Cross posted at the MRC's NewsBusters blog
On Friday's Real Time show on HBO, liberal host Bill Maher called out both anti-Israel liberals and the media for ignoring the deeply embedded anti-Semitism in the Middle East that has thwarted attempts to make a peace agreement between Israel and Palestinian Arabs.
As he brought up the controversy around whether the anti-Israel political activity of Democratic congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib justifies barring them from entering Israel, Maher asked his panel members whether the BDS boycott movement against Israel had any merit.
After his three guests declined to give a direct answer on the issue, Maher bluntly stated:
It's a bulls*** purity test. BDS is a bulls*** purity test by people who want to appear woke but actually slept through history class. It's predicated on this notion, I think, that the Jews in Israel are mostly white, the Palestinians are browner, so they must be innocent and correct, and the Jews must be wrong. As if the occupation came right out of the blue, that this completely peaceful people found themselves occupied. Forget about the intifadas and the suicide bombings and the rockets and how many wars.
Maher then took aim at the media for ignoring the anti-Semitic views of those who founded the BDS movement:
Let me read Omar Barghouti, is one of the co-founders of the movement. His quote. 'No rational Palestinian … would ever accept a Jewish state in Palestine. So that's where that comes from, this movement, someone who doesn't even want a Jewish state at all. Somehow this side never gets presented in the America media. I think it's very odd.
A bit later, the HBO host read statistics on how many Jews used to live in a number of Muslim countries before they were expelled, and brought up Saudi Arabia's current practice of barring Jews from entering their country.