The Hamas Smear Campaign Against the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation: Pastor Johnnie Moore

The UN trucks when they arrive into the Gaza Strip, they're immediately either taken by Hamas or Hamas affiliated groups with guns and Hamas decides what to do with the food. We have one mission to feed the people of Gaza in a way that Hamas, a designated terrorist organization, can't steal the food. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, GHF, a new US-backed aid group distributing food in Gaza, is under fire from critics who have said hundreds of Gazins have been killed near its distribution sites. But is there a bigger story here? One of the things Hamas was trying to do is they were trying to make Gazins afraid to come to our distribution sites. Hamas killed 12 of our local Gazin aid workers. In this episode, I'm sitting down with Johnny Moore, executive chairman of the GHF and former commissioner for the US Commission on International Religious Freedom. The problem in Gaza is that the United Nations and other international agencies created a system which empowered virtually every bad actor to make a bad situation worse. This is American Thought Leaders and I'm Ya Kellik. Johnny Moore, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. It's great to be back. Yeah. So, you have a new project and that is heading up the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and I've been hearing all sorts of things about it. Um, some incredibly positive and some frankly wildly negative. And I'd just like to talk to you about it. First of all, for those that might not be in the know, what is it that you do? When did it start? What is it about? It's actually really simple. We We have one mission to feed the people of Gaza in a way that Hamas, a designated terrorist organization in the United States, in Europe, can't steal the food. Because for many, many years, Hamas has been stealing the food of the Gazin people. They're doing it in collaboration with UN agencies. And on May 5th here in Washington DC, President Trump in the White House uh at at the end of an event, someone threw a question out at him and he leaned over to the microphone to answer the question and he said these words. He he said he was angry that the people of Gaza that their food was being stolen by Hamas and the United States is going to do something about it. So the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is the doing something about it. So every single day through four distribution sites in the in the Gaza Strip, we have American veterans and local Gazin aid workers and we give away one to three million meals worth of food every single day for free direct to the people. So you know as we're talking now, you know, in the next few days, we will we will surpass 70 million meals of food that we provided. Over 1.2 2 million boxes of food, 250 tons of food, just giving it away to the to the Gazin people. The logistics of this are kind of uh staggering. Like just give can you give me a picture of how this would work? So you have four sites and you're giving away over a million meals a day. How does that look like? It's it's a huge logistic operation. So So we're flooding the zone with food. So we have um we call them secure distribution sites. There are four of them. You know this whole plan was custommade because for many many years the UN uh and world food program and UNRA and UNUNICE I mean you name the UN agency there's been this persistent problem that the UN trucks when they arrive into the Gaza Strip they're immediately either taken by Hamas or Hamas affiliated groups with guns. They literally hijack the whole trucks or they take them to Hamas controlled warehouses and Hamas decides what to do with the food and Hamas sells the food. In the middle of this war, young Hamas made over a billion dollars selling free food meant for the people of Gaza delivered by the international community. And so we designed a system that that was to solve one problem, which was to make sure that the mass diversion of food could not happen. That Hamas cannot steal these our trucks. And so we we have these secure distribution sites. Uh we um they're they're not like small distribution sites, you know, the it's not like a local community distribution. These are like they are meant to surge masses amounts of food every single day. The people show up and they can take what they want. And so, you know, it's a huge operation. We're talking about tens of thousands of boxes every single day. Those boxes of food have to be transferred to multiple trucks. They have to be securely taken into the Gaza Strip. we have to communicate with the people of Gaza as to when they can come and and also we have uh a number of projects that we've been doing where we've been um basically working with local Gazins to deliver food to the point of need uh with partners on the ground which is an incredibly dangerous deadly deadly thing. Uh but but the people of Gaza deserve it the Gazans themselves because their food was used to control them. See, the problem in Gaza, it's not just Hamas. It's not just the starvation and this war in October 7th. The problem in Gaza is that the United Nations and other international agencies created a system which empowered virtually every bad actor and every bad force in the Gaza Strip to make a bad situation worse. They have prolonged this conflict. They have let their aid be used as weapons of war. They've tried every second of every day to boycott everything the Gaza humanitarian found. They even threatened people that if they worked with us, they would never work with the UN again. So, we knew when we jumped into this mess that we would be um provoking Hamas, not our intention. We just want to feed people, but we knew Hamas wouldn't like it. I'm surprised that there are a lot of people in suits and ties in Geneva, in New York City, in Vienna. People who spend their time in conferences and five-star hotels and raising money from all the rich people around the world and rich nations to try to help people that actually have constructed a system that the system itself does the exact opposite of what it was mandated to do. And the fuel for the system is my taxpayer dollars and European taxpayer dollars and the benevolence of Arab countries who actually legitimately really sincerely care about the Palestinian people. So, we kicked a hornets's nest I didn't expect to kick. We shined a light on a level of corruption and insidious behavior that I knew it was bad. I didn't know it was this bad, you know. And of course, Canadian tax dollars. I might add because that's I'm always thinking about uh my my country uh when when when thinking about these things. But so explain to me a little bit about how it does the exact opposite