American Thought Leaders - We Refuse to Let Hamas Decide Who Eats, Who Starves in Gaza: GHF Chairman

Episode Date: July 16, 2025

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a newly established U.S.-backed aid group distributing food in Gaza, is under fire from critics who say hundreds of Gazans have been killed near its distribution sites.But is there a bigger story here?In this episode, I sit down with Johnnie Moore, executive chairman of the GHF and former commissioner for the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.“We have one mission, to feed the people of Gaza in a way that Hamas—a designated terrorist organization in the United States and Europe—can’t steal the food because for many, many years, Hamas has been stealing the food of the Gazan people,” Moore says.“The problem in Gaza is that the United Nations and other international agencies created a system which empowered virtually every bad actor and every bad force in the Gaza Strip to make a bad situation worse.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

The UN trucks, when they arrive into the Gaza Strip, they're immediately either taken by Hamas or Hamas-affiliated groups with guns, and Hamas decides what to do with the food. We have one mission, to feed the people of Gaza in a way that Hamas, a designated terrorist organization, can't steal the food. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, GHF, a new US-backed aid group distributing food in Gaza, is under fire from critics who have said hundreds of Gazans have been killed near its distribution sites. But is there a bigger story here? One of the things Hamas was trying to do is they were trying to make Gazans afraid to

come to our distribution sites. Hamas killed 12 of our local Gazan aid workers. In this episode, I'm sitting down with Johnny Moore, executive chairman of the GHF and former commissioner for the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. The problem in Gaza is that the United Nations and other international agencies created a system which empowered virtually every bad actor to make a bad situation worse. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.

Johnny Moore, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. It's great to be back, Jan. So you have a new project, and that is heading up the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. And I've been hearing all sorts of things about it, some incredibly positive and some frankly wildly negative. I'd just like to talk to you about it. First of all, for those that might not be in the know, what is it that you do? When did it start? What is it about? It's actually really simple. We have one mission, to feed the people of Gaza in a way that Hamas, a designated terrorist

organization in the United States, in Europe, can't steal the food. Because for many, many years, Hamas has been stealing the food of the Gazan people. They're doing it in collaboration with UN agencies. And on May 5th, here in Washington, D.C., President Trump in the White House, at the end of an event, someone threw a question out at him, and he leaned over to the microphone to answer the question, and he said these words. He said he was angry that the people of Gaza, that their food was being stolen by Hamas, and the United States is going to do something about it.

So the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is the doing something about it. So every single day, through four distribution sites in the Gaza Strip, we have American veterans and local Gaza aid workers, and we give away one to three million meals worth of food every single day for free, direct to the people. So as we're talking now, in the next few days, we will surpass 70 million meals of food that we provided. Over 1.2 million boxes of food, 250 tons of food, just giving it away to the Gazan people. The logistics of this are kind of staggering. Can you give me a picture of how this would work? So you have four sites and you're giving away over a million meals a day. How does that look like?

It's a huge logistic operation. So we're flooding the zone with food. We call them secure distribution sites. There are four of them. This whole plan was custom made because for many, many years the UN and World Food Program and UNRWA and UNICEF, I mean, you name the UN agency, there's been this persistent problem that the UN trucks, when they arrive into the Gaza Strip, they're immediately either taken by Hamas or Hamas-affiliated groups with guns. They literally hijack the whole trucks. Or they take them to Hamas or Hamas affiliated groups with guns, they literally hijack the whole trucks, or they take them to Hamas controlled warehouses and Hamas decides what to do with the food. And Hamas sells the food in the middle of this war. Yeah, Hamas made over a billion dollars

selling free food meant for the people of Gaza delivered by the international community. And so we designed a system that was to solve one problem, which was to make sure that the mass diversion of food could not happen, that Hamas cannot steal our trucks. And so we have these secure distribution sites. They're not like small distribution sites. It's not like a local community distribution. They are meant to surge masses and amounts of food every single day.

The people show up and they can take what they want. And so, you know, it's a huge operation. We're talking about tens of thousands of boxes every single day. Those boxes of food have to be transferred to multiple trucks. They have to be securely taken into the Gaza Strip. We have to communicate with the people of Gaza as to when they can come. And also, we have a number of projects that we've been doing where we've been basically working with local Gazans to deliver food to the point of need

with partners on the ground, which is an incredibly dangerous, deadly, deadly thing. But the people of Gaza deserve it. The Gazans themselves, because their food was used to control them. With free food, they feel free. And we're seeing something in the Gaza Strip every single day that we haven't seen in a very, very long time, which

is people smiling and thanking America and thanking President Trump because they have this gift from the American people. And it's also from the American people. And it's also prompted the exact opposite. Hamas killed 12 of our local Gazan aid workers. Hamas threw grenades at our American aid workers and injured two of them. Hamas issued death threats to any Gazan that took our food or helped us deliver the food and to all the Americans working in the project.

