Shortly after Hamas invaded Israel, Lyle Culpepper knew that his comfortable life as a gender studies professor at a prestigious American university was about to change.
A self-professed ex-lover of several Hamas leaders, Culpepper suspended his academic career to advocate for Palestinians so passionately and effectively that his popular social media videos are followed and liked even by prominent Zionists, including jurist Anne Herzberg; ADL executive Andrew Srulevitch and senior Israeli diplomats David Saranga and Naor Gilon.
At least, that’s what Culpepper would probably say.
In reality, though, Culpepper is a satirical character created by Florida-based Jewish actor L.E. Staiman, whose popularity has soared after Oct. 7 thanks to his caricaturing of the clueless campus cronies of Iran’s global jihad.
In one of Lyle’s most popular videos, with nearly 800,000 views and 10,000 likes on X, he mourns the loss of the Iranian drones that Israel shot down over its territory in April.
“Forty percent of those drones were children,” Lyle says in that video, his voice cracking with emotion as his bleached, disheveled hair—a wig—quivers over a khaki keffiyeh of the kind favored by Hezbollah terrorists.
“These are drones that will never experience filming a landscape, of a big shot of a city, or a Jake Gyllenhaal ambulance chase scene,” he continues. He asks viewers to “pray for the drones of Iran” in mockery of the anti-Israel narrative that ignores armed terrorists by focusing on minors—including those who engage in terrorism.
Staiman, a professional actor, director/producer and singer, has Lyle star in additional hits across genres, including music videos such as “Intifada in the U.S.A” (500,000 views) spoofing a Miley Cyrus similarly titled number. Then there’s Staiman’s own “Tunnel of Love,” a lustful serenade to former lover and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, AKA “the George Clooney of Khan Younis” who makes Lyle want to “tap that Ham-ass.”
Another genre of Lyle videos features video montages where Lyle speaks ridiculously alongside terrorists, pro-Palestinian celebrities, Democrat politicians and campus activists, who sometimes sound almost indistinguishable from his caricature.
Lyle goes on real-life awareness-raising missions occasionally, including at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last month, where he documented people congratulating him on his plan to “spread light and love through global jihad”—before eventually being recognized and booed.
A recent trolling assignment on Washington Square Park in New York had Lyle and keffiyeh-clad sidekick Abu Fauci signing up passersby for a nonexistent “anti-Zionist dating app” called Jihotties, which they advertise to receptive listeners as “Zionist clean, with no Jews. ”
Lyle’s success has been such that Staiman and his business partner are now developing a television show centered around Lyle for distribution in Israel and the United States, said Staiman. It would bring Lyle to Israel and Gaza for the first time, he said, but declined to reveal anything more about the production.
Lyle, whose major in university was “debunking the myth of the Holocaust through the collective interpretive experience of the indigenous bisexual Women of the Wall,” has a well-developed backstory, Staiman assured JNS. For now, though, Staiman would only say that Lyle grew up in “an affluent conservative home and is suffering the trauma of being ignored as a child, which sets him on a path of doing whatever it takes to have his voice heard.”
Asked about the secret to Lyle’s popularity, Staiman, a 36-year-old father of one, said: “Lyle is the ultimate idiot. He is someone who deeply believes in a cause that he knows nothing about. He’s misinformed and also really, really confident.”
Lyle’s character was born on a whim as an improv at a Jamba Juice cafe, Staiman said. “I just grabbed a wig I had lying around, borrowed my wife’s glasses, threw on a keffiyeh I’d bought in Dubai and we started filming on a cellphone,” he recalled.
The video had an unscripted interruption when a Jamba Juice employee asked Staiman not to film there as he was recommending to the camera Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” (“It is Mein Kampf good,” Lyle said, adding that Bin Laden was a freedom fighter and that the cannibalistic serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was a “freedom eater”.) Lyle shouts back at the employee: “Maybe take your Western, colonial, Zionist values and go shove ‘em up your f…” before the video abruptly stops.
An observant Orthodox Jew who was in Israel on Oct. 7 for the Simhat Torah holiday, Staiman decided to create Lyle after seeing the document by Bin Laden gain popularity on social media in November.
Staiman, who had recently directed and starred in a romantic comedy titled Love Virtually about the virtual reality scene, had not done political commentary at that point, he said. But that changed after Staiman watched 20-year-olds get excited about bin Laden shortly after returning from a grieving Israel, where thousands of Hamas terrorists had murdered some 1,200 people on Oct. 7 and abducted another 251.
“Looking back on it now, it’s pretty tame compared to what’s happened since then,” Staiman told JNS about the bin Laden text. “But at the time, it showed how crazy the world’s become and I felt like addressing that. It became my mission to use this voice to call out hypocrisy and break new stories in a funny way and just show this far-left pro-jihadi perspective.”
Ridiculing aspects of a crisis that has developed into a regional war that has brought tragedy to millions of people does present potential pitfalls, Staiman acknowledged. “I do have guardrails, but they’re very close to the edge,” he said.
One of Staiman’s edgier videos is a montage showing Lyle encouraging the late pro-Palestinian activist Matt Nelson to “slow cook” himself so he could “suffer more for Palestine” as Nelson reads out his manifesto before fatally setting himself on fire on Sept. 11 near the Israeli consulate in Boston. Nelson, the third man known to self-immolate in the United States since Oct. 7, said it was to protest “the genocide in Palestine.”
Staiman considered not making the video because Nelson was “obviously mentally ill,” calling into question the morality of poking fun at his actions, he said.
“If this were condemned by the other side as just a tragic thing done by someone struggling with mental illness, I wouldn’t make fun of it because it’s horrific. It’s sad,” Staiman said.
Yet both Nelson and Aaron Bushnell, who self-immolated in February, “have been completely lionized by their side as heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice. In reality, they killed themselves for nothing and now their families have to suffer for it,” said Staiman. “So I think it’s my responsibility to make fun of the notion that they’re martyrs.”
