Debunking Bill Maher’s Dehumanizing Caricature Of Gaza

A segment on Bill Maher’s HBO show, Real Time, has recently gone viral on social media and features him making a range of arguments about how Israelis “look like us, in most ways, values wise”, while the culture in Gaza is painted as backwards. He also compares Hamas and the Israeli government, presenting Tel Aviv as a beacon of light in comparison to Hamas, which he depicts as being the equivalent of savages.

this is amazing. Here’s Bill Maher, with the good “progressive” Matt Duss sitting and nodding along, saying Palestinians are all pedophiles. This is coming from a Zionist as he’s defending Israel which is literally a safe haven for pedophiles and gives them honorary awards pic.twitter.com/vlHbmw2vIe

— ☀️👀 (@zei_squirrel) June 2, 2024

The original clip, from Bill Maher’s show, which has been consistently pro-Israeli over the years, actually aired over 7 months ago and has recently resurfaced in a major way online, drawing both agreement from some and the ire of others. Maher infamously gave a softball interview to Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in October of 2022 when he was out of office and went on a US media tour to promote his new book. Bill Maher jokingly asked Netanyahu “I have three questions for you: Are you massacring Palestinians, are you ethnic cleansing, and are you an apartheid state?“, to which he replied “no, no and no” after which applause broke out and Maher moved on to another softball question.

Although Bill Maher strikes a stance of protecting Israel to the hilt, while attempting to blame every Israeli problem on Benjamin Netanyahu, he tries to come off as an edgy truth teller. This act makes him a rather effective propagandist for the Israeli war machine and that is why it is important to point out his distortions, lies, and attempts to package a genocide as plausible. Despite his language clearly striking an orientalist, Islamophobic and racist tone, simply labelling him as such is both giving him an easy way out, allowing him to call his critics “woke” and fails to debunk his propaganda for those who aren’t aware of the reality of the Palestine-Israel conflict. So, let’s go through Maher’s list.

“Religious Tolerance”

“Religious tolerance. That doesn’t exist in Gaza” says Bill Maher, who goes on to say “you are either a Muslim or an Infidel and you better be a Muslim”. Contrary to Bill Maher’s ridiculous claims, there is a small but thriving Christian Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip, many of whom have now been unfortunately killed by Israeli airstrikes or driven out of the territory during the ongoing war.

Palestinian Christians have always been an essential part of Palestine’s society and while a majority of them that still live there are located in the West Bank, there has always been a Christian community in Gaza. Over 1,000 Christians lived in Gaza before Israel’s attack began in October, of which 70% were Greek Orthodox and the remaining population were Roman Catholics. The Christians in Gaza were always known to be wealthy and well educated. On a personal note, my mother-in-law told me that, growing up in Gaza, every single one of her teachers at the local UN school she attended in her refugee camp were Christians. It is a well known fact that as a financially prosperous community, the Christians of Gaza have a better chance than Muslim Palestinians to leave Gaza, as the cost of fleeing is extremely high, starting with bribing the Egyptian border guards that demand between 5,000 to 8,000 USD in order to allow a single person to leave.

There are also historic churches in Gaza, two of which the Israelis bombed and destroyed during the ongoing war. In December, Israeli soldiers even shot dead an elderly Palestinian Christian woman and her daughter while they were seeking refuge in Gaza City’s ‘Holy Family Church’. On the other hand, Hamas not only publicly supports the full rights of Palestinian Christians, as per its 2017 Charter, it actively congratulates the Palestinian Christians on their holidays, while making sure to frequently mention the rights of Christians in their press briefings. The head of Hamas, Ismail Hanniyeh, has even performed various public visits to Churches in Gaza, while Hamas condemns frequent Israeli attacks on Christian Holy Sites in occupied East Jerusalem.

