A brilliant 25-minute analysis of the Israeli-executed genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza. Jon Stewart covered all the bases, and then some. Below is a transcript of his remarks created by TurboScribe.

Peace, MAA

Good evening, everyone, or morning, or whatever it is in Gaza right now. Because let’s be honest, time zones are hard when you’re dodging drones. So I’ve been told a lot of things.

I’ve been told that pineapple belongs on pizza. I’ve been told that reality TV is just like real life. And I’ve been told over and over that Palestinians are terrorists.

You know what I wasn’t told? That I’d go there and find a nine-year-old girl offering me tea with a smile while her home was a pile of rubble. I wasn’t told that I’d see medics running toward airstrikes, not away from them. I wasn’t told that faith, real faith, is not something you beat into people with slogans or bombs, but something you witness in the unbroken.

And let me be clear, I didn’t go there on a spiritual journey. I went there like any good Westerner goes to a war zone with a press badge and a bunch of guilt. But when I saw a man cradle his son’s body, kiss his forehead, and say, Alhamdulillah, praising God, even in that moment, I didn’t see a terrorist.

I saw a titan, a spiritual skyscraper, someone who had a relationship with God that made mine look like a bad Tinder date. These people, these so-called terrorists, were kind to me, protected me, fed me, and didn’t once ask me to convert. They just lived their Islam.

They fasted while feeding others. They prayed while bombs fell. They smiled while being slandered.

And in the middle of one of the most brutal occupations in modern history, they still said, peace be upon you. You know how humbling that is? I saw a faith that was not just believed, but embodied. And after all that, I didn’t decide to become Muslim, like I was choosing a gym membership.

I surrendered to a truth that I had seen lived out in real time, by real people, in unreal circumstances. Because if that’s what being a terrorist looks like, then this world needs more of them. But here’s the twist.

They’re not terrorists. They are the terrorized. And they’re still standing.

And me, I stand with them. Because when justice is one-sided and bombs fall like rain, neutrality isn’t noble. It’s cowardice wearing a tie.

So call me what you want. Just know, the world called them terrorists. But what I saw made me a Muslim.

The term terrorist has become one of the most politically loaded and misused labels in modern discourse, especially when applied to Palestinians. It’s a word that doesn’t just describe an action. It redefines a people.

When Palestinians are called terrorists, it’s not about what they did. It’s about who they are perceived to be. This label becomes a narrative weapon, not a factual descriptor.

It erases context, history, and humanity. It makes it easier to ignore occupation, displacement, and generational trauma. Because once someone is labeled a terrorist, their story doesn’t matter.

You don’t ask why they’re angry. You don’t ask where they live or if they still have a home. You don’t ask what happened to their children.

You don’t have to. This dehumanization allows for a moral blind spot in global politics. The word terrorist functions like a fast pass to indifference.

Bombs fall, checkpoints multiply, neighborhoods vanish, and the world shrugs. Because, hey, they were probably hiding rockets, right? It’s not just political rhetoric. It’s propaganda that flattens a complex reality into a black-and-white cartoon, where one side is civilized and the other is… And once someone is declared a savage, the rules of empathy no longer apply.

This is how suffering becomes invisible. It’s how children buried in rubble are rationalized as unfortunate collateral instead of victims of a slow, calculated injustice. But when you step into that world, when you walk the streets of Gaza, when you sit in the tents of displaced families in the West Bank, when you meet a grandmother who offers you bread while her kitchen is a pile of broken concrete, something shifts.

You begin to see the enormous gap between the label and the lived reality. These aren’t people consumed by hatred. They’re people consumed by survival.

Their resilience isn’t violent. It’s sacred. Their anger isn’t irrational.

It’s human. And what becomes painfully clear is that the term terrorist was never meant to describe their actions. It was meant to justify someone else’s.

The power of that word lies in its convenience. It simplifies a messy situation into a digestible narrative for outsiders who don’t have time to care. It grants permission for indifference and even cruelty.

But the truth is, Palestinians are not born terrorists. They are born under occupation. They are born into a system that restricts their movement, their access to resources, their ability to dream.

And yet, when they resist, even peacefully, they’re criminalized. When they protest, they’re agitators. When they mourn, they’re provokers.

