Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher last Friday where he talked about economic policy and the recent attacks on Gaza.
Maher, a consistently vocal supporter of Israel, told the congressman that he was “incredibly gutsy” for defending Israel’s recent attacks. During their conversation Torres and Maher criticized activists for attempting to draw connections between racist violence in the United States and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
“Somehow the Israeli war we just had got conflated with on social media among the woke…with our racial problems here in America, ” declared Maher. “I just want to say, ‘Kids, what’s going on in Israel has nothing to do with George Floyd.’ It’s not about racism…less than half of Israelis are white. The reason why they’re bombing buildings is not because they are racist, it’s because there are rocket launchers in those buildings.”
Despite the fact that Israel is supported by the vast majority of Democratic lawmakers, Maher inexplicably told Torres that he “might be the only Democrat who has been forthrightly standing with the country who seems to be aligned with our liberal values.”
Torres echoed Maher’s sentiments in response to these assertions. “There’s a difference between promoting peace and inciting hatred,” he told Maher. “Most of the words and ideas and memes that I’ve seen on Twitter are aimed at inciting hatred for Israel rather than promoting peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. My concern is that the hysterical demonization of Israel has set off a global wave of antisemitic violence and vitriol.”
“I do feel like Israel is held to a double standard and there is an undercurrent of antisemitism in the disproportionate criticism of Israel,” he also told Maher.
Torres is one of only two openly gay Black members of Congress and he’s referred to himself as “the embodiment of a pro-Israel progressive.” He’s consistently praised Israel’s record on LGBTQ rights while justifying the country’s system of apartheid. In 2019 he told Jewish Insider that he once confronted a gay activist during a Palestine solidarity protest in New York City.
“At the time I was instinctively pro-Israel — because it has democratic values and institutions — but I had no deep knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, no deep knowledge of intersectionality, or of BDS,” he told the website. “But when I announced that I was going on a delegation to Israel, I became a target of vitriolic protest. I had activists from Jewish Voice for Peace accusing me of pinkwashing, accusing me of aiding and abetting apartheid. I even remember coming across an activist with a shirt that read ‘Queers for Palestine.’ I remember telling the activist, ‘Does the opposite exist, are there Palestinians for queers?’ It was partly a joke but partly a serious observation. I found it utterly baffling that you had LGBT activists doing the bidding of Hamas, which is a terrorist organization that executes LGBT people. And then I came to realize that the reason is intersectionality, that the BDS movement uses intersectionality to penetrate a whole host of self-proclaimed progressive movements.”
You can watch Maher’s entire interview with Torres above.
Maher is an Islamophobe and hardcore, racist Zionist, who has said some of the most vile things about Islam and Muslims ever spoken on TV. Torres is an overly ambitious politician pandering to the lobby for financial support to fulfill his ambitions.
Neither is really worth the time of day, IMHO.
This is from 2019 but it’s as valid now as it was then – a Palestinian-American writes an open letter to Bill Maher about Israel:
https://intpolicydigest.org/an-open-letter-to-bill-maher/
You said of Rep. Omar, “We would agree that Palestinians are victims…but not of Israel. They are victims of other Palestinians.”…With all the aforementioned context I provided, I need you to know the following: That statement was the single most ignorant and immoral thing you have ever said on camera.
Maher spewed Hasbara talking points by the dozens during his pathetic display of support for Israel, and justified all its crimes. Everyone knows he is a staunch zionist, but he outdid himself in whining about what a victim poor Israel is, and that Jews were in these territories even before the Arabs were walking there. He also had the Hasbara mental block in forgetting how the last attack on Gaza happened, by citing once again those rockets fired.
Any intelligent person should ask why those rockets were fired, just like Omar Baddar (IMEU) asked if Israel was just minding its business when those rockets started. Maher did not mention the attack on the Mosque, the evictions, or the building housing the media being bombed. He never mentioned the words occupation, or refer to the babies being killed by precision bombs.
He invited Torres because in him he found the only Democrat willing to go that extra mile for the zionists and equate criticism of Israel to racism. Torres seems to be unable to grasp the fact that Israel wants no peace, they simply want to keep the occupation, land grabs, and human rights abuses going on.
