Bill Maher thought he was being funny when he vilified student protestors in a recent show. But he was actually doing the whole of humanity a great disservice.
I gave a much more accurate and empathic account of the main motivation of these protesters in a prior post on this blog entitled The Psychology of the Student Protests.
As an Interpretive political scientist, I observe that the cause of, or reason for, those protests is the strong sense of compassion in the students for their fellow human beings in Gaza who are suffering deeply from the merciless slaughter of their family members, friends, and neighbors.
There are many issues involved in
making this observation, which I addressed in my other post on the subject. I
noted that the students have erected those “encampments” as an expression of
their shared feeling of urgency that the killing and suffering in Gaza be
stopped now.
With over a million viewers, Maher
could have helped to reduce the widespread misunderstanding of what is moving
the protesters by telling his audience the truth.
A second point I made is that such
misunderstanding is possible because so many people don’t have the same intense
feelings as those students. In this absence of understanding, people often make
up stories, or pseudo-explanations, about why the protesters are acting that
way.
For example, one person I know
suggested that students are attracted to the encampments by the amorous
opportunities the tents provide. Well, lots of the students are in their 20s,
so maybe there is a particle of truth in what he says.
But that doesn’t account for why the
encampments were set up in the first place. (The same fun could be had in the
dorms.) So, this seems to be a pseudo-explanation made up by my friend to
appease his desire to understand what’s going on.
Bill Maher is another instance of
someone who doesn’t understand the protesters, but who makes up a far less
benign pseudo-explanation for their behavior. Indeed, his “explanation” is
mean, malicious, sadistic, and totally wrong.
He calls them “the Hamas-backing
college protesters,” who are “morally confused,” and he says they “side with
the people who ruthlessly oppress women,” in other words, Muslims.
Utterly lacking in the sense of
urgency the students feel for the Gazans, and incapable of understanding those
feelings, Maher says they ought to protest the treatment of the women living
under Sharia Law. The current protests seem so pointless and misguided to him
that he thinks the students should be given a cause more worthy of their
“instinct to protest social injustice.”
That’s like the passenger in the back
seat of a car saying to the driver, whose on his way to the grocery store, “why
don’t you go to the car wash, instead?” In other words, Bill Maher doesn’t
understand the mission of the students. He can’t comprehend their urgent, even
desperate, desire to see the killing and misery of their fellow human beings
ended immediately.
Maher sees the same images of the
suffering in Gaza, but because he lacks the compassion that drive the students,
he completely fails to understand them. Instead he scolds them for “blocking
Monday morning traffic.”
Maher represents the failure of
communication between the protesters and much of the general public in the US
today. He re-enforces the ignorance and misunderstanding of his fans.
He also contributes to the
anti-protester propaganda spread by the US corporate media. The aim of this
media is to serve the arms industry and other special interest lobbying orgs
that benefit from, what the ICC calls, “a probable genocide.”
Unhappily, the protesters may have a long
way to go before a critical mass of Americans share their compassion and then
demand an immediate stop to the killing.
William J. Kelleher, Ph.D.
The Political Science Interpretivist
https://interpretat.blogspot.com/
@InterpretivePo1
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