Andrew Tate, a famous internet personality who has been charged with human trafficking and rape, accused Israel of "genociding" Palestinians and refused to condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization, in an interview with Piers Morgan.
“When you call it a war you are doing it a disservice to people having their limbs blown off by some of the most advanced technical weaponry on the planet,” Tate said when asked his thoughts on the Israel-Hamas war. “It is a genocide. It is disgusting and it doesn’t matter which side of the political spectrum you fall on, when you observe a genocide in front of your very eyes, you should be disgusted.”
“Which side is waging genocide?” Piers Morgan asked his guest.
“The Israelis are genociding the Palestinians,” Tate responds. “And you know it, as well as everybody else does.”
“I don’t know that,” Morgan affirmed.
“Then,” speculated Tate, “it seems like your bosses are not allowing you to know that.” Tate had later insisted that the media was lying and implied deeply entrenched conspiracies on what information is being fed to the masses on the war.
“What do you think of what Hamas did on October 7th?” Morgan prompted in the interview, which he was forced to ask several times as Tate avoided answering the question.
In one of Tate’s attempts to avert the question, he countered Morgan with the question “Why are you starting the story in the middle, Piers?” Tate continued to insist that the October 7 attack could not be thought of outside of the wider Israel-Palestine conflict.
“I cannot professionally answer that question without talking about the context that led up to October 7th” Tate admitted. He later argued that Israel’s 2014 war with the terrorist group was on par with the October 7 attack.
Morgan answered that he felt nothing could justify the October 7 attack, where Hamas terrorists entered Israel and murdered 1,200 people. The terrorists also raped and kidnapped many Israelis and foreign nationals.
“Nothing justified what happened before October 7, Piers,” Tate responded to Morgan’s statement. He later argued that Palestinians had been imprisoned and enslaved in an “open-air prison.”
Tate, who has amassed a viral following for his misogynistic videos where he claimed that women bear the responsibility for being raped, argued that he has fought against oppression and was charged for that reason alone.
“Let’s forget I am a Muslim man who is fighting oppression to the best of his ability because he believes that the people in charge of the world are enslaving us all—to the point where I detriment my own life,” Tate told Morgan. “I end up in a jail cell because I am speaking against oppression. Then, you are asking me what I would do if my family was blown to pieces. You are asking me what I would do if another government came along and blew my family to pieces?”
Morgan, after attempting to interrupt Tate for some time, asserted: “You were not put in a jail cell because of any oppression," to which Tate reasserted that was why he was placed in jail.
“No you weren’t,” Morgan argued. “You were put in a jail cell because you’ve been accused of serious sexual crimes.”
“I would not have been accused if I was not monumentally successful and speaking the truth,” Tate declared.
Is Hamas a terrorist organization? "Interesting question."
Morgan, unable to convince Tate otherwise, returned to the topic of the Israel-Hamas war and asked him if he thought Hamas was a terrorist organization.
“That is a very interesting question,” Tate diverted, “but I think you are peddling asininities.”
Morgan repeatedly prompted Tate to answer this question and referenced that the country he was born in, the United Kingdom, has proscribed Hamas as a terrorist organization.
“[The United Kingdom] also describes me as dangerous to children in schools,” Tate countered. He continued to argue that things that are considered wrong, like stealing, can be placed in a context where they are justified. Tate also later insisted that Israel’s response to Hamas was terrorism.
Morgan listed the crimes of Hamas, including the murder of babies, and asked how the violent actions of the terrorist group could be justified. Tate jokingly asked, “were the babies vaccinated?”
Tate continued to accuse Israel of committing the same crimes Hamas committed on October 7 on Palestinians living in Gaza. “What [is Hamas] supposed to do?” he argued while claiming that the attack was “an eye for an eye.”
Morgan, after hearing Tate continually describe Israel’s military response as genocide, plainly said that Hamas was a threat to both Israelis and Jews worldwide and that Hamas knowingly put Palestinian lives at risk by initiating the attack. He later accused the internet personality of sounding like the United Kingdom’s Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, who also repeatedly refused to condemn Hamas as a terrorist group.
Comparing Israel's war on Hamas with Britain's war on Nazis
After Morgan’s previous interview with Mohammed Hijab was referenced by Tate, the popular interviewer attempted to draw the same comparisons he had then. Asking if Britain was justified in its attacks against the Nazis, Morgan compared Israel’s military response to Hamas.
Tate averted the question but acknowledged that the Nazis were terrorists. In spite of Britain bombing Germany to kill Nazis without trial, he criticized the Israeli government for assassinating Hamas members without offering legal proceedings first.
Tate also critiqued Israel’s military intelligence, claiming that if they could not have known that the October 7 attack was going to happen they could not judge the difference between a Palestinian civilian and a terrorist.
Hijab, who Tate had said was more knowledgeable than himself, had called Winston Churchill a war criminal for his carpet bombing of Germany. Hijab had also made a number of controversial comments during that debate, including telling Rabbi Shmuley Boteach that his son should come back from the IDF in a body bag.
“Pressure cookers explode”
Accusing Morgan of dehumanizing Palestinians and Muslims, Tate insisted that Morgan’s quantification of Israeli victims was problematic. Morgan took offense to this and listed the ways and occasions that he had condemned Israel.
Leaning on Morgan’s condemnations of Israel, Tate asked him what he would do if he were a Palestinian living in Gaza, subjected to the restrictions applied by Israel. Morgan asserted that he would not have participated in an attack like October 7, because “nothing justifies the terrorism on October 7th.”
“Pressure cookers explode,” Tate said in a metaphor for Gaza as he continued justifying the attack. He argued that Israeli actions had forced Palestinians to commit “suicide” by engaging in terrorism.
Tate continued on to question if Hamas knew of the consequences that would come from the attack, which Morgan affirmed that they did, and had chosen to brutalize civilians anyway because they did not like the fact that Arab countries were normalizing with Israel. Morgan continued to explain that Iran had played a key role in October 7 and Hamas had absorbed the aims of the Iranian regime at the expense of Palestinians.
Both Tate and Morgan agreed that Israel’s current response would radicalize a new generation. However, the pair’s agreement parted when Tate continued to insist that Israel’s actions had radicalized Hamas into the attack.
After Morgan read out Ben Shapiro’s criticism of Tate, Tate called Shapiro a war-monger and said that he has “short-man syndrome,” continuing his personal attacks against Shapiro’s height.