The American satire program "Saturday Night Live" joked about Israel and the vaccines, and Israel's ambassador to the United States responded with a tweet: "Your 'joke' stems from ignorance, apologize"
"Saturday Night Live," NBC's long-established and talked-about sketch show, often stars in the headlines for the scandals it manages to produce, and this time it has found itself entangled in one that has an antisemitic scent.
. @ nbcsnl I'm a big fan of humor but, perpetuating antisemitism is just not funny.
Your "joke" is ignorant-the fact is that the success of our vaccination drive is exactly because every citizen of Israel - Jewish, Muslim, Christian-is entitled it.
Apologize! Pic.twitter.com/zQqtBmFqJ2
- Ambassador Gilad Erdan Gilad Erdan (@ giladerdan1) February 21, 2021
Arden's tweet
In a program broadcast over the weekend, Michael Che, who presents the satirical news section "Weekend Update", joked that Israel reports that it has vaccinated half of its population against the corona.
"I will guess that this is half the Jew," he added.
Not surprisingly, the joke was able to arouse a storm among Jewish groups who were quick to call it "anti-Semitic", as the American Jewish Committee (AJC
)
also drafted a petition calling on organizers plan to officially apologize for the move tasteless.
"Saturday Night Live's joke is not only false, it's dangerous and has a modern twist on an antisemitic motif that has inspired the mass murder of Jews over the years," the petition, posted on the network yesterday (Sunday), said.
Joining the call for an official apology from the network was Israel's ambassador to the United States and the United Nations, Gilad Ardan, who tweeted angrily yesterday about what he called "a perpetuation of anti-Semitism": "I am a big fan of humor," Arden said, "Your 'joke' stems from ignorance. The success of our vaccination campaign lies precisely in the fact that every citizen, Jew, Muslim and Christian is entitled to be vaccinated. Apologize," he signed and tagged the page of the program.
Although the tweet received several hundred likes and shares, quite a few surfers chose to critique Arden and the content of his tweet, with many of them choosing to mock the level of English he demonstrated.
"There is no English speaker who can style these tweets a bit? A bit out of whimsy," tweeted journalist Ilan Lukacs, and other surfers added: "Okay, no Lukacs ya sour, you might think, a few mistakes in English, so what? What, he ambassador came" M ?! "and" Thank you Giladush, once again proof that we are the most smoky Jews in the world. "
Another respondent tweeted: "You are an embarrassment to the Israeli public. The Israeli government is responsible for 13 million citizens, and instead of worrying about equality you are blabbering on about anti-Semitism. Enough of racism, Ambassador to America from Ali Express, that's what we have there."
Other surfers chose to attack Arden for what he called "Israel's apartheid policy," which they allegedly discriminated against the Palestinians, and tweeted: "Is humor that has truth in it anti-Semitic, Apartheid Boy?".
Another surfer added: "Apologize for what? For being honest? Enough with the whining. You are anti-Semitic if you dare to criticize Israel. Hiding behind the call for anti-Semitism is a cowardly act that sterilizes true anti-Semitism."