The Jordan Harbinger Show - 925: Mosab Hassan Yousef | The Green Prince of Hamas Redux

Episode Date: November 23, 2023

Enjoy this deluxe edition of our initial chat with 'Son of Hamas' author Mosab Hassan Yousef, featuring exclusive new insights into Israel's current events. What We Discuss with Mosab Hassan Yousef: What it was like growing up in one of the first families of Palestinian terrorist group Hamas -- and why Mosab considers it "the greatest school of [his] life." The turning point when Mosab no longer saw Hamas as the "good" guys. How Mosab dealt with the loneliness of working undercover for Israeli intelligence against his former friends and family. What Mosab feels about the well-meaning but -- he believes to be misguided -- "free Palestine" movement. What prompted Mosab to get out of undercover work and chronicle his story for others to read (and watch on television). And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/925 This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up on the Jordan Harbinger show. When you are in a spotlight, you know, as a son of a top leader of the revolution, of all the chaos that's happening, very close the Hamas military wing, and understand the culture and hanging out with, like, basically top-wanted, top terrorists in the region. From the bomb makers to the suicide bomber to the mastermind behind them, you become just a target for everybody. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people

and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers, even the occasional former cult member, arms dealer, astronaut, or tech luminary. And if you're new to the show, or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs is a place to begin. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation in cyber warfare, crime and cults, and more.

And it'll help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on this show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Now today, this is a replay-ish of an older episode. It's with my friend Mossab Hassan Yusuf. We had him on last week to talk about Hamas, given the current climate and conflict. and if you remember, he got quite fired up. This is a very different episode. We recorded this three years ago,

but I wanted to rear it because obviously it is hyper-relevant right now. And it's not just going to be a rear of that episode. I've got some commentary about the current conflict that we are going to be splicing in into the episode, into the show close. So it's not totally a rebroadcast. If you just listened to that one like a week ago,

you could also just listen to this one and you will find new stuff. And if you haven't listened to that one for a long time slash ever, now's a great time to jump in. Masab is much more chill than he was last week in this episode for obvious reasons. So it's a totally different vibe if you thought that one was a little bit too much. This one will not be like that, hopefully. All right, here's an updated episode, 407.

Growing up, Hamas was the family business. If you're not familiar with Hamas, this is a group that is on the U.S. terrorist watch list and operates primarily in Israel, Palestine, elsewhere in the area, of course, including the United States, Europe, Africa. these things do tend to spread. In that area of the world, collaborating with Israel is the worst thing anyone can do. It's literally seen as worse than raping someone in your own family. His dad was a very respected Islamic leader with a major following and a lot of respect

all over the country. His father was essentially the leader of Hamas and Palestine and spent over 25 years in Israeli prison. Just think about that, 25 years locked up in Israeli prison. So he gets out of prison, takes Mosab as his assistant, essentially the gatekeeper to all these folks. Thus, Masab becomes the closest son to the leader of Hamas. This made him the single most important asset of the Israeli security service once he was recruited. So today, I want to go over Masab's story of Hamas, getting recruited by Israel, and eventually escaping that entire

situation. You'll have to forgive the audio quality on this one. It's a little bit rougher than usual. This was recorded in an undisclosed location for obvious reasons. We didn't have our usual stuff, and there were a little bit of issues there. That's just what happens when you're recording something with somebody who is essentially on the run. Many groups, including Al-Qaeda, still have a death sentence hanging over Masab's head. So I do hope you enjoy this.

If you're wondering how I managed to get these amazing guests, it's because of my network and persistence. I'm teaching you how to create your own network, whether it's for business reasons, personal reasons. Check out our course, six-minute networking at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course, they contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company.

Now, here's Masab Hassan, the Green Prince. By the way, initially, this is like one of the, I've known you for a while, and I feel like we go away back, but this is one of the hardest shows to book. Initially, you didn't even want to do it, right? Your manager, like, couldn't reach you, or the book publisher, I should say, couldn't reach you. Can we talk about that a little bit? You know, I said what I had to say. I don't like repetitions, you know, just keep repeating myself. again and again through media outlets.

My publisher, from their point of view, they want me to promote the book, which is a product. For me, if I said something, even to one person, it's already contributing to consciousness to the world. I don't need to repeat it a thousand times. I take a break.

I take a step back. I evaluate my actions. I evaluate my movement. I learn from my mistakes. You know, I'm not like a blogger or a politician or a religious leader. You know, it's like that wants to control a bunch of sheep. I'm individual and I respect my individuality.

Sometimes I feel bankrupted. There is nothing else to say, you know, and I just dwell into silence. You know, I'm not afraid to say, I have nothing to say. That was the truth, you know. I hope that you did not take it personally. You know, I think your show is great and I think you're a great person. Then when time comes, you know, and they saw that you were like insisting, you know, that I was like, okay, see, maybe there's something there.

Well, I appreciate that. I mean, you do have very strong beliefs, and your story is really impressive because of that, because you basically were put in a place where you had to, and correct me if I'm wrong here, you almost had to trade your home to do what you thought was right. You had to trade your home and your family to do what you thought was right in the end. Not only home. In fact, I had to die to the old self. I had to die to everything that I knew, to my friends, to my family, to my culture, my society, my securities, all of them. Everything I knew, all the knowledge that I had, all of a sudden, I had to choose between that all the things that I knew were useless, and I walk into the unknown, not knowing what's

going to be next, what's going to be tomorrow, and that's all for the sake of my freedom, not to be in slavery to the expectations of a certain society or a certain group of people, including my own parents. I don't want to say that this is the ultimate price, but I had to go through a lot, you know, from torture to like literally death. You know, my heart stopped. The level of pressure that I had to go through, my heart stopped for approximately 30 seconds. Most of human beings cannot make it back.

You know, this is the level of stress that I was going through, you know, to lose family, to lose home, to lose my sense of security, my sense of being, which practically now I know that it was just a false sense of being. Let's start from the beginning because a lot of people don't really know, you know, your story, of course, but they also don't necessarily know what Hamas is. Can you explain what it is for people who've maybe never heard of it or only heard of it on the news? Hamas is an Islamic movement, like Al-Qaeda, like Hezbollah, Salafi jihadists, and the rest of those groups. Of course, it has a cause, it has a national cause, it has a religious cause. Now, the United States of America and the rest of the free world actually consider Hamas as a terrorist organization. My father is one of the founding members of Hamas, you know, the seven original founders. Hamas at some point was my project also.

Hamas for us was everything, you know, for me as a person who was born in the heart of Hamas leadership and witnessed Hamas evolution from the moment of establishment to the point where it became an army and a main player in the stability of the Middle East region. It fascinates me. You know, I cannot even say what Hamas is. Is it the Hamas, 1987, the first was born, or is it Hamas 2003, killing thousands of people sending dozens of suicide bombers? Is it Hamas the political movement, or is it Hamas the religious movement?

