Trevor Noah Likens October 7 Terror Attack to the Boston Tea Party

Comedian Trevor claimed Thursday that the Hamas terror attack of October 7, in which 1200 Israelis were killed, was like the Boston Tea Party, because without context, both events could be said to be carried out by “terrorists.”

The Boston Tea Party of 1773 was controversial, even among those sympathetic to the cause. Benjamin Franklin opposed it because it involved the destruction of private property. Yet no human being was physically harmed by it.

Noah expressed his view during a podcast with author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who was questioned by CBS News’ Tony Dokoupil this week about his views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Coates does not think Israel should exist.

Coates’s new book, The Message, includes a large anti-Israel section, one that was described by David Harsanyi at the Washington Examiner: “The Message may well be the most beautifully crafted blood libel ever published. Each turn of phrase oozes with a loathing of the Jewish state. As with his previous work, history is a poetic truth in which white people are innately and inexorably evil — the Jew perhaps most of all.”

Dokoupil interviewed Coates about his book, adding provocatively that it “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.” He asked Coates whether he thought Israel had a right to exist. The author at first tried to dodge the question, then said that no country has an inherent right to exist, and suggested he did not support Israel’s right to exist because he saw it as an “ethnocracy.”

CBS News executives later criticized Dokoupil — though some in the news organization defended him, saying that he was simply practicing journalism by asking challenging questions.

On Trevor Noah’s podcast, Coates made a number of inaccurate claims about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, adding that he had thought obsessively about whether he would have joined the October 7 terror attack, the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust, in which 1200 people were killed, 250 abducted, and many brutally raped.

Noah said his entire peer group had been shocked by the way Dokoupil had approached Noah without deference:

Nicholas Fondacaro of NewsBusters noted: “What made that comparison particularly braindead was the fact that the Sons of Liberty’s actions involved targeting the revenue stream of the crown, and they didn’t rape and murder innocent women, children, and elderly in the process.”

Noah has a history of anti-Israel and antisemitic comments, which came up when he was named the new Daily Show host on Comedy Central in 2015. He left that show in 2022.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.