NBC’s flagship satirical television show, Saturday Night Live, cancelled the airing of a controversial skit lampooning the confirmation hearing of Secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel, but uploaded the skit to the internet.
The skit prompted criticism from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and from Israel advocate Mark Langfan, among others.
Foxman told The Daily Beast the sketch was “overdone and overdone and overdone. It focuses on the issue of Israel to such a ridiculous extreme that we do become concerned because there is a claim out there that America’s a tool of the Israelis.”
It makes no difference, he said, that SNL executive producer Lorne Michaels and many of the show’s writers and staffers are Jewish. “That doesn’t excuse their insensitivity and their playing on stereotypes and selling stereotypes and [en]forcing stereotypes,” he said.
NBC and SNL offered no response on Monday to Foxman’s complaint.
Pro-Israel advocate Mark Langfan went further than Foxman, stating unequivocally that the sketch was anti-Semitic, because it “makes the U.S. senators look like Israeli senators who are prisoners of the ‘Jewish lobby.'”
In addition, he said, it is racist, because it “makes the black U.S. Republican senator look like he just got off a farm and portrays him as a total rube. For SNL it’s kosher to excoriate a black Republican senator only because he’s Republican.”
Asked by Arutz Sheva if mocking the power of the pro-Israel lobby is not legitimate satire, Langfan explained:
“Not when the satire actually perverts the true fact that Hagel looked like the idiot with his answers on ‘containment’ that had to corrected by his handlers with a corrective note. If they attacked a black Democratic congressman like they attacked a black Republican senator, there would be outrage. The black senator was only attacked because he was a Republican. That’s disgustingly racist.
The airing of the skit on television was cancelled, Langfan said, “because they might have realized how putrid and lurid the skit was.”
The sketch, which contains the offensive reference mentioned above, has been placed on an anti-Israeli Youtube channel.
Source: ARUTZ SHEVA
{Matzav.com Israel}
It was overdone. WAY overdone. But it was not anti-Semitic. It did show the Republicans — including Hagel — looking silly, which was actually pretty accurate. Israel is important, but there were so many other issues that Hagel should have been asked about. But kudos to NBC for not putting it on the air.
I write this as someone who thinks Hagel was a terrible choice for SecDef.