'Are you really speaking truth to power or you just think you look cool in a keffiyeh?' the HBO host asked the protesters
Anti-Israel agitators storm Brooklyn Bridge, blocking traffic
Anti-Israel agitators have continued to demonstrate in NYC since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel that killed around 1,200 people. (Credit: WNYW)
"Real Time" host Bill Maher closed his show Friday night by taking aim at the "privilege-y" anti-Israel protesters who recently blocked traffic in cities across the country. He insisted that this is what happens when "activism merges with narcissism."
"Someone needs to tell the people who block traffic in the name of a cause, no one likes you. And you're probably hurting your cause," Maher began his monologue.
"You'd have to be pretty dumb to think that the way to bring people around to your point of view is to make them late to pick up their kids from daycare. And that's what most normies are thinking. 'I have a kid. I have a job. And yes, I'm sure there are injustices on both sides in the Middle East as there are injustices all over the world, but I'm going to be late for work,' something you protesters on the bridge seemed to have the luxury of not having to worry about, which seems kind of privilege," Maher said.
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"Real Time" host Bill Maher told viewers that the anti-Israel movement in America is when "activism merges with narcissism." (Screenshot/HBO)
"You're going to glue your hands to the street because your hands don't have to do any work today," he then quipped. "I'm not saying there aren't sincere passions about Gaza, especially among people from the region, but social justice warriors- for a lot of them, it seems like it's more about the warrioring than about whatever the cause is. If you really cared about apartheid so much, which Israel does not actually practice- Arabs there vote, they serve in Parliament, they sit on the Judiciary- wouldn't you start with this?"
He then showed an image of a woman in a burka next to a man in uniform.
"With the hundreds of millions of women in the world who live under a true apartheid, a gender apartheid of the most brutal kind?" Maher continued. "Are you really speaking truth to power or you just think you look cool in a keffiyeh, which is really just the new Che Guevara t-shirt, another historical figure you'd never researched and so think as a hero who was actually a sadistic racist monster fighting for communism, the worst form of government ever, but these are small matters."
Maher continued, "Small matters, when activism merges with narcissism. Less about the cause and more about 'Me, look at me, watch me and if you liked the way I'm fighting injustice, remember to like and subscribe.'"
Maher linked protesters wearing keffiyehs to the "Che Guevara t-shirt" as an attempt for them to "look cool." (Julia Bonavita/Fox News Digital)
The HBO host pointed to the man who set himself on fire in February in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C. to protest the war in Gaza as well as the other "sad and confused man" who similarly died after lighting himself on fire outside the courthouse where the Trump trial is being held.
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"I don't want to diminish how sad it is that someone would take their own life for any reason. But maybe from now on before anyone commits an act of civil disobedience, they should ask themselves a few questions like is the most important thing in my life, something I hadn't heard of six months ago? Do I even know wha the f--- I'm talking about? Am I really here for the cause, or is the cause here to bring you me?" Maher told his audience.
The comedian lectured, "And it makes you feel good to cosplay as revolutionaries, knock yourself out, burn yourself out. Just don't drag Gaza into it. Also, throwing stuff on paintings is just stupid. No one sees mashed potatoes on a Monet and thinks 'He's got a point. I should recycle my cans.'"
Maher accused the anti-Israel protesters who blocked traffic of being "privilegy" for preventing people from getting to work or picking up their kids from daycare. (KTVU)
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Maher also mocked the ousted Google employees who were fired after staying an anti-Israel sit-in protesting the company doing business with the Jewish State.
"Maybe the question that today's protester needs to ask themselves more than any other is why do I care so much about this particular cause? North Korea starves its people. China puts them in concentration camps. Myanmar brutalizes the Rohingya. Boko Haram kidnaps whole villages of women. The president of Burundi says gays should be stoned to death because they quote ‘deserve it.’ Nothing? Ukraine?" Maher said.
"Maybe if these Google employees have the slightest idea what kind of fundamentalist oppressive a---holes they're supporting- Hamas, the Houthis, Hezbollah, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, they might take it a little easier on the world's greatest monster Genocide Joe. Genocide, by the way, is when you want to wipe out an entire people. That's the stated goal of Hamas! That's what ‘From the river to the sea' means. Hamas would do that to Israel, but can't. Israel could do that to them, but doesn't."
Joseph A. Wulfsohn is a media reporter for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to
