One of the most-watched commentators on the streaming channel Twitch has defended Hamas‘ murder of babies.
Hasan Piker, 32, appeared as a guest on The H3 Podcast on October 12, and was asked by the host, Israeli-American Ethan Klein, about the Israel-Hamas was.
Piker, born in New Jersey to Turkish parents and raised in Istanbul, told Klein he thought the October 7 terror attack was justified.
‘This is going to sound very radical and possibly very violent, but this is a matter of law and maybe if you agree with this, a matter of morality: Palestinians have the legal ground to violently seize back their own homes from these settlers,’ he said.
‘This is a reality, and that is precisely the reason why they have to exist under endless occupation in the West Bank.’
Klein told Piker: ‘If they were settlers, that would be a lot more understandable.’
Piker replied: ‘There are baby settlers as well, there are baby settlers as well. There are babies in the settlements.’
Klein said: ‘But the babies who were killed were not.’
Piker replied: ‘I know.’
He then moved on to declare he was ‘a one-stater’, and defend YouTuber JT Chapman, who tweeted his own defense of Hamas’ attacks.
Piker’s own Twitch channel has 2.6 million followers, who tune in daily to watch him playing video games and musing about politics.
Piker majored in politics and communications at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
Piker’s uncle, Cenk Uygur, co-founded the YouTube political chat show The Young Turks, and Piker was one of the presenters of the progressive show until leaving in 2020 to focus on Twitch.
He has raised over $1 million for Palestinian charities thanks to a fundraising drive on Twitch.
Israel declared war in the aftermath of Hamas’s bloody incursion, which has seen relentless aerial bombardment of the densely populated Gaza Strip, home to some 2.3 million people.
Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry says more than 8,000 people have been killed in Israeli air and ground strikes since Israel declared war just over three weeks ago.
