Emmy Award-winning actress Julianna Margulies said that certain college-age students who have been marching in solidarity with Palestinians would be the first to be attacked if they set foot in Gaza.
“It’s those kids who are spewing anti-Semitic hate that have no idea, if they stepped foot in an Islamic country, these people who want us to call them ’they/them' or whatever they want us to call them—which I have respectfully really made a point of doing. Like, be whoever you want to be—it’s those people that will be the first people beheaded, and their heads played with a soccer ball, like a soccer ball on the field,” Ms. Margulies said.
The “ER” and “The Good Wife” actress made the comments in an episode of the podcast “The Back Room with Andy Ostroy.”
She was making reference to recent protests at university campuses that criticized Israel after Hamas carried out a terrorist attack on Oct. 7, sparking the conflict.
“It is so insane to me that it is laughable if it wasn’t so sad,” she said.
Ms. Margulies said she submitted an op-ed to The New York Times, titled “A Letter to My Non-Jewish Friends,” about how hurtful it was that they didn’t seem to understand the weight of the tragedy and had remained silent after the Oct. 7 attack.
“I wanted it to be an op-ed in The New York Times, and they took it and sat on it for a good week,” the 58-year-old actress said.
When she got the editor’s notes back, she said they wanted her to change the piece and speak more about her personal experiences of anti-Semitism or her Holocaust education program.
Disappointment in Media, Hollywood
Later on, Ms. Margulies criticized The New York Times and the BBC for what she described as “careless” coverage of the conflict and taking at face value the claims of Hamas, which controls the media and the government in Gaza.Ms. Margulies said Adolf Hitler and the Nazis modeled their treatment of the Jews after the Jim Crow South in the United States, and that this is one reason American Jews stood up in solidarity with black Americans during the Civil Rights Movement.
“The fact that the entire black community isn’t standing with us, to me, says either they just don’t know or they’ve been brainwashed to hate Jews.”
After that, the actress offered criticism of her own industry for what she suggested was a weak response.
“Can you imagine the [Writers Guild of America] not putting out a statement after George Floyd?” she asked. “And yet when it was the Jews? The Jews—by the way, all of our great material on television is pretty much from the Jews—the fact that they stayed silent for so long until they were pressured into making a statement. By the way, Me Too movement. The Me Too movement! Women—they cut a fetus out of a mother’s, a pregnant woman’s stomach, and filmed it. And the Me Too movement isn’t condemning Hamas?”
Her comments come after Israel confirmed that it resumed combat operations against Hamas, a State Department-designated terrorist group, following a week-long ceasefire that saw dozens of hostages released. The Israeli Defense Forces said Friday that Hamas is still holding about 136 hostages in Gaza, including 17 women and children.
Israel has sworn to wipe out Hamas in response to the Oct. 7 rampage, which left at least 1,200 people dead. The Hamas-controlled health authorities in Gaza have said that more than 15,000 Gazans have been confirmed killed, although The Epoch Times cannot verify those figures.
