American Thought Leaders - Where Governments Won’t Go: Charmaine Hedding’s Daring Rescues of the Persecuted, From Syria to Tanzania

Episode Date: February 19, 2025

“We had a case of a little cell of Christian believers who were all converts from Islam, and they were meeting secretly. And they were infiltrated by a radical terrorist group called Al Shabaab, and they burnt down the house. They captured some of them, they took them onto the beach, and only two of them managed to survive, because they killed the rest of them.”Charmaine Hedding is the founder and president of the Shai Fund, a humanitarian organization that aids, protects, and even rescues persecuted minorities throughout the Middle East and Africa.“In 2014, I watched as the Islamic State swept over Syria and Iraq. And I watched as the Yazidi and the Christian women were taken as sex slaves and sold in the markets of Raqqa and in Turkey and across the Middle East. And I thought to myself, ‘Who’s going to do something about this?’” she says. “The greatest struggle in the Middle East and in Africa, at the moment, is this concept of freedom of religion and belief.”Hedding was born and raised in South Africa, where her father and grandfather were outspoken anti-apartheid activists. Because of their activism, they were eventually forced to flee to Jerusalem when Hedding was a child.“By the time I was 12, we were harassed by agents. And we had agents in the church. We were followed,” she says. “The question that I remember asking myself as a child after reading the stories of the Holocaust is: If I was a European, what would I have done? And would I have put myself at risk to save a Jewish family? And that’s what motivated me, that question.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

We had a case of a little cell of Christian believers who were all converts from Islam and they were meeting secretly and they were infiltrated by a radical terrorist group called Al-Shabaab and they burnt down the house, they captured some of them and only two of them managed to survive because they killed the rest of them. Charmaine Heading is the founder and president of the Shai Fund, a humanitarian organization that aids, protects, and even rescues persecuted minorities throughout the Middle East and Africa. We were able to pull out eight planes from Kabul Airport

before moving to Mazar-e-Sharif, and we succeeded in evacuating over 9,000 people at risk. And so I can't tell you how many American veterans contacted me and said, please, save my translator. He's going to die. We have to get his family out. We did. Heading was born and raised in South Africa,

where her father and grandfather were outspoken anti-apartheid activists. Because of their activism, they were eventually forced to flee to Jerusalem when Heading was a child. The greatest struggle in the Middle East and in Africa at the moment is this concept of freedom of religion and belief. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Charmaine Heading, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Charmaine Heading, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. It's great to be here with you.

So you pull people out of some of the worst places where religious persecution is happening, mainly in the Middle East. You pulled two plane loads of Nova Festival survivors out of Israel after October 7th, shortly after. Tell me about some of your most recent activities. You have conditions in the world where there's no freedom of religion and belief. People aren't able, for example, in East Africa and some countries there, to change their religion or to have no religion. And we had a case of a little cell of Christian believers who were all converts from Islam, and they were meeting secretly,

and they were infiltrated by a radical terrorist group called al-Shabaab. And they burnt down the house, they captured some of them, they took them onto the beach and only two of them managed to survive because they killed the rest of them on that beach. And when I was contacted, the two of them were on the run, it was a woman and a man, and I was asked, can you help them? And can we get them to safety? And we managed to pull them out the country, get them into another country in a neighboring border country. And that's when we realized that what we're up against is a very tech savvy,avvy, organized terrorist organization

that was able to continue hunting them down throughout this East African country. And so we played this game of cat and mouse, where we would move them to one safe house, have security. As we left, the previous safe house would have al-Shabaab come and say and ask questions. Where are they? Who are they? At the same time, they were plastering pictures of people with nooses around their neck on Facebook and on Instagram, brazenly saying, we're going to kill you because you converted from Islam to Christianity. So we were working with META to pull down this terrorist organization threatening these two young believers and at the same time on the

ground having to manage the security and move them. And thank God we were able to get them out and they're now safe in Europe. So you do this at a very, very small scale where there's one or two people, but you also do this at a very large scale. For example, you know, at some of the Afghanistan airlifts, I understand you were involved in those, a little bit of work even in Syria now. So tell me about that. Yeah, I mean, we all know what happened with the disaster in August of 2021, when we understood that the Biden administration was just going to pull out of Afghanistan. And for those of us who are involved with freedom of religion, we understand that there's multiple minority groups that don't necessarily believe what the Taliban believes, we knew that they were

