In his typically acerbic style of dry humor, comedian-pundit Bill Maher marked the 78th anniversary of Israel’s Declaration of Independence with a hard-hitting monologue that promptly went viral.
He opened the May 15 episode of his eponymous HBO show “Real Time” by saying that “everyone must either wish [the Jewish state] a happy birthday or admit they’re antisemitic.”
He didn’t mention that Zohran Mamdani—who openly mourned the nakba, the “catastrophe” of Israel’s establishment in 1948—perfectly fits the latter label. Nevertheless, he went on to let the likes of New York City’s mayor have it.
“Now, it’s everyone’s right in a free country to be antisemitic,” he said. “But enough with hiding behind Israel or Zionism or [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu. If you think, as so many do now, that when it comes to human rights, Israel is the monster country of all time, you either don’t read or you don’t care about your own hypocrisy, because there are so many worse places. But that’s where we are these days. No Jews, no news.”
For a full eight minutes, he let the hypocrites have it, highlighting the fact that “no one blinks” when an editor from the progressive magazine The American Prospect calls Israel a “brainwashed psychopathic death cult that might need to be nuked to save the human race.”
He then pointed out that Jew-bashing is the one thing that the left and right have in common these days, mentioning Tucker Carlson, on the one hand, and The New York Times, on the other. Though he failed to bring up the Gray Lady’s latest blood libel—penned by Pulitzer Prize-winner Nicholas Kristof, who printed the lunatic lie that Israel trains dogs to sodomize Palestinian prisoners—he did stress that ignoramuses on both sides of the spectrum see Israel as “the only country in the world doing anything bad.”
Yes, he said, taking a dig at the condition of education in the United States, “I see why the meathead manosphere and the Code Pink people are on the same page, because they both went to high school in America and they don’t know anything.”
Unfortunately, according to Maher, “Jew-hatred isn’t just acceptable now; it’s cool. Celebrities love it and make it trendy.”
Ditto with regard to cowardly politicians, whom he chastised for “indulging, rather than correcting, their brainwashed-by-TikTok constituents who now have an unfavorable view of Israel,” and for “not telling their woke idiots that Israel isn’t a colonizer or an apartheid state or committing genocide.” Oh, and for not admonishing the younger generation, “If you brats had to spend a week anywhere in the Middle East other than Israel, you would understand what liberalism is not.”
The above are snippets of his lengthy rant, the rest of which was equally unflinching. Given the political, sociological and cultural climate he was describing so accurately, it’s not surprising that the clip exploded—shared widely on social media by pro-Israel influencers and broadcast on Israeli TV channels.
As worthy of praise as Maher might be for his wise and witty words, however, something is disturbing about the elation they elicited. It’s one thing to give credit to those brave enough to tell the truth about Israel and antisemitism. It’s quite another to be grateful for it.
Indeed, Jews shouldn’t need to treat intellectual honesty as heroism. Nor does it behoove us to grab any morsel of sympathy with the hunger of a hostage.
It’s the height of irony that we can fight fearlessly against enemies on the battlefield, yet recoil in the face of defamation and delegitimization—and bow at the feet of defenders like Maher.
