Ethics Alarms has been skeptical of HBO’s clown nose on/clown nose off host of “Real Time,” Bill Maher, who has recently been critical of his favored side of the political divide and even, mirabile dictu, defending Donald Trump from time to time. Bill is a pompous left-biased jerk, not half as clever as he thinks he is but not stupid, and I have detected a strategic move rightward to distinguish himself from the all-progressive-all-the-time hoard on late night TV. I have also stated that I doubt his sincerity, as I doubt the sincerity of many professional pundits and comics who style themselves as truth-tellers.

Maher recently gave a long, not particularly funny speech in his show’s “New Rules” segment harshly criticizing Democrats and progressives for their increasingly anti-Semitic and anti-Israel rhetoric. It’s long: I’m going to number the paragraphs so I can comment in Part 2. Here was Bill’s speech:

1. And finally, new rules since yesterday was Israel’s birthday. Having become a nation on May 14th, 78 years ago, everyone must either wish her a happy birthday or admit they’re anti-Semitic. Now, it’s everyone’s right in a free country to be anti-Semitic, but enough with hiding behind Israel or Zionism or Netanyahu.

2. 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.

3. No Jews, no news. Ha ha. But China, Russia, Sudan, Iran, Myanmar, Haiti, the Congo, North Korea, all way worse. And that’s how you know it’s anti-Semitism. It’s the inconsistency. People talk about Jews these days like something out of Stormfront, except it’s not Stormfront.

4. It’s an editor from the American Prospect, which is a venerable liberal publication that launched the careers of journalists like Ezra Klein. And yet no one blinks when one of their editors says, Israel is a brainwashed, psychopathic death cult that might need to be nuked to save the human race. Uh-huh.

5. People say the left and the right can’t agree on anything these days. Well, there is this one thing they agree on. Right-winger Tucker Carlson has Nick Fuentes and Holocaust deniers on his podcast and wonders along with them, who really was the bad guy in World War II?

6. And the New York Times has on their podcast super leftist Hasan Piker, who they call a progressive mind, and who says Zionists should be treated the same as Nazis, which I assume means hung at Nuremberg. That’s what progressive is now? I guess so.

7. The kids are sure into it. They went nuts last year at Coachella for Kneecap. That’s the name of an Irish rap group, as if Ireland hasn’t suffered enough.

8. Their stage set is a sign that says, fuck Israel. And then they send a beach ball around the crowd. Again, ha-ha.

9. Because again, Israel is the only country in the world doing anything bad. 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.So we… So we really could someday soon have the tiki torch Jews will not replace us crowd and the queers for Palestine people working together to elect the next Hitler. There’s a North Carolina teenager who’s been charged with plotting to drive through a synagogue to fulfill her life goal of killing as many Jews as possible.

10. Because a kid’s got to have a dream. I’m just asking why in the world would this be the dream of some kid in North Carolina? Why is it the dream of Dan Bilzerian, who’s running as a Republican to win a House seat in Florida? Who’s Dan Bilzerian? Well, he’s a professional douchebag who’s attracted 30 million followers by doing this all day and posting it. Yes, he’ll fit in fine with the current Congress. And Dan is fairly typical of the guys in the Manosphere when he says “the only real battle in the world today that I see worth fighting is fucking exterminating Israel. I mean, I would sign up tomorrow to go fucking put boots on the ground and go fucking kill Israelis.” Why is this asshole’s life about two things? Getting more Viagra and exterminating the Jews?

11. Israel was founded on the idea that anti-Semitism made a Jewish state unnecessary because Jews would never be safe without one.Can you honestly listen to this rhetoric and not see why that turned out to be true? If you don’t have the right-wingers on your side, if you don’t have the progressives, what do you have? What’s more progressive than college, where professors now say things that would make Kanye wince?

12. Osman Umarji calls Zionists bloodthirsty animals. Who’s he, the leader of ISIS? No, he’s a professor right here in California at UC Irvine. And Candace Owens agrees with his assessment of Jews as animals because she says wherever they go, they bring their filth with them. Another professor, Hamid Dabashi, says of Israels, they have a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture. These are the kind of statements Goebbels would have read and said, no notes.

13. I mean, where are the Jewish space lasers when you need them? Now, there are absolutely horrible things said about Muslims, too. That should also be, of course, roundly condemned, like Republican Congressman Randy Fine saying, if they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one. That’s awful. But it’s not the same as they need to be nuked and let’s exterminate them. This is why Jewish people here and in Europe now say they sometimes hide their identity, afraid that the Star of David will get them attacked, as has happened in almost too many places to mention lately.

14. Leave your Star of David at home. But the keffiyeh? You can wear that anywhere. You can wear it to Fiddler on the Roof and you’ll get applause. Jew hatred isn’t just acceptable now, it’s cool. Celebrities love it and make it trendy. It’s the new Che Guevara T-shirt. The Islamophobia is just as bad argument is simply a false equivalency. Can you name a Jewish professor who talks about Muslims the way they get talked about?

15. No. Anti-Jewish crimes, hate crimes, now outpace anti-Muslim hate crimes 9 to 1. It’s not a contest, and I’m certainly not saying do more of the other.I’m just saying these are the numbers, the facts, the reality. There is a frothing anxiousness for the literal extermination of this one group. And Democrats, where are you?

16. If any other minority group was being talked about this way, you’d break out the kente cloth and have ten benefit concerts. But because you see that so many of your brainwashed-by-TikTok constituents now have an unfavorable view of Israel, you indulge them when you should be correcting them. You don’t tell your woke idiots Israel isn’t a colonizer or an apartheid state or committing genocide, and that if you brats had to spend a week anywhere in the Middle East other than Israel, you would understand what liberalism is not.

17. All the people likely running for president now on the Democratic side want it known they don’t take money from AIPAC, the Israeli lobby, a stanch which gives permission to actual anti-Semites to say, see, we’re right about Israel. That’s dirty money from a dirty country. Oh, please, you take money from crypto and factory farmers and big tech from Diddy and Weinstein and Epstein, but AIPAC is too far?

18. Let me just say this to all who ask me. Why are you harder on the Democrats than you used to be? Until you fix this whole issue, stop asking me.

I’ll analyze this Ethics Quote of the Month in Part II, going up soon.

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Source: RealClearPolitics