Coleman Hughes was on the Joe Rogan show and gave one of the best summaries of Hamas & the war in Israel that I’ve ever heard. I’m not a big follower of Rogan - who leans left but thankfully appears to be slowly waking up to the right side - but this segment was excellent and instructive. What Hamas is doing in Israel will happen in America if we don’t close the border.
The conversation was 3 hours long so I pulled out 8 minutes of the most important parts. I have found that, in most podcasts or articles, only 10% is informative and the rest is filler. The goal is to wade through the noise and find the good stuff.
Here are some highlights - edited for clarity. For reference, there are about 2 million people living in the Gaza Strip right now and about 10 million in Israel.
HUGHES: There are about 40,000 Hamas soldiers in Gaza. I don't think the number is known but it's tens of thousands. Hamas says that Israel has killed some 19,000 civilians so far and 13,000 Hamas soldiers.
I've looked into the humanitarian aid issue quite a bit and the truth is that the food IS getting into Gaza. They've gotten tons of food into Gaza. The problem is it's not getting to the people, especially in the north because the north is a war zone. So it's getting through the border. Israel IS allowing it in but Hamas is stealing it.
But then what happens is Israel doesn't control the delivery. The delivery is controlled by humanitarian organizations like UNRWA and others. They have these aid convoys going to people.
But then Hamas hijacks it, random Palestinians hijack it, hungry civilians hijack it. It's an absolute mess in terms of distributing the aid. There was a problem in the war in Iraq too.
Hamas tells a different version of the story than Israel because it’s usually Hamas and their pals who are shooting at these aid trucks and hijacking the food.
You also have powerful crime families in Gaza, you could call them sort of criminal syndicates or whatever. But they're powerful, important families as well that are also taking the aid sometimes. These are the powerful Palestinian families that want to take over the Gaza Strip.
Hamas and these people steal and hoard the aid and sell it for very high prices on the secondary market, which is why it doesn’t get to everyone in the north.
I think that the fundamental difference between Israel and Hamas is that Israeli society, however imperfect, is not going to celebrate monsters on their own side when they're really found to be monsters. They're not gonna hand out candies to people who kill Palestinian civilians like Hamas does when they kill Israeli civilians.
Any nation that suffered what Israel did on October 7th, everyone in the country would be saying, you have to go get these guys, you have to eliminate the organization (Hamas) that did this.
And if Israel is 80% finished with that job, it would make no sense at this point to stop before you've cut out the last 20% of the cancer or before you've put out the last 20% of the fire, right? Even with all of the absolute suffering that is real on the Palestinian side. Israel is not committing genocide because genocide is when you're trying to maximize civilian casualties. I think Israel, however imperfectly, is doing the opposite.
The laws of war say you cannot target a church, a mosque, a hospital. But if the enemy turns that hospital into a military operation site as Hamas does, which is routine for them, then it can become legitimate. You have to do a proportionality assessment. Is it worth killing this many civilians to get the bad guys who are living and operating out of the church, mosque or hospital?
I'm not gonna sit here and tell you that I would agree with every bombing that, that, that Israel has made. But, but that's a judgment call that armies are allowed to make in times of war.
Hamas is the one that turns these civilian locations into military operation sites, which is, in itself, a war crime.
BTW, the ratio of combatants to civilians is I think it's better than America when we got ISIS out of Mosul. That was like 10,000 civilians dead to kill 4,000 ISIS. This is 19,000 civilians dead to kill 13,000 Hamas.
What's unique about this war, unlike every other war that I could think of is, is the Hamas army has perfected the art of embedding itself and meshing itself with civilians so that you cannot hit them without hitting the people around them.
Other armies have done this but none have perfected it to the extent that Hamas has.
Hamas has had 15 years to build 300 miles of tunnel underneath a city that they use to shelter themselves so that they can operate right under a kindergarten, right under a mosque, right under a church.
So this is a challenge no army has faced in history. And so that's what makes this war different. That is the dirty way Hamas fights.
