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The most active thread over the weekend was titled, "Bill Maher explains the Middle East to Gen Z: Can anyone really dispute the facts?" and posted in the "Political Discussion" forum. The original poster linked to a segment of "Real Time with Bill Maher" in which Maher directly addressed singer Chappell Roan, and by extension the entire Gen-Z, and provided what Maher and the original poster apparently believe to be an accurate history lesson about the Israel-Palestine conflict. According to both Maher and the original poster, Gen-Z is wildly uninformed about Israel due to relying on TikTok for information. The original poster finds Maher's version of history to be indisputable. I was an active participant in this thread and found several fundamental errors in Maher's version of history. One issue is less about historical fact and more about interpretations. Maher argues that Israeli Jews cannot be colonizers because Jews have a historic connection to the land of Israel. This ignores that the Jews who created Israel largely came from Europe which had been their home for hundreds, if not thousands of years. There is a legitimate debate over what rights are really construed by such a tenuous connection, especially when Palestinians with much more recent claims on the land are denied any similar rights. Maher also claimed that for 2,000 years, nobody was interested in the land that is today's Israel. This is so fundamentally wrong that it really undermines everything else Maher has to say. Multiple crusades were fought over the land. That hardly signifies a lack of interest. Moreover, Maher erases the thriving Palestinian cities, towns, and villages that existed there for hundreds of years. Maher implied that Zionism was a reaction to the Holocaust and Jews didn't begin migrating to today's Israel until after World War II. Factually, Zionism had its roots in the late 1800s and Jews were emigrating as early as 1882, the time of the First Aliyah. Maher also suggested that anyone opposed to Israel's killing of Palestinian civilians is a supporter of Hamas or Hezbollah. This is a logical fallacy often employed to delegitimize critics of Israel's policies. The irony of Maher's version of history and the original poster's praise for it is that Maher's rendition is more fundamentally flawed that any TikTok video could hope to be. Maher is really in no position to be criticizing anyone else's knowledge given his own apparent ignorance. As several posters pointed out, those like Maher and the original poster criticize young folks for allegedly relying on biased sources of information but Maher and the original poster also have generally only been exposed to equally biased sources. In the Middle East, history is more often used to obscure facts than to clarify them. When people say that the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is complicated, they generally mean that they are confused by history. But history really has little meaning to the current conflict. Jews and Arabs have not been fighting for thousands of years as many would have it. Instead, the conflict is relatively new and quite simple. Two different groups want to live on the same land. It is really not any more complicated than that. Maher's resort to distorted history is really an acknowledgement that Gen-Z is closer to the truth than he would like.