Bill Maher: ‘They’re here, they like their bagel with a shmear, get used to it.’

One of the most frustrating things about Bill Maher is that he often gets things right. And the reason that this is frustrating is because you know that, no matter how often he figures things out, he’ll still vote Democrat and urge his viewers to do the same. However, that failing shouldn’t blind us to his virtues, and he showed his virtues very loudly and strongly when he told Gazastanians and West Bankians to accept reality and, like all other people in the history of the world, to build a strong society right where they are. The Israelis, he said, aren’t going anywhere.

Given that Maher plays to a leftist crowd, as you watch this video, you may find as fascinating as I did the fact that he got a lot of applause and not a single “boo”:

You probably noted that Maher gets a few details wrong in his monologue, but the main point he makes is a powerful one: The people in Gaza and the West Bank are the only people in the modern world who have remained permanent refugees.

What Maher didn’t (couldn’t? wouldn’t?) do was articulate why the Gazastanians and West Bankians are different from all other refugees. There are two primary answers to that.

The first is the nature of Islam. Muslims never forgive and never forget. They are still mad at Spain for the Reconquista and have never given up on their push to take over Europe, something stopped at the Gates of Vienna in 1683. Islam’s prophet was a warlord, and conquest is central to the faith. The Islamic dream is and always has been a “global caliphate,” with the world submitting to its Muslim overlords, whether through conversion or taxes and slavery.

The second answer is the UN. In 1948, the United Nations founded the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (“UNRWA”). Like all bureaucracies, it is the nearest thing to immortality in the modern world. As long as refugees remain, UNRWA staffers keep their sinecures. If the people in Gaza and the West Bank admit that those regions (along with Jordan) are their homes and stop demanding a refugee’s right of return, UNRWA ceases to have a purpose and, in theory, loses all funding. Therefore, UNRWA’s employees can and will do anything possible to stoke grievances.

Image by AI.