‘Variety’ Honors Amy Schumer—Who Called Gazans ‘Rapists’—for Being ‘Outspoken’
Since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed over 34,000, Schumer has shared a range of disturbing posts yet is being celebrated as someone who's "used to pissing people off."
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This week, Variety rolled out its “Power of Women” series to honor a select group of women in the entertainment industry and, bafflingly enough, Amy Schumer was one of those women. In a lengthy profile celebrating Schumer’s “outspokenness,” Variety makes the incredibly frustrating choice to portray Schumer as something of a victim of cancel culture, misogyny, and overly zealous activism from pro-Palestine activists, offering little context into why, exactly, Schumer is the object of so much warranted criticism and backlash.
The profile details one instance where Schumer was filming an upcoming project in Brooklyn when a woman walked by and yelled: “Fuck you, Amy Schumer! You’re a Zionist! You love genocide!” To this, Schumer tells Variety, “It didn’t even raise my heart rate. I didn’t cry. Nothing.” (I can only assume that we, the reader, are supposed to find this brave and inspiring…?) “Of course what’s going on in Gaza is sickening, horrifying and unthinkable,” she said, which is universes away from what she was saying in the fall. “And, I don’t think it’s OK to hate anyone because they were born Jewish.” At different points throughout the interview, Schumer talks about being misunderstood and says she doesn’t “agree with anything” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is doing and opposes the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza which have killed over 34,000 Palestinians in six months.
Except there’s not too much to misunderstand about what Schumer has previously said about Gaza. In October, after Hamas attacked Israel and took 200 Israelis hostages and Israel responded by bombarding Gaza and killing thousands of people within days, Schumer shared multiple inflammatory posts on Instagram. One post stated that “Gazans rape Jewish girls” and mocked pro-Palestine activists with a cartoon depicting someone carrying a sign that said, “PROUD OF OUR RAPIST MARTYRS.” She shared a separate post claiming without evidence that Palestinians, not Israeli forces, bombed their own hospital, killing dozens.