While maligning Israel with an “apartheid” slur, actor Mark Ruffalo accused his own country of similar transgressions.
By Yakir Benzion, United With Israel
Actor Mark Ruffalo went off the deep end last week during an anti-Israel rant on an NBC network, accusing the United States of perpetrating a horrific, race-based system of discrimination that was called “apartheid” in South Africa.
“Here we are in America … this is kind of an apartheid system – there are two systems – there’s the BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and People of Color] America and there’s the white America,” Ruffalo told host Mehdi Hasan, whose show is streamed on NBC’s Peacock television.
Ruffalo is known for his anti-Israel positions and Hasan regaled him as one of the few “A-list Hollywood actors that touch Palestinian rights.”
The actor, who played the character The Hulk in the “Avengers” movie series, said he was motivated by “love of justice” and said “there’s no reason why an ally of American should not be held to same the standard as we would any other nation in the world.”
After branding Israel a perpetrator of “apartheid,” Ruffalo launched into his anti-America rant, saying “we’re looking at the very same thing” in the United States.
There is no record of Ruffalo making any comments on Palestinian terrorism, but in 2015 the actor condemned Israel over the joint Egyptian-Israeli blockade of Gaza, which the Hamas terror group has ruled with an iron fist rule for the past 13 years.
“I invite Mark Ruffalo to come to me for [Sabbath], to live all day in the bomb shelter, 24 hours — and you can’t go out because of rockets — and then say what he thinks about the closure of Gaza,” Sderot resident Chen Hana Elmaliah said at the time in an interview with The Blaze.
“I think the world – actors, politicians, citizens – they choose to be innocent and to close their eyes. It’s really easy to point a finger at Israel and say we’re not OK,” Elmaliah said. “We also want to live. When they send us missiles and suicide bombers we have to defend ourselves. Everyone has the right to defend himself.”
Pro-Israel activists noted that Ruffalo does not have a history of promoting peace, but only anti-Israel activism.
“Mark is a long time anti-Israel activist whose comments are not grounded in reality,” Ari Ingel told the Jewish Journal. Ingel is the director of the Creative Community for Peace, which fights cultural boycotts of Israel.
Ingel continued, “Instead of helping bring about peace between Israelis and Palestinians, these one-sided condemnations, grounded in fallacies, simply work to further division, mistrust, and hostility. As Lady Gaga said after actually visiting Israel, ‘the world view of Israel is just not reality.’”
Ingel said it “is equally disturbing is that NBC and Viacom have given longtime Al-Jazeera TV host and BDS [Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions] supporter, Mehdi Hasan, a nightly prime-time show on their new Peacock platform. It has taken him less than a week on the network to use this platform to bash Israel. It’s unacceptable.”
Pro-Israel Twitter accounts also fired back at Ruffalo.
Yoni Michanie, an IDF veteran and PhD student at Northeastern University, was not impressed that Ruffalo said he “learned about Palestine by meeting Palestinians.”
“That is great — really. Now, get to know Israelis,” Michanie tweeted. “Meet with Israelis that had their entire families ethnically cleansed from Arab countries and who have lost loved ones to terrorism.”