TEL AVIV – Jewish comedian Roseanne Barr slammed members of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement as “right-wing fascists” and “naked bigots” who only pretend to be leftwing.
“BDS doesn’t want peace, nor do they want peace negotiations. They use code words like ‘occupation’ and use it a lot to get all the mileage they can out of it,” Barr said.
Barr delivered her damning speech against BDS at the Yedioth Aharonot and Ynet Conference held in Jerusalem on Monday.
Barr’s views on Israel took a dramatic turn following a failed run for the U.S. presidency as a Green Party candidate in 2012. Prior to that, the actress and activist routinely condemned the Jewish state – even going so far as to refer to it as the Nazi state – but now admits that her reasons for doing so were faulty.
“I didn’t know – when I was harshly critical of Israel as I was before 2010 – I didn’t know what you were doing. I thought it was like being harshly critical of the United States during Vietnam, when we said ‘this is wrong.’ But I didn’t know this was part of a creeping campaign of delegitimization of the entire State of Israel looking to its destruction. I didn’t know that,” she confessed.
“Israel is a state full of millions of good people who want peace,” the comedian, who was accompanied by her mother at the conference, said.
She added that peace won’t “happen until pressure is brought to bear by all intelligent and moral people everywhere who will no longer tolerate war at the cost of the few and expense of the many anymore.”
Watch the full speech here.
“Everything I believed about the left was severely shaken and the scales began to fall from my eyes in many ways,” Barr explained.
“I had to admit that many of those that I considered comrades were naked bigots, who had absolutely no interest in peace between Israelis and Palestinians Arabs at all as I did,” Barr said. “It was shocking to realize that what I considered criticism of Israel many times gave over to the regular garden variety anti-Semitism that I’ve heard all of my life.”
The pro-Israel activist, who currently lives on a farm in Hawaii, recently said that she “might move” to Israel.
Commenting on recent accusations by the U.S. that Israel is expropriating land, the comedian said it “lack[s] the supreme gall and insensitivity of typical leftwing peace activist trust-funders, living in Chicago, to suggest that the world’s surviving Jews should not be able to buy or own or live on land inside any Arab state despite centuries of citizenship there.”
She blasted the hypocrisy of the left in Europe and America for ignoring the fact that Hamas has resumed building cross-border terror tunnels.
“You can’t make this shit up, folks,” she said.
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