Jerry Seinfeld is an American Jew who supports Israel, rejects woke pieties about privilege, identity and oppression – and is, thus, rightly unashamed of his earned success. In other words, he’s, by definition, the ‘wrong’ kind of Jew for the progressive, anti-Zionist left.
Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi devoted a recent piece (“Jerry Seinfeld’s lurch to the right now includes mourning ‘dominant masculinity'”, June 1st) to attacking the 70-year-old comedian, based in part on a podcast interview with him by journalist Bari Weiss, which covered his recent visit to Israel, and meetings he had with Oct. 7th survivors and families of those still held hostage by Hamas.
The experience elicited a rare show of emotion by the normally unflappable performer.
Mahdawi, whose column is devoted to revealing ‘The Week in Patriarchy’, is, even by Guardian standards, an especially dishonest writer/activist, and she was true to form in her latest hatchet job, falsely accusing Seinfeld of misogyny, while continuing to remain silent about Hamas’s rape, torture and mutilation of Israeli women and girls.
However, even more shamefully, he accuses Seinfeld of “cheerleading…genocidal violence” and “joking about suffering children in Gaza”.
Here’s the relevant part:
But while Seinfeld has never been a bleeding-heart liberal, it feels like he’s never been quite so vocally anti-progressive as he is now. Ever since 7 October, Seinfeld has advocated loudly for Israel’s collective punishment of Palestinians, demonized pro-Palestinian protesters, and joked about suffering children in Gaza. “Save the children of Gaza,” he said in a mocking voice after getting heckled by pro-Palestinian protesters at a show. Along with cheerleading what the United Nations human rights council has described as genocidal violence, he has also apparently decided that a great tactic for publicizing his much-panned movie about Pop-Tarts is by complaining about the left.
Let’s unpack this:
First, like most people outside of Mahdawi’s anti-Zionist bubble, Seinfeld’s reaction to the worst antisemitic atrocity since the Holocaust was to express support for the Israeli victims and support the war against the genocidal terrorist group responsible for it. The incident involving the ‘pro-Palestinian protesters’ in question involved two Israel haters interrupting a performance of his in Norfolk, Virginia to scream at Seinfeld himself – again, because he supports Israel in their war with Hamas – that he’s a “genocide supporter”, and that everyone in the crowd is a genocide supporter. A second protester interrupted the show, screaming ‘Save the Children of Gaza’.
As you can see in the video published at various media outlets, Seinfeld did not “joke about suffering children of Gaza”. He reacted to the interruption by rightly mocking the protester for evidently believing that harassing a Jewish performer in the US is going to help Palestinians.
Next, in the paragraph cited above, Mahdawi falsely claims that the “United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) described” Israel’s war as “genocidal violence”. If you open the link, it clearly shows that it wasn’t the UNHRC itself which charged Israel with genocide. The accusation was made by the widely discredited UN ‘Special Rappatour’ Francesca Albanese – in a report to the UNHRC.
As CAMERA has demonstrated, Albanese has engaged in explicit antisemitic rhetoric and actually legitmised the Oct. 7 massacre – hatred which elicited rare condemnations from both France and Germany.
However, even leading Mahdawi’s lie about the UNHRC aside, the most disturbing phenomenon is revealed by both the protesters and the Guardian columnist, engaging in a cruel and morally grotesque inversion that’s peddled continually at the outlet: giving the true genocidaires, torturers and rapists of Hamas a free pass, while projecting the group’s barbarism onto both Israel and most diaspora Jews.
Mahdawi’s isn’t merely smearing and demonising one American Jew. By imputing an almost cartoonish evil onto the Jewish state, she’s effectively anathematising Zionism and, by extension, Jewish identity itself.
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