Israeli propagandists will often point to there being no Jews living in Gaza, as proof that Hamas is somehow not tolerant of Judaism, to which Hamas has responded by affirming that its problem is with Zionism and not the Jewish faith. However, it would be rather foolish to take the word of Hamas as proof here, yet the accounts of the various anti-Zionist Jews who have travelled to Gaza and been treated well by the authorities does support this claim, yet this is not enough to close the argument. It is important to note that Israel makes it illegal for its own Jewish citizens to enter Gaza, or any Palestinian controlled territory for that matter.

While the issue of Christian Palestinians in Gaza could be dedicated an entire book, Bill Maher’s argument about Muslims and “infidels” is not only false, it seeks to play on stereotypes created about Muslims and Islamic cultures in general, in order to make it seem as if Palestinians in Gaza will kill you for not belonging to their faith — a lie that Israel and its representatives are all too happy to lean into. 

“Female Freedom”

On the topic of female freedom, the Western regimes love to employ what is often termed “colonial feminism” in order to argue their superiority over other nations. While there are a mountain of different issues surrounding women’s rights everywhere in the world, and Gaza is in no way an exception to this, the idea that Hamas is implementing some uniquely evil system is just ridiculous.

At this stage of Bill Maher’s list, he doesn’t elaborate on the points and simply states them as fact. This is likely because he had already used his “the Muslim and the Infidel” talking point, conjuring up the false image of Gaza being a society of Bid Laden lovers. Maher didn’t tell us why he thinks women in Gaza don’t have freedom, but we can safely assume that he doesn’t see a near 19-year-long siege and genocide as factoring into this. The most common talking point normally surrounds women’s clothing, on which the Western World likes to point to laws implementing Hijab, or the Islamic headscarf for women. In Gaza there is no such Hijab Law, although the society is socially conservative and there is often great pressure for women to cover their hair. Yet, the way women are judged for how they dress and behave changes depending on where you are in Gaza, some areas are much more socially conservative and other areas are not.

If we are to look at the Israelis, the more liberal Israeli Jews who live in areas like the city of Tel Aviv will dress openly, whereas the more socially conservative Jewish communities will not allow their women to show their hair at all for instance, even to their own male family members. In Muslim households, women will show their hair to their immediate male relatives and sometimes wider family, wearing the headscarf while outside of a family setting.

With this being said, even if Gaza had a Hijab Law like Iran or Saudi Arabia, this is not a justification for bombing civilian areas indiscriminately. You do not bring about female freedom by mass murdering over 10,000 women.

“Free And Fair Elections”

This point is perhaps the most ironic, as both Israel and the United States are the reason why there are no elections in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem at all. When Hamas won in what former US President, Jimmy Carter, literally called a “free and fair election” in 2006, Washington, Brussels and Tel Aviv all imposed sanctions on the Hamas government. The US, with the help of Israel, even plotted a coup against the democratically elected Hamas government in Gaza in 2007, supplying Palestinian Authority (PA) Preventative Security Force head, Mohammed Dahlan, with weapons and financing to depose Hamas.

Hamas caught wind of the 2007 coup plot and foiled it, to which Israel responded by tightening its blockade on the Gaza Strip. The last major attempt for Hamas and their Fatah rivals (who run the West Bank PA) to form a unity government was dismantled after Israel launched a war against Gaza in 2014, which scholar Norman Finkelstein argued was due to the threat of the “Palestinian peace offensive”.

Hamas has never stopped calling for free and fair elections, anyone who listens to what the movement’s leaders have to say will know this well. The one who is threatened by Palestinian national elections is Israel, not Hamas, who would most likely win again in a landslide according to all available polling data.

Meanwhile, on the Israeli side of politics, there are literally hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in East Jerusalem, which Israel has annexed and declared part of its territory officially. The Palestinians of East Jerusalem are neither Palestinian Authority passport holders, nor are they allowed to hold Israeli passports, they are given “Jerusalem ID” that the Israelis can revoke if they choose and are not allowed to participate in Israeli elections.

