Bill Maher Makes Bold Declaration About Whether Genocide Is Happening in Gaza

Bill Maher doesn’t need HBO airtime to broadcast controversial opinions. While Real Time is on hiatus, the comedian has been continuing his Club Random podcast, on which he offered a strong stance on the Gaza war.

In a clip posted to YouTube on Friday, Maher debated The Young Turks cohost Ana Kasparian about whether Israel’s actions constitute genocide against the Palestinian population.

“I know you’re going to say ‘genocide,’ and I’m going to say, well, you don’t know what the word means,” Maher said. “And it’s like, if you don’t even know what the words mean…”

Kasparian interjected, “I’m Armenian. I know what the word means.”

Maher responded, “OK. It’s when you try to wipe out an entire population of people, which [Israel] didn’t come close to doing. They prosecuted a war in which they were attacked, which everybody gets to do.”

Noam Galai/Getty Images

Kasparian disagreed. “If they were doing if they were literally going after Hamas, that is legitimate. That’s totally legitimate. But that’s not what’s happening,” she said. “When the IDF’s own data indicates that 83 percent of the people that they’ve killed are civilians … do you understand that by killing so many civilians, they are essentially multiplying extremism?”

Later in the conversation, Maher said, “I’m sure they have committed what we would call war crimes, as every army does in every war, right? … In every war, including the [American] Civil War.”

The Real Time host’s declaration defies that of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, a group of around 500 members around the world, which passed a resolution this summer saying Israel’s conduct meets the United Nations’ definition of genocide, per BBC News.

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Earlier in the summer, the Israeli rights organizations B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel also deemed Israel’s conduct as constituting genocide against the Palestinian people, as BBC News reported at the time.

Maher sparked outrage with genocide comments in October when he claimed that there was a “Christian genocide” happening in Nigeria. In response, Gimba Kakanda, a senior special assistant to the President of Nigeria, wrote an Al Jazeera op-ed saying that Maher was citing “largely fabricated claims and manipulated images from unverified outlets.”

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