Something very interesting came out recently and it is coming from the former Commissioner of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Robert J. Jackson Jr., who suggests that Hamas functionally engaged in insider trading of Israel equities alongside its October 7th attack, yielding its billions of dollars in profits.
Therefore, this breaks down US Senator Elizabeth Warren’s nonsense lies, as she was trying to paint it as though Hamas was only using crypto, and crypto causes Hamas to do these things.
Read: Crypto Funding In Geopolitical Conflicts: How It Could Play Part In The Israel-Palestine War
US Senator Blazenly Blames Crypto For Funding Hamas – Recap
On October 11th, Senator Warren tweeted that Hamas utilized cryptocurrencies for terrorism financing.
However, the resistance movement discontinued its use because the blockchain’s transparency allowed authorities to track those who were making donations to the organization.
Senator Warren did not provide the full context or details in her statements and was getting called out by the crypto community.
The Wall Street Journal retracted their mistake and issued a correction to its original article, acknowledging that there was “no evidence” that Hamas used crypto to fund its military operations.
But of course, Senator Warren did not apologize or retract anything, continuing to maintain that cryptocurrencies are a risk for terrorism financing and that stronger regulation is needed. She sent a letter to the Biden administration urging them to take action. In the letter, she cites Wall Street Journal’s original article as evidence that Hamas is using cryptocurrency to fund its operations.
Read: US Lawmakers Propose FTPA To Combat Crypto Use By Terrorists
Cryptocurrencies Are Not The Problem
Founder and CEO of Messari, Ryan Selkis, sarcastically highlighted what he had to say about this issue, “Hamas manipulated the stock market in order to funnel billions of dollars of insider trading profits to its militants. We must shut down the global stock markets @SenWarren. Anything less is terrorist sympathizing.”
Before crypto, bad actors were also doing money laundering — they could use fiat, gold, anything of value. Bad actors will use any medium to fund their activities — it is not the currency or the asset that is at fault, but the bad actors. And logically, politicians and government agencies should put a stop to these bad actors.
Final Thoughts
I am sharing this because you will mostly see headlines and sensationalism that collaborate on these lies, painting a bad picture on crypto. As you may be aware, many of the TradFi folks do not like crypto and they want to slow it down and kill crypto startups, forcing them to leave offshore so they can come in and take over.