I was walking around Brussels recently to meet with the European Parliament. In the capital of the EU Parliament, in the seat of the European Union, I had to walk the streets of Brussels with a bodyguard for the sin of giving free food to the people of Gaza. It's insane. It is. And I want to dig into why this all might be a case in the moment. But I just want to backtrack for a moment and just say, we know each other. I think I reached out to you when you were sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party while you were a commissioner on the USERF, US Commission on International Religious Freedom, basically some kind of

butcher of Falun Gong practitioners that was sanctioned and you were sanctioned in response to that. I've learned a lot from you about religious freedom and your passion for it, and also your deep commitment to reaching across the divide, right? Which you've made a point of this. As a case in point, the new president of Syria reached out to you and invited you to Damascus. There are a lot of things that you just said there that I, before I get to Syria, I'll say like, I'm clearly a longtime associate of President Trump and the Trump administration. I was appointed by President Trump to USIRF. I met the president 14 years ago. And yet what motivated me to be helpful to the Trump administration is what motivates

me to be a good citizen, which is these shared values that we have. And my sanction for the Chinese Communist Party came in the Biden administration in retaliation for a Biden sanction. And you're exactly right. I was the response to a sanction that the United States put on one of the most evil actors targeting the Falun Gong community. And in that moment, sanctioning of that office and the retaliatory sanction sort of knit, I would say, our communities together, the evangelical community and the Falun Gong community.

But as a Christian, you know, I follow the Prince of Peace. We're peacemakers. And so, yeah, I mean, when I received an invitation, oddly enough, at the United Nations to meet with the foreign minister first of the new government in Syria, you know, I took the invitation because that's what people like me do. I invited along a good friend of mine and a friend of yours you've interviewed before on this program, Rabbi Cooper from the Simon Wiesenthal Center. He's an advisor and a mentor of mine and a friend of yours you've interviewed before on this program, Rabbi Cooper from the Simon Wiesenthal Center. He's an advisor and a mentor of mine.

And I wanted to make sure I had a second opinion in the conversation. And I say that Rabbi Cooper is like, he's like the bad cop and I'm the good cop, or like both cops, but I'm more of a diplomat and he's more of an activist. And when I sat down with the Syrian foreign minister, I said, look, this is really simple. We don't know if we can trust you or not. And even if we can trust you, you gave a great speech at the UN yesterday, but can you actually do these things? And he said, we can do them with your help.

And this meeting was about a week before, 10 days before President Trump went to Riyadh and eventually met the Syrian President Al-Shar there. And then I went through all the hard questions. And the Syrian foreign minister was like patient to answer all of my tough questions. And I'm quite close to the US government, to the Trump administration. So I immediately was in touch with the Trump administration. Before my plane landed in DC, I had communicated with what I had learned from the meeting.

But yeah, the invitation was extended for us to go to Damascus. And I never thought I would. I mean, the last time I was involved in the Syrian crisis, I mean, I was helping get people out of Syria because of the horrible things they were experiencing. I just never imagined I would go to that place. And yet it's our responsibility as people who want to leave the world better.

We have to lean into the hard things. So whether it's going and meeting with the new Syrian president and getting him all the complexities of this frag fragmented country. And, you know, this guy was like five minutes ago, you know, he was al-Qaeda and now he's the president of Syria and there are all these sanctions and all of these things. Or whether it's responding to the fact that as a human being, I can't let people starve and Gaza, like we got to help. We got to help these people.

Like this is this is what we do. I can't say, I thought that the Syrian problem was a harder problem and feeding hungry people was an easier problem. I found it to be the exact opposite. I found that I think there's a lot of reason for optimism in the future of Syria, huge challenges. But when the United States leans into those challenges, we can make a big difference, even for peace in the region. But in Gaza, Yad, see the problem in Gaza, it's not just Hamas, it's not just the starvation, and this war, and October 7th. The problem in Gaza is that the United Nations and other international agencies

created a system which empowered virtually every bad actor and every bad force in the Gaza Strip to make a bad situation worse. They have prolonged this conflict, they have let their aid be used as weapons of war, they've tried every second of every day to boycott everything the Gaza humanitarian found. They even threatened people that if they worked with us, they would never work with the UN again.