Is it Hamas? It's a monster. When you say that it's a monster, I mean, I want to get into the evolution of this. I actually, of course, I read the book, I watched the movie. We'll link to those things in the show notes as well. You grew up with Hamas throwing rocks at convoys, Israelis, convoyes and things like that. Your dad was in Hamas. Your grandfather was in Hamas. What was your turning point where you realize like, oh, I'm in the middle of this organization? I mean, I know

when you were young, the police, the Israeli soldiers, I should say, came to your house to talk to your dad for five minutes. Was that story the beginning of your experience? It almost seems, as you tell it in the book, that that's the beginning of when you realize like, oh, this is a real thing that I'm in here. This is like a family legacy that's pretty safe. First of all, my father was arrested by the Israeli forces many times. He was just released a few weeks ago. He spent more than 25 years in Israeli prisons. And as a child, you know, I grew up where a bunch of uniformed soldiers considered by

the Palestinian society, my society then as the enemy, the occupier. We did not like them. Actually, we hated them, and we won them dead. And for that, they would come. They arrest my father and his other Hamas friends and other Palestinian factions. It was a war zone, you know. Not only arresting my father, we're not talking about, like, you know, the police coming into some protesters' house and arresting them in California, you know.

We're talking about the army coming into the house with their rifles, pointing at everybody, and sometimes there was shooting, and sometimes there was clashes outside. Sometimes children got shot, sometimes elders got shot. Thousands of people died during the first person in an Intifada, and I was living just right next to the cemetery of the town, which as a child at the age of 10, I witnessed the burial of dozens, hundreds of people. On daily basis, you know, the bodies just keep coming and coming and coming. Of course, talking about it right now sounds exaggerating, but like even, And for me right now, it's very hard action to believe that I had to go through that to see the human brutality.

It's not as simple as just like, you know, they took my daddy, you know, away, you know, and the child now have some prejudices, you know. We're talking about hardcore, human ugly side, you know, as ugly as it can get, where everybody's living in fear, where everybody wants to shoot everybody, where everybody's trapping everybody. So in this chaos, human chaos, where the truth is lost, where a child honestly doesn't know a better truth, my father was the truth. And what to do with those uniformed soldiers coming into the house to just arrest my father, you know? Of course, any child, if you were in my position, you would hate them. But that was not only a personal thing. It was ideological thing. It was a national thing.

All the groups, religious groups, if you go to the mosque, the mullahs or the imams are inciting against those occupiers. Graffiti on the wall is inciting against the occupation. The media, the family, the parents, many external forces are pushing you to believe in one thing. This is very, very dangerous conditioning process. When did you change the view or did you change the view of your father? You know, like a lot of us, we look at our dads, we see this hero.

When did you change your view from my dad as a hero to my dad is a complicated man that could rationalize the deaths of a lot of people? Of course, this is an evolution. If I tell you that there was like a moment to just figure out everything, then I would like for everybody in the Middle East to go through that moment to realize. But this is an evolution. And I tell you something, you know, my father and his likes, and I don't mean to disrespect my father by any mean, you know, I love him, but I don't respect him, you know, that much. At some point, he was an inspiration, he was the freedom fighter, he was the one who's sacrificing his life in Israeli prisons and all that. But today I understand he just wearing a mask by the name of the cause, the Palestinian cause, which everybody's cause.

and by the name of God, or by the name of Allah, that's their God, or by the name of a certain ideology, or liberating the people, free in the people. Every individual can have their own version of truth and hide behind it all the desires and the lust and the hatred and the human delusion. And my father is no different, you know. I wish that he was of a higher understanding, you know, to just see that he's just only driven by hate, lust, anger, and delusion. And when an individual is blinded to that degree, they will cause harm.

They will cause damage. And the mind will always find a way to justify its actions. On one hand, he would kill and blow people up. On the other hand, it's like, okay, you know, we are defending our children. We're not killing others. We're defending our children. And the same mind that tells him the truth. both the same mind that tears him the life as well.

Tell me about, I don't mean to chuckle at this story, but when I think about it, it's almost a little bit funny because it's like your teenage moment here. You're 18 years old, and you decide to buy a load of guns. First of all, what was that all about? That was like the worst plan ever, right? Well, you know, it's, I grew up in a jungle, you know, full of just hate, not only.

only, by the way, from Palestinian-Israeli hatred, also the rivalry of Palestinian factions within the Palestinian society. You know, the PA versus Hamas, versus Fatah, versus Public Front, and 10 other factions, if you don't have guns, nobody respects you in that culture. And if you don't have power, they will crush you. There, there was no government. There were a punch of corrupt politicians, basically criminals committing crime against humanity. So to grow up in this type of environment, you should not be very surprised, you know, that a child of that environment decided to go by guns. It's not like, you know, if I grew up in California, let's say in San Diego,

then all of a sudden I decided to become a gangster and go by guns. Yes, this is idiotic. But for that region, it's normal. Today, looking back, of course, it was idiotic because I could have been killed easily. The guns got me in trouble. They got me in prison. And I spent 16 months in Israeli prisons. I was tortured. They was beaten up by soldiers. I was depravated from sleeping for months. I was tortured mentally and physically, you know, that I still have marks on my face from that torture. When I look back, it's really scary to just remember the minefield that I was walking in. But sometimes it's a blessing to go through. through a minefield, not knowing it's a minefield. And when you get out, then you realize it was a minefield, otherwise probably you would have not survived. In the prison, what's going through your mind in there? Like, do you think you're going to be locked up in there forever? They're not

being nice to you. Like you said, they're beating you up. They're torturing you. They're not letting you sleep. Like, what are you thinking at age 18 when you're locked up like that? I just can't imagine it. You know, it's very hard for any human language, actually, to convey a human feeling and a human experience at this depth, you know, to really express pain and frustration and anger and confusion of why, you know, all is happening. On one hand, you know, I was hurt a lot by my own society, you know, as a child I was abused and as a child I was hurt badly. Then I was beaten up, you know, by the parents and by the teacher and by the other kids in the streets. I was bullied. It was amazing.

You know, to know that there's like an external enemy, you know, that I could blame everything on that enemy, which happened to be Israel. Then you go on blaming Israel and now you buy guns and you want to kill Israelis to just express your anger and your hatred on one thing. For me, it's really like, of course, I can get emotional about it right now, you know, and it's like, oh, it's an unjust world. It's unfair. But today I see it differently. I see it as the greatest school of my life, you know, the brutality of the human society. And the human society is, by the way, it just showed me, you know, something about my own nature. And I had to choose, do I want to be like this image or do I want to transform into a more refined higher consciousness, you know, that can handle pressure, that can handle pain?

So today, really hard for me, you know, to go back and recreate the blaming mentality, you know, what they did to me in prison, what they did to me as a child, why they did to me at school. It's very hard for me to recreate, honestly, you know, because without those events, I would have not been able to transcend actually man, to transcend the limitation of the human conditioning. I know you had to choose a faction, right? Hamas, PFLP, Palestinian Authority, or PA, or something else. And you initially, I guess, agreed, how did it come to be that you agreed to collaborate with the Shinbet, the Israeli internal intelligence service? Because that seems like a really hard choice to make after growing up in one place. And it's like, okay, I guess I'll be the worst thing that everyone

considers, you know, a collaborator. How do you make that choice? So back in the 1990s, a couple of Hamas members succeeded in infiltrating the Israeli intelligence. They were double agents. They were heroes among the Hamas movement, like the most sophisticated. Because, you know, Hamas does not have intelligence, like strong intelligence, like the Israeli intelligence. And to be actually able to fool the Israeli intelligence and double play them was like a really bad ass in the Palestinian street. So everybody wanted somehow to do it. And I was just another

idiot. We thought that I could actually fool the Israeli intelligence. So this is why I agreed to work with Israel with a hidden agenda or hidden intention is simply to be a double agent. Sure. Okay. That makes sense. But what happened later, thousands of Hamas members were in prison. And now Hamas didn't know how their members and their cells and their secret operation was exposed by Israel. So they wanted to know who was actually who were the rats. So they started torturing their own people, anybody, any suspect. And they were tortured them brutally. And the peak of their torture was during the time when I was in prison.