“Free Speech”

In Gaza, people are not shy about publicly criticizing Hamas and they will literally scream insults at Hamas members, from inside their homes in some instances. While there is no law preventing Palestinians from criticizing the Hamas government, there have been cases where police forces loyal to Hamas have detained and abused citizens for acting against them, something that cannot be denied. However, it is not out of the norm for police to harass and even harm dissidents in the Western World, as many citizens of western nations who are critical of their government know very well. Really, the case that can be made against Hamas when it comes to free speech can be made anywhere against just about any government.

Israeli occupation forces brutally and violently suppressed protests by orthodox anti-Zionist Jews. pic.twitter.com/WQUuD9ernA

— Kuffiya (@Kuffiyateam) January 10, 2023

If you contrast Gaza with Israel, however, the Israeli regime may allow Jewish Israeli citizens the right to free speech on most occasions, with most of the exceptions to this rule coming during the current war, yet for non-Jewish Israelis there is clearly no such thing as free speech. Here I would refer to the following reports of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Israel’s top rights group B’Tselem. Israel has openly defined itself, as per the 2018 ‘Nation State Law’ to be a State in which only Jewish people have the right to self determination and we see that now more than ever, as Palestinian citizens of Israel are being arrested for liking social media posts and sharing content online.

“Gay Rights“

On this issue, gay rights do exist as a category in Gaza under Hamas rule. It is viewed by both the Hamas government and most of the socially conservative population of Gaza, whether Christian or Muslim, as a sin according to religion. Yet the argument often made by Zionists, that if you are gay you will be thrown from a roof, is completely inaccurate and cheap propaganda. There are gay Palestinians in Gaza that are open to their friends and members of their families about it, but this is only in the more liberal areas of the Gaza Strip. In a socially conservative society, like all religious societies on earth, being openly gay is difficult.

This being said, the Israeli attempts to Pinkwash their war crimes in Gaza, while pretending to be so liberal and open to gay rights themselves is not rooted in fact. Gay marriage is illegal in Israel. And while they may advertise their large gay pride parades in Tel Aviv as evidence of their pro-LGBTQ stances, this is actually not tolerated at all by large segments of the Israeli society. In fact, the second largest Israeli Party in Netanyahu’s ruling coalition, Religious Zionism, is led by a man who openly brags about being homophobic.

“Pedophilia” 

Again, on this point, Bill Maher tries to play on the ignorance of his audience, following this point up by saying “child brides and so forth”. So, right off the bat here, the legal age for a marriage to be consummated in the Palestinian Territories is 18 years of age in the West Bank, while in Gaza it is 17 for girls and 18 for boys. Although there have been cases of girls being married off at younger ages, this is not common and is not legally binding.

In Israel, the age for marriage is also 18, despite there also being rare cases of child marriages there too. However, on the question of actual pedophilia, Israel has also been declared a haven for Jewish pedophiles, who will often escape pedophilia charges in other countries by fleeing to Israel. Unlike Gaza, there have been countless cases of horrifying pedophile gang rapes in Israel and all sorts of other atrocities of this kind, which are so out of control that nearly half of the sexual abuse cases between 2019 and 2020 involved underage girls.

The reason Bill Maher mentioned child brides, is just so he can evoke the stereotypical Muslim terrorist archetype in his audience’s minds. It is not only that he is lying here, he is trying to stir up bigotry in order to justify Israeli actions in Gaza.

Israeli “Look Like Us”

Before Maher listed off all of the points addressed above, he prefaced what he said by talking about “values and customs”, mentioning that the Israelis “look like us”. He is basically trying to say that the Israelis are like us, they are western people who share American liberal values, whereas the Palestinians are a society that is alien and immoral. As demonstrated briefly above, the Israelis are not a perfect representation of American liberal values at all, they are an ethnostate that is built on the idea of Jewish supremacy and does not afford equal rights at all.

Bill Maher is simply lying to justify Israel’s actions in Gaza. He does this by dehumanizing Palestinians. As is the case in all genocides and wars of aggression, you can’t do it to equal human beings, so you have to transform the other into the equivalent of unhinged barbaric animals. How do you do that? You lie.