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June 8th, 2021 
Awake Goy 
Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher last Friday where he talked about economic policy and the recent attacks on Gaza.
Maher, a consistently vocal supporter of Israel, told the congressman that he was “incredibly gutsy” for defending Israel’s recent attacks. During their conversation Torres and Maher criticized activists for attempting to draw connections between racist violence in the United States and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
“Somehow the Israeli war we just had got conflated with on social media among the woke…with our racial problems here in America, ” declared Maher. “I just want to say, ‘Kids, what’s going on in Israel has nothing to do with George Floyd.’ It’s not about racism…less than half of Israelis are white. The reason why they’re bombing buildings is not because they are racist, it’s because there are rocket launchers in those buildings.”
Despite the fact that Israel is supported by the vast majority of Democratic lawmakers, Maher inexplicably told Torres that he “might be the only Democrat who has been forthrightly standing with the country who seems to be aligned with our liberal values.”
Torres echoed Maher’s sentiments in response to these assertions. “There’s a difference between promoting peace and inciting hatred,” he told Maher. “Most of the words and ideas and memes that I’ve seen on Twitter are aimed at inciting hatred for Israel rather than promoting peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. My concern is that the hysterical demonization of Israel has set off a global wave of antisemitic violence and vitriol.”
“I do feel like Israel is held to a double standard and there is an undercurrent of antisemitism in the disproportionate criticism of Israel,” he also told Maher.
Torres is one of only two openly gay Black members of Congress and he’s referred to himself as “the embodiment of a pro-Israel progressive.” He’s consistently praised Israel’s record on LGBTQ rights while justifying the country’s system of apartheid. In 2019 he told Jewish Insider that he once confronted a gay activist during a Palestine solidarity protest in New York City.
“At the time I was instinctively pro-Israel — because it has democratic values and institutions — but I had no deep knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, no deep knowledge of intersectionality, or of BDS,” he told the website. “But when I announced that I was going on a delegation to Israel, I became a target of vitriolic protest. I had activists from Jewish Voice for Peace accusing me of pinkwashing, accusing me of aiding and abetting apartheid. I even remember coming across an activist with a shirt that read ‘Queers for Palestine.’ I remember telling the activist, ‘Does the opposite exist, are there Palestinians for queers?’ It was partly a joke but partly a serious observation. I found it utterly baffling that you had LGBT activists doing the bidding of Hamas, which is a terrorist organization that executes LGBT people. And then I came to realize that the reason is intersectionality, that the BDS movement uses intersectionality to penetrate a whole host of self-proclaimed progressive movements.”
You can watch Maher’s entire interview with Torres above.
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