Maher made sure he had his cheering squad who applauded every time he uttered lie after lie. Bill is anti Muslim, and anti Palestinian, and seems quite okay that Israel’s precision bombs took the lives of 68 children. After all, the Israelis had to defend themselves from entire families and little babies.
Bill Maher is a damn racist, and a fool.
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https://off-guardian.org/2021/06/05/the-myth-of-anti-semitic-violence/
“The Myth of ‘Anti-Semitic Violence’”The Guardian, June 5/21, by Michael Lesher
EXCERPT:
“The claim that the world is awash in an outbreak of Jew-hatred is a myth – a fiction cynically recycled every few years as a cover for Israeli brutality.
“That’s easily said. Still, with so many falsehoods parading as news these days, why single out the lie that Jews are ‘under attack’ in what mainstream media monotonously call a ‘wave of anti-Semitic violence’? Why not just ignore it and move on?
“First, because this particular lie is peddled by so powerful an array of propagandists, and swallowed by so many well-meaning people, that a prompt corrective is needed to set the record straight.
“Second, and even more importantly, because the lie is part of an organized campaign to turn reality upside down – to convert supporters of Israeli violence into victims, to blame the real victims for their own suffering, and to subordinate the whole issue of Palestinian human rights to the self-serving dictates of an Israeli-driven propaganda machine as to what does and doesn’t offend delicate Jewish ‘sensibilities.’
“If we allow that kind of lie to stand unchallenged, we’re (quite literally) helping Israel get away with murder.
“Not that you’d know any of this from mainstream media. At the moment, it’s almost impossible to find a ‘respectable’ outlet that isn’t brimming with warnings about a worldwide threat to the Jews – and the fact that the same claim has been peddled before, and debunked before, doesn’t seem to bother the purveyors in the slightest.
“Yet there really ought to be a few raised eyebrows over the gulf dividing the alarmist tone of the ‘reports’ – ‘violence and harassment targeting American Jews…coast-to-coast’ (BBC); “anti-Semitic attacks and slurs in several American cities’ (PBS); ‘a wave of antisemitic attacks…violence and abhorrent rhetoric’ (National Public Radio); ‘Jews have been threatened and attacked’ (New York Times) – from the remarkably murky details purportedly proving them. (cont’d)
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“The May 26 issue of Ami Magazine, a popular Orthodox Jewish weekly, claims to have information about ‘several scuffles…including in Toronto, Montreal and New York’ and insists that ‘Jews were beaten at several of these events.’
“Ah, but which ones? Ami avoids giving specifics – and a closer look suggests that the facts aren’t on offer because they don’t exist.
“Consider Toronto. What was originally described as an “anti-Semitic attack” in that city turned out to have been a fracas instigated by the notorious Jewish Defense League – listed by the FBI as a terrorist organization – in which the Jew identified as the ‘victim’ first swung a large club, then brandished a knife, before being ‘attacked.’ (That didn’t stop Ontario Premier Doug Ford from condemning ‘anti-Semitism’ after the event – a statement he refused to withdraw even when presented with video evidence of the behavior of the ‘victim.’)
“And Montreal? The circumstances of that ‘attack’ are scarcely less turbid. The claims of ‘violence’ against Jews were reported entirely by pro-Israel organizations and their supporters; given the heavy police presence in the area at the time, the absence of corroborating testimony renders the story rather hard to credit.
“Meanwhile, a similar report of an ‘anti-Semitic attack’ in Los Angeles (also cited in Ami) was promptly debunked by Richard Silverstein, whose Tikun Olam blog has an excellent track record for accuracy. Here is Silverstein’s report as of May 25th: “You may have read about the purported ‘wave’ of anti-Semitic incidents sweeping the world in response to Israel’s attack on Gaza. Don’t you believe it. One of the main incidents supposedly involved a group of Jews eating outdoors at an LA sushi restaurant. The media narrative says that a car full of Palestinians waving the Palestinian fla[g] shouted ‘fuck you’ at the diners and then threw a bottle at them.
“My LA Jewish friends who’ve seen video of the incident and spoken to Palestinians involved (who were never interviewed by the media) say that a group of right-wing Iranian Jews saw the car with the flags, shouted ‘fuck you’ at the Palestinians, then threw a bottle from their table at the car.”