Controversial podcaster Hasan Piker appeared on “Pod Save America” to discuss his ideology.
HASAN PIKER: I stand by that.
FAVREAU: Well, so I will say this is the one that bothered me most when I first heard it. And I remember, I remember having a reaction to it when I first saw it in January, because I think even if you believe what happened in Gaza is genocide and what’s happening in the West Bank is apartheid. Those are different claims from Hamas is a thousand times better because Hamas is an organization that has massacred, raped, kidnapped civilians on October 7th.
They’ve also been catastrophic for Palestinians by almost every measure. They governance corruption, they made choices they knew would result in mass civilian death of their own people. So my question is, when you say Hamas is a thousand times better, do you actually mean that? Or is that a rhetorical move or like a solidarity signal? Like what?
PIKER: I mean, it’s all of the above. I do mean it. I think it’s a rhetorical move because it frustrates a lot of people.
I’ve also said I’m a harm reduction voter. I’m a lesser evil voter, and therefore I would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time because I’m looking at the situation as a paramilitary organization that has like a political party as well, a Politburo as well, that is entirely comprised not as an alien force, but of orphaned children that have, you know, had their parents killed by an apartheid state that has been dominating the lives of Palestinians for 80 years at this point. And they’ve done a genocide at this point as well. But like it started off with the Nakba and has only evolved as technology has gotten better to become more heinous.
And Gaza is this hermetically sealed area that many people correctly point to as the world’s largest open air prison before October 7. So my perspective on this has always been that I think that Hamas’ tactics, which I oppose at times, right? Or it’s like internal governance issues are secondary to this conversation because it’s like placing a lot of emphasis on the Nat Turner rebellion or instead of talking about the much larger, much more consequential, much bigger harm that, you sell black people and to rape them and treat them as though they weren’t human.
I think that’s a far larger systemic force that is going to make the Nat Turner rebellion look inconsequential in comparison to the greater harm. Same with, for example, the ANC. The ANC had a militant wing called the MK.
I’m not going to try to even attempt to say it. And, you know, Nelson Mandela went to prison and was imprisoned by the apartheid state. And MK and the ANC did a lot of stuff to collaborators, the collaborators that have worked alongside the apartheid administration.
They had a practice called necklacing, where they would put attire around the necks of collaborators and light it on fire. It was a heinous practice. And it was, of course, condemned after the fact, but none of the people that were engaged in it, if I recall correctly, even in the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, were actually legally charged for it.
Because there’s this understanding when we look back at some of the more heinous things that resistance groups have done and militancies have done, we match that up against the far larger, far broader systematic violence that an entire people have been subjected to. And it makes me feel silly to consistently talk about what Hamas has done, especially when there has been an October 7 times a thousand, if not more than a thousand at this point, in the hands of Israel against the Palestinian population in its entirety. I mean, they’re doing an October 7 to Lebanon right now as we speak.
Just take it from the Palestinian perspective.
