrorist organization. “That’s a slogan that calls for the elimination of Israel,” Maher finally said.
Rafael Valera, Venezuelan, student of Political Science, political exile in São Paulo, Brazil since 2017 // Rafael Valera, venezolano, es estudiante de Ciencias Políticas y exiliado político en São Paulo, Brasil desde 2017
I never watched Mr. Maher before but the more I hear his common sense arguments the more I like him. I wish others would look at things realistically and debate sensibly. Thanks for sharing this!