That was back in 1996, 97. Hundreds of prisoners were tortured. Dozens were killed. And the level of brutality of what they did to human beings exceeds anybody's imagination. And I don't exaggerate when I say this. Imagine putting needles under someone's fingernails. You know, and just like let them experience pain. you know, slowly for months to squeeze information from them, you know, as they scream.

I remember they would just put a soap bar in a prisoner's mouth, then tie it with a towel on the outside, blindfolded as, you know, they burn plastic on their bare skin. So basically, this is what Hamas was doing in prison to any suspect who had any relationship with the Israeli intelligence. And here I am, I'm coming to prison, you know, with actually a relationship with Israeli intelligence, but, you know, with no intention to spy on my own people or commit treason or betray them.

You know, I would never betray my father, for example. So I told Hamas, hey, guys, this is a situation. I had agreed to work for Israel, and I have some agenda. He said, okay, write it down. So I write down the story to the Hamas. security wing. And they came back with more questions. But I said, I don't have answers for those questions. Like, for example, who is your network? That they give you a special device? What's your

mission? And I told them simply, the Israeli intelligence said, go to prison, spend your time. It's like a cover. And after you're released, we will be in touch with. They did not give me a mission. They did not give me a device. They did not give me a network. They did not connect me to a handler. And that was the true. So simply Hamas did not believe my narrative and did not fit their imagination. So they start questioning. And this is where I felt Hamas, my own father's organization, that we as a family sacrificed everything so it can live.

Here I am face to face with this monster. I'm even telling them the simple truth that I'm not a traitor. I stepped forward. They did not discover me. I just came forward and I said, hey, I have a relationship. I established a relationship in principle. I never did any mission for Israel. And I have a national agenda.

I want to take revenge from those enemies of our society. But Hamas did not believe it. And they started interrogating. Of course, my father was not there to protect me in prison. And I became all of a sudden accused for nothing I did. And that was the moment where I saw Hamas true face that they truly don't see Israel as the enemy. Also, I can be their enemy. Anybody else can be their enemy.

Just disagree with them. Tell them a truth that isn't their truth and they will hate you, they will interrogate you, they will torture you. And this is what basically they were doing for many other prisoners. This is when I start having actually my doubt about other prisoners being tortured and killed. I know that I was innocent. And what if all these prisoners also were innocent people? So basically, as you see, I don't have like a simple answer to say yes or no. I go to work with Israel to take revenge from them, but somehow like I end up working for them.

To the Muslims, I oppose as a Christian. To the Christians I pose as a Muslim, to the Israelis as a Palestinian, to the Palestinians as Israeli agent, all the opposite extremes of life exist within my journey. For me, I learned how to swim against the current. Some people tell me, okay, so you cross the river to the other side, and was it greener on the other side? And I say, the truth is, it wasn't greener, you know, when I swam, I got to the other side.

It was not greener. But I said, then what was the point? What was the point of departing? I say, simply I learned how to swim against the current and in order for us to see and to know our higher potential. It doesn't matter where we came from. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Musab Hassan Yusuf.

We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing folks for the show, it is because of my network, and I know that sounds silly, but honestly, I managed to dig a form of, Israeli intelligence officer slash Hamas operative out of the jungle to do this interview. So, I mean, I don't want to pat myself on the back too much, but there's some networking skills involved, or at least relationship building skills involved. That's what I'm teaching you how to do for free over on our six-minute networking course.

Jordan Harbinger.com slash course is where you can find it. It's about digging the well before your Thursday building relationships with people that are not, it's not going to be cheesy. It's not going to make you feel gross. Not going to make them feel gross. And many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to that course. So come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong.

You can find the course at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Now, back to Masab Hassan Yousef. You'd said the world I knew was relentlessly eroding, beginning to reveal another world I was just beginning to understand. What the Israelis were teaching me was more logical and more real than anything I had ever heard from my own people. This is, I guess, how you felt when you were first released or while maybe you were still in prison with Loai,

this Sheenbet officer explaining that Hamas destroys itself more from the inside than anything Israel could do from the outside. But it sounds like you see that happening everywhere. It is happening everywhere. Yes, I experienced slavery. Yes, the Israelis wanted to provoke intelligence within me because they wanted me to be effective. So, you know, they invested in me, you know, as a human being. I'm grateful to that, you know. When talking about intelligence service, This has been actually or had been one of the biggest schools of my life because somehow also we created reality, you know, and I saw the creation of reality, you know, what really creates public opinion and what really manipulates public's perception of a certain thing. We do something on the ground. Then you see something on the media that is completely opposite of what we did on the ground.

Then you start scenes like the gap, you know, between children. truth and perception of truth. Of course, you know, they invested me as individual, you know, and they wanted me to go to school and finish university. And that was the first thing, you know, and now I understand why, you know, because I was much more effective that way. But also when we talk about Israeli intelligence, it is a prison of its own. This type of organizations, forget about it. You go in and your chances to get out only as a corpse, you know. So they invested in you, counting that you would never find your way out. The truth at that level and the power that you experience within Israeli intelligence

or any other intelligence service, we're talking about power, you know, and we're talking about real intelligence, and we're talking about real creation, you know, like a huge orchestration, you know, that deceives politicians and media and average people. and you can create any scenario to anybody and make them believe in it, and they would believe in it. So when I was playing, you know, at a very young age and start having a taste of that powerful game, this is what everybody is fighting for or thirsty for, you know, to experience power. But for me, it was another form of sleep. And I did not like the fact that all that power that I was experiencing.

experience and was just basically serving the agenda of politicians in a certain state, which I'm not against. I love Israel. I love Israel very much, you know, and it's very, it will continue to be an inspiring model, you know, for me, you know, such a beautiful nation, such a beautiful people, and they inspire me. But I don't want to be for the rest of my life, or I did not want to be for the rest of my life as part of Israeli intelligence and secret operation.

on daily basis, you know, in the morning something, in the afternoon, something, and in the evening something else. The game of deception and the reverse psychology and all that the intelligence services do, it's effective and it works, but it's limited. I wanted just to try to convey the truth as is, you know, to my people, you know, what I have learned, what I have learned as a child, what I have learned growing up, what I have learned from all the hardships that I had. And also, I did not want to cut the part, you know, which was the part that would condemn me to execution, to death penalty, which was my affiliation with the Israeli religions. And that was the hardest part, you know, but I needed to be honest with my people. They did not recognize my work with Israel.

