The pro-Hamas demonstrations that you’re seeing on college campuses across the country made their way to, of all things, a standup comedy show in Richmond last week.
A show featuring the comedian Chelsea Handler was interrupted several times by people reportedly affiliated with a group that calls itself Here 4 The Kids, which says on its website that, in addition to its efforts to enact gun reform combat climate change, “we are currently seeing the indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian children with our United States tax dollars.”
Here 4 The Kids was founded in 2023, so, to be fair, it hasn’t been around long enough to have had a history of protests against the oppressive Hamas regime that has been in power in Gaza since 2006.
It’s doubtful, though, from looking at the Here 4 The Kids website, that it would have engaged in those kinds of protests, despite proclaiming on its front page that its “mission is to liberate future generations by confronting and abolishing tools of oppression and re-imagining our global reality.”
Here 4 The Kids, like other fringe activists who claim to be standing on behalf of Palestinians in the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, neither acknowledges the impact of the years of rampant corruption and systemic oppression by the Hamas regime on the residents of Gaza, nor the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks that Hamas launched on Israel that led to the deaths of more than 1,100 Israelis and precipitated the military response from the Israeli government that, to date, has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians.
The Handler show was an attractive target for local activists because the comedian is Jewish, and because, though Handler has often been critical of Israeli government policies, she teamed up with Israeli actress Noa Tishby in a video in which Handler said she wanted “to be clear that we are pro-Palestinian and anti-Hamas, and it’s OK to question Israeli policies and still be pro-Israel.”
Such nuance isn’t the kind of thing that will get over with the protest set, of course.
Handler’s Richmond show was first interrupted by a female audience member who shouted at Handler, “Murder, mass murder!” and after Handler responded, “Oh, honey, please, this is not what this night is for,” and asked for the woman to be removed, another woman called out to Handler, “Palestinian babies! You’re a genocide supporter! Genocide supporter!”
A video of these and other outbursts that followed was posted on an Instagram account that calls itself Race2Dinner, which referred to Handler dismissively in a video caption as a “loud and proud Zionist.”
How about that for a racist dog-whistle?
The term “Zionist,” from the Oxford dictionary, is defined as “a person who believes in the development and protection of a Jewish nation in what is now Israel.”
Logically, then, if you’re one who thinks the concept of “Zionist” is something to be denigrated, wouldn’t that make you somebody who doesn’t believe “in the development and protection of a Jewish nation in what is now Israel”?
Where we should be with the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza is where Handler is – pro-Palestinian, anti-Hamas, and understanding that both everyday Israelis and Palestinians are being wronged by the people in power, whose mutual main aims seem to be the eradication of the people on the other side.
Mutual, as in, the “genocide” that one of the protestors referenced at the Handler show last week isn’t one-sided.
Look up what Hamas says it wants to do to Israel.
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Chris Graham