Israel never has a clean shot and so they have to let Hamas get away with it because it’s too much to bear.
So - we are essentially creating and allowing a situation where terrorists have found the perfect solution - which is that you can cross the border, go house to house slaughtering your enemies and then hide behind your own people and they can do nothing about it. It's a perfect strategy. Can we live in a World where we allow that to be an acceptable strategy?
[Is this what you want for America, by the way, because that’s what they have in mind!]
I don't think so and it's very, it's very ugly to watch. Yes, it's heartbreaking and I completely understand why people don't think the way I think when they see the videos, I completely get it. But I don't think we can actually live in a World where that's allowed to be a strategy.
I've heard two kind of conflicting theories about why October 7th happened.
One was that Netanyahu wanted to keep Hamas in power and was essentially paying them off. The other theory, which kind of conflicts with that, is that Netanyahu wanted the attack to happen as a pretext to take over Gaza.
I don’t think either theory is true. Here’s why…
Nobody has wanted to take over Gaza, nobody, not even Egypt. Nobody wants to run it. There’s no strategic advantage. Israel is focused on the West Bank which has religious significance to Jews. They call it Judea and Samaria where so many of the things in the Bible happened. Jews have an attachment to the West Bank - even secular Jews.
Secondly, October 7th is basically the worst thing for Netanyahu's legacy ever. His popularity has only declined because of this attack - so he had no reason to support it.
The second the war is over, he's basically gonna be run out in shame. There were protests before October 7th about Netanyahu’s effort to stop the left-wing courts from hurting his administration - but those protests were HELPING him by firing up his conservative base. October 7th weakened him.
His situation immediately got worse after October 7th because everyone blamed him.
And it's only gotten worse in the past few months if you look at the polling on the approval of Netanyahu. So if it was a false flag, it would be the dumbest false flag in the World and he's not a dumb guy. So there's no chance it's a false flag.
Very few Israeli soldiers were there protecting the Kibbutzes near Gaza because they distracted the whole country over these protests. The soldiers were in the West Bank and this is one of the reasons why people blame Netanyahu because it was under his watch that they took their eye off Hamas.
The problem is that the kibbutzes in Israel - where Hamas slaughtered civilians - are right next to Gaza. Those are all the hippies. These are all the super left-wing Israeli hippies and Communists that are literally living in communes.
A kibbutz is a left-wing commune. They're very little idyllic beautiful villages and they're the most left wing part of Israel. They have a lot of love for the Palestinians. They're the people that go over into Gaza when someone needs to go to the hospital, they, you know, they'll drive them from Gaza to Israel.
So Hamas slaughtered the left-wing unarmed hippies at the Kibbutzes - not right-wing hardliners. It’s crazy for Israelis to live in communes right next door to people that hate them and not have guns.
The red dots are where Hamas invaded and slaughtered mostly liberal people.
Hamas knows they can’t beat Israel militarily. Their goal is that in the long run, the World will turn against Israel and sympathize with the Palestinian people so deeply that Hezbollah, Iran, Hamas and America, the great Satan, will abandon Israel. If Hamas is successful with this PR campaign against Israel, they have a very good chance of beating Israel in the long run.
[Like Trump said - Israel needs to do what it needs to do to get rid of Hamas - but it is losing the global PR war - and Hamas is winning. That needs to change!]
Mosab Yousef, the son of a founding Hamas commander, said this:
“There is no difference between Hamas and the so-called ‘Palestinians’ - as the vast majority of them support Hamas.
There are no ‘Palestinian’ people. There are conflicted tribes, and without Israel as the common enemy, they would kill each other.”
People say "I don't care what Hamas is doing in Israel. America First."
Well - that's short-sighted and just wrong. You need to educate yourself. It's EXACTLY what they will do here in America if we don't close our border!
I wrote about the 10/7 attack on Israel in detail last year in a three part series - which you can find on my website. It’s one of my most important and well read articles and connects lots of dots. Hughes’ comments fill in many blanks and it’s worth re-reading.
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