They did not reveal or expose me. I revealed myself. And I stepped forward. And I told them, this is the honest truth. know now you're going to see me as a traitor. I know that you're going to crucify me for this, but you do it. But for me, I'm going to tell you the truth. If I fought 10 years to save human lives on daily basis, why should I be ashamed of it? Why should I be ashamed of it? But back to the point, I did not want to stay in the intelligence game, into the deception game for eternity.

And I wanted to find my freedom. So I got out. I got out to a higher choice. truth, but also that was not fine. Why wouldn't they let you have relationships with women? I thought that was weird. You know, you talk a lot about like they're sort of going through some of the rules. First of all, it doesn't seem like they trained you at all. Like, they just kind of like threw you out there and they basically only had a few rules, one of which was no relationships with women.

What's up with that? It's very strange, you know, to hear that the Israeli intelligence did not want an agent to have a relationship with that. Yeah. For them, they wanted me to always be and continue to be the Hamas member, the one who goes to the mosque, the one who follows the code of conduct of my society, respect the God, respect the parents, don't cross the red lines, don't do something that is morally offensive through the eyes of that society. Even the very ones, you know, who are telling me the stories, disagree with that. But right now, they wanted me to be the perfect fit.

They don't want me to hang out with women, which is not acceptable to the Arab and Muslim culture. It's a very conservative society. So the Israeli intelligence understand this situation, and they don't want me to go and do something that is abnormal, something that is not acceptable by my own society. Then if I lose my reputation, nobody would respect me. then I would not have access to all the religious leaders, which basically were the very terrorists that we needed to establish relationships with them and to know what they are up to.

I had a relationship, you know, I like secret relationship with a woman that I was in love with, but we really like had to like hide and go like to a different town, you know, to just go out for lunch, you know, it was like a long journey, impossible one, even like jump some fences, you know, I had risk my life, you know, to just go and meet with her. This is a Palestinian woman, or were you dating an Israeli woman? No, she was actually a Palestinian woman. And this is why actually what made the Israeli intelligence actually go against it. They, in fact, asked me not to hang out with this woman anymore.

And I think they were right, you know, because it was dangerous for the woman, and it was dangerous for me. She was very important to me, you know, that I would not even, in that culture, it's very, very hard for women. You know, if a woman hangs out with a man, and let's say it's like, for example, loses her virginity or something like that, you know, she would never be able to marry again, and that's it. It's like in that culture, unfortunately, and please forgive me for the comparison, but it's like a secondhand car, and it will always be like a secondhand car. Not like in the United States, you know, it's like a divorced woman or a single woman,

you know, single or in a relationship, you know. There are much more definitions of like, okay, This is version, this is not version, you know, and, you know, the 72 versions, you know, it's a big thing in that culture. Yeah, it's ridiculous, you know, but again, this is the human deluge. But anyway, my personal life was not easy, but I managed somehow against the odds, you know, to enjoy, you know, moments of my early life, you know, as a youth, as a young man. And it was a very nice adventure, you know.

Today, looking back, you know, and she's like, okay, there was love there, you know, I was like to go meet a woman, you know, to jump the fence and risk your life and hide somewhere and change your look and, you know, do all the impossible just like to spend with her, you know, it's like half an hour and that's it. There was something, you know. But here we are and I learned what I learned. You did uncover a lot of suicide bomber cells, terror cells, and I assume you had to be pretty careful because the Palestinian authorities, so the government of the Palestinian territories at

that time, they had CIA eavesdropping gear that they could easily have used both against terrorists and against people who are collaborators, right? I mean, you must have really been kind of between Iraq and a hard place because Hamas now might be the authority in Gaza and the West Bank, but back then it was not. So you were being hunted by Israel, by the Palestinian police, by Hamas by everybody. That must have been a lot of pressure. Look, all you have to do, everybody's looking for you.

And simply, just look with them. Everybody's like, who is this motherfucker? You know, who is passing the information? You know? And you just ask the same questions. And if people are looking, just go with them. You know, and look for that person.

And they would never figure out. I had a very good cover. And as I told you before, it was like walking in a, a minefield, you know, truly a minefield. I was not only a target for the Israeli intelligence. You know, it was also CIA was also all type of intelligence services, you know, in the region. And when you are in a spotlight, you know, as a son of a top leader of the revolution,

of all the chaos that's happening, you know, and very close to decision making, in Yasser Arafat meetings and other top Fatah leaders and very close Hamas military wing and understand the culture and hanging out with like basically top wanted, top terrorists in the region. From the bomb makers to the suicide bomber to the mastermind behind them, you become just a target for everybody.

And, of course, everybody's looking for you. Only a handful of people know who you are. Even within the Israeli intelligence, a handful of people knew about my existence. Even when I had, let's say, solid intelligence, you know, like about, For example, I had information about Hamas taken over the Gaza Strip one year before Hamas took over. And I told the Israeli intelligence, Hamas is going to take over Gaza.

They are planning for this. They are building an army, underground army. It did not make sense to them. They were like, no, this is, they won't be able to pull this together. Even if they had the intention to do so, you know, they cannot do it. It's impossible. The Palestinian Authority is 10 times the size of Hamas in Gaza Strip. They've got much more guns.

they've got much more members and they have the support of the whole world, you know. Hamas wouldn't be able to take over the Gaza Shrip and throw Fatah out. And I thought them, okay, if you say so, you know, they could have stopped it. They could have stopped it. And look now what happened and how many wars happening in Gaza Strip today. So sometimes, you know, you just don't take seriously a piece of information. The reason I said this, you know, at this level of intelligence, you know, when you have like solid information, it goes to the prime minister, for example.

Now, the prime minister does not see my name on the report. He would only see symbols. And if there was any piece of information that would lead to me, they would take it out or they would cross it out. So basically, even the report that goes to the head of the state, I would be totally coded so they don't recognize who I was. This is how much the game was very serious, you know, and my life was in danger. And I was like, if I get cut, I am done.

Matter of seconds, that's it. I would be with a crowd, with a mob, a punch of militia, arming, waving with rifles, with rage, angry. Who the fuck give the information? It would be me just right next to them. And you just need to trust, you know, anything could happen, anything. Were you lonely doing this? Like, you couldn't share your life with a woman. You couldn't tell any of your friends.

You definitely couldn't tell your family. Nobody other than your handlers in Shinbet, so Israeli intelligence. And even then, I mean, they're like, they're not your friends. They're people that you're working with. You can't just call them on Friday because you're feeling bored or alone or isolated, right? Was it lonely? You know, this term, lonely, it would be in a case if I now came to recruit you, Jordan, that it's like, hey, I want to sit you on a mission, leave your wife, you know, leave everything behind

and just go behind the enemy lines. and it would be a totally strange culture, then maybe you would experience that. I was alone for sure, but I was still within my own culture, playing the same role that actually the majority of my society wanted me to play. I just needed to be careful

so they didn't know the other roles that I had. When you do things like this, you need to understand the drive. If I was doing it for money, if I was doing it for revenge, If I was doing it for like any other human thing, then I would have greater fear. But if you keep your compass that the more I'm doing this, we are stopping suicide bombing attacks. Suicide bombing attacks lead to death.

