Bill Maher, DARVO, and media distortion

Every accusation is a confession. What do I mean by that? Well let’s break it down. Every time a guilty party accuses its victim of a crime, it is a projection of what the accuser is in fact doing to the party being accused. And the effect of that on the victim is complex, ranging from induced paranoia and fear (you feel like you’re literally going crazy), to a sense of total helplessness as you’re catapulted into a uneven playing field of he says/she says.

Every accusation is a confession.

Israel is in a he says/she says fight with the world’s media right now. Keep the above rule in mind as I run through some of the biggest mainstream stories and controversies from the last week.

Over the weekend, the New York Times published a story here appearing to falsely accuse the IDF of committing the war crime of shooting children in the head, at point blank range (ie, what Hamas do to Israelis, and their own civilians). Medical “experts” in Gaza are those providing this alleged testimony. And yet their “evidence” has been analyzed from numerous experts across medicine, radiology, trauma and nursing outside of Gaza (ie, not under Hamas control, or provided by Hamas) who have concluded that the x-ray images printed by the NYT are either digitally altered or entirely fake. Allegedly the x-rays below are from children shot in the head by 5.56 caliber bullets. And yet, there are no fractured skulls, no exit wounds, and no change in the bullets…

Moving on.

Earlier last week, Ta-Nehisi Coates, acclaimed American author and academic, appeared on CBS News and created a ruckus with the below clip. Then everyone’s favorite antisemite Trevor Noah (have you seen his Twitter history?) invited Coates onto his “What Now” podcast to embellish even further. Here is his now viral segment in which he says that were he to grow up in what he falsely assumes is a Gazan’s reality he is not convinced he too would not have chosen to rape and pillage and murder Jews on October 7:

Ta-Nehisi Coates there normalizing sympathy for terrorism with an ignorant, ahistorical, and antisemitic view on the Middle East. Imagine a lauded academic publicly supporting the Taliban or ISIS?

Pre-Coates, last week, the Guardian published a since-redacted review of an October 7 documentary, effectively arguing that not all Nazis are bad… Stuart Jeffries was the reviewer. Yes that Middle East expert (he writes about comedy). I remember when I used to work for the Guardian. I remember how painfully precious they were about sourcing the precisely correct writer for every single review and/or feature. But these standards don’t apply to Jews, nor the documentary One Day In October.

Yes. Sadly, the documentary also demonized killers and looters as… killers or looters.

Historian and public intellectual Simon Sebag Montefiore wrote better than I can about my former employers on Twitter:

“Reading a couple of @theguardian articles in a last few days, I feel we may be seeing its final departure from the pluralistic liberal tradition that made it a great newspaper, thanks to its capture by – its morally fuddled editorial cadre – surrender to, an activist, ideological, anti-Western and more than that, anti-factual front. Our liberal democracy needs institutions of pluralistic discourse like this once-hallowed paper but it also requires a respect for facts and some sense of morals. Facts were once the essential ingredients of the coverage of a paper like the Guardian. However at least there are comedic sides to this. Two recent articles exemplify the Guardian’s embrace of illiberal anti democratic, anti fact forces and at the same time represent “a bonfire of the vanities” (an appropriate quotation from Savonarola who used the phrase to launch a bloodspattered but absurdly self-righteous purge of Florence that ended with his own execution.) Today’s was a truly creepy review of the One Day in October documentary, by a comedy-writer Stuart Jeffries, on the October 7 Hamas massacres who seemed irritated and uneasy that the real record of the atrocities by Hamas and some Gazan civilians, gleefully documented by the killers themselves on GoPros and smart-phones, did not accord with his and the Guardian’s political prejudices. How could these impertinent film-makers present these killers, decapitators, rapists, body-mutilators, corpse-abusers, kidnappers and looters as baddies? That is against the simplistic, rigid, flimsy framework of the ideology of anti-Israeli decolonization and must be wrong! This uncomfortable fact must be corrected! The result: a piece of unintentional, amoral gallows comedy at the Guardian's expense. The other was equally embarrassing and morally tone-deaf: a comically self-important and self-reverential but ugly and historically ignorant essay claiming the Israelis were guilty of memoralizing their October 7 fallen (so unlike every society, ever, in history from the 300 of the Spartans to the West with WW1 Armistice Day, the West and Russia with WW2, The Holodomor by Ukrainians, the Holocaust by the Jews, the Nakba by Palestinians, 9/11 by Americans and so on) by the clumsy Canadian provocateur Naomi Klein, all but indistinguishable from her alter-ego and fellow solipsist the other Naomi. As I posted this amidst general contempt for these pieces across the X platform, the paper may have taken one of them down 'pending review.' The fact is the paper has lost its heart and soul and sense of moral judgement but these preposterous pieces at least provide a sort of bleak, EndDays comedy amidst the heartbreaking civilian losses of Middle Eastern conflicts...”

This is the astonishing Naomi Klein headline that Montefiore references in the latter half of his comment.

Klein is a Jew, of course. We are living in a very long Black Mirror episode.

What I saw yesterday, however, in the New York Times took the prize, and hit the crescendo of the last maddening week of media distortion. Brace yourselves.

The article itself contains zero evidence for the outrageous claim made in the headline. Does it even matter any more? In a world where emotions trump facts, does it even matter any more?

