SNL’s Bowen Yang Has a Genocide Problem

You would think someone whose own family left China would be concerned about the genocide now taking place there.

So why is Saturday Night Live star Bowen Yang falsely accusing Israel of genocide, while ignoring the confirmed genocide perpetrated against Muslim Uyghurs in China?

Yang is one of the 4,500 actors and directors who have signed a pledge to boycott any Israeli filmmakers or film festivals “that are implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people.”

At first glance, the pledge might seem purely hypothetical—since there isn’t any “genocide” or “apartheid” being practiced against the Palestinian people, there isn’t anybody for Yang and his comrades to boycott.

But the devil is in the details. The pledge Yang and company signed has an asterisk next to the word “implicated.” That directs the reader to a “Frequently Asked Questions” document which declares that there is already “ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza,” and claims that virtually everyone in the Israeli film industry is “complicit.”

How so? Well, since “Israel’s public and private broadcasters” reject the Gaza genocide charge, that means they are guilty of “whitewashing, denying, and justifying Israel’s war crimes,” the document asserts. Israel’s major film festivals are guilty, too, since they “partner with the Israeli government” (meaning they receive some government funding).

And “the vast majority of Israeli film production & distribution companies, sales agents, cinemas and other film institutions” are also guilty of “complicity,” because they “have never endorsed the full, internationally-recognized rights of the Palestinian people,” the document insists.

What makes Bowen Yang’s participation in this anti-Israel project ironic is that while he has joined the mob falsely accusing Israel of genocide, he has said nothing about the real genocide taking place in the oppressive country that his parents left.

Yang’s parents and his sister departed from their native China in 1986 when his father was admitted to university studies in Australia. That was during the long period that the Chinese government forbade its citizens from having more than one child.

Bowen was born in Australia in 1990. “I wouldn’t have been born if my parents had stayed in China,” he noted in an interview, alluding to the one-child restriction.

When Bowen’s father completed his graduate studies, the family moved—but not back to China. They went to Canada, then later the United States.

In 2021, Yang became the first SNL featured player to be nominated for an Emmy award for Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. That same year, the U.S. government ruled that China’s totalitarian rulers are committing genocide against the country’s Muslim Uyghur minority.

The Communist Chinese regime is guilty of “the arbitrary imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty of more than one million civilians, forced sterilization, torture of a large number of those arbitrarily detained, forced labor, and the imposition of draconian restrictions on freedom of religion or belief, freedom of expression, and freedom of movement,” the U.S. decided.

The China genocide determination has bipartisan support. It was made initially by outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Then, shortly afterwards, his successor, Antony Blinken, likewise concluded that the Chinese government “continues to carry out genocide” against the Uyghurs. 

Given his own family background, you would think Bowen would be particularly interested in what is happening in China right now. He has said in interviews that he has visited China multiple times over the years—including just last month. He said he was interested in seeing the town where his father grew up, in China’s Inner Mongolia region. 

That region happens to border Xinjiang Province, where most of the Uyghurs reside—and where hundreds of thousands of them are imprisoned in “re-education” camps. Yet in Yang’s many public appearances and interviews, the supposedly genocide-sensitive Yang has said nothing about China’s genocide against the Uyghurs.

In an interview a few years ago, SNL creator and producer Lorne Michaels described Yang as “remarkably funny and consistent.”

Funny? Sure. But Yang’s embrace of the fake genocide charge against Israel, while ignoring the real genocide taking place in China, is the very opposite of consistency.

Dr. Medoff is director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. His latest is The Road to October 7: Hamas, the Holocaust, and the Eternal War Against the Jews.