Then they lead to retaliation from the state. Then they lead to more chaos. And those people, by the way, the victims of suicide bombing attacks, not only Israel, Arab Israelis, Muslims, Americans, like the Hebrew University, for example, six Americans were killed, students at the cafeteria on campus. And I knew the people actually who sent those suicide bombers to carry the attack. One of them is Ibrahim Hamid, and I helped locate him, which was wanted for about eight years. Wow. Now he's spending life terms in Israel in prison.

So we're talking about high-profile terrorists that did not only kill Israelis. You know, they killed Americans. They killed all type of people. So now when you have a head of your eyes in this very dangerous game, okay, all the money in the world is not going to give you security or give you comfort in that situation. Actually, even if you were paid, let's say, millions, what are you going to do with the money? You live in a small town where all the eyes on you. And even if you had all that money, you cannot spend it because you would be exposed immediately, you know. In fact, the Israeli intelligence did not like the fact that they had access to money from other sources, like the USAID or my father.

They were very careful to tell me, careful how you spend the money that you take from your father, because people might think that we are the ones giving you the money. You know, and it was basically Hamas giving me the money. So practically, it's a very dangerous thing. And what can keep one alive in such a situation is your moral compass. What are you fighting for? And now I'm such a small player in that game. But this small role that I'm having can save a human life. And this meant the world to me.

This is why I was alone, but I was not lonely. You know, that bombing at the Hebrew University cafeteria, I ate at that cafeteria every single day, and the bomb was probably about three feet away from where I used to sit every time. So there's a, I had left Israel already, but I was a few months away from not being able to have this conversation. That's for sure, because it was right there in the French Hill, right? Yes, yes, yes. Wow.

Brother, I'm so glad that you are here and we are talking. I'm so glad that, you know, that eventually Hamas military wing in the West Bank, the head of the Hamas military wing, which was Ibrahim Hamid. That was a very sophisticated operation, you know, that I brought him. back to justice, you know? And I say it proudly. Of course, it's a team effort. But without the intelligence that somehow existence gave me, we would have not arrested him in time. So now, you tell him it's like, thank God, you know, I'm alive.

Or it's like, thank God, you know, it's like many others are alive because this man was brought to justice and was put in prison. This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Mossab Hassan Youssef. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. All of the deals discount codes and ways to support the show are at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals.

You can also always search for any sponsor using the AI chatbot. You can even email me to surface a code. I would love to help you use these codes. That's how important it is. Thank you for supporting those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Mossab Hassan Yousef. You knew you were pushing your luck and would eventually get caught, right? So the Sheenbet, the IDF, they launched this massive, I guess, fake, but also totally real operation

to arrest you. And the way you tell it in the book is they set up this operation to pretend to try and catch you. And it was like this massive special forces operation. Can you tell us a little bit about that? This is like the wildest thing that must. I mean, you have a lot of wild stories, but this is up there for sure. Gosh, man, you're opening those files from many years ago.

I don't realize sometimes how old I am, you know. Yeah, well, you and me both, man. You and me both. So basically, there was an operation, and I had access to five suicide bombers, potential suicide bombers. I knew their location, and it was a trick that I played on them somehow to just suspend their operation for about 48 hours, and they somehow listened to me. Okay, somehow listen to me, and I put them in a safe house, and the Israeli prime minister decided within 30 minutes to bomb the entire building and just kill everybody in it. I did not want to be part of killing or assassinations, because my motive was not revenge.

So I told my handler, listen, I don't want them dead. But he said, if you don't want them dead, they will mention your name during the interrogation and truly, like, assassinating them is the best way to keep your cover. If they mention your name, you're done. Because you have to go to prison for a long period of time. And we cannot put you in prison for a long period of time. And if you don't go to prison, how can you explain this to your parents and to the other movement? They would know that you are the one who give the information.

So this is why it was very difficult. And they had to orchestrate one of the biggest plays, you know, to get me out of the situation, but also respect my request that I don't want them to be killed. They were just, by the way, 19 to 21-year-old, young teenagers, basically. They didn't know what they were doing. So they decided to arrest them instead of assassinating them. And what they were afraid of happened. One of them during the interrogation, in the first couple of days in the interrogation,

he mentioned my name, that I was the one who helped them and gave them the house and gave them the gun, which was, you know, basically. one of the tricks that I used to get into their world. You gave them guns, that was the trick? It's funny. I gave them a handgun and I took a car full of explosives in return. It's a good trade, I think. I don't know.

It was a crazy trade because on one hand, I told them you cannot move around in the city full of intelligence services, full of army, full of IDF, Palestinian authority with a car, a stolen car full of explosives. So I made it about their safety and I made it about the plan and what's right thing to do. So I told them, listen, I keep the car, I put it in a safe place and here's my gun. So I just hand them my handgun. And I say you just use this in case you need something. To defend yourself, you need a gun. You don't need a car full of explosives. And they kind of like the idea. And now I keep them on a leash. Because if they go with the, the car, they might find someone else to help them or just decide suddenly to just blow it up and

it's over. You just hear about it in the news. But if I have their explosive, they have to come back to them. And this is how we got in trouble. I received a phone call from my handler and say, you know, we have a situation and you need to go under the ground right away. I was like, what's going on? He said, they mentioned your name. And he said, we prevent them from visiting any attorney or any family member or anybody so the people don't know that your name has been mentioned. This is what usually prisoners do. If they mention some member of the movement, name during interrogation, they would tell the lawyer that we mentioned the name of this activist.

So the lawyer would go to their family and say, hey, your son's name has been mentioned. It's just a matter of time before they are arrested. So now they don't want Hamas or the outside world to know that my name was mentioned. First thing, they deported one of them, which was a Jordanian national back to Jordan. Immediately. This type of terrorists, potential suicide bomber with explosives on them, they would spend at least 15 years in Israeli prison. So now they send one of them immediately back to Jordan, deported. trial, nothing. So his friends were like immediately, how come he's just free two days later,

you know, back with his family? And the kid was just celebrating with his family, you know, not knowing the trap that he's in. So everybody in his own group thought that he was the traitor. So that was the first step. But that's not enough that we framed someone else. The second one, basically we totally framed an innocent person. The second step was to make me into a wanted person. So I could not go to prison at that time because I was part of so many operations and the relationships that we worked so hard to establish them

with other terrorists, with other groups, with other dangerous people. To put me in prison, this means that we will lose all the leads that we have established over two years or so. So I had to be still in the field. They said the best way is to make you into a wanted person, but they wanted that to be as real as it can get. So again, as I told you, only a handful people in the Israeli intelligence knew about my existence. So the army, the special forces, you know, something similar to the Navy SEALs in the United States, they don't know about my existence.

So now those people have to act like they are going after an enemy. So the Israeli intelligence give their own army and the special forces. the most wanted man's whereabouts, which in that case mean. We want him alive or dead. Shoot him. Don't hesitate. You know, he's a very dangerous man. He's affiliated with suicide bombers. And that's like the truth that they wanted the army to know. So when the army came in, they come with, first of all, undercover agents, 50 of them or more, all just like civilian Palestinians in civilian cars. Palestinian plates surrounded the area. Before they got the okay to attack the house,

where I was supposed to be, you know, my family's house, I got 30 seconds to get out of the house and make it look like an escape. So I got out of the house. The special forces on the ground got the green light from the intelligence that I am inside the house still. So the special forces come. About five minutes out of that circle, they were like a punch of Merkava tanks.

