A
popular leftist Twitch streamer seized upon his time on Ethan Klein’s “Leftovers” podcast earlier this month to criticize Israel, set Hamas terrorism in a more favorable light, and claim that Palestinians were within their legal and moral rights to attack noncombatants. His remarks, seen millions of times in their original form, have begun to capture greater attention in an excerpted form.
Hasan Piker is a leftist commentator with millions of followers on the Amazon-owned streaming service Twitch. In 2019, the former HuffPost writer, who up until 2020 had a series on his uncle
Cenk Uygur‘s “The Young Turks” network,
said that “America deserved 9/11.” The following year, he hosted fellow Israel critics Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and Ilhan Omar (Minn.) as part of a get-out-the-vote stream.
Piker appeared on the Oct. 12 stream of Klein’s podcast, where the host zeroed in on comments made by both JT Chapman, the Texas Marxist behind the YouTube channel “Second Thought,” and Chapman’s for-profit Marxist co-hosts.
As Israelis were being slaughtered by the thousands on Oct. 7, Chapman, who has tens of thousands of followers on Twitter and over 1 million followers on YouTube,
tweeted, “This is what a liberation struggle looks like. Solidarity and victory to the Palestinian people!”
Chapman, ostensibly justifying Hamas’ terrorism,
added, “Imagine someone comes to your town, murders your neighbors, kicks you out of the home your family has lived in for generations, and relocates you to an open-air prison. Are those occupiers civilians? No. They’re criminals and accomplices in genocide.”
Although Klein has denounced the Israeli government and referred to the Jewish nation of which he is a citizen as both “genocidal” and “psychopathic,” he underscored that Chapman’s comments were disgusting, especially since they were “normalizing murdering civilians.”
Klein repeatedly prompted Piker for a response.
“If he was saying this about Palestinians instead of Israelis, that would not only be not condemned at all by a singular person, that would be the specific policy position of the entirety of the Western world,” said Piker.
Klein responded rhetorically, “Because Israelis and the Western world are monsters, then we shouldn’t care when the opposite people are monsters because it doesn’t matter.”
“Not necessarily,” said Piker.
“That seems like what you’re arguing,” continued Klein.
Piker went on to say, “Palestinians — and this is going to sound very radical and possibly very violent, but this is a matter of law and, maybe even you would agree with this, a matter of morality — Palestinians have the legal ground to violently seize back their own homes from these settlers.”
Piker and Klein then appeared to agree that Israeli “settlers” in the West Bank would qualify as civilians,
reported the Federalist.
“If they were settlers, that would be a lot more understandable,” said Klein, referring to the murderous suggestion implicit in Chapman’s post.
“There are baby settlers as well. … There are babies in the settlements,” replied Piker.
“But the babies who were killed were not,” Klein clarified.
“I know,” said Piker, a self-described “one-stater” who was largely defensive of Chapman and dismissive of other online defenses of Hamas’ attacks.
Here is the podcast in full:
Israel vs Gaza – Leftovers #61youtu.be
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