Pre-emptively posting this to the dunk tank before viewing: Israel-Hamas War: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
Pre-emptively posting this to the dunk tank before viewing: Israel-Hamas War: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
I'm not sure this really belongs in the dunk tank and it's incredibly annoying to me when people post things that they haven't read/watched.
I'll start with the bad things about the video. He spends like a minute talking about a video of hamsters, but thankfully he didn't make any sexual jokes about the hamsters. He usually makes some joke which sexualizes animals or references furry porn in every video. He also talks about a bag that was removed from amazon because it said "Merry Ham-mas!", just like some shitty Christmas merchandise that was supposed to pair the words "Ham" and "Christmas", people confused it with Hamas.
He also explicitly says that he's not going into the history of the region. He says that he won't talk about the holocaust or the nakba or how Palestinians became displaced in Gaza and the west bank. I think this would have been important information for american liberals. He tells the audience to google it.
He mentions the 1200 Israelis who were killed on October 7 and he says that 11000 Palestinians were killed by Israel since October 7. It feels like he spends more time saying that Israeli citizens have suffered but then he says that Palestinians have suffered twice as much as Israelis have.
He makes the claim that neither Hamas or Netanyahu represent the interests of their civilian populations. He says that Hamas was elected in 2006 and that was before like 50% of Gazan civilians were even born. Then he says that 76% of Israelis want Netanyahu to resign according to some poll. He says that Netanyahu gave cash funding to Hamas in the past. He talks about How Netanyahu incited the assassination of his political opponent Rabin, to become elected. He says Netanyahu has always been "hard right" politically.
He then puts blame on the United States. He calls the US the 3rd party involved in the conflicts and says that the US gives the Israeli military almost $4 billion every year.
He talks about the inhumane living conditions forced on Gaza by Israel and plays clips of Israeli officials denying that the conditions are inhumane. He says that Israel is downplaying the suffering that they are inflicting. He plays interviews with Gazan children who have been victims of Israel attacks. This footage I think will be especially powerful to evoking some empathy out of liberals. Seeing the Gazan children suffering is really sad.
At the end of the video, he says that Biden and Trudeau are refusing to call for a ceasefire. He says that continuing the bombs will create more extremist. He says we need peace and ends the video by saying that Israelis and Palestinians have to talk out their differences.
I think overall it is not bad. It's mid. It's going to show his audience some of the many atrocities that Israel has committed. He does do somewhat do a "both sides" narrative, but he also says that Israel is twice as bad.
I think it would have been better if he went into the history of the Israel occupation. Historical analysis is always important.
My biggest criticism is that the ending of the video is very weak. Usually when John Oliver makes segments, he finishes them with like a big surprise ending. When he made a video about how companies would resell medical debt to debt collecting agencies, he announces that he bought a bunch of medical debt and then forgave it, pennies on the dollar. I would have expected John to tell his audience to donate to Palestinian relief fund or to pressure their government representatives to call for a ceasefire. He just says that Palestinians and Israelis just need to sit down and talk it out. This is really disgusting because in this conflict, Israel has all of the power and Palestine has nothing, Israel is clearly the aggressor. An oppressed people can not simply "talk it out" with their oppressors.
Then he says that 76% of Israelis want Netanyahu to resign according to some poll
Lmao nobody tell Oliver that this is because he "let Oct 7 happen" not because he's too hardline
Isn't it also now because he's preventing the military cabinet from preemptively striking Hezbollah?
Approval ratings are ok sometimes, but using them to say the population wants this to end is bad journalism
Permanently Deleted
I have to make a correction to my post. At 3:51 in the video, John Oliver says that Yoshi from the super mario universe "would be good in the sack" and shows an image of Yoshi with tongue far extended. So John Oliver does reference having sex with an animal in the video.
My biggest criticism is that the ending of the video is very weak. Usually when John Oliver makes segments, he finishes them with like a big surprise ending. When he made a video about how companies would resell medical debt to debt collecting agencies, he announces that he bought a bunch of medical debt and then forgave it, pennies on the dollar. I would have expected John to tell his audience to donate to Palestinian relief fund or to pressure their government representatives to call for a ceasefire. He just says that Palestinians and Israelis just need to sit down and talk it out. This is really disgusting because in this conflict, Israel has all of the power and Palestine has nothing, Israel is clearly the aggressor. An oppressed people can not simply "talk it out" with their oppressors.
reminds me of a talking "expert" head i saw on the television discussion panel saying stuff like "well they have to talk it over, but right now isnt the time to have those talks." like lmao, what the fuck does that even mean, you wet tissue-paper limp-wristed dickhead!
fucking wish that the shithead has to shovel up his kids into a plastic bag and then some genius goes: "well you just gotta talk it out with the people who put your kid into a bag, even though you have literally no power in this situation."
He also explicitly says that he's not going into the history of the region. He says that he won't talk about the holocaust or the nakba or how Palestinians became displaced in Gaza and the west bank. I think this would have been important information for american liberals. He tells the audience to google it.
fwiw, I have had a couple people in my life who know absolutely nothing about Palestine ask me what was going on, because they know I care about it. I also know with them, if went into the history of it all first I would probably lose their interest and/or they would have a hard time tracking it all. So in order to keep it very basic, I just started with the notion about how the Palestinians have no say in how their lives are run and how what they live under is the textbook definition of apartheid. That was enough to convince them that Zionism is bad. That’s how awful just the current situation is for the Palestinians - that even without the historical context, it is so incredibly brutal and unjust that no person with an ounce of humanity can support Israel. I don’t know if that’s what Oliver was going for or not.