going to be in immediate danger, especially the Christians who were all converts from Islam, because under their understanding, it's apostasy. And the rule, the Sharia law that they were imposing across Afghanistan was that you would be killed for converting or leaving Islam. At the same time, we couldn't understand why all of these young believers were being hunted down and they knew their homes, they knew their telephone numbers, they knew where they worked. And that's when we understood that the social security database had been given to the Taliban. And some of these Christians, when this database had been made electronic and into a biometric system, had not wanted to deny Jesus. And so what they did is they wrote, we are Christian. And of course, when it was

handed over to the Taliban, they could immediately pull up who these Christians were, where they lived, what their phone numbers were, and they started hunting them down. And so I was contacted and asked if we can evacuate and help save some of these lives of these Christians now on the run. Also, there were women who were judges and lawyers, and they had been put in place as a 40% quota by the Europeans and had adjudicated many cases of Taliban violations, human rights violations. So when the Taliban took over, these were the kinds of people that they immediately started to hunt down.

The Ahmadiyya Muslims, who is a form of Islam that the Taliban doesn't agree with, their leadership was taken and they had young boys tortured and forced to sign false confessions. And they contacted me and said, can you get us out? And so we then worked to find a solution on how do you evacuate planes from Kabul airport. And in the end, we were able to pull out eight planes from Kabul Airport before moving to Mazar-e-Sharif and we succeeded in evacuating over 9,000 people at risk which also included Americans and of course people who had served with the US government and other governments. Right we heard about you know some of these translators the various people that were well let's say, just very friendly with the Americans were not seen very positively.

Yes. Yeah, because they had seen them as local translators that had worked with the Americans to translate or to do logistics or forward running for them. And they were seen as traders now. And so these were the first people that they went after. And so I can't tell you how many American veterans contacted me and said, please save my translator. He's being hunted down. He's going to die. We have to get his family out. We did. And tell me before we continue further, just about the situation in Syria right now, because we hear many things. Yeah, Syria is very interesting because we do hear many things. And I think the main thing that we need to understand is

there were two groups, both funded by Turkey and Qatar. It funded financially and also trained and also given arms. And they were subproxy militias that had been in Idlib and other areas that Turkey had used in order to infiltrate and to try and take over parts of Syria. And as soon as Israel declared the ceasefire with Hezbollah, which meant that Hezbollah could no longer withstand Israel's forces and we had decimated Israel had decimated them enough that they had to declare a ceasefire they understood that the Assad regime which is a low white Shiites could no longer have Hezbollah it's a Shiite, Iranian-funded militia or terrorist organization, to come in and support the Assad regime.

And we immediately started seeing troop movements of various factions, which then gathered under the Syrian National Army, which is actually a Turkish proxy militia, mostly consisting of ISIS militants, and then also HDS. Now, HDS under al-Sharah al-Jolani, he was in Idlib. And what we saw in Idlib and understood from his style of governance, it's classic Sharia law. We saw the beheading and stonings of women and anyone who didn't agree with them. The population in the governorate had about 10,000 Christians. Due to the persecution, less than 400 are able to live there.

In fact, in the news just in the last couple of weeks, the release of Yazidi sex slaves. So these are Yazidi women that ISIS took and then gave to fighters fighting for the Islamic State. They were released and found in Idlib. And Idlib was under al-Sharah or Jalani's control. So when he takes over, or we allow him to take over Syria, we are giving a Sunni Islamist party control over Syria. And the dangerous thing is that just last week, he dissolved the constitution. And he's basically said that he can't rewrite the Constitution for another three to four years and there won't be elections. So basically we have an autocrat that's

taken over Syria who doesn't believe in the inclusion of women, who doesn't believe in the inclusion of any of the religious minorities or components of Syria and for sure has not included them in his government. So we are seeing this government with officials that belong to HDS or who helped manage Idlib now be put in governance over all of Syria. So if we in the West support that, we are supporting a radical Sunni Islamist group that's come out of Jabhat al-Nusra and Al-Qaeda understanding of the world.

