Gay Canadian comedian's viral video exposes Hamas in new light

One of the biggest and most pleasant surprises in the months following the October 7 Hamas attack is that one of Israel’s most effective, cleverest, and certainly funniest, advocates on social media has been Daniel-Ryan Spaulding, a gay Canadian stand-up comedian.

Currently based in New York, Spaulding has been selling out shows all over the US, Europe, and Israel for years, and will be performing at the Zappa club in Tel Aviv, where he will play two shows on March 28, and at Zappa in Jerusalem, where he will appear on March 29.

While he has long been known for his stand-up appearances in the gay community, an act he calls, “Power Gay,” Spaulding has recently acquired tens of thousands of new followers on Instagram and TikTok who were drawn to his advocacy for Israel. His Instagram account was recently suspended and then reinstated, apparently because of an attempt by Hamas supporters to silence him.

Video calling out western liberals goes viral

Just a few days after October 7, he made a video that went viral in which he called out Western liberals and leftists for defending Hamas, in which he said, in part, “I think it’s a little ironic that the people who seem to be defending Hamas online are also the people they’d be most likely to kill.” 

He then switched to sarcasm, saying, “Oh, no, no, I’m sure the Islamic terrorists wouldn’t kill you, queer intellectual feminist: ‘We’re freedom fighters, they’re fighting for their land and I’m fighting for my right to purple hair.’” 

For many Israelis and Jews around the world, it was the first moment since that black day when there was anything to laugh about. But Spaulding wasn’t just joking around, his empathy and compassion for the October 7 victims were clear as he went on to say, “I’m sorry if your reaction to people being slaughtered, beheaded, raped, and burned alive isn’t complete and utter disgust and horror, if your reaction is, ‘Yeah, but I mean... see it from their perspective,’ you need to get your f**king head checked.”

THAT VIDEO changed his life and his career. Spaulding has since focused intensely on advocating for Israel however he can: meeting with hostage families, many of whom have come to see him as a friend, and speaking at “Bring Them Home” rallies; palling around with the likes of Israel’s hasbara [advocacy] queen Noa Tishby and government spokesperson, Eylon Levy; attending the “Hear Our Voices” UN event hosted by Shery Sandberg which focused attention on the sexual assaults committed by Hamas; showing up at a gathering at Sundance Film Festival to keep the hostages in the news; and much more. 

In addition, he has released a whole series of what he calls the “purple-hair girl” comedy videos, where he plays that clueless anti-Israel hipster he referred to in that viral video and then educates her, Mr. Rogers-style, dissecting and demolishing her worldview point-by-point. While she chants “Globalize the Intifada,” he introduces himself in a Mr. Rogers-like cardigan, saying, “I’m Mr. Daniel, and this is my friend, the purple-hair girl. She’s not a bad person, but she’s been radicalized to become a raging Jew-hater, and we want to help her.” 

In a recent Zoom interview from New York, where he proudly wore his dog tag to support the hostages, he said that on his seven or so visits to Israel, he learned a great deal about the country and made many friends, so he was very upset when he saw others defending Hamas online after October 7. 

Spaulding had performed in Israel just about a week before the Hamas attack and, he said, “The idea that I had friends [outside of Israel] who would think that if I had been killed or kidnapped [while in Israel]... would say... ‘Oh, well, I guess he shouldn’t have gone there.’ It horrified me so much... I just knew I had to say something, because what I was seeing was so messed up... I was just so shocked by the reaction, that I was just puzzled by it and I thought, ‘How stupid are these people, that they don’t realize that Hamas is a terrorist organization?’ 

“And so initially I didn’t fully know what I was saying, I didn’t fully think through what would be the reaction, but I think that because I had been spending so much time in Israel over the last few years, I sort of deprogrammed myself from the propaganda that people [abroad] are... inundated with.”

He chose to create the purple-hair girl videos – and has just begun releasing a new series of them – because he hoped that they could make a difference. 

“It got to the point where I realized that some of these purple-haired girls, we may never reach them. But what I could do? I could empower the silent majority to have the facts that they need to be able to have these conversations with the purple-haired girls in their lives because it’s only through love and connection that we can open our minds and take in a little new information. If I had never gone to Israel and I had never made those friendships, I would have never learned the information I needed, to see the perspective of Israeli society and the truth of the situation.” 

In these videos, he tackles each woke misconception one by one, like the claim that it’s possible to hate Zionists without hating Jews.

The Mr. Rogers-style format occurred to him because, he said, “I was thinking to myself, who could possibly solve a problem like this? Mr. Rogers! So I wanted to do basically Mr. Rogers for the antisemitic apocalypse happening now.”

Spending time with the Jewish community wherever he was performing, especially in New York, helped educate him in the finer points of “ancient Jew hatred... So as I did more research and really delved into this subject over October and November... I learned all about blood libel and learned the history; but your average person doesn’t have any idea about this. That’s what I was trying to do with purple-hair girl, was give people the vocabulary to be able to have a deeper understanding of this issue. I wanted to give them just basic facts. Like people don’t even know that Israel is 20% Arab. They don’t know anything.”

He has been accused of “pinkwashing,” an expression used by those critical of Israel to suggest that the fact that the LGBTQ community enjoys freedom in Israel unlike anywhere else in the Middle East is just a tactic to divert attention from the oppression of Palestinians. 

He first heard the term more than a decade ago, and it seemed strange to him. “Canada has a horrible environmental policy but it also has gay rights, and I would never say Canada pinkwashes our environmental policies through having gay rights, it just made no sense to me... At some point, someone must have realized, ‘We need to discredit gay men, to break down this talking point that Israel is positive for gay people,’ to make it something that’s also a conspiracy, that, ‘They use gay rights to cover up their human-rights abuses.’” 

In addition to his advocacy, he plans to continue his stand-up career and hopes to write, produce, and act in a television show. 

SPAULDING SAID that he hoped his story would help people who support Israel be less hesitant to speak out. 

“We’ve built this insane system where everyone is obsessed with followers and popularity, ‘What will people think of me? I want everyone to like me.’ It’s like we’re all these fragile 15-year-olds in high school. But people that are evil and people that are misguided and people that are uneducated, they don’t care, they’re spouting off the most horrible, hateful rhetoric, but it’s people who actually have critical thinking skills who are nervous about speaking the truth because they’re afraid of the consequences.” 

He says that his experience has shown him that “There are no consequences,” if anything, he has gained thousands of followers after taking his stance in October. But much more important, he said, was that “It’s been such an honor for me to speak out and to be there with people in their hour of need and to give them support.”

As he often does, Spaulding referred to the hostages and their families. “I want those people to know, when [the hostages] are released, that someone outside of Israel cared about them and was talking about them and loving and supporting them.” 

He is completely at peace with his journey into advocacy: “What is that Lizzo song? ‘I’m not the girl I used to be, but I might be bettah!’”