Fact Checking the "The Billionaire Leaders of Hamas" Story
true or false? read and decide
not done. more details later.
Today’s update to the earlier entries posted lower down the page: the “Hamas Billionaires” claim is coming up looking pretty sketchy.
I originally found it in a link to a November 2023 New York Post story and my search also found other MSN page links that appeared to support the claim- which led me to think that the story had been confirmed.
Not hardly.
It feels strange to me to be caught out like this, because I’ve preached about the need for fact-checking so often in my online posts. But, truth to tell, the NY Post has quite often had reliable headlines (if biased and tabloid-y, duh), so I was inclined to accept the claim. But what really iced it for me was the confirmation provided by MSN links. But on reading into the stories and following the page jumps and links, the MSN links turn out to consist of a very narrow selection of news sites.
As far as I can tell, the sole original source for all of the "Billionaires of Hamas" claims is this story in the online news site Globes (Israel), from 2014:
https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-the-phenomenal-wealth-of-hamas-leaders-1000957953
The identical story was run in the Algemeiner newspaper, July 24, 2014 https://www.algemeiner.com/2014/07/28/gazas-millionaires-and-billionaires-how-hamass-leaders-got-rich-quick/
More than nine years later, in early November 2023, the claim was unearthed again—often in links showing up at the top of page results, showing the URL of the staid old respectable MSN news feed page. The MSN links were to the following outfits: The NY Post. The UK Globe and Mail. The National Post. The Western Journal.
Also, "essa.com" and The Daily Express USA (the page line at the byline leads to MSN?) Those last two stories read like they were written by AI, or by someone dumbing thereself down to bot level with dull generic prose, same difference.
(I find AI easy to spot, but it takes practice. Here's an easier example. )
All of those stories were advanced in early November 2023. More recently, there’s this story, in the Jerusalem Post: Hamas's blood-soaked billions: How does the terror group stay rich? The story opens with this claim (and otherwise has little to say about it):
There are 3,194 billionaires worldwide. Some on the list are well known, such as Elon Musk (Tesla), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), and Mark Zuckerburg (Facebook/Meta).
But some names on the list arouse puzzlement, disgust, and fury, such as Musa Abu Marzouk ($2.3 billion) and Khaled Mashaal ($2.6 billion).
There’s a problem with that claim: where’s the list? The author doesn’t provide the source. There’s no link support offered. The names Musa Abu Marzouk and Khaled Mashaal are absent from the 2023 Forbes annual listing of the world’s billionaires (which, I note again, at one time included cocaine billionaire Pablo Escobar. For seven years running, from 1987 to 1993.) Forbes is about as authoritative as one gets on that subject. But I haven’t found any Hamas leaders on the 2023 list- which includes a special section for Arab billionaires.
Speaking of Forbes magazine, a January 2022 Forbes Israel article estimated the entire annual budget of Hamas at $500 million.
The Jerusalem Post story then goes on to rely on the same primary source as the 2014 article published in Globes and Algemeiner- Moshe Elad, an Israeli college lecturer.
The Skeptics Exchange- an open Internet forum used for fact-checking news claims- has some interesting observations about the "Hamas Billionaire" claim. As of 2021, the participants found no sources for the claim other than the already cited Moshe Elad.
The SE forum thread notes that the college instructor, Moshe Elad, has provided advice on how to publicly defend and advance the Zionist position, a practice widely known as hasbara. My view on hasbara is that it’s no different than any other partisan defense of a political position, per se. Hasbara only takes on an illegitimate character when it assumes the form of Bearing False Witness. It’s an unfortunate fact that partisan advocacy of any position very often partakes of that unethicality. Partisans are in the habit of reassuring themselves that their ends justify any means that lead to the immediately desired result. They’re fooling themselves.
[5/3/2024: I definitely posted this claim too hastily. It’s worth noting that none of the people alleged to be billionaires in the links below are listed by Forbes. In the days when Pablo Escobar was a billionaire cocaine wholesaler, Forbes had no problem estimating his wealth. So my suspicions are aroused. Possession of multi-billion dollar fortunes would make the leaders of Hamas richer than most Arab princes.]
And how is it I just found out about this three days ago? I like to think I keep up with the news. How come I can’t find any reporting on that situation prior to 2023?
https://nypost.com/2023/11/07/news/hamas-leaders-worth-11bn-live-luxury-lives-in-qatar/
One of the billionaire leaders, Ismael Haniyeh, just lost three sons in Gaza on April 10. He received word at his haven in Qatar. I wonder if he’s wondering whether the Cause is still worth it. I wonder if he’s thinking that he’s in too deep to get out. I can speculate on the questions that might be rising to his mind. But not their answers.
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/11/20/inside-hamass-sprawling-financial-empire