I don't think we want to do that. You know, the question is, what do you do? It's not like the Assad regime was a decent government. Not at all. No. I mean, you know, I always say we're intelligent human beings. Hopefully we can hold two thoughts in our head. Assad was horrendous. He killed, you know, hundreds of thousands of people, tortured them in the most horrendous way. And it's fabulous that we've got rid of him. But if we want to stop these never-ending wars, then we need to make sure that there's an inclusive government that has all the components and representation in Syria, including the eth to contribute and to take part, not just people who come out of Al Qaeda or al-Nusra and were supportive of HDS. And that's the difference. And there is already an existing model in Northeast

Syria of exactly that. Northeast Syria since 2012 has had a social contract which includes religious freedom, the inclusiveness of and good governance of all participating components of that area which is Kurdish, some Jews, Yazidi, Christian and they designed this amazing contract all on their own. And then when the Islamic State rose and started taking over parts of Syria and Iraq, we in the West looked around for how and who would be our partner. We asked Turkey. Turkey refused. So who did we go to? We went to this self-autonomous administration of northeast Syria. And that's why today we have U.S. forces there, because they were our partners on the ground who fought ISIS, fought for freedom of religion, fought for democracy, and fought for

an inclusive style of governance. These are the people we need to support and these are the people that can show the rest of Syria how it's done. What work have you done in Syria? We've actually just landed a plane full of aid into northeast Syria because they haven't been able to get access to medicines because the Turkish-backed Islamist militia called SNA, which is made up, as I said, of ISIS veterans, has been used by Turkey to attack northeast Syria. They've been attacking the Tishrin Dam, the infrastructure, and Turkey's been given the air support while it uses these proxy militias to go in and take over as much land as they can while committing massive human rights abuses.

And it's been well documented. And we also know that this time Turkey and these two militias have wisened up, whereas before they would upload everything onto social media. We have seen the instructions that have been given to these Islamist terrorist groups to not upload it and to make sure the West doesn't know, so that we can be fueled into supporting them. And then when they have control, they'll do what the Taliban did and come out and do all the things that they usually have done and what they believe in, which is what ISIS or Al-Qaeda believe in.

And we know what that is. So we've been going in to help with medicines, dropping food aid into northeast Syria and also helping them with projects on the ground, clinics, medical clinics for the injured and also in order to help them with water we've been setting up water wells using solar panels so that we can pump the water in case we have a loss of diesel access, projects like that. So tell me about the Shai Fund. What motivates you? What makes all this work? I think from my Christian values I understand that if we have freedom of religion and belief

it's the ultimate underpinning of all of our freedoms and the right to be able to believe what we want and to act on those beliefs, whether you have faith or you are of no faith or you want to change your faith. Basically at the end of the day that understanding of human dignity, that I treat you the same as anyone else. I don't discriminate against you because of your color, your gender, your faith. That's what informs me. And so I started Shai Fund when in 2014, I watched as the Islamic State swept over Syria and Iraq. And I watched as the Yazidi woman and the Christian woman were taken as

sex slaves and sold in the markets of Raqqa and in Turkey and across the Middle East and I thought to myself who's going to do something about this and I really felt that I needed to stand up so I registered the organization we got the nonprofit status and I flew into Iraq and met the Christians and the Yazidis that they wanted to create a caliphate with their own religious understanding of what a caliphate is, and they wanted to eradicate all of the other religious minorities or any other belief system. And that's why they wanted to get rid of the Christians, any Yazidis. Of course, in these two countries, we don't have any Jews left. And so in a lot of these communities and what we saw with ISIS, for example, I'll never forget it, with the pickup trucks with the ISIS

flags and the banners in Arabic that said, first the Saturday people, then the Sunday people, first the Jews, and then the Christians. And that's what we are seeing in the Middle East, this radical Islamic agenda to take over land, to have the return of the Khalifa or the Sultan, which is the leader of this caliphate. And in order to do that, they have to have this religious purity. And so no other faiths like you and mine are allowed. Very briefly, for those that aren't familiar, tell me about the Yazidis. So the Yazidis are a small ethno-religious minority that are between Iraq, Syria, and all the way into Iran. And the essence of their religion is more similar to Zoroastrianism, but they have their own religion. They have their own leaders of their faith, and you can't marry in or be buried into the faith so basically the only hope that they have of existing is

