This morning I woke up to the inevitable news that South Park, which is in the midst of yet another unfunny news cycle-focused season as told through the eyes of two aging Gen Xers pretending to be 4th graders, had released an episode making jokes about Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel bombing hospitals in Gaza. I watched a few clips from it with a great deal of disappointment — I had previously predicted to a friend that there would be a scene where Donald Trump, who in this season is depicted as being virtually identical in character to Saddam Hussein as depicted in the South Park movie many years ago, would get the Ayatollah and Netanyahu in the same room for negotiations, with both the Ayatollah and Netanyahu depicted with the personality and mannerisms of Saddam Hussein as well. “Eh, relax, guy, my nuclear program is for peaceful purposes,” the Ayatollah would say, with Netanyahu saying something along the lines of “chill out, friend, it’s just a hospital, no big deal.” Do you think this would be funnier than what Trey Parker and Matt Stone actually came up with? I can’t say for sure because I haven’t seen the full episode. I cancelled my Paramount+ subscription after Dexter: Resurrection ended, and the new South Park season proved to not be worth paying for.
This article, however, isn’t a review of the new South Park season, or even the latest episode of it. What I’m far more interested in is the reaction I’ve seen from Hasbara influencers, who have gone into collective hyperventilation over the following joke: Students at South Park Elementary use a political betting odds app to bet on whether Kyle Broflovski’s mom Sheila will bomb a Palestinian hospital. When she is spotted flying to Israel, the odds of her bombing a hospital go up, but it is revealed at the end of the episode that the highly neurotic Sheila actually went there to complain to Netanyahu personally about the war, arguing that his actions being committed in the name of the Jewish people are causing a surge of antisemitism in the United States.
How could South Park do this? Are they not aware that, erm, actually, there were tunnels under those hospitals that we bombed, or it was an accident, or whatever other excuse was given at the time? Don’t they know that Jews are NEVER responsible for the antisemitism that we face? As Hen Mazzig said, “blaming Jewish people, rather than the people targeting us, is never right. We aren’t responsible for the hatred against us. Antisemites are.” Mazzig, of course, is an expert who South Park’s creators should be listening to since he has undeniably fostered more antisemitic feelings among the British public than South Park ever has.
Some Hasbarists have even suggested that Trey Parker and Matt Stone should have to front security costs for the synagogues they put in DANGER because of this episode, which could no doubt inspire people to commit acts of violence against the Jewish people. They want to pass this off as a “joke,” but a joke can’t target an entire group of people. Let’s call it what it is: stochastic terrorism.
Or perhaps it’s even more nefarious than that. Maybe they’re being PAID by QATAR? You never know. Where did that $1.5 billion they just received come from? Oh, it’s from the same company that just put Bari Weiss in charge of CBS. Is there a Kabbalistic Candace Owens we can consult on this matter? Maybe she won’t get to the bottom of this, but we can find out why Netanyahu’s wife looks like a man. Important stuff to investigate!
It’s absolutely astounding to me that Zionist influencers still insist on talking like this even as this kind of rhetoric from the woke left has created the largest right-wing backlash in America since the late 1960s. Why did it foster such a backlash? Two reasons. First, Americans don’t like being morally judged, and second, they especially don’t like being judged by people so obviously morally flawed themselves. It’s one thing to be told not to be racist, it’s another thing to be told not to be racist by someone who expressly encourages criminal behavior among black people and demands that normal people just accept rape, murder and vagrancy all around them.
Similarly, you can give a million justifications for why Israel was right to bomb a hospital. In fact, I’d probably agree with most of them, and I definitely think Israel has better reasons to bomb a hospital than woke people have to promote criminal vagrancy or trans kids. But you have to be completely out of your mind to not think that there is an obvious moral repugnancy that normal, uninvested people will feel toward someone telling them that bombing hospitals is okay and legitimate but jokes are violence. If Hasbarists insist on using this line of thinking against the American public, we will lose badly, and the loss will be well-deserved. Additionally, we have the benefit of hindsight to clearly know it doesn’t work, and especially two years after October 7th we’ve had the benefit of direct experience to know moralistic browbeating doesn’t work.
It also goes to show just how terrible these people are at picking battles. South Park has a long history of lambasting antisemitism, including an episode just a few weeks ago wherein they mocked antisemitic manosphere influencers as charlatans. Two years ago they made an episode mocking Kanye West’s antisemitic outbursts, and the claim that Jews control Hollywood. During the Covid pandemic, they made an episode where the State of Israel quite literally saves the day. In a subsequent episode, Eric Cartman is depicted as only being capable of turning his life around by abandoning antisemitism, converting to Judaism, and becoming a Rabbi. Compare this to how South Park treats Muslims, for instance, by making a two-part episode where they have to deliver the prophet Muhammad to a group of angry celebrities so they can extract goo from him to gain his power to not be made fun of, with them later discovering that the cure to being made fun of is relentless Islamist violence against innocent people. If you’re at all familiar with South Park, you’d have to be a total lunatic to think the show promotes antisemitism, although most Zionist influencers these days seem to fall into that category.
So how should Hasbarists have reacted to this episode? Perhaps they could’ve taken notes from the Anti-Defamation League and said nothing at all. That’s where we’re at now — the ADL is less prone to neurotic outbursts over antisemitism than the Zionist influencer class. Or perhaps do what Charlie Kirk did when he was depicted in South Park and embrace it. Some big Zionist influencer could’ve changed his profile picture to South Park Bibi. Perhaps lean in to Kyle’s mom, overcome with Ashkenazi neuroticism, raving like a lunatic about Israel being responsible for antisemitism, perhaps pairing it with her calling to ban everything she doesn’t like from episodes of previous seasons when South Park was actually funny.
But for the love of G-D, stop with the scolding over anything that doesn’t just endlessly glaze and make excuses for Israel and Jews. Jews (including Matt Stone) are a funny people. Start having a sense of humor.
- Beau Chasse