The Ben Mulroney Show - How did anybody ever consider Hamas information credible?

Episode Date: October 15, 2025

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The payroll party to the nation. A national payroll party? Precisely. Sounds like a plan, you know, just one thing. What's that? I'm choosing the music. What? And I'm sitting in the back seat.

The whole way? The whole way. Welcome to the Ben Mulroney's show. It is Wednesday, October 15th. Thank you so much for making it to the midweek with us. And thank you so much for listening to our show, participating in the show, helping us grow the show on every single platform, YouTube, social media, streaming apps, podcast platforms. And of course, on the radio, we are so appreciative. And thank you for joining us on this journey.

And thank you so much to our good friend, Tony Chapman, who joins us every week to talk about stories in the news from a different angle. Tony, welcome to the show. Always the pleasure. And midweek, it's also mid-month, if you can believe it? That's, can you believe, mid-October already? And can you believe that 42% of consumers don't know that Lays potato chips are made with potatoes? You know, I worked in consumer brands for years, and it actually doesn't surprise me. It should, because it has the word potato in the chips.

But the confusion started when they really focused on the ingredients, you know, it's the barbecue, the sweet chili heat, and really emphasis. size the flavors and downplayed the potato chip. And then Pringles came along, which really isn't sliced potatoes. It's kind of a reconstructive dough and all sorts of weird ingredients. But it's interesting that Lays is going to have to go back to the well, repackaged to remind Canadians and Americans that they're actually eating potatoes because, as we know, this move for better for you,

Lays has got to scramble and say, we don't want to be cast away as kind of just a sin product. We want to let Canadians and Americans know we're eating healthier food, at least natural food. I mean, look, fine. People don't know that laser made with potatoes, whatever. Did anybody ask them what they thought they were made with? Yeah, it would have been lovely to get the rest of the survey. But they would have just talked about processed.

Right now there's a lot of negative towards processed food, so everybody's pulling away from it. And I guess, obviously, potato chips, given the fact that it's an indulgent snack. And that's the consumer is just immediately trying to find ways to discount it. All right. Well, Dove is, I guess, like a skin and beauty brand. And any time they come up with a new campaign, it makes big, big news. Of course, the body positive campaign from a few years ago. What are they doing now?

Well, it's interesting. One of the things they study is that we tend to give compliments to girls in terms of how they look. You look so pretty today. Oh, I love the way your hair is. and they're not talking about what's happening inside. So what you're creating is these false beauty stereotypes. Mom, dad, my aunts, my teachers, my friends, they only like me by the way I look, not who I am.

So for International Women's Day, they've come out with a bold campaign. And what I'm really proud about is it's orchestrated by Zulu, which is a Canadian ad agency that's also got an office in New York. And they collaborated to create this. And the whole idea is when you complement anybody, but especially a girl, don't focus on how they look, focus on who they are and why they matter. And how does a brand that is built around helping you with how you look, leveraging that?

Well, I'll tell you, it's a quick story, but years ago, we had ivory that's loaded, we had Irish spring that smelled like a manly soap, and Dove lost its point of distinction. Dermatologists were not, we're prescribing to young girls that had acne because it has no beef towel on the soap.

Long story. But a quick story they realized that women, girls who were the happiest in the world as soon as they got a few pimples became introverted,

refused to put their hand up in class, wanted to hide away. And that's what started this whole campaign for real beauty. And they actually had to film the board of directors' daughters to let the board of directors at very Dutch company

realized that you could sell soap based on an emotional attachment versus the functional aspects of soap. And that's what started the Dove campaign for Real Beauty. Fast forward, I think 12, 15 years later, women love it because they're allowing them to have important discussions about self-esteem and beauty with girls, because more often than not, girls are chasing who they are based on what's happening on Instagram and the cover of magazine. So long answer, but basically they've realized that that emotional attachment to a brand doing

good work is why they're getting loyalty in stars. All right, well, let's move on to another, a company, like, listen, you look at someone's bracelet, you look at their earrings, you look at their jewels, gorgeous, obviously they're designed to sparkle, they're designed to catch the eye, but in the past, mining for those materials, mining for those metals, has caused massive environmental issues, and there is a company out there doing things slightly differently. Yeah, I like what they're doing. They're saying we're going to go back to the old mining sites,

and very often what's left after a mine is taking everything they want out of the ground is not pretty. And so they're going back and recycling all of this bad stuff, and in doing it with new technology, they're extracting gold that was left behind. They're using that gold as a pointed distinction to go to Apple, Tiffany's, Majura, and Canada, and saying, look, you can package this, and they call it salmon gold, you can package this as better goals because what we're doing with the profits from it is we're cleaning up these sites. We're bringing back wildlife. We're bringing back fishing to the streams.