if they're able to practice their own freedom of religion and be able to exist in in these countries and so when the Islamic State for example or what we've seen with HDS with Jelani's group or SNA, both of these Turkish backed militias, that they want to go in and eradicate the Yazidis because they say that they're not people of the book. They're not mentioned in the Quran. And so therefore, it's acceptable to take them as sex slaves. and they also beheaded and killed tens of thousands of their menfolk. We found mass graves all over Iraq and Syria, and the women and young girls were sold in these sex markets

or given to foreign fighters that came from our western country, about 30,000 of them came through Turkey into Syria, signed up with the Islamic State, and as a reward were given Yazidi or Christian sex slaves. And we know there were prices for them. If there was a one-year-old girl, a nine-year-old, 40-year-old, different prices, and they were sold in sex markets or given as gifts for foreign fighters. One Christian woman I spoke to, she had 12 ISIS men that owned her, and I asked her where did they come from.

She said to me, Australia, Germany, America. They were all foreign fighters. Then she was given as a reward to be used as a sex slave by them. We helped to get her out and eventually got her out of the country. She's now living safely in Australia. Such an unbelievably horrific reality. Clearly Clearly you had a life before this. I did. What were you doing? So I was born into apartheid South Africa, and my father and my grandfather were both anti-apartheid white activists against the white apartheid government. My grandfather was a big figure on the mines in South Africa and he didn't believe in what the white apartheid government did so he was the main negotiator for

the different black African tribes in order to negotiate for them to have better conditions. My father went into the church as a church planter in Southern Africa, but the church segregated and we didn't believe in segregation. And so he joined the Black African movement under Nicholas Bengu. And Nicholas Bengu is like the Grahams, Billy Grahams of Southern Africa.

So my whole childhood, I spent doing everything that the government told us not to do. Don't go visit black people, don't go visit Indian people, don't support their human rights. And by the time I was 12 we were harassed by agents and we had agents in the church, we were followed and my father was a very good orator and he took it on theologically based on the human dignity of everyone and what we believe. And he attacked it from that point of view and challenged the church to rise up and do something about it. And one of those agents got saved, became a Christian, and came to him with a file like this and said to him, you have to get out. They're going to put you in detention without trial by the Bureau of State Security, and you will disappear. You're seen as a threat to the white apartheid government. And because of sanctions against South Africa, we had two options. We

could either go into Taiwan, and we had no relationship with Taiwan, or we could join the church in Jerusalem. And so I ended up growing up in the Middle East and began to understand all of the Middle East and how it operates and where the religious spaces are, where there is their religious freedom, and how does it work. And at that time, it was in the 1980s, you could feel the tensions with this establishment of a Jewish state in the Middle East and the anger. And of course, they were attacked by the different countries. And the question that I remember asking myself as a child after reading the stories of the Holocaust

is if I was a European, what would I have done? And would I have put myself at risk to save a Jewish family. And that's what motivated me. That question, when I came to be tested, would I step out of my comfort zone and save someone that I don't know? Because I believe in human dignity and their right to freedom of religion and belief and not to be persecuted for it by a state or an individual actor or a terrorist group. It's fascinating because it's not necessarily immediately obvious that obviously a devout,

very devout Christian such as yourself will be acting on the benefit of all these different religious minorities. Yeah, I think it's fundamental to our faith. It's fundamental to what we believe, because at the end of the day, I was given free choice just like you. And I think that's part of having human dignity and being able to choose what it is that we want. That's why freedom of religion and belief is freedom to be able to choose, to not to choose, to have faith or not to have faith, because it's the Bible that informed us of that concept of human dignity and what does that mean. And our job is to defend that God-given right. Tell me about this evacuation of the Nova Festival survivors. Yeah, you know, the 7th of October I was in Jerusalem, and we wake up very early in the morning. It was six o'clock to air, just after six o'clock to air raid sirens. And we knew that something was drastically wrong

because living in Jerusalem, we have the Dome of the Rock there. And it's very unusual to have air raid sirens in Jerusalem because they can hit the Dome of the Rock. And so here we have a Jewish state protecting the Dome of the Rock with the Iron Dome and protecting all of us with the Iron Dome. And in Jerusalem, as you know, it's split. You know, there's Christians, there's Jews, there's Muslims. It's, you know, the incredible, interesting city of all the great fates. And so we have this iron dome going off and we're running into our shelters and we can hear the missiles popping above our homes as the iron dome takes out

