Sunny Hostin, co-host of “The View,” compared Hamas to the Proud Boys in Friday’s episode of the show in the wake of the deadly Hamas attacks on Israel.
“I think that we all know that Hamas has been designated a terror organization just like many other terror organizations have this designation,” Hostin said, “like the Proud Boys here in the United States.”
Hamas was designated as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” by the Secretary of State in October 1997, according to the State Department. While the Southern Poverty Law Center designated the Proud Boys a hate group, it has not been designated as a terror organization in the U.S. It has been labeled as so in Canada and New Zealand.
Since Hamas launched a massive attack on Israel early Saturday, the White House has frequently referred to Hamas as a “terrorist organization.”
“The people of Israel lived through one such moment this weekend. The bloody hands of the terrorist organization Hamas — a group whose stated purpose for being is to kill Jews,” President Biden said in a speech Tuesday.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday that Hamas’s brutality is “worse than what I saw with ISIS.”
There has been some pushback about the hesitance to refer to members of Hamas as terrorists. Anti-Defamation League Director Jonathan Greenblatt said in an interview on MSNBC “I am angry with the world that allowed the dehumanization of Israelis and sanitized the terrorism of Hamas.”
“They are not fighters,” Greenblatt said. “They are not militants – and I’m looking right at the camera – they are terrorists.”
More than 1,300 Israelis and 1,900 Palestinians have been killed since Saturday.