He also talks about a bag that was removed from amazon because it said "Merry Ham-mas!", just like some shitty Christmas merchandise that was supposed to pair the words "Ham" and "Christmas", people confused it with Hamas.
Yeah, I've noticed a lot of libs and centrists who have every instinct to "both sides" it, but just can't manage to because the occupation is so violent and so indiscriminate. They easily agree w a ceasefire now. To them, I think a ceasefire is just the fastest way to get the carnage off their screens and go back to not thinking about the middle east.
I've also noticed a lot of people on the right who would normally love bombing brown people, but also can't quite get on board so they're now the ones giving up, mumbling something about "both sides" and awkwardly changing the subject. It's kind of strange seeing people who are normally maniacs behave so cautiously. They know its indefensible and just don't want to be associated with it.
given the target audience, this is better than I would've expected
Better than I expected from him, but anything that calls it the "Israel-Hamas war" is inherently dunkable for that crime against truth
If he didn't use the words genocide and ethnic cleansing then I don't want to hear a syllable out of his lib mouth
There's no goddamn room for "both sides" obfuscation or liberal sympathy manufacturing, if watching headless Palestinian children being pulled out of rubble doesn't stir some random shitlb, then that person's opinion doesn't fuckin matter, in fact western opinion on this subject in general doesn't matter
Only the Arab street matters and these johnny-come-lately to basic humanity cowards can go fuck themselves
Oh you just realized the US isn't a honest broker in the two-state bullshit solution, wow that's a great take you should've had in 1994
Never forget John Oliver is at best controlled dissent. He's even married to a republican veteran who he met while she was working for "Veterans for Freedom", a veterans organization dedicated to "victory in Iraq and Afghanistan". From interviews he's given she sounds like the insufferable kind of
war criminalveteran that never shuts up about it"How do you think it goes down when I come back from my day writing for a comedy show writing jokes? You can see her eyes roll back into her head and go 'just shut up,' " he quipped. "When you've been in a war you have no time for the insecurities of a mid-range comedian."
damn never thought I'd want to say this to John Oliver but dump that motherfucker
I just watched this in pure trepidation of hearing the same crazy fascistic lib shit I hear here on lemmy (fuck you .world!), but it actually is surprisingly pretty good for what it is.
I really expected it to be a lot worse.
Huh, that wasn't too bad, mainly shit humour and the "solution" sucked, pretty good overall
how was it
if i hear this man's voice any more I think ill get a terminal brain disease
Maybe this is because my expectations were in the negatives but it wasn't that bad. He had to keep condemning Hamas but also called for a ceasefire and showed clips of Palestinians talking about their situation. My big complaints is that he should've completely dropped the "humor" this episode and should've actually explained Israel is an apartheid state instead of vaguely gesturing towards it.
Calling Israel an apartheid state would have triggered response against him and labeled as an anti-Semite.
This episode is a half-measure, and suggests the problem of Israel is the right-wing government led by Netenyahu and Likud - with Hamas as their mirror - and not something endemic to settler colonial states seeking displacement of Palestinians from the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel's interior borders.
John Oliver at the very least does scold world leaders for letting this carnage continue by avoiding pressure of ceasefire.
Nah fam, ive decided that i would no longer watch anything involving anglo saxons.
Funny, I made the exact same resolution just yesterday. Tired of Anglo bullshit
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Okie dokie
Any body got a mirror can't watch this in kkkanada. Please link
nvm the mirrors the bot provided work
His takes are usually fine
edit: lol at my inbox
not with foreign policy
He's ok on American domestic issues, though he'll never blame capitalism and call for it's abolishment. He may as well be reading the CIA's script when it comes to foreign policy.
Domestic maybe, but foreign policy? Nah he's usually just doing state dep propaganda then.
tarzie on chris hayes, although he could just as well have been talking about john oliver:
Hayes looks out at a burning house and with true moral conviction and unsparing vision, describes it. He then proposes solutions that amount to washing the windows while the building is engulfed in flames…his prescriptions for solving the massive problems he identifies in the book are the typical incrementalism that has constrained the American left for over 30 years.
Regular readers of this blog will know instantly that what DeBoer is describing here is what I call ‘heat vampire’ liberalism. Rather than quote myself again on what that is, I’ll borrow a nicely concise phrase DeBoer uses for Hayes: “all Karl Marx in description, all Tom Daschle in prescription.” [...]
This is basically what DeBoer’s Marx/Daschle formulation describes: a clear eyed, even radical, assessment of all that’s wrong in the world coexisting with acquiescence in oligarch-approved methods for putting things right, no matter how often and resoundingly these methods fail. So constituted, heat vampire liberals act as role models for the rest of us, reconciling things that aren’t logically reconcilable, successfully wrestling themselves into compliance with status quo fundamentals while bemoaning the particulars.