all of these missiles that were incoming from Gaza. And of course we got on our phones and tried to understand what was happening and those of us who work a lot in the Arab speaking world, a lot of us got onto the telegram channels which started to upload the images. So whereas the Nazis hid what they did to the Jews and they hid the Holocaust and the gas chambers. It was absolutely remarkable. It was the opposite with the Nova Festival and the Gaza Invalid, which is what we call the area next to Gaza. They uploaded it with GoPros and with cameras straight up onto the internet and for the whole world to see how they raped, pillaged, burnt, and killed every Jew that they could find.

They killed over 1,200 people that single day. They took 250 hostages, 252 hostages, from over 35 nations. There were Thai workers that were working in Israel. They took them. There was Bedouins, Muslims living in Israel. They took them as hostages as well. And so they took anyone that they saw supporting the Jewish state. And just this weekend, five of those Thai hostages have got out alongside a number of our other hostages. We have 79 hostages left in the Gaza Strip, and we know that 35 of those hostages are dead. Why was some kind of airlift needed in that situation. You can imagine the situation.

We've got thousands of missiles coming in from the Gaza Strip into Israel, into Jerusalem, across Tel Aviv. And the air raid silence are just almost continuous. At the same time, you've got this radical Islamic group, Hamas terrorist organization, flooding into the Gaza Strip and into Israel proper. And we immediately had to close our airspace because what commercial flight or any plane can fly where you've got so much missile movement? And so with everything closed and locked down, there was no flights going out and there was

no flights coming into Israel. While we tried to fight back Hamas terrorists, the next day, Hezbollah starts attacking us from the north. So now we've got missiles incoming from the north, missiles incoming from the south. And you've got people in the Gaza envelope area and the Nova Padi area who are hiding in their shelters. There's bodies strewn all over the ground. People are dead. People are wounded. They're dying because they can't get medical assistance in. And as Hamas is moving through this area, they're burning it. There's cells that are hiding. And so as Israel starts to regain control over the area and bring the people out, we have to clear the area and push them back.

Well, that took days. It took months. And then we found the tunnels. There were more tunnels that were found underground in Gaza than there are in the great city of London. And so they'd spent all that money building an underground terror infrastructure so that they could hide, they could stash weapons, and they could pop up and attack us, and also that they could take hostages into those tunnels. And so there was no way that we could keep any of our civilians anywhere near that area. Same thing happened in the north.

We found tunnels from Lebanon into Israel, and we found documents that proved that they wanted to do the same thing, so we had to evacuate our people from those areas as well. So now the north is evacuated, the south is evacuated, our airspace is closed, and you've got all of our population squeezed into the middle belt of Israel. We're fighting a war on multiple sides, and the people are traumatized, rape victims, Holocaust survivors that lost all of their family and they can't go back to their homes. And they've lived through this horrendous experience of spending hours and hours

waiting in their safe rooms while the Hamas terrorists roam outside trying to find Jews to shoot and kill them. And so they come out and they've got nowhere to go. They are displaced. And Israel starts putting them in hotels, but you've got constant airway sirens triggering them. And many of them who had homes or had relatives outside the country and felt that they needed, after what they'd seen and experienced experienced to leave the country and be able to recuperate before they could come back, had no way of getting out.

Or maybe they had, like the two Holocaust survivors, had their family had all been killed. And so they needed to go to America where they had some family left that could look after them after what they'd been through. So we decided to charter private planes, got the permission to get the airspace open when we could. And literally, we were bringing the people into the airport. There were sirens going off in the airport. The Iron Dome was taking out the missiles, and we waited for a moment where there was relative peace and then we were able to take those planes out.

And we landed them here, some of them in Europe and one of them we landed here in the United States of America in Nashville. The scary thing at that point for us and also for the people on the plane was what would be the reception when they came and they landed in Nashville. Because as you probably know, there's over a 500% increase in anti-Semitism, which is the age-old hatred of Jews because they are Jewish and because of what they believe in. So it's persecution at the root of that and the lack of understanding of freedom of religion and belief. And so these people that had survived were asking me at the

airport, what's going to happen when we arrive in Nashville? And at the same time, there was a plane that landed in Russia. You might have heard about it. And as they landed in Russia, they understood from the flight origin that it came from Tel Aviv. And there were immediately masses of crowds that started to hunt down the Jews that got off that plane in that airport in Russia. And they had to hide them in back tunnels in the airport and get them out because the crowds were so incensed with anti-Semitism. And it's back to front. Here's Hamas, who attacks a civilian population of the Jewish state of Israel because they hate Jews and they want to eradicate this Jewish state. And they killed 1,200 of them. They took 252 hostages and they launched through funding from

Iran and weapons from Iran a seven-front war on that Jewish state. Yet the world wants to kill and lynch Jews. I was going to say that that was not something I was expecting, that the day after October 7th, that the response would be increased anti-Semitism. I was expecting the opposite. We were all expecting it. And so that's how much more the need for an understanding of that the basic freedoms and rights that I enjoy should be given to everyone because otherwise we end up in places where we're supporting basically a radical Islamic agenda to globalize the intifada.

What does that mean? It means to have Islamic Sharia law where there's no freedom of religion for me as a Christian, for Jews, for Yazidis, for Baha'i, any other faith. That's what that's going to end up looking like. And we will not have the same rights as citizens or basic human dignity under that form of governance. What do you think of the recent deal that was made to release hostages? For the state of Israel and the Jewish people, it's very conflicted because the conditions that they've been held in, in tunnels with no light for over 480 days, with no light, no ablutions, so many of them hardly have washed themselves, and no food.

They've been starved. We know that many of the men and the women were raped and repeatedly sexually molested. And a lot of them were dying because they didn't have access to medicines. And the Red Cross, they refused to assist and to help us get medicines to the hostages in the Gaza Strip. And so we knew that, for example, of the 79 that are still there today, we know that 35 of them are dead. And the longer we leave them inside the Gaza Strip in these conditions held by this terrorist organization, they will eventually all die. You cannot survive these conditions. Some of them have spoken about being kept in cages.

Others have spoken about how they were given one pita bread, one little loaf of bread a day, maybe every day or alternate day. Others have spoken about how they had injuries and they were operated on without anesthetic and sometimes by veterinarians. The conditions are shocking. And so Israel made the hard decision to hand over 2,000 prisoners in our prisons, of which over 700 of them are in prison because they killed Israelis by the use of suicide bombings or stabbings or sort of mass terrorist attacks. So these are armed, trained killers that we have to release in order to get these hostages back. So very conflicted in Israel at the moment. And a lot of people would agree that it's better to save one life, save these lives,

and then even if it's going to cause a massive security problem for the country afterwards, that we would rather have that and cope with that security issue. Yeah, I mean, the criticism that I've heard was that it provided Hamas with the lifeline they were looking for. I think the lifeline that they were handed was already given to them a long time before this. I mean, on a number of accounts, right? Basically, Hamas is being given millions of dollars, 400 million a year by Qatar, with no strings attached. And they were wealthy and used that money to create terror tunnels instead of creating the

Dubai of the Middle East, which is what they could have done. That was their choice and they've chosen to death and not life. And so they've also taken the humanitarian aid. I'm sure you've heard of the huge controversy and I'm a, and we know that the aid is being resold at exorbitant prices or kept in warehouses where they stash, Hamas stashes the aid and doesn't give it to the population. And so I think they already have a lifeline. Unless we're willing to totally eradicate this terrorist organization like we did with the Islamic State, with ISIS. We didn't have mercy on them. We didn't have mercy on Nazi Germany. It's the same issue that we're dealing with here with Hamas.

If we aren't able to get rid of the stranglehold on the people of Gaza, we're never going to ever see a different style of governance and worldview that looks more at the issues that we admire and have values in the West. Democracy, human rights, human dignity. By we, do you mean Israel? The West. The West. Yeah. The West and Israel haven't gone in and dealt with Hamas. And this is the big question now with the new Trump administration.

