TikTok famous comedienne, Jessica Kirson, belongs to the new crop of American stand-up comics like Matt Rife, Matteo Lane and Sam Morrill who have astutely gained a substantial global following by being ubiquitous on your socials. She pops up everywhere on your phone and deservedly so – she’s very funny. Her crowd work, a heady mix of self-deprecation, unfiltered banter and scarily spot on observations on audience members, is what makes her go viral.
There’s trouble in paradise for Kirson though. And she is solely to blame for it.
During the aftermath of Israel’s invasion of refugee-heavy Rafah, when the world was engulfed with grief and rage and an image with the phrase “All Eyes on Rafah” was shared over 50 million times online, Kirson decided to share an incendiary contrarian view on her Instagram account. Rather than share in the world’s ongoing sense of fear, horror, and helplessness over the despondent situation in Gaza, Kirson instead was urging her million plus followers to focus their attention on Hamas’ 120 Israeli hostages.
Her followers thankfully (present company included) weren’t having it and started spewing their vitriol at the seemingly Zionist comedienne who, like all deeply problematic celebrities, resorted to gaslighting, pointing the finger of blame at “Cancel Culture”.
“What Kirson fails to understand is that asking your million plus followers to sympathize with genocidal colonizers is very much the moral equivalent to shoring up sympathy for slave owners.”
For the 1% who aren’t aware, “Cancel Culture” serves as the current flimsy defense mechanism for toxic celebrities wishing to absolve themselves of any wrongdoing.
Kirson also employed other ad hominem arguments to justify her actions namely whataboutisms and Bothsidesism. Not that it matters, but Palestinians and Palestine supporters are also deeply concerned with the horrors unraveling in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo and are simultaneously posting on their socials about the genocide there as they are in Palestine. As for the tiresome, relentlessly debunked Bothsidesism argument, the Zionist Entity has the fourth strongest army in the world and is militarily backed by the strongest army in the world. Palestine has no army whatsoever and isn’t militarily backed by any nation’s army.
What Kirson and her generation (I’ll come to that later) fails to understand is that asking your million plus followers to sympathize with genocidal colonizers is very much the moral equivalent to shoring up sympathy for slave owners.
I won’t publish the numbers of Palestinian murders and casualties or discuss the 80-year annihilation of Palestine at length on here. That’s not why I’m writing this piece. I will only say that university students have never been on the wrong side of history. They weren’t wrong about Vietnam or Apartheid South Africa or Apartheid Israel.
Empirically, there is a generational divide in America when it comes to support for Israel. According to Pew polls, among those aged 50-64 i.e. Kirson’s age demographic, 60% hold a favorable view of the country while, on the opposite end, those aged 18-29 i.e. Gen Z-ers, largely don’t. That’s because Kirson’s generation ties the Zionist Entity with the Holocaust while, for Millennials and Gen Z, there is a clear schism between the horrors Israel inflicts on innocent lives and the horrors of the Holocaust.
The murder – and now deliberative starvation – of thousands of Palestinian children is what is truly pulling at the world’s heartstrings and is galvanizing teenage students across the world to place their lives at risk (police officers are physically assaulting and hospitalizing them) to protest day and night on the streets.
Disturbingly, Zionists, as a collective, have never publicly expressed any sympathy for the thousands of innocent Palestinian children they have murdered over the past decade. To Kirson and her ilk, Palestinian children’s lives clearly do not matter. Rather than undergo any form of self-reflection or feel any semblance of sympathy for the scores of murdered and maimed Palestinian children, Zionists like Kirson routinely and narcissistically deflect all accountability and pull out the worn out, incredulous “self-defense” card at every given opportunity.
If the roles were reversed and Palestinians like me saw scores of dead Israeli children trapped under rubble, burnt alive and decapitated, we would be weeping for them. We wouldn’t be pointing fingers or shrugging it off or rejoicing, as many Zionist settlers have been caught-on-camera doing. That’s not how a mentally stable human being would react to the sight of mutilated children.
All children in Islam, regardless of their ethnicity or spiritual background, are innocent and Heaven-bound. Even children belonging to the Zionist Entity.
Jessica Kirson belongs to multiple disadvantaged and vulnerable groups (she’s Jewish, queer and a woman) and is a mother of four which makes it hard to understand why she is so stridently pro-Zionist and anti-children.
The problematic comedienne has the freedom to express her genocidal-leaning thoughts but it’s also our right to call her out on it and trounce her in a deservedly humiliating manner. And hopefully, cancel her.