And I think it's a really interesting point of distinction. The challenge will be, of course, do consumers value it? Are they willing to pay a premium for it? And is this something it's easy to communicate at the retail level when you're coming in and looking around at watches and rings? Are you going to spend five minutes explaining why this gold is different? But I think is a capitalist way to cleaning up the planet. I think it's very creative. Well, yeah, because they have to explain how dirty it was before

in order to have a point of reference to say, look at what we're doing now. We're making it much cleaner. So it is a big nut to swallow. It is a big nut to swallow. And there's a lot of people in the jewelry business. But certainly do not want to remind consumers that that gold and that sparkly thing they're buying, that cosmetic thing they're putting on their body

that leaves behind such an environment. arm out to wake behind them. So to me, it's hard to imagine this getting through retail, but I do think Instagram, the story, a chance to raise capital, it's a hook, and will the hook actually land on the consumer, time will tell. All right, let's move on to the marketing powerhouse that is Taylor Swift. Depending on what the algorithm tells you, her new album is either a proof positive of the second coming, or it's a serious.

of songs that have been lifted from other people. That being said, doesn't matter. She has sold, I think, over 4 million copies of this album in the first week, which is crazy. It is. The numbers are stuck. The Billboard charts, 12 songs, her 12 songs in the album are listed in the top 12. She's just passed Drake and Jay-Z, so there's only one artist that has sold more, first that number one albums, and that's the Beatles.

and so it's interesting that she is a powerhouse and there's nothing that stops this lady from commanding but what she did, which is really interesting. You just talked about at the beginning of your show. Thank you for following me, streaming, YouTube. She realized that content has no dead ends. And so she's put out her album in so many different variations and CD formats and vinyl.

You can't help discovering it, seeing it, and purchasing it. So kudos again to one of the great marketing master minds of our of our generation well let's not forget excuse me let's not forget that when the album came out sure you could you could stream it online and you could listen to it but i my daughter was amongst four or five of her friends that went to a movie theater to listening listen to watch a movie about the drop of this album that doesn't happen and she went on her boyfriend's podcast and it went from popular to right off the charts to joe rogan out that week She knows, again, that content has no dent in.

Again, you're doing with your show. Most people just say, that's my radio show. You're going, I don't have a radio show. What I have is content, and I'm going to put it out in the world in the universe. And that's what Taylor Swift does better than anybody. She realizes that if I want to listen, I should have that available. Content should be within arms reach a desire. And your daughter goes to a movie theater.

Over one million vinyl albums were sold. Think about that. Final. One, wait, sorry, one million vinyl albums? Yeah, one million vinyl albums. Like hard copies. Hard copies, because it's a cut, even if you don't have a record player, you want it as a souvenir, because it's got the bright orange. She's, again, even the vinyl has her notes on it.

And that's what you need to do. The brander today, you have to realize, a promise made is the promise pet and leave it everywhere. It's Taylor Swift's World. We're all just living in it. Tony Chapman, thank you so much. Always a pleasure. Have a great Wednesday. Up next.

This may come as a shock. to some, but big surprise, Hamas wasn't truthful about everything that happened over the past two years. We're going to break down this shocking revelation when we come back on the Ben Mulrooney show. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show. A couple of days ago, I remember it was yesterday, I put forth the idea that had journalists in the Western world been more responsible in the information that they were putting out into the public sphere, that there would have been more pressure brought to bear on Hamas

to do the responsible thing, do the thing that would have ended the war earlier, which was give back the hostages, and Israel would put down their weapons. And they have been true to their word. That's exactly what they've done. One of the pieces of information that Western journalists have been so cavalier with are the numbers released,

by the Gaza Health Ministry, as if they are one of the Ten Commandments, as if they come from on high, when in point of fact, they've been largely fabricated numbers, pulled out of the ether, and they have been weaponized by the useful idiots who have been clamoring about a genocide and clamoring about starvation and clamoring about apartheid. Well, joining us now is former British Airborne Officer from the UK, Andrew Fox, who's joined us before about exactly this, as well as other numbers that have been fabricated by Hamas. Call me crazy, but I don't take them at their word ever.

Andrew, welcome back to the show, and yet again, allow me to say thank you for your service. Hey, Ben, thank you for having me on again. It's great to be here. Okay, so you told us weeks ago that the stories out of Gaza were either fabricated or exaggerated in regard to the humanitarian crisis. You had found yourself on the ground

to see with your own eyes that Israel was not actively and intentionally starving anybody. Do these fatality numbers surprise you? Because we're getting numbers now about the total fatalities, the number of combatants killed, the civilian-to-combatant ratio. Talk to me about what we're learning today. Well, you know, I wrote my paper back in December 2024, where I just pointed out, it was basic journalism, it was basic checks that should have been done by any responsible journalists in the world, that those numbers were full of errors when you scrutinize them. And then three months later, Hamas deleted 3,000 names because they were just completely incorrect. So we know that the numbers that have been relied on throughout this war, even Hamas admits that they're full of flaws.

Let's look at what those numbers include. Yes, we can talk about the overall total, 67, 68,000. We've got no way of saying whether that's true or false. We do know that 25,000 at least of those were Hamas combatants. The IDF have said that, and they've been accurate in pretty much every war in Gaza since Farnastakovus in 2005. We know that no lists have been produced of natural deaths. We know that children under five, there is no increase in mortality from what you would expect in a normal year without war in Gaza. The same number of children of that age group have died as if there had been no war at all.

