“Do you condemn Hamas?” — Propaganda Literacy

On October 17, 2023 — ten days after the Hamas attack on Israel — Egyptian comedian and television host Bassem Youssef appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored. His wife's family lives in Gaza. Their house had been bombed three days before the interview. Communication with them had been cut. He did not know whether they were alive.

Morgan opened with the customary pleasantries. Then, as Youssef began to speak about the civilian death toll and the history of the conflict, Morgan waited. He was preparing to ask the same question he had asked every Arab and Muslim guest since October 7 — the same question that had spread from his studio to CNN, the BBC, Sky News, Channel 4, and every major Western television platform within days of the attack.

Youssef saw it coming. He got there first. [1]

The exchange got 23 million views. People did not share it because it was entertaining. They shared it because something rare had happened: a guest had named the mechanism out loud before it could be deployed against him. He performed the condemnation ritual with visible, almost theatrical compliance — and then immediately demonstrated that the condemnation was irrelevant to the actual evidence about Palestinian deaths.

When Morgan began to interrupt him, Youssef stopped him: "If you want to only hear your opinion, I can just condemn Hamas and go home. I can do that. So — do you want to do that, or do you want a much more nuanced conversation?" [1]

This article is about what Youssef identified. The mechanism. The technique. How it works. Why the science says it is so effective. And what it is designed to prevent.

The question "do you condemn Hamas?" has been studied by academics and analyzed by media scholars since at least 2010. After October 7, 2023 it became, in the assessment of Aleksandra Zoric at the University of Belgrade, one of the most significant propaganda instruments in contemporary political media. [2]

Zoric's 2025 peer-reviewed analysis in the journal Theoria is the most precise academic examination of the question to date. Her conclusion: it is "a sophisticated linguistic tool, carefully calibrated to function on multiple levels, as a performative speech act, a means for narrative framing, and a mechanism for public shaming and the imposition of a specific ideology." [2]

It operates simultaneously as four distinct mechanisms, each reinforcing the others.

Piers Morgan documented the function of his own technique with unusual candor in a post on X on May 11, 2025: [4]

This is the clearest possible primary evidence of what the question is designed to do. It is not a gateway to conversation. It is a pre-qualification test that determines in advance whether any subsequent argument will be heard. Those who do not perform the condemnation have already been disqualified — not by the quality of their arguments but by their failure to comply with the ritual.

A user replied directly: "Each and every pro-Palestine guest you brought has told you repeatedly about the genocide and massacres committed by Israel and you didn't acknowledge any of that — just kept repeating 'do you condemn Hamas.'" [4]

The technique's effectiveness is not accidental. It exploits documented cognitive mechanisms that have been studied in controlled experiments for over fifty years.

In their landmark 1981 study published in Science, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky demonstrated that subjects presented with identical information responded dramatically differently depending on whether outcomes were described as gains (lives saved) or losses (deaths) — despite the mathematical outcomes being identical. [5]

The "do you condemn Hamas?" question frames the entire subsequent conversation before a single substantive word is spoken. The Palestinian civilian death toll, the legal framework of occupation, the history of the blockade — all of it is subsequently processed through the frame established by the opening question. The guest who has not condemned Hamas is already morally compromised in the audience's fast-processing mind before the argument begins.

Elizabeth Loftus's foundational research on eyewitness testimony showed that the wording of a question changes what subjects perceive and remember. Subjects shown the same film clip and asked "How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?" reported higher speeds and were more likely to remember broken glass than those asked about cars that contacted — even though they watched identical footage. [6]

The word "condemn" in the question pre-activates an emotional and evaluative frame before the guest speaks. The presupposition embedded in the question's structure is: condemnation is the morally obvious response, and failure to produce it requires explanation. This presupposition is never stated — it is delivered through the question's grammar.

Hasher, Goldstein, and Toppino's 1977 study demonstrated that repeated exposure to a claim increases its perceived truth regardless of its accuracy. Statements rated as less plausible on first encounter were rated as significantly more plausible after repeated exposure alone. [7]

The "do you condemn Hamas?" question has been asked thousands of times on Western television since October 7, 2023 — by Morgan, Dana Bash, Channel 4, Sky News, Fox News, and across the Western media ecosystem. By sheer repetition, its embedded premise — that Hamas condemnation is the morally necessary starting point for any discussion of Palestine — has acquired the status of self-evident truth. This is the illusory truth effect operating at civilizational scale.

The technique's most revealing feature is its asymmetry. In the weeks following October 7, no major Western television interviewer asked the following questions of their pro-Israel guests: [3]

"Do you condemn Israel's killing of over 15,000 children in Gaza?"

"Do you condemn the 16-year blockade that prevented food, medicine, and building materials from reaching 2.3 million people?"

"Do you condemn the settlement expansion on occupied Palestinian land that the ICJ has ruled unlawful?"

"Do you condemn the Israeli government's classification of Gaza as a legitimate military target?"

This asymmetry is not journalistic impartiality. It is its opposite. Noura Erakat, Palestinian-American legal scholar, framed the structural argument precisely: [11]

Philosopher Slavoj Žižek dismissed the question as a distraction from Palestinian civilian deaths, particularly child deaths. [10] The Middle East Monitor wrote in November 2023: "For the past month, the media has tried to force anyone they interview into condemning Hamas. It has all become rather tragic and pointless. While all of this goes on in TV studios around the Western world, the Palestinians in Gaza are being slaughtered in their thousands." [10]

What the question prevents, in every deployment, is this: any discussion of Israeli military operations, the blockade, the occupation, settlement expansion, international law, civilian casualty ratios, or the ICJ's rulings — before Hamas has been ritually condemned. In practice, given limited interview time and the energy consumed by the condemnation demand itself, it frequently prevents that discussion from happening at all.