Roseanne Barr has dramatically changed her opinion about the state of Israel, with a little help from her friends or ex-friends .
The actress/comedienne and self-described socialist has apparently become disillusioned with what she called self-righteous elitists on the progressive/liberal left, given the anti-Semitism that she has encountered from that side of the ideological spectrum.
“This fake left of trust-funders of privilege have created a profitable worldwide network to slander, threaten, [and] blood libel Jews with the same trash used by the czars of Russia, Spanish Inquisition, Nazis…,” she declared in a speech about her former political colleagues whom she accused of engaging in revisionist history and for being peace poseurs.
Last month, Barr admitted that she might be moving to Israel from where she currently lives in Hawaii.
In 2012, Roseanne unsuccessfully sought the Green Party presidential nomination, and ended up running as the Peace and Freedom Party candidate.
No stranger to controversy over her career, Barr, 63, starred in the eponymous megahit situation comedy Roseanne , which ran from 1988 to 1997 on ABC, co-starring John Goodman.
An outspoken social critic who reportedly became more political after the 9/11 attacks, Barr delivered the speech in question at a “stop the boycott” conference in Jerusalem, Israel, on Monday.
There, Barr denounced what she described as the “fake left” BDS movement prevalent on U.S. college campuses and elsewhere — and among celebrity activists like Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters — which seeks to economically boycott and divest from Israel and impose sanctions on the Jewish state in an attempt to isolate it from the world community.
Formerly an Israel basher, Roseanne Barr revealed that she began to see things differently amidst her quirky 2012 presidential run, during which she was shouted down by the left when she spoke in favor of Israel.
“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,” Brietbart News explained .
According to the liberal website AlterNet about her trip to Israel to attend this week’s anti-BDS conference,”Ex-Hollywood TV star Roseanne Barr [has] undergone a conversion from being a rabid anti-Zionist to an Arab-hating Israel supporter…”
“Explaining her seemingly sudden 180-degree turn on the issue, she explained that her original protests against Israel stemmed from the same moral obligation which prompted her dissent against the American involvement in Vietnam. In both situations, the actress appreciated the country and its sovereignty, but objected to its military actions,” the Jerusalem Post noted .
In her presentation (during which she lost her place once,) Barr asserted that anti-Israel BDS leftists have fascistic tendencies and use opposition to Israel as a proxy for bigotry against Jews.
She also denounced the campus “BDS factories” where social justice warriors routinely silence pro-Israel dialogue.
“During may campaign about 2012, everything I believed about the left was severely shaken, and the scales began to fall from my eyes in many ways. And I had to admit that many of those I considered comrades were naked bigots who had absolutely no interest in peace between Israel and Palestinians Arabs at all as I did. It was shocking to realize that what I considered criticism of Israel many, many times gave way to the garden variety anti-Semitism that I’d heard all of my life…”
Barr recalled that her political associates made many anti-Semitic comments in her presence, having no idea (like most of America in her TV heyday) that the Salt Lake City native was of Jewish heritage. She also stressed that Israel is far from perfect.
“I’m certainly not here to defend the indefensible. … Israel has many things about it that need correction like every single other state and nation on earth…yet Jews don’t care what religion other people are, and we would never dream of denying any religious minority their right to worship…many religions and religious freedom itself are part of the diversity of Israel…”
@therealroseanne gives electrifying speech in #Israel for @StandWithUs @ynet @ynetnews pic.twitter.com/LoT5dJNNEL
— James (@cooklikejames) March 28, 2016
Barr decried the apathy among the United Nations, various pressure groups, and NGOs for their alleged disinterest in the rights of Jews and Christians who, in her view, have been ethnically cleansed from Arab countries.
“BDS doesn’t want peace, nor do they want peace negotiations,” claimed Roseanne Barr, insisting that the real agenda of the BDS movement is to expel all Jews from the Middle East. “You cannot possibly make this sh*t up, folks,” Barr said in a callback to her feisty sitcom persona.
Watch the entire speech embedded below and draw your own conclusions.
“Barr described the European Union, United Nations, and the ‘BDS left’ as ‘crazy’ for refusing to see that ‘Israel is a state full of millions of good people who want peace,’” TheBlaze summarized .
Most of the disproportionate attention by Israel’s foes in the international community fixates on the disputed Palestinian territories on the West Bank controlled by Israel, even though territorial and sectarian disputes exist all over the world. Jews have been continuously present in what is now known as Israel for approximately 3,000-plus years, according to the ArabIsraeliconflict.info website as well as many other sources. Israel was founded in May 1948 after the so-called British mandate over Palestine officially ended.
As Roseanne Barr alluded to in her remarks, although every nation, including Israel, has shortcomings, and whether one approves or disapproves of that country’s policies, Israel is the only functioning multicultural, multi-faith democracy in the Middle East.
Last year, around the time that she announced she was suffering from macular degeneration, Roseanne Barr dissed Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as corporate Democrats beholden to big money interests. “Bernie and Trump have been stealing some of my lines,” she told Haaretz in February about the U.S. presidential election.
[Photo by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP]