I’m not sure whether it says more about Bill Maher or Hollywood liberals that the former has become one of the sole voices of reason among the latter.
Maher, longtime host of HBO’s “Real Time” and now a prolific podcaster, has long used his platform to call out the excesses of his own camp, but the divergence has become more apparent over the past few years — to the point where the substance-friendly Playboy Mansion frequent-flier is often the only voice of reason in an especially unreasonable milieu.
Consider his interview with comedienne and actress Sandra Bernhard, still apparently relevant after all these years. Bernhard — best known for her role on the ABC sitcom “Roseanne” and more recently (if not more famously) seen on “Pose” and “American Horror Story” — visited Maher for an episode of his podcast “Club Random with Bill Maher” and ended up looking like an insulated apologist for the worst elements of anti-Semitism on the American left.
This is doubly troubling since Bernhard is Jewish. However, she seemed upset that “everybody’s, like, up in arms now about being Jewish.”
Yes, unbelievable. Widespread prejudice towards one’s ethno-religious group — particularly when that prejudice is either condoned or minimized by those on the left — does tend to do that to a person.
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“Suddenly, everybody’s discovered their Judaism,” Bernhard continued, noting that she’d been Bat Mitzvahed and went to Hebrew school, but she didn’t seem to agree with anyone defending the state of Israel these days.
“I don’t feel persecuted,” Bernhard said.
“Well, not persecuted perhaps, but there is an anti-Semitism afoot in this country that we haven’t had in a very long time,” a cautious Maher, also Jewish by birth, said.
“I tell you where it comes from, it comes from the right-wing, the extreme –” Bernhard said, before Maher interjected: “No, it doesn’t.“
Is the left leaving Bill Maher behind?
“There’s anti-Semitism on both sides; the right-wing has the ‘Jews will not replace us’ nonsense,” he continued, referring to the chant of the white supremacist protesters at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.
“The left wing is even worse,” he added. “That is coming down from elite colleges who see everything only through a racial lens.
“They are stupid. They don’t know history. They think everything is about colonizers and racists and how awful America is — and America has done some bad things, but to drag Israel into this as the stand in for every bad thing white people ever did, this is not any more complicated to most of these collage kids than ‘the Palestinians are brown and poor and the Israelis are rich and white,’ even though half of them are not rich and certainly not half are white,” he added.
Bernhard was willing to meet Maher on what she thought was halfway, asking, ” Can we get on the same page and agree that Benjamin Netanyahu is a s***-disturber and needs to be yanked out of Israel? … He is solidly to blame for everything that’s happening right now.”
“He’s so not to blame for everything that’s happening. That’s the fault of the Palestinian people and the religion of Islam, which gets lost in all of this,” Maher said. Bernhard looked confused, so he said, “Islam? You’ve heard of it?”
“What does that have to do with –” she said.
“You said Netanyahu was mostly to blame,” Maher said. “Right now is happening because, for years, Hamas took aid money and instead of buying food with it and building buildings and hospitals, they bought bombs and made tunnels.”
Bernhard continued to insist that Netanyahu was the root problem; Maher dropped an uncomfortable truth for her when he noted that the Israeli prime minister is “not long for the job — but what everyone who’s been to Israel will tell you, my dear, is that even when he goes, the Israelis are completely for the policy [he’s pursued]. That will not change.”
WARNING: The following video contains graphic language that some viewers will find offensive.
The sad thing is that this is essentially the unthinking opinion of a wide swath of the Hollywood left, who are completely cut off from the anti-Semitic culture on their own side by their celebrity. They’ve had the media to assure them in soothing voices that, as much as Republicans are “pouncing” on the activity of a few bad apples on college campuses, the issue is really what some tiki torch marchers did in Virginia seven years ago.
The problem is that the right is willing to disavow the far-right; I know of no conservative who the vast majority of us would hold in good stead that ascribes to those beliefs or gives succor to those who do. On the left, the far-left anti-Semites have become mainstream — and we have Sandra Bernhard and the like telling us that no, the real problem here isn’t Hamas or the campus left, but Benjamin Netanyahu. Because of course.
There’s a reason why Bill Maher suddenly sounds like the sane classical liberal in a room full of raving lefties: That’s because, when it’s a sea of rabid believers on his side of the aisle, it’s not hard to be the normal one.
