If you never thought you’d hear these words, you may
want to prepare your fainting couch: During Friday’s edition of HBO’s Real
Time, Bill Maher agreed with a senior editor from conservative website The
Daily Caller. Not only that, but his audience applauded the conservative writer
on multiple occasions. While disagreeing on several other issues during the
program, Daily Caller senior editor Jamie Weinstein and Maher found themselves
in-sync over the justifications for the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip as
well as who’s to blame for the civilian deaths incurred by the Palestinians.
“I feel terrible for a
Palestinian child who dies,” Maher said, “but if it’s your father, your
brother, your uncle who’s firing those rockets into Israel, whose fault is it really?
Do you really expect the Israelis not to retaliate?” The audience
cheered Maher’s suggestion.
Weinstein agreed, noting that the Hamas charter
explicitly calls for the destruction of all Jews. Fellow panelist Jane Harman
chimed in to say she actually agreed with Charles Krauthammer‘s take that while
Israel builds an “Iron Dome” to defend its citizens from missiles, Hamas uses
its citizens to defend its missiles.
That line drew applause as well.
Maher went on to suggest that, out of necessity,
Israel has become very good at defending itself, largely because of the Jewish
expertise in science. “Jews have, I think, 155 Nobel
Prizes, Muslims have two,” he said. “That seems like kind of a big advantage
for team Hebrew.”
The surprising agreement continued again when
Weinstein interjected that Israel continually has the public advantage because
its government “believes in life.” Their “Iron Dome” technology is explicitly
designed to protect Israelis from missile threats, he said, while Palestinian
leaders use their funds to build tunnels to attack Israel and hide weapons,
“not protect their people.”
More applause from the Maher audience. Like we’re in
an alt-universe, right?
While it may be somewhat baffling to see the famously
liberal comedian agree with a conservative pundit on a hot topic like Israel,
his views were made somewhat explicit in this controversial tweet from
Thursday:
Dealing w/ Hamas is like
dealing w/ a crazy woman who's trying to kill u - u can only hold her
wrists so long before you have to slap her
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