Media Analysis

Why does Bill Maher get to run anti-Semitic jokes with Bari Weiss, when Ilhan Omar can’t say a word about Israel?

New York Times staff editor Bari Weiss is on a hell of a roll these days, having just published a book called “How to Fight anti-Semitism”. Weiss’s own paper, the New York Times, judges the book to be “a brave book”, because Weiss is ostensibly walking into perilous intellectual territory:

Should she have to fear ostracism or damage to her journalistic reputation for pointing out that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, while theoretically distinguishable, have long merged into a single ugly phenomenon?

Presenting Zionist apologists like Weiss as being in danger is laughable. She is representing a privileged mainstream view, one that is applied by the conservative left as well as the right in attempt to moderate voices that are starting to challenge Zionism. That’s the view of those who try to silence Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, that’s the view of those who try to discredit Jeremy Corbyn in UK. The new voices who break through the orthodoxy are currently in the minority, but Weiss is now trying to portray herself as a representative of an oppressed and persecuted minority:

I meet such people in every Jewish community I speak to. They tend to wait until late in the evening, after the crowd has thinned out or after they’ve had a few glasses of wine, to make their confession. But the confession is always the same: I’m in the closet. It’s not their sexuality or gender expression they are closeting. It is their Jewishness and their Zionism.

So now, the poor Bari Weiss was interviewed by Bill Maher on HBO – you know, giving a voice to those who have none, as it were.

And here’s the big irony. This 8 minute interview is supposed to be about anti-Semitism – and yet, Bill Maher is repeatedly making anti-Semitic jokes, to which both Bari Weiss, the audience and the other guests laugh.

After Weiss speaks about the historical traces of anti-Semitism (referring to the killing of Jesus), Maher says:

Well, I am no expert on Judaism, although I try never to pay retail. 

This is a big moment. Everyone is laughing, the audience, the guests, including Weiss, there’s clapping – it goes on for more than 10 seconds. Weiss disturbs it with a little remark:

You’re going to get into trouble for that…

But it’s clearly not a condemnation – she keeps on laughing, she’s clearly not suggesting that she herself would condemn him, but that others might. And Maher dismisses it completely:

Oh, like I could give a fuck. Oh, like this week would be different.

So it’s not really a big deal. Let’s remember that as we move on.

Immediately after, Maher promotes the talk about supposed anti-Semitism on the left, and Weiss picks it up to call Jeremy Corbyn an anti-Semite, flat out:

Just look at the [UK] Labour party which is run by an anti-Semite, Jeremy Corbyn. 

At this point there is one person clapping in the audience. Weiss stops herself from continuing, turns around and says “thank you” to that person. Bill Maher uses this to make his next anti-Semitic remark:

One Jew, isn’t that great, one Jew.

You see, without knowing the person, Maher suggests that a mark of being Jewish, is to trash Jeremy Corbyn with false and McCarthyite accusations of being an anti-Semite, since he has pro-Palestinian leanings and challenges in some way the Zionist orthodoxy. Maher is thus suggesting that the disgusting bigotry presented by Weiss is a trait common to all Jews (the many Jews who support Corbyn must be the ‘wrong kind of Jews’), and if you cheer this bigotry, you must be a Jew.

Maher repeated that ‘Jew’ theme later on. The context here, on which I will expand, was Maher’s reciting of false anti-Palestinian trash which was supposed to serve as a history lesson, to which Weiss kept nodding:

Let’s not forget, that first of all, 97% of the West Bank was on the table in the 90’s, in the Oslo Accords, and they [the Palestinians] did not take the deal. Also the West Bank was controlled by Jordan for 19 years – where is the Palestinian state then? These are things you don’t hear in the American media.