This isn’t about terrorism. This is about controlling the narrative, the optics, and ultimately the truth. So when someone who’s only known the Western narrative meets Palestinians and sees something else, kindness, strength, patience, dignity, it’s not just shocking, it’s transformational.

Because the word terrorist doesn’t survive firsthand experience. It can only thrive in distance, in ignorance, and in media soundbites. Once you look into the eyes of the people behind the label, the label falls apart and the truth comes rushing in.

Humanizing Palestinians through personal experience begins where headlines and hashtags end. In much of the Western world, Palestinians are presented as distant, abstract figures, numbers in death toll, silhouettes in rubble, or faces blurred behind keffiyehs. They exist more as symbols than people.

But when you encounter them in real life, face-to-face, not filtered through a news anchor or political analyst, everything changes. The slogans fade and what remains is a deeply human story of survival, family, faith, and love. You might meet a father who can name every tree that once stood in his olive grove before it was bulldozed.

Or a teenage girl who walks miles each day to get to school, crossing checkpoints, navigating soldiers, and still dreaming of becoming a doctor. You see children playing soccer near the remnants of bombed-out buildings, laughing like kids anywhere else in the world. You sit at a table with a family who has almost nothing but offers you everything.

These are not acts of politics. They are acts of humanity. And it’s that humanity that punctures the veil of narrative distortion.

When someone is described only through the lens of conflict or extremism, you stop imagining their birthdays, their weddings, their laughter. You don’t think about what music they like, what jokes they tell, or how they hold their children when they sleep. But when you actually meet them, you begin to realize that they are not defined by war.

They’re surviving it. They are not agents of violence. They’re victims of it.

They are not changing them. And yet they carry themselves not with bitterness, but with remarkable grace. That personal connection forces a reckoning.

It exposes the hypocrisy of labeling an entire population based on the actions of a few while ignoring the systemic violence inflicted on them daily. You begin to notice how language itself is weaponized. A homemade rocket is terrorism.

A multi-billion dollar airstrike is self-defense. A stone thrown by a boy is a threat. A sniper round through his chest is policy.

You start to see how uneven the moral scale really is and how much easier it is to dehumanize someone when you’ve never had to look them in the eye. Personal experience dismantles distance. It removes the safe buffer that allows people to form opinions without accountability.

It turns statistics into names, ruins into neighborhoods, and war zones into homes. And once that shift happens, it becomes harder, if not impossible, to return to the language of indifference. You can’t unsee a mother weeping over her lost child.

You can’t unhear the call to prayer echoing through broken streets, carrying a dignity that refuses to die. You can’t unread the poetry etched on prison walls or forget the quiet strength of a boy who offers you half his sandwich even though it’s his only meal. These moments are not grand, dramatic conversions.

They are intimate, quiet ruptures in the story you’ve been told. And in those ruptures, you begin to understand Palestinians are not a political issue. They are people.

Spiritual transformation rarely arrives in moments of comfort. It comes quietly, often when the world feels upside down. Witnessing faith in action, especially in places where suffering is the norm, not the exception, can shake a person to the core.

It’s one thing to read about a religion in books, to study its rituals, its commandments, and its theology. It’s another thing entirely to watch people embody it with such sincerity, grace, and consistency under unthinkable pressure. That kind of lived faith doesn’t just inform belief.

It becomes the proof of it. In occupied Palestine, Islam isn’t practiced as a set of rules, but as a way of surviving with dignity. You see people who have lost their homes still rising before dawn for prayer.

You see women who have buried children still whispering verses of the Quran with calm on their lips. You see men who carry the trauma of war and occupation, yet still bow their heads five times a day, thanking a God they trust, even when the world seems void of justice. That kind of devotion is not performative.

It’s not forced. It’s real. And it radiates something that cuts past skepticism and intellect.

For someone raised in a secular or even religiously skeptical society, the idea of surrendering to God can seem outdated or weak. But in Palestine, surrender is not defeat. It’s strength.

It’s a spiritual rebellion against despair. It says, you can take my land, my home, even my family, but you cannot take my trust in the one who sees all. And witnessing that kind of resilience in real time, watching someone stand tall in the ruins and still utter Alhamdulillah, shakes everything you thought you knew about power, about peace, and about what it means to believe.