So we knew when we jumped into this mess that we would be provoking Hamas. Not our intention, we just want to feed people, but we knew Hamas wouldn't like it. I'm surprised that there are a lot of people in suits and ties in Geneva, in New York City, in Vienna, people who spend their time in conferences and five-star hotels and raising money from all the rich people around the world and rich nations to try to help people that actually have constructed a system that the system itself does the exact opposite of what it was mandated to do and the fuel for

the system is my taxpayer dollars and European taxpayer dollars and the benevolence of Arab countries who actually legitimately, really sincerely care about the Palestinian people. So we kicked a hornet's nest I didn't expect to kick. We shined a light on a level of corruption and insidious behavior that I knew it was bad. I didn't know it was this bad. And of course, Canadian tax dollars, I might add, because I'm always thinking about my country when thinking about these things. So explain to me a little bit about how it does the exact opposite, because that's a very strong statement. Yeah.

Let me give you an example. So this issue of aid diversion. So I've already mentioned how these trucks are immediately stolen when they go in the gut. We've all seen the videos. Like militants sitting on top with guns, they take the whole truck. There are actually allegations that these trucks were not

only stolen. Sometimes they were taken directly to the homes of Hamas leaders, to the hiding places of Hamas leaders to get inside the tunnels. But what we've discovered is not just a Gaza issue. Let me give you some examples. There's an editorial, in fact, that was recently published in a news outlet by an incredible, incredible scholar whose name is Netta Barak Cohen.

And in her editorial, she says that this has become, this aid diversion issue is like not a bug of the humanitarian system, it's like a feature. So in Somalia, for instance, the World Food Program was, according to her research, was in effect paying off warlords to help them distribute aid. And these warlords were simultaneously taking the aid and using it to preserve their power, deciding who the ultimate recipients are. The World Food Program said in one circumstance that only 1 percent of its aid in Yemen had been diverted. In actuality, according to this research,

60 percent of the aid meant for Sana'a alone never made it to its intended recipients. You can chart every humanitarian response and every conflict for the last 20 years. And if the United Nations or one of its agencies is involved, they have made a choice that in order to get aid to people, they had to do deals with some of the worst and most dangerous people on the planet. And the net effect of it is it only empowers the bad guys. What we thought was just a Hamas issue isn't a Hamas issue. This is one of the greatest scandals of our modern time. That the huge aid, and by the way, it's not just the humanitarian side of it.

It's also the anti-Semitism and all this bigotry and everything that's emanating from this international system. The UN has behaved like nothing less than a mafia, nothing less than a mafia, working with their preferred partners, excluding those who they don't like, anybody that shines a light on something that they don't like, anybody that shines a light on

something that they don't want known, they get excluded. And we need this system. We need the countries of the world to come together and not in this sort of like one world government sort of experiment that some people make, but these humanitarian crises, even for the United States, they're too big to solve, but they have an effect on all of us. The Middle East has an effect on all of us. We need countries to come together. But what countries do, particularly European countries and Canada, is they just say they put money in a budget for the United Nations and say, it's the UN's problem. But there's not a conflict in the world the UN's aid system hasn't thrown oxygen on in the

last 20 years. Because of this relationship where the money goes knowingly and with agreement somehow to the warlords, maybe they felt this is the only way it can work. Well, that's the choice. Yeah, so this is the choice that they've made. They've said like, the only way to feed people is we have to work with these people to feed people. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation—and this is where we kicked the hornet's nest and we didn't realize we were kicking the hornet's nest— we didn't realize we were kicking the hornet's nest. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has called the bluff of the system and proven that we

can actually get massive amounts of aid in the most complex, deadly humanitarian environment in the world, in one of the most condensed spaces in the world of an active war. In fact, we've been operating for just over a month, and we did it in two hot wars. I mean, for 12 days of our operations, you had the Israeli-Iranian conflict. Our guys were showing up every single day to serve these people after being up all night

with missiles flying in the skies. What the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has proven is that this was a false choice from the beginning. There's a better way of doing it. Astonishing. And so I want to touch on a few things. I mean, this has been covered in so many, actually this got really the attention of the world's media, the legacy media, ourselves. Everybody is interested in this project. I want to mention a few things that have been said about it and just see how you might respond to that. One of them, I think the most serious would be that basically these Gaza Humanitarian