because that's a that's a very strong statement. Yeah. Let me let me give you an example. So um this issue of aid diversion, you know, so I I've already mentioned how these trucks, you know, are immediately stolen when they go in the we've all seen the videos like militants sitting on top with guns. They take the whole truck. There are actually allegations that these trucks were not only stolen, sometimes they were taken directly to the homes of Hamas leaders, to the to the hiding places of of of Hamas leaders to get inside the tunnels. But what we've discovered, it's not just a Gaza issue. Let me give you some some examples. There's there's an editorial, in fact, that um was was recently published in a in a news outlet by a incredible incredible scholar uh whose name is Neta Barack Cohen. And in her editorial, she says that this has become not a this aid diversion issue is like not a bug of the humanitarian system. It's like a feature. So in Somalia for instance, the World Food Program was according according to her research was in effect paying off warlords to help them distribute aid. And these warlords were there were were simultaneously taking the aid and using it to preserve their power, deciding who the ultimate recipients are. The World Food Program said in one, you know, in one circumstance that only 1% of its aid in Yemen had been had been diverted. And and in actuality, according to this uh to to this research, 60% of the aid meant for Sana alone never made it to its intended intended recipients. You can chart every humanitarian uh response and every conflict for the last 20 years. And if the United Nations or one of its agencies is involved, they have made a choice that in order to get aid to people, they had to do deals with some of the worst and most dangerous people on the planet. And the net effect of it is it only empowers the bad guys. what we thought was just a Hamas issue isn't a Hamas issue. This is one of the greatest scandals of our modern time that the huge aid and by the way it's not just it's not just the humanitarian side of it. It's it's also the you know the anti-semitism and all this bigotry and everything that's emanating from this from this international system. The UN has behaved like nothing less than a mafia. nothing less than a mafia working with their preferred partners, excluding those who they don't like. Anybody that shines a light on something that uh that they they uh don't want known, they get they get excluded. It is a re and and we need this system. We need we need the countries of the world to come together and not not in a um not in this sort of like one world uh government sort of experiment that that some people make. But these but these these humanitarian crises even for the United States they're too big to solve but they have an effect on all of us. The Middle East has an effect on all of us. We need countries to come together. But what countries do, particularly European countries and Canada, uh is they they just say they put money in a budget for the United Nations and so it's the UN's problem. But there's not a conflict in the world. The UN's aid system hasn't thrown oxygen on in the last 20 years because of this relationship where the money goes knowingly and with agreement somehow to the warlords. Maybe they felt this is the only way it can work. Well, that's that's the choice. Yeah. So, this is the choice that they've made. They they've said like the only way to feed people is we have to work with these people to feed people. The Gaza Human and this is where we we kick the hornets's nest. And we didn't realize we were kicking the hornets's nest. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has called the bluff of the system and proven that we can actually get massive amounts of aid in the most complex deadly humanitarian environment in the world in one of the most condensed spaces in the world of an active war. In fact, we've been operating uh for you know just over a month and we did it in two hot wars. I mean for for 12 days of our operations you had the Israeli Iranian conflict. our our guys were showing up every single day to serve these people after being up all night with, you know, missiles flying flying in the skies. What the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has proven is that this was a false choice from the beginning. There's a better way of doing it. Astonishing. Johnny, one quick sec. We're going to take a break and folks, we're going to be right back. And we're back with Johnny Moore, chairman of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. And so I want to touch on a few things. I mean this has been covered in so many actually this got really the attention of the world's media the legacy media ourselves. Everybody is interested in this project. I want to mention a few things that that have been said about it and just see how you might might respond to that. Like one of them I think the most sort of serious would be that basically these Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites these four sites actually facilitate massacres of people somehow. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I this this whole story is is a piece of Hamas disinformation. And it's the same it's the same type of disinformation we've seen over this entire conflict where where every single day the so-called health ministry of Hamas releases a statistic of civilian casualties. They don't distinguish between cas this is a war. People die in a war. They don't distinguish between the casualties being civilians or whether they're Hamas fighters. You know, while everyone, you know, is constantly appealing to international law, international humanitarian law and all of these things, you know, Hamas, they seem to only dress in their military fatigues when they're transferring hostages, you know, for the for the cameras. They dress as civilians. They blend in into the in civilians. So what we've experienced um since the since GHF started is an adaptation of this part of the Hamas disinformation war which is they started saying that basically every casualty in the Gaza Strip was a civilian casualty and every civilian casualty happened at GHF and and then they started saying so our sites therefore are death traps. It's a lie. Like with any lie, there's an element of truth. And the truth is the IDF has admitted that there were a few circumstances where civilians may have been inadvertently killed or harmed. It's a much much smaller number, we believe, than any of this reporting. And what isn't reported is that Hamas intentionally harmed and killed probably many hundreds of people in order to try to to claim that those casualties were either at our sites or at the hands of the IDF or in uh in in proximity to our our distribution our