Welcome to the Empire Files podcast. This is your host, Abby Martin. This is the audio of our show.

You can watch the episodes on our YouTube channel or at the Empirefiles.tv.

Saturday Night Live is under fire for a joke on their program on February 20th, where comedian Michael Chase stated, quote, Israel is reporting that they vaccinated half of their population.

I'm going to guess it's the Jewish half.

Predictably, there have been swift condemnations demanding an apology and retraction for the statement.

Former Israeli military spokesperson Avi Mayer tweeted,

It's all fun in games until you start promoting anti-Semitic myths.

NBCSNL apologize.

Ellie Kohanim, the official State Department envoy to combat anti-Semitism, called the joke

modern-day blood libel against Jews.

Making this about anti-Semitism is an attempt to deflect from the

real punchline, that Israel is a human rights violator with criminally unequal treatment for

Palestinians. This is an indisputable and well-documented fact. Yet in the American media

landscape, even a reference to it is considered

unacceptable. But if critics really want to make it about the accuracy of the claim about

vaccine distribution, that's worth looking at too. Israel is making headlines for rapidly rolling

out the vaccine for its 9 million citizens, about 1.5 million of whom are Palestinians

with Israeli citizenship. According to reports, they are receiving the vaccine at the same rate

that Jewish Israelis are receiving it. That's great. But that's not the real story here.

See, U.S. and Israeli politicians like to pretend that the only Palestinians that matter

are the ones living within Israel's 1948 borders, and that the 5 million Palestinians living

in the West Bank and Gaza are not their problem. It's a deliberate concealing of the situation

...