Foundation sites, these four sites actually facilitate massacres of people somehow. What are your thoughts on that? This whole story is a piece of Hamas disinformation. It's the same type of disinformation we've seen over this entire conflict, where every single day the so-called health ministry of Hamas releases a statistic of civilian casualties, they don't distinguish between, this is a war, people die in a war, they don't distinguish between the casualties being civilians or whether they're Hamas fighters. While everyone is constantly appealing to international law, international humanitarian

law and all of these things, Hamas, they seem to only dress in their military fatigues when they're transferring hostages, you know, for the cameras. They dress as civilians, they blend in into the civilians. So what we've experienced since GHF started is an adaptation of this part of the Hamas disinformation war, which is they started saying that basically every casualty in the Gaza Strip was a civilian casualty and every civilian casualty happened at GHF. And then they started saying, so our sites therefore are death traps.

It's a lie. Like with any lie, there's an element of truth. And the truth is the IDF has admitted that there were a few circumstances where civilians may have been inadvertently killed or harmed. It's a much, much smaller number, we believe, than any of this reporting. reported is that Hamas intentionally harmed and killed probably many hundreds of people in order to try to claim that those casualties were either at our sites or at the hands of the IDF or in proximity to our distribution sites. In fact, recently when Hamas managed to infiltrate one of our sites and throw two grenades at our American aid workers, which by the way, the grenades are a type of common

grenade Hamas uses in the Gaza Strip that originated in Iran, a surprise. But what Hamas did when they threw the grenades, I'm sure they would have been happy to kill Americans, but it doesn't seem like that was the intention. They were happy to harm them, but what they wanted to do, we believe, is they wanted to provoke our team to retaliate and harm civilians right in the middle of the ceasefire negotiation, because it would have been an effective propaganda tool for Hamas to achieve their goal of the elimination of GHF in the ceasefire negotiations.

So we don't deny that there have been civilian casualties. We just want the truth to be the story. And the truth is, if it involves the IDF, it seems much smaller, you know, a symptom of war than has been reported and accidental. If it involves Hamas, it's at a much larger scale and it's intentional for various means. And so we dispute the nature, the scale, and the attribution of these attacks. But the media doesn't. So all across the world, virtually every media, in fact, one major network here in the United States, they didn't even say this was the Hamas-run health ministry.

They said Gaza officials say. And it's just, it's like intentional propagandizing. They are lying. And who suffers from it? It's the people of Gaza that suffer from it. And one of the things Hamas was trying to do is they were trying to make Gazans afraid to come to our distribution sites. Because Hamas doesn't want Gazans getting free food. And yet I think one of the most inspiring things to us is that the people of Gaza keep coming to our distribution sites.

They keep coming because they need it, and they keep coming for a different reason, because they're not afraid anymore in the way they had to be afraid before. This is a question we get asked every second of every day. I suppose that it's also controversial that the Israeli military is providing the security for you. I think it's the only such scenario I've ever heard of. It's not exactly because I guess a more common term would be creating a humanitarian zone in a conflict. So in a conflict like this, the professional army operating in the conflict is the IDF. So this is a war.

It's an active war. We didn't wait for a ceasefire to feed people, because the people needed fed immediately. So you have the IDF, which is the professional military. And sometimes, plenty of times, we disagree with the IDF. We're always arguing with the IDF. We ask for this and that, and we're going back and forth. And it's a professional army.

We can demand an investigation. They can do an investigation. We can ask them to change the way, the path to the, through the humanitarian zone sort of functions and all of these things. But it's not uncommon at all in a war, whether it's happened a lot in the Russian-Ukraine War, you create a humanitarian zone. The difference in Gaza is that Gaza is such a concentrated place and the IDF is fighting

basically against a guerrilla warfare type of enemy. And so it's not like the rules of engaging are more complex. Is it dangerous? It's very dangerous. Do we want civilians having to cross IDF lines in order to get to our food? No. We want to be as close to the people as we can. And in fact, we're in the process of getting closer to the people

and piloting new things. And in a ceasefire scenario, one of the features of the ceasefire scenario is that we have to engage with the people outside of the IDF. This has always been the plan. But it's a misnomer that somehow because the IDF is operating in the Gaza Strip that this is delegitimizes GHF's work. It's exact opposite. But it's also complicated for us because we can't control what happens outside of our distribution sites. And this is the weird thing that we always get asked questions that should be directed