And the bottom line here is that there is so little kind of clarity on what Hamas are releasing. They're just releasing names and dates of birth. And that's really it. No combatants, no accounts of people who've been killed by Hamas's rocket. dropping short. No, uh, acknowledge, no, no acknowledgments of, sorry, no, no acknowledgments of the fact that, uh, you know, people who've died in previous wars we found on those lists. So that they're a mess. They're a mess. Andrew, like the, the one point that I go back to is Hamas couldn't keep track of, uh, of a few dozen dead bodies of, of hostages. But

we are led to believe that five minutes after a battle, they have the exact number of dead gossens at the hand of the IDF. It is so ludicrous on its face that to accept that you have to be a self-avowed idiot and so stupid you should never leave your home without wearing a helmet. I mean, that's, and there are so many people who have just accepted these. numbers. I mean, Andrew, years ago, very early on, I tweeted something like, call me crazy, but a group that has no problem killing and murdering and raping and burning babies might not have an ethical problem fudging the numbers. And the pushback that I got from that was significant. Well, it's because they call themselves the Ministry of Health. And, you know, that implies doctors

and nurses. And of course, we all know that they could never tell a lie. And look, the bottom line here is that people don't understand how Hamas operates. And a lot of the kind of anti-Israel sentiment we've seen in this war for the last two years comes from a position of deep ignorance. They don't understand that when Hamas took over in 2005, they murdered all of their opposition. They don't understand that they purged every government ministry

and replaced everyone in them with pure Hamas loyalists. So when people think that the Ministry of Health is just these neutral civil servants who are doing their best for the people, of Gaza. That is nonsense. Yeah. You know, these are Hamas loyalists who will push out whatever Hamas tells them. And look, I've called for airstrikes.

I did three tours in Afghanistan, all of them in fighting roles as an army officer. And I've, you know, even in a small airstrike and a compound in Helmand, I know for a fact that it took us a good few hours to work out who'd actually been in there and who died, never mind the scale of which we're talking in Gaza. So it's patently been nonsense throughout the war. And the world have just swallowed it. And again, going back to the very intro point you made, this is a neglecting failure of journalism to do their jobs properly.

And so what we're looking at today, I should have been clear, is that the numbers that we're seeing today are from doctors without borders, which is a big step forward compared to the Hamas Health Ministry. Right at the bottom of the list of fatalities, there is the civilian-to-combatant ratio. of 1.39. And in your expertise, in your experience in war, what does that number signify and how does it compare to other wars? Well, look, the average, according to the UN, is nine to one. So nine civilians die for every one combatants. So to have got anywhere lower than that,

it is clearly indicative of sincere care being taken with civilian lives by the IDF. Now, I would add the caveat as a responsible analyst that actually it doesn't matter how many civilians died. What matters is if they died in a manner that was, you know, contiguous with the laws of unconflict. And that's the really important thing. Have the Israelis followed international law and what they're doing? I've been into Gaza three times. I've spent time embedded in IDF targeting cells. I know how they operate. And I can tell you right now, they do no things differently to how the British army or the Canadian army or the American army would do things.

Now, I'm, you know, I've got no moral concerns about how the IDF has conducted this war. Yeah. Now, before we let you go, I would love to get your sense, you know, the early days, a lot of optimism, a lot of hope. But Hamas seems to be already digging in their heels and saying they're not going to follow through because they're not going to put down their arms and they're not going to disband. And meanwhile, as their power, at least temporarily, remains unfettered, they're shooting people in the head all over Gaza. So what does that say for the long-term viability of this peace plan? I'm deeply pessimistic. You know, they've killed 54 people in the last 48 hours in Gaza. Just pure murderous execution.

You know, people on their knees, gun to the head. And, you know, it's striking, I think, in this alleged genocide that we've seen for two years, there is not one incident where the IDF have done anything anywhere near what Hamas have done in just the last 48 hours. I think it's going to be incredibly difficult to disarm them. I think my earlier points about the fact that they've infiltrated every aspect of civilian life

and governance in Gaza makes things incredibly difficult. I have a low hope and expectation for phase two of this ceasefire deal. Well, it's also quite frightening to believe that if Hamas disbands, you are going to have thousands upon thousands of radicalized civilians. walking around Gaza. Never mind the kids that have been indoctrinated in the schools over the past few decades, but you're going to have these guys who had taken up arms against Israel, who are now just citizens walking around than looking like everybody else.

Yeah, and the real issue here is Palestinianism, which is the idea that Palestine should be free from the river to the sea, which means the eradication of the state of Israel. That's never going to happen. Israel has just proven over the last 24 months that they will fight to the last IDF soldier to make sure their country is defended, until Palestinians accept the existence of Israel and a desire to live in peace, then there's no path to peace until they get a grip of that idea. Look at the difference in celebrations.

No, exactly. Israelis having dance parties, Palestinians, murdering over 50 of their fellow citizens. The difference could not be more stuck. Andrew, we're going to leave it there. Really appreciate your insights, as always, my friend. Thank you. Thank you, Ben.

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