Comedian and talk show host Bill Maher slammed queer singer Chappell Roan for speaking out against Israel’s war in Gaza – telling her she would have been thrown off a roof due to her sexuality if she had grown up in Palestine.
Maher’s almost nine-minute segment offered “an open letter to Chappell Roan” during which he accused her of succumbing to misinformation by getting her history from TikTok.
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Chappell Roan says she’s voting for Kamala Harris while insisting there are “problems on both sides”
The pop star has faced criticism for recent comments about the U.S. presidential race.
Maher also squeezed in a joke mocking trans folks, explaining to Roan who he is by saying that his show launched when “you were barely old enough to be told you were in the wrong body.”
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He provided historical context to explain why Jews had a claim to Israel far before the Palestinians and criticized her and her generation for feeling moved by “dead Palestinian bodies” but not being “nearly as moved by the Jewish bodies” after the October 7th Hamas terrorist attack last year.
“You killed at Coachella this year, but when Hamas kills at a music festival, it’s a whole other thing,” he said. “Doesn’t the sight of so many young women raped at a music festival make it a little personal?”
“Chappell, if you think it was repressive growing up queer in the Midwest, try the Mideast,” he continued. “You’re a female drag queen and you sing: ‘I f**ked you in the bathroom when we went to dinner, your parents at the tables.’ That wouldn’t fly in Gaza, although you would – straight off a roof.” He then said the morality police would “kill your feather-boa-wearing ass.”
He accused her of enabling terrorist organizations like the Taliban, ISIS, and Hamas by speaking out against Israel’s war in Gaza.
“You’re a singer, and you’re advocating for a place and a culture you would never want to live under,” he concluded. “Gender may not be binary but right and wrong kind of is.”
While LGBTQ+ people are indeed oppressed in the region, Maher’s comment specifically about being thrown off a roof may have been the result of misinformation.
In December, Reuters published a fact check confirming that a 2015 video showing members of ISIS throwing people off a roof in Iraq had been incorrectly captioned as referring to Hamas’s actions in the current Israel-Hamas war.
Roan has repeatedly spoken out against the Biden administration’s role in Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza. During her breakthrough performance at New York City’s Governor’s Ball in June, she called for “freedom for all oppressed people in occupied territories” and has raised funds for Palestinian aid via the merch table at her shows.
In September, Roan told Rolling Stone that she’d considered accepting an invitation to perform at the White House’s Pride celebration this year so that she could protest the war by reading poems written by Palestinian women, but she ultimately declined.
Israel’s treatment of Palestine has long divided the LGBTQ+ community. Israel has spent millions to tout itself internationally as the most LGBTQ+-friendly nation in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Palestine grants nearly no civil rights to its own LGBTQ+ citizens.
Pro-Palestinian protestors have long accused Israel of using its LGBTQ+-inclusive policies to “pinkwash” its human rights violations against Palestinians. As a result, anti-queer conservatives in the U.S. often resort to “homonationalism,” citing Muslim-majority countries’ anti-LGBTQ+ policies as a pretext for racism, Islamophobia, and violence against Muslims.
The American queer community’s disunity over Israel and Palestine has gained greater significance following the October 7, 2023 Hamas militant terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians, which reportedly killed 1,200 civilians and took 253 hostages.
Since then, the Israeli military has killed about 38,000 Palestinians, Reuters reported in July. An estimated 2.3 million people have been displaced from their homes by forced evacuations amid Israel’s continued attacks in Gaza.
Israel was also accused of genocide by the World Court for its destruction of Palestinian homes, schools, hospitals, refugee camps, and vital infrastructure. An estimated half of all Palestinians in Gaza are now experiencing starvation as a result of Israel’s continued military action, the United Nations’ World Food Program has said.
While queer voters worry about the harmful anti-LGBTQ+ impact of a second Trump term, a spokesperson from Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT) told LGBTQ Nation in July that Biden and the Democrats are continuing to alienate voters and risk re-election by refusing to end the United States’ largely unconditional support of Israel.
Roan recently got flak on social media for comments she made about how she believes that “both sides” – that is, both Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump – “have problems” and therefore she won’t be publicly endorsing anyone in the presidential election.
She then posted a follow-up video confirming she was voting for Harris: “So, hear it from my mouth if you’re still wondering: No, I’m not voting for Trump, and yes, I will always question those in power and those making decisions over other people, and I will stand up for what’s right and what I believe in.”
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