You know, the Merkava tank is like, I think, 40 or 50 tons of steel. And when this thing turns on, the engine is much higher than an airplane's engine. And when you have 10 of them storming into the city, it's like an earthquake happening. So those were about like five minutes away. And they start driving towards the city center to my family's house. So it's like all this orchestration, it became like a war zone, right? now. So my family right now is cut up in the fire. My family inside the house. And of course, my headler said, don't worry. We'll do everything within our ability that, you know, your family

wouldn't be hurt, but we want this to be real. Like, we want you to look like a real wanted. Otherwise, Hamas will kill you. They came into the house. In the speakers, they called for my name. And of course, I'm not at the house, but the special forces have reliable, in terms. that I am inside the house. They don't know that they are also manipulated by their own intelligence. So when I don't surrender, they evacuate my family first. Then they get the green light from my handlers to shoot the house. You know, they launch a missile into the house.

And they spray bullets like all over the wall. Like in my room I had about like 150 bullets just in the wall. And the militia groups right now, they start gathering and surrounding the special forces. creating like another ring of fire and shooting at the forces and the forces shooting back at them. This is what brought the choppers. It became a war zone. Everybody in the city knew that I'm a dead man. And my father, the Hamas leadership, even the suicide bombers that I was helping,

everybody knew that I was in a deep trouble and Israel is not tolerating. And that gave me actually a very good cover in the city, but I had to act like a wanted man. I could not just like, you know, become a wanted man and just lead a normal life. So I had to actually become a wanted man. So Hamas was actually, my father was very afraid for my life. And through his connections with the movement,

he arranged with the Hamas people to give me some of their safe houses and hang out with other wanted people that we were looking for for a long time. So I end up hanging out at all the safe houses. and knowing the locations of the most wanted people that we wanted. And this is how we cracked down the entire Hamas military wing in the West Bank responsible for 90% of the suicide bomb attacks during the second person in the FDefada.

So that was the play. Wow. Wow, that's a dangerous play, though, right? Like, you're almost getting a missile shot at you, or at least almost hit you. It did get shot at you. There's bullets all over the place. But then you get this street cred as like a badass. terrorist and then they're schlepping you around to all of the safe houses to hobnob with all the

the most wanted. I mean, it's absolutely wild. I wonder, though, you were already disillusioned with Hamas, but there's this one instance in the book, or one incident in the book, where it really looks like things went south. Hamas blew up a bunch of their own people at a rally and then blamed Israel. It was just a, they were showing off with like a rocket launcher or something like that. What happened there? I mean, this whole thing is just such a cluster. Look, Hamas, other terrorist movements, Palestinian movements, Palestinian leadership throughout this conflict. They never take responsibility for any of their actions. They want Israel to be responsible for all the problem in the Middle East.

And this is to have a common external enemy that you export your internal crisis on has been the method. This is the mechanism. and this is how they have survived so far. Hamas people used the Gaza children as human shield. Then they blamed their blood on Israel. When they had even an incident where, you know, their own explosives blow up and kill Palestinian people. Of course, they couldn't be brave and honest enough to say, we did it. They wanted Israel to take responsibility for it.

But how can we expect from such dark organization without morality? And it's beyond just nationalism. It's like, okay, many people in the United States, especially like, you know, my friends in the liberal camp, also it's like, you know, they went like, okay, justice for Palestinians. And we say it's like, define Palestine. Define Palestinian. You know, there is no such a thing. You know, we're talking about dozens of rival parties, you know, a layer of a layer of darkness.

of confusion, of ignorance, and you know who's crushed in between, the children. And all the Palestinian factions, with no exception, religious or secular, conservative or liberal, all of them put nationalism ahead of the children. And as long as they are thinking this way, they should be held accountable. They should be countered by any means. And this is what Hamas is doing. You know, we cannot say it's like, okay, Palestinians. No, the children of Gaza are helpless.

Hamas store missiles at schools, at hospitals, at mosques, and lunch rallies, you know, with their homemade, kitchen-made missiles among thousands, hundreds of thousands of civilians. What's that? And when a mistake happens, the Rashdublem Israel. That was like really taking it too far. Just man up for one time in your history. You know, just take responsibility and say it was us. But they cannot.

They cannot. I know you ended up leaving the shin bet, the Israeli intelligence service. What happened? When was enough enough? You just decided one day, hey, look, I've had it with this crap. I mean, how did that thought process come about? As I told you, this world of intelligence, the world of deception, also it's not an easy world.

Anybody, whether you work for FBI, for CIA, for KGB, for whatever it is. It's a very dangerous world. They call it intelligence world, and yes, there is intelligence to it, but it's a human intelligence the end of the day. And I think intelligent people eventually will find a higher intelligence, and higher intelligence means leave, get out. But when you try to get out, they have something to lose, you know, because if you still, an asset, if you still has juice in you, they want to squeeze you to the last drop, you know, excuse me for the expression, but this is what they want to do.

I wanted to be the person I wanted to be. And that was not possible by just living a secret life with many secret identities and so many masks and hoods and all that. And this is when I felt the necessity, you know, for me to get out. Because honestly, I cannot stop human madness. I cannot go in the head of every Palestinian or every terrorist and make them see the truth that I see. I cannot. If I see the truth, I needed to work on myself.

I needed to transform myself. I needed to actually emancipate myself from all the things that I had witnessed, from all the experiences that I had. And that requires more freedom, that requires honest. that requires to be truthful to who I am. Many people, of course, you know, they tell me, why don't you just talk more about your adventure and about the life?

You saved many human lives. I think it's like, what's the point, you know, if you save so many human lives and you lose yourself in the process, you know? You know, first we need to be able to actually help ourselves, you know, then we can help others. Even if we had an impact only on one person, we already have contributed a great deal towards humanity and towards consciousness.

Tell me about the last conversation you had with your father when you told him about working for Israel. I wanted him to hear from me. And again, in my silence in San Diego, California, back in 2007 and 2008, I decided that I wanted to document my journey. At that time, I didn't know that I could write a book. I didn't know that you could actually profit from a book or you could make money from a book. which many people, you know, accuse me of creating a controversy, and I was like, for the sake, profit. For me, it was like, I have to document this story in case an accident happens to me, in case I die, in case I get assassinated, you know, I don't know. Maybe the Israelis come after me. I have lots of government and state secrets. Maybe terrorist groups would come after me.

Maybe just simply an accident will happen, you know. And I don't want all this experience to just go in vain. You know, I wanted to be documented somehow, you know, for maybe the next generation to read, you know. I didn't think it would be published, but I wanted my father to hear from me, from my mouth, you know, not from my book, not from others. And I wanted him to know the truth. So I told him, I told him, you know, I didn't know how I managed actually to tell him, you know, it's just crazy, you know. And what a shock. You know, it was his right hand. I was his oldest son. I was his friend. a most trusted person that he had in his circle, I basically betrayed him. I betrayed him in order to save him.