This transformation isn’t born out of argument. No one sits you down with a list of theological bullet points. No one pressures you to change your mind.

What you’re confronted with is a kind of spiritual integrity that doesn’t need to be sold. It just exists. It breathes in the patience of a shopkeeper who rebuilds his store for the fifth time.

It moves through the voice of a child reciting Quran beside a pile of rubble. It stands in the eyes of an imam who preaches mercy on Friday while funerals take place outside. It forces you to ask, how do these people still find hope? How do they still smile? And more hauntingly, what do they have that I don’t? Eventually, the question stops being about religion as an institution and starts being about truth as an experience.

You stop evaluating Islam as an outsider and begin feeling its pull in your own heart, not because of doctrine, but because of demonstration. Not because you lost an argument, but because you witnessed a beauty that defied logic. You saw it, you felt it, and something in you shifted.

Not out of pity or politics or even guilt, but out of reverence for a people whose faith turned their suffering into strength. Satire and sarcasm are not just tools for comedy. They’re weapons for truth.

When facts are buried under propaganda and when serious discussion is hijacked by political spin, satire cuts through the noise like a scalpel. It allows you to say the uncomfortable, the censored, and the inconvenient without sounding preachy or self-righteous. It takes the absurd and lays it bare.

And in the context of Palestine, where decades of injustice have been wrapped in the language of diplomacy and conflict resolution, satire becomes one of the last honest forms of protest. There is a reason humor survives in the darkest places. When bombs fall and headlines lie, laughter becomes rebellion.

But this laughter isn’t about dismissing pain. It’s about refusing to drown in it. It’s about exposing the surreal nature of a world where a military occupation is called self-defense and the people resisting it are labeled aggressor.

It’s about highlighting the irony that the victims are constantly asked to justify their grief while their occupiers are praised for their restraint. Through sarcasm, that double standard is exposed. Not with rage, but with a raised eyebrow and a devastating punchline.

When someone uses satire to talk about Palestine, they’re not making light of suffering. They’re illuminating the contradictions that polite society refuses to confront. It’s a way of saying, look how insane this is without screaming.

It allows audiences, especially those far removed from the reality, to process horror without shutting down. Because when you’re laughing, your defenses are down. You’re listening, you’re open, and in that moment, the truth sneaks in.

That’s the power of humor. It lowers the guard. It speaks to people who might otherwise dismiss the topic entirely.

When someone hears a brutal fact framed in a joke, like how Palestinian homes are demolished faster than most Americans can order takeout, it sticks, it disturbs, but it also reveals. The hypocrisy becomes harder to ignore. The propaganda starts to crack.

And once that crack appears, it’s very hard to unsee. Sarcasm also gives the speaker emotional distance. It allows them to touch subjects that are too wrong, too enormous, too painful to describe directly.

Through humor, they can talk about checkpoints, mass surveillance, and airstrikes without breaking down. And that allows the audience to sit with it longer. It keeps the conversation going when it would otherwise be too heavy to carry.

It’s not disrespect, it’s strategy. What makes satire especially effective in this context is that it turns power on its head. It mocks the powerful and centers the oppressed without sanctifying them.

It shows that truth can be both devastating and absurd. That occupation is not just violent, but ridiculous. That pretending to be neutral while people are being brutalized is not noble, it’s laughable.

And through that laughter, something shifts. People stop parroting narratives and start questioning them. They begin to see the injustice not as an unfortunate complexity, but as a preventable farce.

And that realization, born through irony, can be the first step toward real awareness. Western complicity and media bias are central to how the Palestinian struggle is perceived, distorted, and often erased. The role of Western governments, especially the United States and much of Europe, goes far beyond passive observation.

These powers are deeply entangled in the politics, funding, and military support that sustain the occupation of Palestinian land. Billions of dollars in aid flow annually to the Israeli military, and yet there is almost no scrutiny of how those funds are used, even when civilian casualties mount and international laws are broken. This support isn’t neutral.

It enables the very structures that Palestinians are resisting. Media in the West plays a critical role in maintaining this imbalance. It doesn’t just fail to report the truth.

