JNS
The HBO talk show host challenged a fellow left-wing comedian about the ideologies most fueling bigotry today.
Longtime leftwing American comedian Bill Maher took some shots at his own side during a podcast where he also defended Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In the Monday installment of his “Club Random" podcast, Maher jousted with actor/comedian Sandra Bernhard, who is Jewish and known for her roles on such shows as “Roseanne” and “American Horror Story” as well as the films “Hudson Hawk” and Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy,” which starred Robert De Niro as a lousy comedian desperate for a big break.
Maher rejected Bernhard’s claim that antisemitism came primarily from the political right, saying that side of the spectrum included “The ‘Jews will not replace us’ nonsense” but that “the left-wing is even worse."
The “Real Time with Bill Maher” host argued that antisemitism today flowed “from elite colleges who see everything only through a racial lens.”
Maher declared “they are stupid. They don’t know history. They think everything is about colonizers and racists, and how awful America is."
Further dissecting the motivations of the protesters at top-ranked universities, Maher said the conflict was “not any more complicated to most of these college kids than the Palestinians are brown and poor and the Israelis are rich and white."
Shifting gears in an attempt to regain common ground, Bernhard challenged Maher on Netanyahu, declaring the Likud leader “solidly to blame for everything that’s happening right now."
Invoking his long-established opposition to organized religion, regarding faith as a prime mover in human misery, Maher responded that Netanyahu “is so not to blame for everything that’s happening. That’s the fault of the Palestinian people and the religion of Islam, which gets lost in all of this.”
Expanding his indictment, Maher said that the war in Gaza “is happening because for years Hamas took aid money and instead of buying food with it and building buildings and hospitals, they bought bombs and made tunnels."