to the IDF. So the press and Hamas and critics and international organizations, the United Nations and others, some politicians, they want to hold us accountable for their problems with the IDF. We're not the IDF. You got a problem with the IDF? We have problems with the IDF sometimes. Go talk to them, don't talk to us. Well, and something interesting just struck me. Basically, you're telling me that the Gazans, and maybe you can give me an estimate of how many have actually come to these four sites, are actually crossing IDF lines to get there, feeling comfortable to do that

somehow. How many people are we talking about here? I mean, here's the crazy thing. It depends on who you ask as to how many people are in Gaza. The sort of going number is around two million. We have personally provided food for at a minimum 800,000 of those two million just through our four distribution sites. And it may be closer to half. It may be closer to a million. It's hard to tell. So despite all this criticism and all the information war

and all the politics and the UN's inexcusable behavior and the danger of operating and being in the crossfire of the IDF and Hamas and everything else, we have fed over a month since President Trump said on May 5th to do it, we have fed half of the people of Gaza, between 800,000 and a million. Do you have a sense of how many have crossed the IDF lines to get there? I just find it really interesting that people would do that, given what many media say about the IDF and what many Gazans might believe about the IDF.

I mean, we're saying that we're seeing Gazans that interact with us. Answer your question. It's hundreds of thousands, for sure. But we're seeing Gazans at our distribution sites criticize Hamas, complain that Hamas leaders sit in hotels and doha and negotiate over their starvation. So this is not the Gaza Strip of, you know, two years ago. This is the Gaza Strip of the people of Gaza deciding more and more every day about their own future. And one of the things about giving them free food, you know, as I was saying earlier, like you also give them freedom. And so I think one of the things that's been educational to me is, you know, I always believed

that the first victims of Hamas were the people of Gaza. They were always been the first victims. And there were plenty of people in the Gaza Strip on October 7th, civilians that participated in what happened. You know, by the way, one crazy statistic I was reading recently is that something like 49% of those who worked for UNRWA, the UN agency, in the Gaza Strip had some link to Hamas, which is just crazy. There are plenty of Gazans on October 7th that participated in October 7th, cheered

on October 7th, all of those things. That's true. It's also true, and we meet them every day, that there are plenty of Gazans that pray every single day for the opportunity to rebuild their lives in the Gaza Strip or outside of the Gaza Strip. People who every single day pray for the opportunity to not live under the fierce boot of this terrorist organization. And one of the injustices, and also as a human rights activist, like one of the injustices of this whole thing is when the international community and the UN Human Rights Council

and all these politicians in the UK and in the United States and all these progressives everywhere and everything. The way they talk about the Palestinian people in Gaza, there are plenty of Gazans that hear that as these leaders being on the side of their oppressors. They're on the Hamas side. They're not speaking up for the Gaza people. They're speaking up for their oppressors. They're supporting terrorists. And what we discover every day is there are two

Gazas. There's the Gaza that every day they pray to be free from Hamas. And then there are the terrorists. And every day, there are fewer terrorists, and there are more Gazans that feel free. The reason I asked earlier about you being invited to meet with the Syrian leader, al-Shah, is that I think it indicates that he at least doesn't believe you're somehow anti-Arab or anti-Muslim or something of its nature. And of course, I know you're not. But I just find that very interesting that he would pick someone who is doing exactly

this sort of work. It says something about the new Syrian government, because I was critical of the new Syrian government. They could have, I can assure you, there are plenty of people around the world that they could reach out to that would be much nicer to them than me and Rabbi Cooper. And Rabbi Cooper and I always joke that there are plenty of rent-a-clergy around the world. If you want the photo op, We're not photo op people.

We're direct people. And one of the indicators that the US policy is correct on Syria is that the Syrians are engaging substantively with people like us. But, I mean, it's interesting because everybody reports and talks about things from their own lens. And like when I began to be involved in GHF, the only thing anyone talked about was how close I am to the Jewish community and how often I'm in the state of Israel.