You know, what's going to happen in Gaza? Because even the last few days that I was in Israel, we had missiles coming over from Gaza again. And then what about the, you know, obviously humanitarian disaster that you're describing in Gaza? Yeah, it's a massive humanitarian disaster. And I'm sure you've watched some of the footage of Gazans going back and crying out about what has Hamas done, and they've brought this upon us and they have. Hamas has a stranglehold over Gaza. When I see pictures or graffiti and it says, free Gaza, I always want to write from Hamas underneath because we need to free them from this terrorist infrastructure that is eating them from the inside.

And that's the problem with what we saw in Lebanon as well with Hezbollah. These are all Iranian-funded terrorist groups. And the West pulls out and you can't build infrastructure and the people don't benefit. But they take over more and more land and more control, like Hezbollah did. And they sort of raise their fist and say that we've won, but beneath them is a Lebanon that is destroyed. And the same thing has happened with the Gaza Strip. When Israel handed over the Gaza Strip to Hamas, well to the Palestinian Authority, they had the elections. And I always say to people, it was one man, one vote, one time. Because Hamas got in, they killed all the opposition leaders. They hung gays from the top of roofs and threw them down,

and it was very clear that they were taking over by force, and they've had this stranglehold on it ever since. The solution to this perennial problem, as I'm hearing you talk about it from these different angles, seems difficult, I mean, to say the least. Yeah, I think it is difficult, but I think that there are areas of the world in the Middle East where we have governments that are not like that, and we can work with them. When you look at, for example, northeast Syria, there are Muslim background believing churches that opened in 2023, big churches that are all believers who changed

their faith, which is their right under Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to have freedom of religion, to believe or not to believe, and to change your faith. So if we support those kinds of models and countries that are much more moderate or believe in much more closer to human dignity like northeast Syria, then I think we're going to have an end of these never-ending wars. If we support Hamas and we leave them in power, or we support HDS without any conditions and making sure that we see changes in their style of government, then we're going to end up with more wars and more instability in the Middle East. The choice is ours. It seems to me like the vision of the current administration is to certainly a lot more allow countries to figure these things out for themselves rather than having the long arm of America promote its vision.

How do you see that? It's interesting because I think we always talk about globalization and we live in a global village. And yet when it comes to these kinds of issues, we want to disconnect that concept from our foreign policy. And so when you have a situation in for example northeast Syria where if you just allow them to continue to flourish and don't support a strong man that's going to implement radical Islamic law then I think that's great but what I see is for example taking off the 10 million dollar bounty on the terrorist Jalani when he hasn't done anything except gone with his Turkish-backed militias and taken over the country and dissolved the constitution.

It's a problem. And Israel thinks it's a problem. There's been a number of statements by the Israeli foreign minister, Gideon Saar. He's been very strong in talking about who we should be supporting, and he's been very clear about it. We need to support the people that fought back ISIS. They fought back this radical Islamic terrorism, and they have formed this democratic state, semi-autonomous state, which is an example and could be implemented across the whole of Syria.

Nonprofits have been, especially here in recent days in America, have been looked at with great suspicion. And I guess, how do you keep yourself on mission? It's a great question because we look at this issue and we've just done a whole look at our mission and who we are and what our vision is. And it was very interesting because we realized that the greatest struggle in the Middle East and in Africa at the moment is this concept of freedom of religion and belief. It's really the canary in the coal mine. And so when you have those conditions, then you see more violations, you see more people dying, you see more distress of the different populations. But when you have a country that has good freedom of religion conditions, then you have other freedoms. And it filters, you know, like yeast or like salt throughout the whole of the communities and the societies. And so we've been very

clear that this is the issue that we want to work on through all of our humanitarian work and it's kind of the lens of how we see anything. So when other communities like the Yazidis who are being persecuted or being sold as sex slaves come to us and say, will you help? We say yes. Super quickly, what percentage of your budget goes to administrative costs versus delivering outcomes. So we're very particular about it and very proud that we have a lot of we have really good what we call bang for your buck and our admin fees I think are less than 9% and 91% goes straight to the beneficiaries that we help. And since we started the organization in 2014, we've helped over 630,000 people. And most, if not all of those, the high percentage

of those are religious minorities. And where can people learn more about the Shai Fund? You can go onto our website. You can read the stories and the people we've helped at www.theshifund.org. And Shai is spelled S-H-A-I. Well, Charmaine Heading, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. It's been amazing to talk with you. Thank you. Thank you all for joining Charmaine Heading and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janja Kellek.