Well, this is a seriously flawed account. This is incitement. And although Maher says we don’t hear it in the American media, it’s coming from Bill Maher on HBO, which is American media. First of all, the Oslo accords of 1993 and 1995 didn’t lay 97% of the West Bank on the table. They were not final territorial peace agreements, they were only interim agreements which eventually, in the course of 5 years were meant to lead to an actual peace and territorial negotiation. And the Palestinians did “take the deal”. In fact, they recognized Israel by treaty already in 1993, and they went with this deal in hope that it would lead to a sovereign Palestine, even though Rabin assured Israel in 1995 that it would lead to “less than a state”. In the meanwhile, the West Bank was carved up into areas A, B, and C, where Israel controlled most of the West Bank fully with Area C, which covered over 60% of it and encircled the Palestinian enclaves (Areas B under joint control, urban areas A under Palestinian Authority control). But Israel did not ratify the prescribed withdrawals, and the freeze of the Oslo Accords came to serve as a blueprint for Israel’s further expansion, with massive ethnic cleansing in area C and now talks of annexing it, coming in different forms from both the government as well the opposition.

I don’t know where Maher gets that 97% number. Maybe from the “Clinton Parameters” of 2000. But even Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, with the famous “generous offer” of 2000, did not actually offer more than 77% of the West Bank for the first 6 to 20 years, since he insisted on retaining control of the Jordan Valley for that period, and with that prospective 10% addition at some point, it would have added up to 86%. In the end, it would have been a set of Bantustans, something that even Barak’s Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben Ami admits he would have rejected were he Palestinian.

But Bill Maher doesn’t seem to know that history so well, maybe because they don’t talk about it that much in American media. Nonetheless, it’s completely safe for him to twist it like that, blame it on the Palestinians as if he was some Ehud Barak going “no partner for peace”, and Bari Weiss nods.

So, after all this awful background, the anti-Semitic joke. Several people are now clapping to Maher’s anti-Palestinian incitement. Maher is pleased:

Alright, now we have 5 Jews.

Weiss giggles.

Once again, per Maher, if you are anti-Palestinian, you must be Jewish.

You see, Bari Weiss doesn’t have a problem with this, she goes along with it. She can’t even see the anti-Semitism reeking from Maher, because it serves her purposes.

But when it doesn’t serve her purposes, Weiss bends over backwards to address an anti-Semitic motive to critique of Israel. Like what she did against Ilhan Omar, charging Omar of “anti-Semitic slander” for a 2012 Facebook post that related to Israel’s Gaza onslaught, where Omar wrote that “Israel hypnotizes the world”. Weiss invented a whole new myth to accommodate her charge – the “myth of Jewish hypnosis” – even though Omar was speaking about Israel, not Jews.

When it suits them, these pundits, like Bari Weiss, like Forward editor Batya Ungar-Sargon, make the connection between Jews and Israel in no-time, accusing the critics of anti-Semitism, accusing them by association of using “anti-Semitic tropes” and what not. But when the nerve of the talk is supportive of Zionism, even when it is rabid Zionist, bigoted and false propaganda, the anti-Semitic tropes just pass by with a laugh, one by one.  

We can be sure that Bari Weiss is not going to write an article titled “Bill Maher and the myth of Jewish sleaziness and bigotry”. That’s not going to happen, because Maher was supportive of Weiss and her advocacy. Weiss is being celebrated in the mainstream media and given a prime position as staff editor in the New York Times – top of the world, right? And she still has the nerve to portray herself as a persecuted person. The sad irony is that Bari Weiss can’t recognize anti-Semitism, even though she’s written a whole book on it. And even if she does sniff it, she won’t call it out, not when it serves her Zionist, anti-Palestinian purposes. Because in the end, Weiss is not on about anti-Semitism – she’s just using the old trick in order to protect Zionism. Oh, I forgot – she’s a liberal, because she opposes Netanyahu…

H/t Ofer Neiman

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WRT the %”offers” over the years. Nice collection of maps here demonstrating that it’s always the SAME offer. The west bank minus anything that makes having a viable state possible including water and arable land. Quite aside from that, it’s not much of an offer – something that ISN”T yours in the first place – is it? But intellectual dishonesty is a trademark of both the people in this article. Along with cowardice,hubris, stupidity and pretentiousness.

From the link:
1. Israel has, and has only ever had for the past 40 years, one plan for the Occupied Territories. The plan is to control permanently the whole West Bank, but to avoid annexing the people who live there (and who would simply vote Zionist control over them out of existence if they ever enjoyed equal rights) by forcing them to leave or – for the really stubborn ones – by confining them in impoverished reservations and calling this “Palestine”.