And yet, virtually every time I'm in the state of Israel, I'm either going or coming from an Arab I'm probably one of the only people ever to just a few weeks ago. I was in Damascus on Tuesday and I was in Jerusalem on Wednesday and Which I hope becomes a common Experience and I hope it becomes very common to be in Beirut on Tuesday and be in Jerusalem on Wednesday or have dinner and It's very common to be in Beirut on Tuesday and be in Jerusalem on Wednesday or have dinner or lunch in Haifa and dinner with friends in Damascus or Beirut. That's my prayer. But the Middle East, all of it, and especially the Arab world, has been in my life from the

time I was a child. My father lived in Saudi Arabia when I was a kid. As soon as I became an adult, I got on an airplane and I went to the Middle East. I went to Jordan. It was the first Middle Eastern country I went to. I went to Jordan years before I went to Israel. These are all countries that are close to my heart. And over the course of this war between Israel and Hamas, I've been to many of these countries. I think when I decided to help GHF because I was legitimately concerned

about feeding the people of Gaza, you know, my friends in Egypt were happy that I chose to help GHF. And so I think this game of politics and disinformation, the way the media behaves sometimes, and the way our politicians politicize everything, it makes it harder for people like me, who are actual bridge builders and peacemakers,

to do our work. Because they draft us into their political conflict. And I don't want any part of the political conflict. I just want to help make the world a better place. And the irony is you're exactly right. Sometimes it's those outside of the United States who see it more clearly than we do. But what I can assure you is that many of the international

system whose job it actually is to do these things, I'm a private citizen. I don't work for the US government. I've never worked for the US government. For two years, or two terms, I served on USIRF, which is a US commission, but it was a voluntary appointment. You know, this is also the amazing thing about being an American.

And I can take my American passport, and I can go to virtually any place in the world. And that American passport, because of our American values and our American strength and our commitment to peace through strength, that passport is the ticket as a regular citizen to make a difference. And I always, I tell young people, I'm getting older now. I'm not that old, but I'm getting older. And I always say, if you care about something,

just do something. Get on an airplane, go to the place, meet people, try to find a way of doing something. And as a religious person, I believe that every single human being is made in the image of God. Every human being is like a treasure. And there's some human beings that take that treasure and they use it for evil purposes. And those people deserve to face the justice of the systems of government that, you know, we believe that government is like a God-ordained institution,

like, you know, it's meant to provide justice. But when I sit down and talk to a head of state or a beneficiary of aid or somebody I like or don't like or agree or disagree with, I'm talking to a human being like me. And relationships are what knit all of this together. The legacy of the first Trump administration, which will be the legacy of the second in an expanded way, is an administration that saw no new wars and a historic peace in the Middle East. And those relationships have survived this war. And over the course of this war, and even over the course of this last month when I've

been, you know, every single day I've had to fight the whole world for permission to provide food for people. It's just insane. But every day I talk to friends inside some of these agencies who are very angry at the behavior of their leaders. I talk to advisors of heads of states in Arab countries. I talk to people all around the world who are my friends. And I think that's the power of all of it. And so I think we overestimate the role of government and we underestimate the ability of an individual

to make the world a better place. Something that just struck me also in doing this type of work or developing these relationships, my experience with you is that everything you say is meaningful. You don't tend to throw it away. And I think people probably appreciate that. Your role at GHF, as I understand it, if I understand it correctly, is also a volunteer role. And you didn't fully realize what you were getting into, it sounds like. I knew it was going to be controversial because the, you know, I was watching, I watched the Middle East, but I didn't expect the level of vilification and disinformation and the bad faith behavior of so many people.

Right. But also, I mean, there's a verse in our Bible, the New Testament, that says, if you care about the opinions of people, you can't serve God. So I can't wake up every day and decide what I'm gonna do, or what I'm gonna believe, if I am deciding it based upon

whether it's controversial or not. Everything's controversial to someone. You have to wake up every day and decide whether it's right to do. And there's nothing more right than to feed people who need food. And there's nothing more just than to make it a little harder for the oppressors of those starving people to have a little harder time oppressing them. I mean, you just have to do what's right. And what I much prefer to, you know, it's interesting.

Like, I always say I do multi-faith work, not interfaith work, because interfaith work is like the kumbaya stuff. You have to trade your beliefs for permission to engage. And I don't think that really changes anything. I think we have to get sincere believers together, you know, people who are multiple faiths, like multi-faith. You don't have to exchange your identity, you know, for permission to be in the conversation. And there are plenty of people in the aid community, and I could go do this in a thousand other easier places, and I would be appreciated and not criticized and all of these things.

