Bill Maher probably isn’t making any friends among opponents of America’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza after Friday’s episode of “Real Time,” when he used the “New Rules” segment to compare protesters to Donald Trump.
Maher’s argument was that the protests have largely consisted of ineffective actions that anger possible allies while not advancing their cause. Maher also criticized what he said is support for oppressive regimes that happen to oppose Israel and said that a lot of people involved in the anti-Gaza war protests seem more interested in self promotion than in their cause. Which, so the argument went, makes them a lot like Donald Trump, who Maher called “history’s greatest attention whore.”
Watch the full “New Rules” segment from Bill Maher at the top of the page now.
Maher began by complaining about protest tactics he disagrees with, saying, “Someone needs to tell the people who block traffic in the name of a cause: No one likes you.”
Maher ran down a list of recent such as protests in cities like New York, Chicago and elsewhere, joking that one also happened in Los Angeles on the 405 Freeway “but no one noticed” — the joke being that traffic there is already at a standstill. Always.
“You have to be pretty dumb to think that the way to bring people around to your point of view is to make them late to pick up their kids from daycare. And that’s what most normies are thinking. ‘I had a kid, I have a job and yes, I’m sure there are injustices on both sides in the Middle East as there are injustices all over the world, but I’m going to be late for work,’” Maher said. “Something you protesters on the bridge seem to have the luxury of not having to worry about, which seems kind of privilege-y.”
“Social justice warriors. For a lot of them it seems like it’s more about the ‘warriors’ thing than about whatever the cause is,” Maher continued before pivoting to his argument that the protesters are on the wrong side of things. “If you really cared about apartheid so much — which Israel does not actually practice. Arabs there vote, they serve in parliament, they sit on the Judiciary — wouldn’t you start with this, with the hundreds of millions of women in the world who live under a true apartheid, a gender apartheid of the most brutal kind?”
Maher was referring to the brutal oppression of women in many majority Muslim nations — the host has been a frequent critic of Islam and Muslims. He then began to question the sincerity of protesters generally.
“Are you really speaking truth to power, or do you just think you look cool in a cafe? Yeah. Which is really just the new Che Guevara T-shirt,” Maher continued. “Another historical figure you’d never researched and so think is a hero, but was actually a sadistic, racist monster fighting for communism, the worst form of government ever — but these are small matters.”
This brought him to his arguments connecting the protesters to Donald Trump. “Small matters, when activism merges with narcissism. Less about the cause and more about ‘me, look at me, watch me. And if you liked the way I’m fighting injustice, remember to like and subscribe.’”
Maher spoke against the man who set himself on fire ostensibly to protest Gaza several months back, and then about the delusional man who set himself on fire outside of the New York Trump trial last week. “So you can tell yourself you’re a martyr for the Palestinian cause, but it’s a lot less special when the next guy does it for Stormy Daniels,” Maher said.
Maher then turned attention to the Google employees who staged sit-ins at the company’s New York and Northern California offices recently. It will not come as a surprise that he was in favor of Google firing them.
“Maybe the question that today’s protester needs to ask themselves more than any other is, ‘Why do I care so much about this particular cause?’” Maher said. “North Korea starves its people. China puts them in concentration camps. Myanmar brutalizes the Rohingya. Boko Haram kidnaps whole villages of women. The president of Burundi says gays should be stoned to death because they, quote, ‘deserve it.’ Nothing. Ukraine? Maybe if these Google employees have the slightest idea what kind of fundamentalist oppressive assholes they’re supporting — Hamas, the Houthis, Hezbollah, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard — they might take it a little easier on the world’s greatest monster, ‘Genocide Joe.’”
“Genocide, by the way, is when you want to wipe out an entire people. That’s the stated goal of Hamas. That’s what ‘from the river to the sea’ means. Hamas would do that to Israel, but can’t. Israel could do that to them, but doesn’t,” Maher argued.
“Not to rub it in, but you know who all this posturing for a cause reminds me of? This fat guy from Florida,” Maher said as a photo of Donald Trump appeared on screen, “who’s always pretending that he’s all about the cause of America, making America great again. Plainly, he’s simply history’s greatest attention whore. He’s always finding some new injustice, or Obama’s birth certificate, or rigged elections, learning nothing about it and making it personal. So chew on that, my warrior friends — the person you most resemble is the guy who looks like he’s always jerking off two guys at once.”
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