Comic and social critic Bill Maher dialed up the heat on elite universities that have become hotbeds of anti-Semitism, the latest indicator that something has gone badly wrong with America’s institutes of higher learning.
On the latest edition of his popular HBO show “Real Time With Bill Maher,” the host weighed in on the disgraceful testimony of the heads of the nation’s most prestigious universities who were grilled by Congress over the explosion of raw hatred toward Jewish students on their campuses over Israel’s military campaign to clean the terrorist presence out of Gaza.
Maher, an old-school liberal who has become one of the few on the left who are willing to call out the “woke” cultural revolutionaries as the authoritarian lunatics that they are, wondered why Ivy League schools Harvard and UPenn are on “Team Hamas” and how so many students are acting as “useful idiots” for the virulent Jew haters that have organized mass protests in the streets and on college campuses.
Sitting down one-on-one with his guest Greg Lukianoff, an author and the president and CEO of the free-speech organization Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the host strongly criticized today’s crop of students as well as the universities which are incubators for racism, bigotry and anti-Americanism.
Does protected speech include calling for the genocide of Jews?
Watch @TheFIREorg president @glukianoff and @BillMaher get real about crossing the line of free expression on tonight’s Real Time: https://t.co/WHMPVAkoNe pic.twitter.com/vkmyrQ6IWi
— Real Time with Bill Maher (@RealTimers) December 9, 2023
“So these are two of the colleges who are now on Team Hamas,” he said of the two elite schools. “Is that a coincidence? Or what is the connection?”
The two discussed the incendiary rhetoric being directed at Jewish people, including the genocidal slogan “from the river to the sea” and the more explicit “f**k the Jews” as well as colleges defending the term “intifada” which is one “one of those vague terms like jihad,” which “probably means violence” with “from the river to the sea” being “a little more genocide-y.”
“But, you know, let’s give the benefit of the doubt- that could be ‘Well, we just want the Jews to move and not die,'” Maher said. “And then there’s the phrase ‘by any means necessary.’ Ok, now I’m kinda peeing my pants.”
“What irks me is that look, I’m always going to be on the side ‘as far as you can push free speech,'” the host said. “What bothers me is the double standard. … Say they don’t want to say ‘Kill the Jews,’ but I certainly have heard chanted ‘F**k the Jews, f**k the Jews.’ I cannot think of any other group that you can say ‘f**k the blank’ and have it be acceptable.”
Bill Maher declares Harvard, UPenn ‘Team Hamas,’ calls students bashing Israel ‘f–king idiots’
“Real Time” host Bill Maher railed against universities like Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania as being “Team Hamas” and having students who are “useful idiots.”
The… pic.twitter.com/SJoldqhJyY
— Sal Gueli (@sal_gueli) December 9, 2023
“I honestly think the kids, I think they’re — you know that phrase, useful idiots? The bigger scandal here is that these are the biggest, most esteemed colleges in the country and they’ve raised a bunch of f**king idiots. So, do I really think they want to wipe out the Jews? I don’t. But they have this — they live by buzzwords and what they read on TikTok, they want to be an ally of people who have more melanin and less money,” Maher said.
“That’s who you have to be an ally [to], don’t think of it past more than that. And that’s — how did this happen at these colleges? Which, you and I both have been talking about this for a long time. And by the way, there’s a group of us, I would call us old-school liberals, which, we get called conservative for being that now,” he added. “And, for a long time, my dear liberal friends, but the ones who only watch MSNBC and read The New York Times, they were like, what are you talking about? If there’s anything good that has come out of this, it’s that now you see what we’ve been talking about. We were not making it up.”
Maher had previously criticized the anti-Israel letter signed by at the “a**hole factory” Harvard.
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