Too many people still don't understand Hamas.
Hamas isn't a government. It's not a liberation or "resistance" movement. It's a gang, a mafia. Maybe that reframing will wake up more people to the reality in Gaza and other parts of the Middle East.
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If you live in the West, you already know how gangs work: Cities plagued by drive-by shootings, neighborhoods ruled by fear, kids recruited before they can do basic algebra.
Whether it’s the Crips and Bloods in Los Angeles or drug cartels bleeding into Western cities, gang culture is a well-documented plague. It’s violent. It’s tribal. It’s cutthroat. It thrives on poverty, broken homes, and power vacuums. And it doesn’t just destroy lives; it destroys entire communities.
We don’t call these gangs “governments.” We don’t hand them unchecked humanitarian aid or invite them to write op-eds in renowned media outlets. We don’t pretend they’re freedom fighters. We recognize them for what they are: Criminal networks that terrorize their own people and profit from chaos.
And yet, when the gang is called Hamas and the turf is Gaza, the story changes. Suddenly, Western journalists use words like “militant” or “political wing” or “health ministry.” Human rights activists rally in their defense. University students wave their flag. The same people who would never let a gang run their block demand that one be allowed to run a nation.
That disconnect, that refusal to see Hamas for what it truly is, is one of the great moral blind spots of our time.
For all the op-eds, protests, and speeches about Hamas, too many Westerners misunderstand what kind of organization Hamas actually is. They debate Hamas like it’s a political movement. They frame it as a liberation or “resistance” group. They analyze its leaders like they’re statesmen and speak of Gaza like it’s a country occupied by a foreign army.
But Hamas isn’t a government. It’s a gang — armed, ideological, and utterly indifferent to human rights. Gangs operate by exploiting the weak and vulnerable. So does Hamas.
In poor, neglected neighborhoods across the West, gangs offer young boys a sense of belonging, money, power, and purpose — especially those with unstable families, absent fathers, or trauma. Hamas does the same thing in Gaza, Hezbollah the same in Lebanon, and the Houthis the same in Yemen. They prey on poverty. They radicalize powerless children. They reward loyalty with food and punish dissent with death.
This isn’t a resistance movement rooted in justice or equality. It’s a power structure rooted in control and submission. Hamas has built a regime that doesn’t allow opposition, doesn’t tolerate free thought, and doesn’t serve its people. Like the worst street gangs, it keeps power through fear, not trust.
And, to be sure, Hamas is not an outlier in Palestinian society; it is a recurring feature. The Palestine Liberation Organization, founded in 1964 as one of the first real organizations to “represent” a new people called “the Palestinians,” was a terrorist organization supported by the Soviets, their most enduring success against the “free world.” (This according to Major General Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking Soviet defector during the Cold War.)
Pacepa wrote that, for nearly four decades, the Palestine Liberation Organization was the world’s largest, wealthiest, and most politically connected terror group. It used drug trafficking, arms smuggling, money laundering, and counterfeiting to amass a fortune estimated to be $10 billion by the early 1990s (nearly $25 billion today if adjusted for inflation). The Palestine Liberation Organization collaborated with international criminal organizations, drug cartels, other terror groups, and rogue states such as Libya, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Sudan.
Yasser Arafat, a mega-terrorist who became chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1969, was notoriously corrupt, using public funds for his own purposes, which ranged from financing an expensive lifestyle in Paris for his wife, to buying and retaining the support of Palestinian politicians.
In the West, we take for granted things like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, open debate, and the right to criticize our leaders. In Gaza and the West Bank, those ideas are foreign luxuries. Dissent gets you jailed. Criticism gets you beaten (or killed). Journalists trying to do their jobs regularly disappear. Political opponents have been thrown off rooftops. Even moderate Muslims who want peace are silenced. Hamas in Gaza, as well as the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, have created a climate where everyone must submit to the gang, or suffer the consequences.
It’s not unlike the way of the jungle: survival of the fittest, obedience to the boss, silence in the face of abuse. If you’re not useful to the gang, you’re disposable. And if you challenge them, you’re dead.
Westerners tend to project their own values onto foreign conflicts. So when they hear “elected government,” they imagine something like a European parliament. When they hear “resistance,” they think of Apartheid-era South Africa. When they hear “occupation,” they envision civil rights marches, even though no occupation exists.
But Hamas doesn’t play by those rules. Hamas doesn’t want to build a society; it wants to destroy one (the neighboring Jewish one). It doesn’t build institutions; it digs up water pipes donated by naive Europeans and turns them into rockets. It doesn’t protect its people; it uses them as disposable human shields; and it doesn’t aim to live side by side with Israel; it aims to eliminate it entirely.
Its charter calls for genocide and misogyny. Its leaders openly celebrate mass murder. It teaches children not just how to read and write, but how to shoot and stab (you know, Jews). It’s not merely a gang; it’s a death cult in every sense of the term.
This is where the West gets played. While Hamas oppresses its own people and provokes wars that lead to preventable deaths across the board, it weaponizes Western empathy. It understands that images of suffering children will trigger outrage across Western television screen and social media feeds. So it deliberately manufactures those images — by storing weapons in schools, launching rockets from hospitals, and using civilian neighborhoods as human shields.
If you’ve found yourself thinking or saying, “Those poor women and children in Gaza, Israel should just stop it already” — you’ve been played by Hamas. And you’re not alone. Universities erupt, commentators cry foul, human rights groups parrot propaganda, and all the while, the people who actually suffer from Hamas (both Palestinians and Israelis) are trapped in a vicious, never-ending cycle.