And what is the emotion driving this? Jew hatred. They cannot handle the idea of Jewish people defending ourselves and surviving. People love dead Jews, and even at that they love dead Jews sometimes when they can be morphed into lessons for the world at large. See: Anne Frank. They won’t admit it because they’re standing on the necks of Jewish people to prove that they have the moral high ground. But their entire motive is to prevent the Jewish state from winning a war she never started because they don’t believe she can ever be the victim. Their victim. They hate us, cos they ain’t us.

To summarize. In the last week alone we have seen:

• The Guardian review an October 7 documentary by criticizing the film for "demonizing" terrorists

• Ta-Nehisi Coates on several esteemed outlets including CBS and Trevor Noah's show empathizing with - and humanizing - Hamas for carrying out the deadliest massacre against Jews since the Holocaust

• The New York Times printing libelous stories about the IDF shooting children in the head and using Palestinians as human shields

• Activists parading as academics, lawyers, doctors, etc online relying on emotions and not facts by assimilating the deaths of civilians who are housed by terror proxy groups in munitions storage sites to the Nazi gas chambers

The level of mainstream media and social media distortion and DARVO has escalated to a state of total normalization where the perpetrators of terror are now the innocent victims, and the nation defending itself from all of the Islamic Republic of Iran's terror proxy groups is the perpetrator of sensationalized humanitarian crimes. We are seeing the absolute demonization of Israel by the world's media. It is calculated, organized, well-funded and highly influential. And it is deeply dangerous. The new antisemitism is not just entirely acceptable; it is also THE most popular and profitable story of our time.

The agenda has been set. It is not investigative journalism. It is agenda-based activism. If Israel was a woman, or a minority of any other kind - racial, ethnic or gender/sexuality-based - it would be very clear to the same people who question all sorts of media bias and institutionalized patriarchal agendas, but it’s not clear to them because it concerns the Jews, who they deem fair game for double standards and policing. Hiding behind the trope that the Jews control the media, these same critics of mainstream media can maintain a mistrust of Jews and a need to dictate what the worldview on the Jewish people and our nation should be. That - ladies and gents - is a colonialist mentality.

The institutionalization of antisemitism in the media is corroborated by decades-long teaching of leftist views on history in the West’s top places of higher education. It’s suicidal. And for those who have been following me for many years, the first time I understood media distortion was concerning Israel, and that is why I could see clearly when media distortion and media DARVO was being used against female victims of abuse. Not the other way around. I have been able to identity this consistently because I have been exposed to it for decades. Since I was in university, I saw how places of authority were primed to groom generations of students to think upside-down.

Take Coates, for instance. His sudden injection into the Israel-Palestine debate demonstrates how antizionism has become the ultimate manifestation of leftism and wokeness. Despite the bigotry and moral inconsistencies of antizionism. It is woke fascism. Israel’s grievances are inverted. The narrative of oppressor-oppressed is reversed. The genocidal declarations from Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and the Iranian ayatollahs are ignored while the IDF’s responses to massacres and daily indiscriminate bombing are libelled as genocide. In addition, Israel has been singled out for a false charge of apartheid by countries and states who have pracised apartheid and slavery for centuries. By places that have historically ethnically cleansed every Jew from within. Zionist Jews are labelled settler-colonialists because we returned as an indigenous people to a slither of land, and those who accuse us are instead defending a 1400-year-old religious colonialist empire that is 600 times the size of Israel. Coates and his woke acolytes all call for the dismantling of systems of oppression. In this case, the system to dismantle is Israel itself. It’s all or nothing. Nothing less than the erasure of the only Jewish state will be justice.

Every accusation a confession.

Where is the empathy for us? Without empathy, there is no connection. No trust. No authentic vulnerability. Without empathy, there is no compassion, no ability to understand the root of another person’s suffering, and to eke out a solution. Without empathy, there is no courage to devote yourself in service to another, no capacity to cradle another’s eyes in your arms without any motivation other than to care and provide. Empathy is the greatest tool of community, of healing and of existing beyond ego, beyond pain, beyond fear. We all crave to be seen. But we can only be seen if we see others.

Please watch this tremendous breakdown by activist Elica Le Bon.

And oh yeh. I used Bill Maher to hook you in. Well he did the same by using Chappell Roan to hook his critics in. Bill Maher is the exception to the general mainstream media rule. I am disappointed in Bill Maher. And I love him. Bill Maher has a tendency to bully women. Yet he’s brilliant on the rest of the truth.

A question for all the anti-Israel obsessives: in the last year as you returned to a time old tradition of projecting all your problems onto the Jewish people (or - as is fashionable now - ISRAEL), has your health improved and your life got better? Has the world suddenly got brighter for you? Did your problems all disappear?

Yeh didn’t think so. You will waste your entire lives on this. Sympathizing with terrorists is a waste of time. They have no sympathy for you. The Jewish people will survive your ignorance and your lies and your cowardice. But you might not.

It was Yom Kippur this weekend. I went to watch my friend Remi Franklin make a speech to the 3,000-strong Persian congregation at the Beverly Hilton to raise money for the IDF, but I was last-minute coralled into making a speech in front of the congregation on the fly. I stood in front of the thousands of people fasting and praying and I said to them twice: Every accusation is a confession. Don’t forget it.