There was no way around it, you know, there was no way around him to save him from himself. He would have been assassinated a hundred times now. All his friends at the same level of the organization, all of them are gone. All of them are assassinated. None of them survived there. The Israeli politicians wanted him this. And the army wanted him dead. The only thing that was stopping him from dying was me.

Whether if he knows it or not, whether if he will recognize it ever, it really doesn't matter. For me, he was my father and I did not want him to die. I wanted him to know. On one hand, I betrayed you, but on the other hand, I saved you. And this is what makes it very, very hard for him. In fact, this is what makes it very hard for the Palestinian people. First of all, I was not against the Palestinian people, and I'm still not against the Palestinian people. I'm against stupid ideas and the national ambitions and the sick beliefs.

I am against all that, and I have no regrets to go against it. And I wanted to tell him personally, and that happened. And a few months later, you know, the book came out. It had more details in it, you know, of how things happened. It was a great disappointment for him, you know. But the truth is, by the way, I gave him the option. to disown me. Because I understood, even though he's a great leader of the society, if he keep giving me cover in that culture, it would be participating with me. So I told him this on me.

And he told me this is not an option. He told me, you will always be my son, no matter what, you're part of me. You're my liver, you're my kidney, you're my heart, you're my soul, you're everything. I cannot disown. The eve of publishing the book, I heard from the news, his statement. He made a statement and he disowned me from his prison. So this gives you just another idea, you know, of like where his heart is and where his mind is and the vast ocean in between.

But our greed and our political ambition continues to divide us if it was able to divide my father and me. And we really loved each other, you know. And I am sure that we still do, you know, love each other. and the bond between us cannot be broken. But still, for the public image, you know, he has to go until the whole public, this is not my son anymore.

I don't know him, you know, kill him if you want. How could you say that? And if you were forced to say this, what does that tell you about the nature of this entire conflict, you know? What about unity? What about love? What about understanding? Will ever there be peace in the Middle East?

If this is what happens, you know, for a father-son relationship? Mossab, thank you so much. This has been really an amazing conversation. You're really open, forthright, and I'm glad we're friends. I have one final question for you, though. They blasted Leonard Cohen all the time, very loud when you were in prison. Now you tell me your favorite artist was Leonard Cohen. How is that possible? You were 24-7 Leonard Cohen blasting in prison. They're torturing you. Now you listen to it in your car while you're driving around. I don't understand this. Of all the things you've told me, this is the hardest for me to get through my head.

Well, you know, so many of my friends criticize me and I was like, okay, oh, very depressing, you know, to listen to Leonard Cohen. It's actually not my favorite artist, but because, you know, how he was introduced to me, it's like his thick voice and loudspeakers, and I was sitting on a small chair, you know, being tortured in El Mascobia. This is like the slaughterhouse in West Jerusalem. and Leonard Cohen's playing again and again and again, first we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin. But I had no idea what he was saying, because I did not understand English at that time.

And I didn't even know who was the artist. So after I was released from prison, I kept looking, you know, and I could not find, how would I know who to ask? I'm not going to go back to Al-Mascobias. What was the torture song that we were listening to? Yeah, can I borrow that? CD. And one day I was listening to the radio and Leonard Cohen's song came up and I started shouting out loud like, anybody knows who the singer is the singer? Who is the singer?

A friend of mine mentioned, he said, this is Leonard Cohen. Okay. And I took the name. I wrote it down. I was afraid that I would forget it. And I go and buy all his work trying to find that song. And this is how I got introduced to Eleanor's going. You know, you'd think you would have been staying away from that music, but I guess if you've got an it, you know, a mental itch, you got to scratch it, right? Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Masad, thank you once again, man.

This has been really, really an interesting conversation. Again, thanks for being so open. Thanks for taking the time. I know you're in the middle of nowhere and, you know, it was hard to track you down. But again, I'm glad we're friends now and I'm glad I got this story on tape. Thank you, Jordan. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much.

And best of luck. I've got some thoughts on this episode, but before I get into that, here's a preview of my conversation with one of Al-Qaeda's most respected bomb and poison makers who swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden himself. Here's a quick listen. We took so many prisoners. 80 of them were taken to a clearing, and it was decided there and then that these people will have to pay for the crimes what they did, seeing the blood-thirsty nature of people who, just until a year ago, I used to see them as sweet, tender, decent, good people, suddenly it basically became people who would use chainsaws

to dismember these people alive. How could one year in Bosnia, one year of ugly conflict turn these wonderful souls into ugly, blood-thirsty individuals? When I went to sleep that night, all I could think about was, How could I unsee what I've seen? None other than the mastermind of 9-11, Khalos Sheikh Mohammed, he said to us, you should go to Afghanistan, where the training camps are reopening,

to become good at bomb-making, to become good at urban warfare, to become good at assassinations, at kidnapping, a new kind of war that will never be fought in the mountains anymore, but it will be fought in every urban center from the pole to the pole. Suddenly, you know, I thought that. the nature of the war is changing from fighting in the mountains of Bosnia. I mean, basically we are talking about gassing people in cinemas and nightclubs and trains.

Of course that was unsettling, but I thought this is just the ranting of one insane individual. Al-Qaeda carried out its first serious attack against American interests. Everyone was jubilant in the camps they were firing bullets into the air, you know, in celebration and shouting Allah-awakabar. We are no longer just a bunch of freedom fighters. We are now bona fide terrorists. To hear why and how Amundee eventually switched sides from being a jihadi to spending eight years as an MI6 spy trying to take al-Qaeda down from the inside, check out episode 383 on the Jordan Harbinger show.

This has turned into quite a mess, not just the conflict, but the media and information landscape around it. and I see a lot of people who are just out of control and talking out of both ends or the wrong end on a lot of this. You can criticize Israel without supporting Hamas. That shouldn't be controversial, but apparently it is. Hamas is a genocidal terrorist organization bent on eliminating the Jews. I know that they updated their charter recently to tone that stuff down, but actions speak louder than words in their original charter is probably what they really meant.

When somebody tells you who they are, believe them, especially when they're terrorists. Also, key to remember here is the immense amount of innocent Palestinian civilians caught up in this reaction to October 7th. This loss of life is staggering and unjustified, even if some people think this collateral damage is unavoidable or even somehow necessary. It is hard to overstate how horrible this really is for people on the ground. And you really, no matter what side you're on, I think you can be pro-civilian and anti-Hamas. and I'm going to come back to that a few times during my rants here on this episode. I want to suggest to folks that maybe you don't need to have a side in this information and propaganda war.

You can be instead on the side of innocent civilians and wanting to prevent further loss of life. But it doesn't mean that you're going to be right about the approach one needs to take to avoid that loss of life. Some people think the best way to avoid loss of life is to completely wipe out Hamas with military force the way that is happening now. Other people think that a ceasefire is the best approach. You can be on the side of innocent civilians. It doesn't mean you're going to be right about the approach.

Palestinian civilians, of course, are the ones who are suffering the most right now. Hamas doesn't care about this. This is a feature, not a bug. Stakeholders in Hamas are in essentially a death cult and or living in Qatar and Iran enjoying their billions of dollars that they have pilfered from Palestinian people and the international community. They are not on the ground in Gaza suffering like the people that they claim to support. There have been a lot of events that have been reported very crappily by the media.