It’s important to note that one of Hamas’ most dangerous tactics isn’t on the battlefield; it’s behind the scenes, where it manipulates humanitarian organizations into doing its dirty work. In the Gaza Strip, Hamas runs a network of so-called “social services” (including schools, hospitals, and welfare programs) which serve as a front for its fundraising operations. And, by providing “social services,” Hamas builds influence that it leverages to accrue exponentially more local sociopolitical support, a common tactic of the Muslim Brotherhood (of which Hamas is an offshoot).
To the outside world, Hamas claims to be the provider of social services. But in reality, Hamas lets foreign aid groups — from the United Nations to Western NGOs — do the actual day-to-day feeding, schooling, and healing, while it focuses on generating revenues via the black market, stockpiling weapons, building terror tunnels, and brainwashing the next generation. It’s a classic gangster move: Outsource the good, monopolize the violence, and take all the credit.
And humanitarian organizations, especially those affiliated with or embedded in the UN (like UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinians), repeatedly turn a blind eye to Hamas’ activities — or even collaborate with the terrorist organization. UNRWA schools are used to store weapons. Aid convoys have been hijacked and diverted. Billions in international funds have been funneled not into economic development, but into rocket factories and terror tunnels.
Meanwhile, Hamas has turned Gaza’s schools and mosques into ideological training camps. Kids aren’t learning civics or science; they’re learning martyrdom, hatred, and the theology of annihilation. Mosques don’t preach peace; they preach jihad. And if you dare question it, you disappear.
What’s more, humanitarian aid (food, water, medical supplies, financial assistance) is often diverted from its intended recipients. In some cases, aid meant for civilians is seized by Hamas and then sold on the black market, with the proceeds funneled back to terrorist activities. This not only deprives vulnerable populations of much-needed assistance, but also strengthens the financial base of this terrorist group.
Frequently, Hamas and similar groups also launch fundraising campaigns under the guise of providing humanitarian relief. These campaigns are often targeted at diaspora communities and sympathetic international donors. Emotional appeals, combined with graphic imagery of suffering civilians, are used to solicit donations. Unbeknownst to many donors, a significant portion of these funds is redirected to support terrorism.
For instance, the Union of Good is an umbrella organization comprising numerous charities believed to be linked to Hamas. While publicly promoting humanitarian aid, these charities have been accused of transferring millions of dollars to Hamas-controlled entities. Such operations often exploit the lack of transparency and oversight in war-torn regions, making it difficult for donors and regulators to track the funds’ final destination.
Long story short, Hamas doesn’t want to build a functioning society; it wants to appear like one long enough to extract sympathy and money from the international community. The real goal isn’t education, health, or stability; it’s permanence in power and war without end.
And still, the tragedy is not just what Hamas does to Israel; it’s what Hamas does to its own. They turn children into soldiers. They turn teenagers into martyrs. They turn homes into bunkers and schools into warzones. And they call that “resistance.” If you really care about Palestinians, you should be Hamas’ fiercest critic, not its apologist.
To understand Hamas, stop thinking politics and start thinking gang warfare. Think of the cartels in Mexico or the mafia in Sicily — brutal, controlling, paranoid, and devoid of morality. But with one terrifying difference: Hamas isn’t just after money or territory; it’s after ideology. It wants to destroy Israel, dominate the Middle East, and die as martyrs while doing so.
One Hamas leader recently told a band of journalists, when asked how the destruction of Gaza could not be perceived as a total loss of this war that the terror group started on October 7, 2023, “You’re not understanding us. We’re jihadists. We want as much destruction and chaos as possible.”
Here’s what’s even more twisted: The admiration Hamas receives from certain corners of the world isn’t in spite of its brutality; it’s because of it. It’s no surprise that Islamist mobsters and their useful idiots in Western countries pine for Hamas. They see in Hamas a model: total control, fear-based rule, the merging of ideological purity with brute violence. For them, Hamas isn’t a moral problem; it’s a blueprint, a religious mafia that cloaks extortion and murder in holy rhetoric, a way to dominate society through terror and call it “justice.”
Hence, Hamas isn’t just “somewhere far away” in the Middle East. Its influence has metastasized. It’s in New York. It’s in London. It’s in Paris. It’s in Melbourne. Not as an army, but as an ideology — one that recruits in mosques, festers on college campuses, and hides behind slogans like “From the River to the Sea!”and “Free, Free Palestine!” It shows up at protests draped in the modern-day swastika, the keffiyeh. It walks through Western cities preaching annihilation and dares to call it solidarity.
And many of Hamas’ supporters — namely the Western activists who implicitly and sometimes explicitly chant for the terror group at rallies — are too brainwashed or too ignorant to see it. They’ve become foot soldiers for a theocratic mafia, duped into thinking they’re marching for freedom while carrying water for a fascist regime.
Until the West understands all of this, it will keep misreading the conflict — and worse, it will keep empowering the very gang that keeps Gaza in chains.
The West does not WANT to understand. It will undermine their Jew hatred narrative.
I love your writing Josh, and this was another nice summary for the choir; however, after 21 months of writing, nothing any of us write here means jack. Every other month I read that Israel will now finally get tough on Hamas. And every other month, Hamas claims another victory. Reminds me of the bad old days of the Vietnam War, just before the Tet offensive, when "We can see light at the end of the tunnel.". Right. That was the slow freight train coming at us and it took the U.S. 5 more years to get out of that morass. I was tired of hearing it then. I am tired of hearing it now. Israel needs to do what is necessary to get this war over now, make itself secure from the river to the sea, and take whatever fallout happens. The enablers and appeasers at the U.N. hate Israel anyway. May as well be hated for something worthwhile.