Hamas And The World’s Largest Terrorist Organization - November 7th 2023

November 7th 2023

Yuriy offers hard-hitting insights from his experiences in Gaza and establishes haunting comparisons between Hamas and modern Russia. He provides his thoughts on the distressing realities of living under war-torn regimes and their impact on innocent lives.

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TRANSCRIPT: (Podbean app users can enjoy closed captions)

It is November 7th. 

I've been to Gaza several times while working as a journalist. Initially, I covered the conflicts where, and later I visited the Ukrainian diaspora. It's quite sizable with several hundred people, primarily women who married Arab men who studied in Ukrainian universities and moved to their husbands' homeland. So, I have firsthand experience of what Gaza is like, who Hamas is, and what really happens in the region. Once I spent eight hours being interrogated by, so-called Hamas counter intelligence. This happened after Hamas found a photo on my daughter's Instagram page with a few flags, including the Israeli one in the background. It was enough to raise suspicions that I might be a spy. 

During the interrogation, my guarantor, in fact, a hostage of Hamas was questioned alongside me. This was a common practice. Any journalist. Coming to Gaza had to have a local guarantor approved by Hamas to ensure that the reporter would not write or film anything that could compromise Hamas. My guarantor was a local Ukrainian who received death threats and torture warnings for his family due to the photo on my daughter's Instagram. Now, Ukrainians, along with ours, many of whom I know personally are dying in Gaza because of Hamas. 

You know, I think the similarities between Hamas and modern Russia go beyond being bloodthirsty terrorist regimes built on hatred. They share a few other things. Firstly, neither Hamas nor Putin can give up war. War has become the essence of way existence. As long as there is a war, they can ignore economic problems, horrific losses of way around population, unemployment and poverty. In Soviet Union, there was a saying, "war erases everything" in the sense that war can justify any including catastrophic failures. Without war, without hatred, both Putin and Hamas would be ordinary losers. With no normal economy, excessive mortality, deteriorating education, and an all powerful repression apparatus. 

Hamas became what it is by taking 2 million residents of the Gaza Strip hostage. Yes, many of them supported Hamas, but far from all so we can talk about hostages. Hamas demanded world aid, insisting it was needed for humanitarian purposes in Gaza, but spent it on war. I once stayed in eight story hotel in Gaza with only two guest rooms and no stairs- you could only move around with an elevator. This was because concrete for stairs and walls went into building tunnels for Hamas, water pipes, were used for manufacturing makeshift rockets, and so on. And not just in the hotel. 90% of water in Gaza was contaminated because water pipes were almost never used for water supply, only for rockets. 

Putin on the other hand, didn't take anyone hostage. The world willingly gave him money and provided technologies for the production of weapons far more dangerous than what Hamas had. Even after Russians annexed Crimea and started a war in Donbas, openly saying what we preparing to destroy Ukraine as a state, money, technologies and weapon components continued to flow to Russia. The world, especially the West, on its own money, created its own Hamas with nuclear weapons, obsessed with the idea of destroying neighbors. The West created it and then left Ukrainians -those same neighbors -to deal on their own with were wars. Largest terrorist organization.