One comes to mind this hospital rocket explosion where they said they leveled a hospital and 500 people are dead. This turned out to be largely nonsense. The missile was a misfire from Palestinian Islamic jihad. It landed in the parking lot and suddenly when people were able to prove that, the death toll went way down. This kind of stuff is a win-win for Hamas because they can blame Israel and then even if they're the ones who did it or their affiliates did it and everyone knows later on, civilians died, people will still blame Israel, the PR victory is there and the damage is done. So even if you're ardently anti-Israel, you should also be as ardently anti-Hamas. Supporting Hamas because you care about Palestine is like supporting the Taliban because

you care about Afghanistan. It's not the caring about Afghanistan or the caring about Palestine part that's problematic. It's who you support in the mission of doing so. Hamas is not pro-Palestine. They're just anti-Israel. The distinction here is very important. It should, of course, go without saying that Hamas is not the same as Palestine,

and militant terrorists are not the same as Palestinians. To add, there should be no rush to be right or correct when it comes to events in this conflict, especially new events that pop up in the media. No one is going to give you a medal for your correct signaling on this stuff. There's nothing wrong with waiting for sources outside the two hostile parties

who have a vested interest in lying about their adversary. Also, consider that you might not need to have a strong opinion for or against one side or another. Consider that you can condemn the deaths of innocent people on both sides instead of wanting one side to brutalize the other. Furthermore, I would say, look, if you're professional or you're young, I would implore you to be even more considered in your opinions on these issues

and perhaps realize that you don't need to express them publicly at all. I'm not saying you shouldn't take a moral stance on this. What I am saying is perhaps your LinkedIn profile or other social media is perhaps the worst place to have this kind of dialogue, if you can even call it that. You get all the drawbacks of angering those around you who disagree, endangering your business, scaring away or alienating clients, making sure that it's harder to hire you later on down the line and damaging your career, and you get none of the benefits of actually exchanging ideas with people in good faith, or in a way that increases one another's understanding of this conflict. Again, this is an

information war. Anyone forming immediate opinions and sharing rumors based on the latest clickbait headlines and social media posts is being weaponized in this war. Don't allow yourself to become part of the problem. Of course, many people have asked me what I think about Israel's response to October 7th. Israel, in my opinion, made a huge set of mistakes here. If people had nothing else to report on but the Hamas massacre for the last month and change. We'd be having very different conversations about Palestine and Israel and this conflict. The Israeli victims and their families would be getting vigils worldwide, and those who celebrated Hamas on the streets would be properly vilified. Now it's an afterthought to the rest of the world. Hamas was never going to get infantry back over the border after that. This was a time for

exposing evil, telling each victim's story, improving their ties with the rest of the Arab world, getting some of their hostages back due to pressure on Hamas, if that could even be effective. This would have deprived oxygen to the flame that is Hamas. Yet revenge, which is a lot of what we're seeing now, I know that there's some tactics here. It's debatable, whether this is zero percent revenge or 60 percent revenge. Okay, no matter how justified one might think revenge is, this has squandered the opportunity here that Israel had, in my opinion. Not only is it an injustice to the memory of the victims, it's creating so many

more victims and so many more terrorist sympathizers and actual terrorists, I'm sure, as a result of killing so many dang civilians. Now, some people will say, but Israel created Hamas. I want to address this because I was shocked to hear that, and it turns out it's just not true. So I did a bit of a dive on this with historians, actually, and the predecessors to Hamas were an alternative at the time back in the 70s and 80s to the PLO, Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Liberation Organization, militant and violent then and was killing people in hijacking planes. Hamas, the precursors to Hamas, was far more political. This, of course, changed later into the Hamas that we see today. Early days predecessors to Hamas were a new alternative to the PLO, which was probably more

promising than simply trying to work with the PLO, keep getting nowhere, keep getting attacked. At the time, as I mentioned, PLO was militant, precursors to Hamas were not militant, but they did provide social services. So yes, people who say that Israel created Hamas, there are often misinformed or they're frankly just trying to mislead you into thinking Israel created Hamas in 1984 so they'd have some excuse to bomb Gaza in 2023 and that is just not accurate. In much of the world right now, there seems to be very little room for nuanced debate and no matter which direction you're coming from, I really have to beg you to remember that there are human beings involved in this. This is what we need to remember if we are going to find any sort of end to this conflict in the

next several years, peaceful or otherwise. I'm not sure how hopeful I am for this right now, but I think it is a damn shame that we find ourselves tribalized on this when most of us are frankly quite uninformed. This is a war. It is going to be bloody. None of that excuses civilian deaths or collateral damage, but it is reality, and that reality is extremely unfortunate. And I think, and I hope, that we can do better. As you can see in this conflict, I'm not really taking one side. I'm anti-Hamas, that's clear. I'm pro-civilian, that's clear. But everything else is quite nuanced.

And it seems like that nuance is lost on a lot of people. I'm especially appalled by pro-Hamas, and I don't mean pro-Palestine. I mean pro-Hamas sentiment on college campuses and among the left wing especially. I know that if you're on the left, you're like, I don't support Hamas. I'm not talking about you, obviously. I'm talking about the people you know that have similar political beliefs that are pro-Hamas. It's not that hard to make a distinction. Hamas leaders in 1993 were recorded on a wire-timore.

tapped conversation, stating that their goal was to deceive the American public into supporting Hamas by appealing to the American left's denouncement of oppression. Musa Abu Marzuk, a senior Hamas official, literally formed a far-left academic think tank. It's called the United Association for Studies and Research, UASR, based on a Chicago, and their goal is to start disseminating this deception. The organization has ties to Duke, Johns Hopkins, Fordham, University of Maryland, just to name a few major universities. So in other words, this information war, it's not something that started in October 7th.

It's not something that started 10 years ago. This is something that has been taking place over the course of the last 30 years and beyond. So that should scare you a little bit, that people are trying to influence. And I'm not saying that only Hamas does this. We see influence and lobbying from all sides here, but I think to be deceptive about it. Instead of, there's a difference between advertising your product and lying about what your product is. And I think that's a very important distinction here when we're talking about human lives and civilian human lives for that matter. So as you can see, the situation is nuanced, but I hope we can all agree that

terrorism, no matter what form that takes is not the answer. And jihadis are not looking out for anyone but themselves in their religious zilitary. That part is extremely dangerous, extremely concerning, and it's extremely disheartening to see the moral confusion that has overtaken many of us, both online and in person, since the start of this conflict. Anyway, I hope that cleared some things up for people instead of just making this far more confusing. It's very difficult to cover this and not take a side on one issue and then take the opposite side on the other. It's very, very hard to have nuanced conversations about this. It's very hard to cover any of this without getting death threats in my email inbox from one

side or another. And so if you like this, definitely reach out and tell me why. And if you hated it, Well, you don't have to tell me that you're going to kill me in an email. You can just email me and tell me what you don't like about the episode. Dialogue. Who to thunk it? All things, Massab will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com or ask the AI chatbot on the website. Transcripts always in the show notes as well. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show. All at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals.

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And six minute networking, don't forget about that over at Jordan Harbinger. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace, Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Emilio, Campo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. A fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

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