Hardly.
I missed this, but apparently the unhinged Israel-is-good-and-righteous-at-all-times lunatics went after Jon Stewart. When he did the first (very short) bit about what’s happening in Gaza last week, I noted how unusual it was for Stewart to bring up Israel. He never does it. Literally, never. I always assumed that his silence on the matter was an effort to to keep the peace with the unhinged Israel-is-pure-as-the-driven-snow crowd.
He’s Jewish so if he was of the opinion that Israel can do no wrong, sharing that opinion would be unsurprising, right ? I mean, it’s human nature to band with your tribe and be more forgiving and understanding of what your own people are doing. I always assumed that his silence was a sign that he didn’t want to ruffle feathers among the the pro-Israel crowd with his objectivity. The reality of the world is that when a Jew says that these bombings are atrocious, it means more than when anyone else says it. When a famous Jew says it, all hell may break loose. It means more because that Jew grew up learning our history of persecution and suffering. We know how many times we’ve been scattered all over the earth, and we know why. So when we conclude that Israel is doing wrong, it has the voracity that comes with being intimately aware of the history.
Jon Stewart is very open about his Jewiness, which is why the attacks against him are unhinged. He’s not ashamed of who he is so implying that he’s anti-semetic is patently absurd. First the offending clip. He starts at 4:53 and stays on the topic for roughly 2 1/2 minutes.
That was it. Two and a half minutes of what Jon Stewart does; present empirical facts in a way that highlights the absurdity of the situation. That sent back bench, right wing whackadoodle extraordinaire, Mark Levin into a tizzy. He started off with this little nugget of crazy;
As you well know, the Israelis are doing everything humanly possible to use their technology and their weaponry to limit civilian casualties. But Hamas is doing everything possible to kill its own people, because apparently that’s the price of a good press release.
Huh. Some might say that a 70% – 80% civilian casualty rate indicates either a lack of effort, or a lack of competence in regard to minimizing casualties but eh, evidence! Who needs to introduce facts into the conversation when there’s so much irrational emotion to present as fact?
Then Levin goes on to call Stewart a "little twerp" several times, which is funny, since in terms of audience size, Levin seems to be projecting. Then he rants on about "Jon Stuart Liebowitz". Ummm, does he understand that using Stewart’s name in that way has a seriously anti-semetic tinge to it?
And then David Horovitz jumped in with an editorial in The Times Of Israel. He was more civil, but equally unhinged. He starts off his piece by saying;
That Jon Stewart, he’s sooooo funny. Just watch his amusing take on the current Israel-Gaza conflict. Really, it’s a nonstop laugh fest. Yeah, it misrepresents what’s going on here. But hey, it is funny, and all those millions of Americans who watched it on Monday know that it’s just satire, don’t they?
Okay so at this point, I’m prepared to be informed about all of Stewart’s "misrepresentations". He goes on;
Our super-smart, engagingly frustrated host starts up despairing over a news report of the intensifying conflict which says Israeli troops are poised to invade Gaza, and which ends with the words “as the aerial bombardment from both sides continues.”
Stewart: “Tastes great. More killing.”
See, right off the bat, I’m unhappy. Because, first up, he’s begun with talk of Israel being set to invade Gaza, but without any cited reason — such as, say, Hamas being a terrorist organization with a notorious track record of suicide bombings, individual killings, kidnappings, and incessant rocket fire. And, second, because the implication here is that the combatants — Israel and Hamas — are both happy to be back killing again, and that’s just plain false. Hamas is avowedly committed to the destruction of Israel and holds to a perverted interpretation of Islam that claims killing Jews, Christians and non-believing Muslims is your guaranteed path to paradise if you also die in the process. Israelis, by contrast, would much rather live and let live. (We left Gaza unilaterally in 2005, under international pressure, hoping that the security risk would be worth it, and that we’d be rewarded with tranquility rather than rocket fire, but I wouldn’t expect Stewart to go back that far.)
Okay, well you didn’t demonstrate that Steward misrepresented anything, you’re just upset that he didn’t make Israel’s case for their part in the bombardment. How does an otherwise intelligent person think they’re doing anything productive here? If the goal is to discredit Stewart, it didn’t work. So then he continues "exposing" Stewart’s misrepresentations;
Stewart: “Both sides are engaging in aerial bombardment, but one side appears to be bomb-better-at it. (Studio laughter at the wordplay.) Most Hamas rockets are neutralized by Israel’s Iron Dome technology, and Israeli citizens can even now download a warning app. (Cut to clip of Israel’s US ambassador Ron Dermer explaining how Israelis can know where and when they’re being attacked.) So Israelis seem to have a high-tech, smart-phone alert system.”
Let me see if I understand the point he’s making here: Having falsely implied that Israel is as keen on killing as Hamas is, Stewart now seems to be criticizing Israel for not being as vulnerable as Hamas would like it to be to those Hamas rockets that are sent to kill us. He seems to be bashing us for having those tech smarts. It’s a bad thing that we developed a unique, astonishing Iron Dome missile defense system, without which hundreds of us would be dead? It’s a bad thing that we developed an app to warn us that the rockets designed to kill our citizens are heading this way?
Israel isn’t as keen on killing as Hamas is? Really? The Israeli death toll is around 30 and the Palestinian/ Hamas death toll is over 700. If this imbalance doesn’t suggest an enthusiasm for killing by Israel, I don’t know what does. Is Horovits suggesting an inadvertent killing proficiency going on here? How does one accidentally get so proficient at killing? Curious. But don’t believe your own lying eyes, believe Horovit’s feelings that Israel are the good guys.
Then he goes on to sound super stupid by "misunderstanding" what Stewart was saying about how absurd it is to warn civilians that bombs are coming, with smaller bombs. I’m not going to pick apart the rest of it because it’s more of the same. You can read it for yourself if you want, but he didn’t expose any "misrepresentations", so much as demonstrate how smart people turn really stupid when they let emotions form their opinions.
So in response to the super crazy Zionist whackadoodles, Jon Stewart brilliantly did this;
I can’t conceive of a better way to demonstrate the level of crazy here, than the way Stewart did it.
I suspect this will be the last time he brings up the topic of Israel, and that’s too bad because no one is as good at exposing hypocrisy, lies, or absurdity, as Jon Stewart is. Plus, he has the Jew shield against allegations of anti-semitism. Not that it stops the whackos from accusing him of it, but it does demonstrate just how crazy they are.