But the place that needed it the most, in the most complex environment in the world, was this place. And so you do it. And I don't care what people think about it. I care about doing it right. And we're not perfect and we do it better every day. But I mean, if the intention was by criticizing me or putting pressure on us and all these things that I would go away or that we would go away, like, it actually does the exact opposite. It's exhibit A that what we're doing is the right thing. Right. A friend of mine always said that when they attack you, it means you're over the target.

That's interesting. So a couple of questions that I know we're going to have to finish up fairly shortly. But first of all, just to stand up this whole effort at the outset, it was done almost instantaneously. It's still hard for me to fathom how that would have been done. If you could give us a tiny bit of insight into that and then also where it's going. Is there an end point? Yeah. The irony is that the first elements of this plan originated with some people in the Biden administration. It took Donald Trump, as it very often does, to implement something that was in defiance of the whole international system. And so it's not like it had to be built from scratch.

There are people that a year and a half ago, private sector people, people who care, you know, a handful of invisible heroes that will never get the accolades that they deserve, some of them will never be known because they were just like quiet people that cared, saw how the manipulation of humanitarian aid was prolonging the conflict and hurting these people. And so they started putting a plan together. And so it's not like you prepare. Before you build a house, you build a plan. And so it didn't come from nowhere. It was a lot of work over a long period of time waiting for the right moment. And sometimes it takes, you know, I mean, one of the reasons why Donald Trump is such a historic and impactful president

is he's willing to defy convention if the convention is broken and take calculated risks, you know, to do it. And so it actually didn't come from nowhere. In terms of what we want to do, like, we're in this for the long haul if we have the ability to do it. We don't decide whether we have the ability to do it. When Hamas showed up at the ceasefire negotiations on the first night dismantling GHF, which

was the position of the United Nations as well, was like one of the top issues they were advocating for because they wanted to control feeding the people of Gaza. So, you know, we don't decide whether we have permission to operate, but if we have permission to operate, you know, we wanna help give a future to these people. Long past this war, we'd love to be part of the stories of these people's lives. You know, our system doesn't have to just deliver food. We can deliver food and healthcare and education. We long past this war, we'd love to be part of the stories of these people's lives.

Our system doesn't have to just deliver food. We can deliver food and health care and education. We can help with sheltering them. We can do all of these things. We can help rebuild their lives. That's what we want to do. We want to do it with the world. We want to do it with a international system that's not corrupt and unwilling to change.

We want to do it with allies and partners of the United States and Europe and the Gulf and Arab countries. We want to do all of this together, but it's not meant to just go away. But we operate at the permission of other people. Where does the funding come from? It's a very important question, and I'm going to not dodge the question entirely, but I'm going to partially dodge the question. Because in the United States of America, we have laws here, regulations here. One of them is that as a private U.S. charity, you don't have to disclose your donors.

It may sound absurd to people, but I understand why better now after a month of this whole experience, because anybody associated with GHF, they've had their addresses, docs, they've received death threats, people have lost their jobs, people have been threatened. One of the most incredible things about the United States of America is that not only do we have this abundant free speech, but we protect people, organizations, and others so that they can do what they believe is right and do it discreetly if they want to do it. That is a feature of the nonprofit system in the United States of America. The most important funder and supporter of this effort is the United States.

It's not the only one. There are some other countries involved, including some countries that would make the European Union probably quite frustrated. They've chosen to do it quietly behind the scenes. I understand why. It's not for me to, not for me to say. I think when it's all said and done, the net effect of what we've done, even if we do nothing else, if this is the last interview I do, if this is the last day of our operation, there are over 70 million meals of food in the Gaza Strip to starving people that otherwise would not have any food hardly at all. And I think for whatever

all the other arguments are and all the other complexities and all the other questions, it's really, really hard to argue that it would have been better had those people not had any food at all. Or that food had come through the Hamas proxy. Exactly, which is what would have happened. Johnny, this has been a wonderful conversation. It's great to see you again. It's been a while. A final thought as we finish? I have discovered once again in the last few weeks how important truth is in a world filled

with lies. And one of the reasons why I appreciate you so much, and I'm always happy to come here, not enough, is that this network, everything you guys do, every conversation I've ever had with you has always been a conversation in pursuit of truth. And truth has no fear of inquiry. But we live in a world of lies. And one of the places I think we can get truth from is when we have long conversations like we just had. And so I just want to thank you for having me.

Well, Johnnie Moore, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. The pleasure was mine, John. Thanks for having me. Thank you all for joining Johnnie Moore and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.