Far-left Twitch streamer Hasan Piker defended his rhetoric calling Hamas "a thousand times better than the fascist settler colonial apartheid state" of Israel on Sunday despite acknowledging it was "intentionally provocative."
"I say that on purpose," Piker told Rolling Stone Magazine. "I want to force people to really think about what I’m saying. I want to challenge them to think about it a little bit."
Piker made the comment in an X post from January and has since doubled and tripled down on the claim while facing backlash. Though he conceded that he would likely alienate fewer people by simply saying Israel was "worse" than Hamas, Piker told the magazine that it wasn't his style.
"First of all, everyone says that," Piker said. "I’m not interested in the many bad things Hamas has done. I’m trying to get people to understand why someone becomes Hamas. Do I agree with everything they do? Of course not. I’ve called out their war crimes myself. But the point is to make people identify from their perspective. Palestinians have lived under this brutal occupation for 75 years. Put yourself in their shoes."
In the same article, Rolling Stone Magazine reported that the Democratic Party had a more favorable opinion of Palestinian people than the Israelis with the Israeli government ranking only three points higher than Hamas, suggesting Piker's opinions were more mainstream than they appeared. Piker joked that the backlash he faced for his comments were a result of "having the correct position too early."
Still, he didn't regret his hyperbolic comments made on his livestreams or elsewhere.
"In some ways it is a performance. But existence is a performance," Piker said. "I could speak in sanitized, academic language all day — but that wouldn’t be as entertaining or reach as many people. So, I speak in a way that people understand. And sometimes I push buttons."
Fox News Digital reached out to Piker for comment.
During an April appearance on "Pod Save America," Piker doubled down on his Hamas comparison despite pushback from co-host Jon Favreau.
"I've also said I'm a harm-reduction voter," Piker said. "I'm a lesser-evil voter and, therefore, I would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time because I'm looking at the situation as a paramilitary organization that has a political party as well, a political bureau as well that is entirely comprised not as an alien force but of orphaned children that have, you know, had their parents killed by an apartheid state that has been dominating the lives of Palestinians for 80 years at this point and have done a genocide at this point as well."
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During an interview with CNN last week, Piker denied that he supported all of Hamas' actions but insisted that Palestinians "have a right to resist militarily."
"Well, I wouldn't say I express support for all of Hamas's actions or anything," Piker said. "I do say that the Palestinian resistance largely does have an internationally recognized right to resist. Do they violate that sometimes with war crimes? Absolutely. And Hamas certainly has as well. But at the end of the day, Palestinians do have a right to resist militarily."
In a previous comment to Fox News Digital, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) condemned Piker's comments along with Democratic officials who continue to ignore them.
"Hasan Piker repeated multiple times that ‘Hamas is a thousand times better than Israel,’ while also shrugging off ‘war crimes.’ That is a person with more than 11 million followers sincerely expressing support for a designated terrorist organization, on a mainstream platform, to thunderous silence from the Democratic officials who continue to campaign and appear alongside him," an ADL spokesperson said.