The key to creating these impoverished reservations is that Israel must directly annex those parts of the West Bank that – if relinquished to the Palestinians – would make their state a viable concern. In practical terms, that means:
severing Arab East Jerusalem entirely from the Palestinians of the rest of the West Bank (because East Jerusalem is the economic powerhouse of the Occupied Territories, generating more than one-third of GDP, and is the key to economic viability for a Palestinian state). You do this by building a “Jerusalem envelope” or ring of settlements around the eastern edge of Arab East Jerusalem – like Gilo, Har Homa, East Tapiyot, Ramat Eshkol, and more than a dozen others – so that when you magnanimously declare you will settle for annexing “only” the settlement blocs you also happen to be entirely severing East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank. You didn’t really think the location of the major settlement blocs was decided by chance, did you?)
annexing the Jordan Valley, which ensures the West Bank has no land border with the outside world, leaving it entirely dependent on Israeli largesse. (And seeing as the Jordan Valley is the breadbasket of the West Bank, annexing it also leaves the Palestinian reservations entirely dependent on Israel even for food).
annexing those parts of the West Bank that control the Palestinians’ water supply (you do this by building major Israeli settlements – like Ariel in the northern West Bank – on key points for dominating the West Bank acquifer, so that when you magnanimously declare you will settle for annexing “only” the settlement blocs you also happen to be annexing the water supply they control; you didn’t really think the location of the major settlement blocs was decided by chance, did you?
annexing those parts of the West Bank that allow the Palestinians meaningful territorial contiguity (you do this by building major Israeli settlements – like the largely empty but super-sized Maale Adumim, which extends from East Jerusalem almost to Jericho – at the narrow point of the central West Bank, so that when you magnanimously declare you will settle for annexing “only” the settlement blocs you also happen to be cutting the West Bank in two; you didn’t really think the location of the major settlement blocs was decided by chance, did you?)
What this all looks like on the ground was first mapped out immediately after the Occupation began, with the Allon Plan of 1967 (click all maps to enlarge):
https://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/news/2008/08/treading-water.html

Thanks for the analysis; it must have been tedious to do, but worthwhile. This sort of thing is so common in American life that one hardly notices it, unless it is pointed out. It shows that the human mind is smart enough to manage without effort the contortions demanded by Newspeak taboos. Much as one can negotiate the drive to the office each day with some less-than-fully conscious part of the mind. Of course, the key factor is that there are different rules for different people.

I think I have heard that 97 percent claim made, probably about Taba. It’s been a long time since I read about that–people used to argue against the myths propounded about how Arafat was totally at fault for turning down a generous offer yada,yada, yada. But people don’t talk as much about that anymore and I’ve forgotten some of the details about who said what. What you generally hear now is that the Palestinians were given generous peace offers three times (or some such number) and turned them all down. The details don’t even matter. It’s a trope. The moral is supposed to be that if Palestinians suffer, it’s all their own fault.

Bari Weiss is antisemitic in one of the ways that Trump is–that is, she thinks a good Jew is one that supports Israel. Trump presumably learned this from his ambassador to Israel (and bankruptcy lawyer) David Friedman, who said that JStreet people are worse than kapos.

A reviewer at Slate was a bit gentler about it than I just was, but he observed that Bari echoes Trump in that fashion.

https://slate.com/culture/2019/09/bari-weiss-how-to-fight-antisemitism-review.html

Around 4:40 Maher says “The Jews, 70 years ago, said: let’s share it [the land].” And that’s the mainstream trope: the Jews just came back to their ancestral homeland and wanted to live in peace among the natives, but no, they were met with rabid anti-Semitism!

The first part of Ben White’s “Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide” examines the motives of Israel’s founders – here are some gems from the book (references and links are provided):

“If there are other inhabitants there, they must be transferred to some other place. We must take over the land” – Menahem Ussishkin, chairman of the JNF, 1930

” ‘Disappearing’ the Arabs lay at the heart of the Zionist dream, and was also a necessary condition of its realization” – Tom Segev, historian

“We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from the people inhabiting it” – Moshe Sharrett, Israel’s second prime minister.