At 14.5 million followers, The Joe Rogan Experience consistently tops the charts as the most popular podcast on Spotify.
With 16 million subscribers on YouTube and millions more on Apple Podcasts, it is clear that Joe Rogan’s unique interviews and charismatic personality resonate with and influence a wide audience.
Part of the appeal of The Joe Rogan Experience is that it covers topics that are generally considered controversial and features interviews with people who hold ideas that are seen as being outside the mainstream.
Naturally, this means that the podcast has touched on Israel and the Jewish people in the past.
However, just because The Joe Rogan Experience’s brand isn’t scared to go outside the mainstream, it does not absolve the podcast of spreading misinformation by either Rogan, himself, or one of his guests.
Here are just some of the times that Joe Rogan enabled the spread of anti-Israel misinformation or dangerous stereotypes about the Jewish people on his podcast.
Joe Rogan: Israel is Committing Genocide
During a podcast interview with comedian Kurt Metzger recorded at the end of March 2024, Joe Rogan commented that Israel’s ongoing defensive war against Hamas was tantamount to genocide due to the number of civilian casualties caught up in the fighting.
Rogan then went on to engage in Holocaust inversion, claiming that Israel was okay with imitating what was done to the Jews during the Holocaust. According to Rogan, “You guys [Israel] are willing to do what was done to you that led you to believe that you needed to start your own country? You’re willing to do that on a small scale in Gaza.”
Rogan also allowed his guest to openly claim that Israel’s war conduct in Gaza was worse than that of Putin’s Russia during its invasion of Ukraine and that Israelis hated Palestinians as part of a “racial thing.”
BREAKING: Joe Rogan says Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/knZU94CatJ
— Mac (@GoodPoliticGuy) March 27, 2024
Joe Rogan Defends ‘All About the Benjamins’ Tweet
In 2019, Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar publicly commented on US congressional support for Israel, tweeting “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby,” asserting this bi-partisan support for the Jewish state is a result of lobby money and not shared values between the two countries.
With its allusions to the classic antisemitic stereotypes of Jews and money as well as dual loyalty, Omar’s tweet aroused a media firestorm and she subsequently apologized for her statement.
In February 2023, following a US House of Representatives vote to oust Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee, her 2019 tweet arose as a topic of discussion between Joe Rogan and his guest Krystal Ball.
Rogan jumped to the defense of Omar, quipping that her 2019 tweet was “not an antisemitic statement, I don’t think that is. Benjamins are money. The idea that Jewish people are not into money is ridiculous. That’s like saying Italians aren’t into pizza, it’s f—-ng stupid.”
Later, Rogan concurred with Krystal Ball’s assertion that the pro-Israel lobby movement and money are responsible for “uniparty consensus around our policy vis-à-vis the Israeli government and a total inability and unwillingness to criticize the Israeli government.”
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Joe Rogan Interviews Roger Waters
For years, Roger Waters has spent his time spreading a wide variety of absurd claims about Israel, Zionism and the Jewish people, some of which have crossed the line into outright antisemitism.
So, it was only natural that when he appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience in October 2022, the famed musician would take some time to spread his latest conspiratorial talking points about the Jewish state.
However, as pointed out by many on social media at the time, rather than push back against Waters’ extreme rhetoric, Rogan simply nodded along and even responded positively to some of Waters’ assertions, granting them an air of legitimacy.
As detailed at the time by the pro-Israel blog site Israellycool, some of the most egregious statements made by Waters during his Joe Rogan Experience interview included:
- The claim that Israel behaves like “people in the past behaved towards Jews in northern Europe” [i.e. Nazis].
- A legitimization of Hamas as the “democratically elected government of Gaza,” the claim that Hamas rockets are “ineffectual,” and the implicit validation of Hamas’ anti-Israel terrorism as “resistance” against occupation.
- That Israel is hoping for another Palestinian intifada as a pretense “to kill them all.”
- The oft-repeated claim that an Israeli audience reacted negatively to Waters’ suggestion at a 2006 concert that it was incumbent upon this generation of Israelis to make peace with the Palestinians even though audio footage from this concert belies his claims.
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Joe Rogan Hosts Abby Martin
In 2017, Joe Rogan hosted independent journalist and former Russia Today host Abby Martin on his podcast, giving her a platform to spread her anti-Israel libels and misinformation.
As noted by the UK-based Israel Advocacy Movement in its takedown of Martin’s untruths following her appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, these are the most egregious claims that Rogan allowed Abby Martin to make without any pushback:
- The claim that Palestinian political parties are illegal in the West Bank.
- That Palestinians who share incitement to violence against Israelis and Jews on social media are punished based on how popular their posts are.
- Her claim that someone she had interviewed had been shot in her vagina during a “peaceful protest” even though the woman admitted in her original interview with Martin that she had been shot in the leg while attempting to slingshot Israeli forces during a violent riot.
- The absurd claim that 200 Palestinians had been shot during this violent riot even though there are no reports that it ever occurred.
- The claim that Israel has a policy called “shooting to cripple,” where Israeli forces shoot men in their genitalia.
- That barely any Palestinians are allowed to pray at the Dome of the Rock, “the most holy site in Jerusalem” (which also goes to show her general ignorance about the region in general).
- The baseless claim that Arabs and Jews have different license plates (as opposed to different license plates in Israel and the Palestinian Authority).
- The claim that Israel is a “white nationalist ethno-supremacist state.”
- The claim that the UN “partitioned a country on top of another country” even though there was no independent state in the area during the 1947 UN vote.
- That Israel has been the “crux of so many problems in the world.”
Despite the above examples, there have been other occasions where Joe Rogan has interviewed pro-Israel voices or made positive comments about Israel and the Jewish people on his podcast.
Unlike some of his guests, Rogan does not appear to have an inherent animus against the Jewish state. However, his apparent lack of understanding of the topic has allowed for the spreading of extreme and absurd claims about Israel and the Jewish people without any resistance.
As someone with an audience of millions of followers around the world, Joe Rogan has a responsibility to do better and not to allow his podcast to serve as a jump-off point for the proliferation of such baseless and dangerous claims.
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