In a now-viral interview, satirist and television host Bassem Youssef, widely heralded as “Egypt’s Jon Stewart,” appeared on “Piers Morgan Uncensored” on Tuesday and skillfully used dark humor to expose the depths of the Palestinian dehumanization, anti-Arab sentiment and Islamophobia that’s been foregrounded and exacerbated by the Israel-Hamas war.
Bassem Youssef skillfully used dark humor to expose the depths of Palestinian dehumanization.
“Their house also was bombed,” Youssef said of his Palestinian wife’s family in the Gaza Strip. “You know those Palestinians, they’re very dramatic: ‘Ahh, Israelis killing us!’ But they never die. … They are … very difficult people to kill. I know because I’m married to one. I tried many times — couldn’t kill her.”
When an obviously uncomfortable Morgan mentioned Youssef’s “dark humor,” he said, “It’s not dark humor. I tried to get to her, but she uses our kids as human shields; I can never take her out.”
In joking that his wife is using their children as shields, Youssef refers here to how propaganda about human shields has been deployed consistently through the decadeslong Middle East conflict, often to justify Israel killing innocent Palestinian civilians. This assertion has been hotly contested throughout the years and questioned by some journalists. Israel, as reported by The Associated Press in 2007, used Palestinians as human shields in violation of international law and a ruling from the Israeli Supreme Court.
When Morgan asked, “How do we get from where we are now to peace?” Youssef attacked the line of thought that’s been expressed by politicians, such as Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, who has described the conflict as one between “good and evil.”
“Now, if you’ve already decided someone is good, he can do no evil,” Youssef said. “And if you decide someone is evil, it’s good to kill them. Killing them is good.”
He continued:
Westerners have always dealt like this with Indigenous people. You first treat them like savages — you know, Native Americans, First Nations, Aboriginals. ‘They’re savages! Kill all the savages!’ And then when they’re almost extinct, you start feeling sorry for them … you know, like animals. So maybe the solution is that we kill as many Palestinians as possible so the few of them that remain do not bother you … and you will campaign for preserving the three Palestinians left.
Youssef’s comedy, as he showed in that appearance with Morgan, isn’t intended to make us laugh. It is intended to make us feel agony and to provoke people who blithely mouth Western talking points about Palestinians to question their assumptions.
With humor, he adeptly reduces colonial ideology to a few uncomfortable sentences.
Throughout the interview, he used a similarly irreverent tone to question Israel’s endgame and took jabs at Western media narratives that perpetuate anti-Arab and anti-Muslim tropes.
Youssef’s interview with Morgan had 15 million views on Morgan’s YouTube page by Friday afternoon and millions of views on TikTok, reaching far corners of the internet. Egyptian-Iraqi British political consultant Hafsa Halawa, a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute, who focuses on human rights and political economy, wrote on the social media platform X that Youssef “expresses what the region is thinking: this conflict didn’t begin on 7 Oct, and it cannot be explained, described, or situated only through the lens of 7 Oct. That isn’t justifying, or defending, it’s just fact.”