distribution sites. In fact, when the uh recently when um Hamas managed to infiltrate one of our sites and throw two grenades uh at at our American uh uh aid workers, which by the way, the grenades are a type of common grenade Hamas uses in the Gaza Strip that originated in Iran of of surprise. But what Hamas did when they threw the grenades, um, I'm sure they would have been happy to kill Americans, but it doesn't seem like that was the the the intention. They were happy to harm them, but what they wanted to do, we believe, is they wanted to provoke our team to retaliate and harm civilians right in the middle of the ceasefire negotiation because it would have been an effective propaganda tool for Hamas to achieve their goal of the elimination of GHF in the in the ceasefire negotiations. So, we don't deny that there have been civilian casualties. We just want the truth to be the story. And the truth is if it involves the IDF, it's seems much smaller, you know, a a um a symptom of war uh than has been reported and and accidental. If it involves Hamas, it's at a much larger scale and it's intentional for for you know, various means. And so we we dispute the nature, the scale and the attribution of these of these attacks, but the media doesn't. So, you know, all across the world, virtually every media, in fact, you know, one major network here in the United States, they didn't even say this was the Hamas run health ministry, they said Gaza officials say, and it's just it's just in it's like in intentional propagandizing this. It's they are lying. And who suffers from it? It's the people of Gaza that suffer from it. And and one of the things Hamas was trying to do is they were trying to make Gazins afraid to come to our distribution sites because Hamas doesn't want Gazins getting free food. And I yet I think one of the most inspiring things to us is that the people of Gaza keep coming to our distribution sites. And they keep coming because they need it. and they keep coming for a different reason because they're not afraid anymore in the way they had to be afraid before. But yeah, this is a a um a a a question we get asked every second of every, you know, every day. I suppose that it's also controversial that the Israeli military is providing the security for you. I think it's the only such scenario I've ever heard of. It it's it's not exactly because the ter I guess a more common term would be creating a humanitarian zone in a conflict. So so in a conflict like this I mean the the professional army operating in the conflict is the IDF. So this is a war. It's an active war. We didn't wait for a ceasefire to feed people because the people needed fed immediately. So you have the the IDF which is the professional military and some sometimes plenty of times we disagree with the idea. We're always arguing with the IDF. We we ask for, you know, this and that and and we're going back and forth. And it's a professional army. We can demand an investigation. They can do an investigation. We can ask them to to change the the way the the path to the through the humanitarian zone sort of functions and all all of these things. But but it it's not uncommon at all in a in a war where there are um it's happened a lot in the in the Russia Ukraine war. You create a humanitarian humanitarian zone. The difference in Gaza is that Gaza is such a concentrated place and the IDF is fighting basically against a guerilla warfare type of um enemy and so it's not like the rules of engaging, you know, are um are are more are more complex. Is it dangerous? It's very dangerous. Do we want civilians having to cross IDF lines in order to get to our food? No. We want to be as close to the people as we can. And in fact, you know, we're we're in the process of getting closer to the people and piloting new things and and you know, in in a ceasefire scenario, you know, one of the one of the features of the ceasefire scenarios that we have to we have to engage with the people outside of the IDF. I mean, this has always been the always been the plan. Um but uh but it but it is a um it's a misnomer that uh somehow because the IDF, you know, is operating in the Gaza Strip that this is uh um you know, delegitimizes uh GHF's uh work. It it's exact opposite, you know. It it's but it's also it's also complicated for us because we can't control what happens outside of our distribution sites, you know. And this is the weird thing that we always get asked questions that should be directed to the IDF. So the so the press and Hamas and critics and international organizations, the United Nations and others, some politicians, they want to hold us accountable for their problems with the IDF. We're not the IDF. You got a problem with the IDF? We have problems with the IDF sometimes. Go talk to them. Don't talk to us. Well, and something interesting just struck me. Basically, you're telling me that the gazens and maybe you can give me an estimate of how many have actually come to these four sites are actually crossing IDF lines to get there feeling comfortable to do that somehow. How many people are we talking about here? I mean, here's the crazy thing like the it depends on who you ask to how many people are in Gaza. The the sort of going number is around 2 million. We have personally provided food for at a minimum 800,000 of those 2 million just through our four distribution sites. And it may be closer to half. It may be closer to a million. It's hard to it's hard to tell. So despite all this criticism and all this all the the information war and all the politics and the UN's inexcusable behavior and the danger of operating and being in the crossfire of the IDF and Hamas and everything else. We have fed over a month since President Trump said on May 5th to do it. We have fed half of the people of Gaza. Half between 800,000 and a million. Johnny, this has been a wonderful conversation. It's great to see you again. It's been a while. A final thought as we finish. I have discovered once again in the last last few weeks how important truth is in a in a world filled with lies and and one of the reasons why I appreciate you so much and I'm I'm always happy to come here not enough is that this network the everything you guys do every conversation I've ever had with you has always been a conversation in pursuit of truth and truth has no fear of inquir quiry, but we live in a world of lies. And one of the places I think we can get truth from is when we have long conversations like what we've just had and so I I just want to thank you for having me. Well, Johnny Moore, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. The pleasure was mine, Yan. Thanks for having me. Thank you all for joining Johnny Moore and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Yana Kellik. [Music]