It often shapes it into something unrecognizable. Words are chosen carefully but deceptively. When Palestinians are killed, they die in clashes.

When Israelis are killed, it’s a terrorist attack. Bombings that flatten entire neighborhoods are described as retaliatory strikes, while a stone thrown by a teenager becomes a symbol of dangerous militancy. This language isn’t accidental.

It is part of a framework that centers one side’s pain while minimizing or justifying the suffering of the other. Images are filtered, too. When the media does show Gaza, it’s usually after a bombing, portraying Palestinians only in grief or rage, never in joy, never in resilience, never in humanity.

The context, decades of occupation, displacement, siege, is stripped away. The result is a caricature, a faceless mass of angry people in a perpetual state of chaos. This allows the viewer to consume the violence without understanding it, without asking why, without caring.

Western politicians echo these distortions. They offer hollow statements about Israel’s right to defend itself while saying little or nothing about a 75-year occupation or the daily violence that Palestinians endure. The language of peace is used to justify policies of aggression.

The calls for restraint only ever seem to apply to the occupied, not the occupied. And when someone speaks up, especially in politics or media, they are quickly silenced with accusations of antisemitism or being one-sided, as if speaking about Palestinian suffering is somehow biased by default. This distortion has a numbing effect.

People grow up hearing the same version of events, one where the roles of victim and aggressor are fixed and unquestioned. And because it comes from trusted institutions, they believe it. It becomes the lens through which everything else is judged.

Palestinians must prove their humanity again and again while the systems that dehumanize them go unquestioned. But when someone sees the reality firsthand or begins to question the narrative they were raised with, the entire structure begins to wobble. The complicity becomes visible.

The silence becomes definite. And what once seemed like a complicated political issue is suddenly revealed as a clear moral failure, perpetuated not just by the obvious players on the ground, but by governments, media outlets, and institutions that claim to stand for democracy and human rights while turning their backs on the very people most in need of both. Moral clarity in the face of oppression is not a luxury.

It’s a responsibility. In a world where injustice is often dressed up as policy and war crimes are explained away as security measures, choosing to stand with the oppressed is not a matter of politics, but of conscience. Neutrality in such situations is frequently portrayed as fairness or objectivity.

But in truth, it often functions as a shield for complicity to remain silent or indifferent when people are being bombed, displaced, and dehumanized is to accept those conditions as tolerable, to say without words that their suffering is not significant enough to warrant action. In the case of Palestine, the moral imbalance is staggering. One side lives under military occupation, denied basic human rights, and frequently endures attacks that destroy entire neighborhoods.

The other side holds one of the most powerful militaries in the world, enjoys full statehood, and receives unwavering support from global superpowers. To pretend this is a conflict between equals is dishonest. It’s not two sides fighting over land.

It’s a people fighting to exist, to breathe, to have the right to raise their children without the sound of drones overhead. In such a scenario, claiming neutrality becomes a kind of moral laziness, an unwillingness to take a stand when the truth demands it. There is often a fear, especially in Western societies, of taking sides in something as politically charged as the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

People don’t want to offend, to alienate, or to be labeled. But moral clarity doesn’t come from being safe. It comes from being honest.

It requires looking at what is happening on the ground, not through the lens of media soundbites, but through the lived experiences of those who suffer. When hospitals are bombed, when children are pulled from rubble, when entire families are wiped out in airstrikes, the response should not be a carefully balanced statement. It should be outrage.

It should be empathy. It should be action. Taking a stand with Palestinians does not mean hating Israelis, nor does it mean denying the complexities of the region.

It means recognizing a massive power imbalance and choosing to side with those whose lives are constantly undervalued. It means refusing to equate the violence of occupation with the resistance against it. It means refusing to accept a narrative where colonization is framed as self-defense and survival is branded as terrorism.

True moral clarity is often uncomfortable. It challenges long-held beliefs, disrupts the status quo, and demands accountability, not just from foreign governments, but from our own. It asks individuals to move beyond hashtags and statements and into real solidarity, educating themselves, speaking out, and refusing to allow silence to be mistaken for peace.

Because in the end, history remembers not just those who commit injustice, but those who watched it happen and said nothing. And in the face of such persistent brutality, the only truly neutral position is one of cowardice.