The Campaign Against Antisemitism disputed the premise of Che’s joke while acknowledging the latitude afforded to comedy.
By Shula Rosen
Michael Che faced criticism from two organizations after the “Saturday Night Live” “Weekend Update” co-host referred to genocide in a joke about record voter participation in Israel’s elections.
“This week, a record number of people voted in Israel’s election, which is great to see regardless of if you’re on the right side, or the left side, or the genocide,” Che said on the NBC program.
NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck objected to making the term genocide a punchline and questioned whether the program’s audience understood its meaning.
“We’re now at the point where it’s a punchline to refer to Israel as a genocidal state,” Houck told Fox News Digital. “SNL’s ill-informed viewers are unlikely to know the actual meaning of the word, and that it’s more applicable to how many Arabs view whether Israel should be allowed to exist.”
Arab participation in the election could have provided the basis for a different joke, Houck argued, pointing to the 19 Knesset seats won by Arab parties.
“One could have framed it as a dig against the calls of genocide that a country held free and fair elections in which Arabs could vote and did, to the point their parties won 19 seats in the Knesset, but that would have been too large of a bubble to burst for the far-left in America,” Houck said. “Simply put, use of the word ‘genocide’ shouldn’t be something to joke about.”
Separately, the Campaign Against Antisemitism disputed the premise of Che’s joke while acknowledging the latitude afforded to comedy.
“There’s always a lot of latitude with comedy, and this joke is hardly an exception,” a spokesperson told Fox News Digital. “The problem is that it’s playing on what has become a widespread but baseless belief that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.”
According to the organization, accusations of genocide against Israel cast Jews as perpetrators of the crime inflicted upon them during the Holocaust and are “motivated in no small part by a desperation to assuage global guilt for a real genocide against the Jews by casting the Jews as perpetrators of this grave crime themselves.”
“It has fueled abuse and violence against Jews worldwide — including terrorism and murder,” the spokesperson added.
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