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Amid widespread campus protests and worldwide controversy surrounding Israel’s ongoing war against Hamas in Gaza, Andrew Dudum shared a statement on X leading some to accuse the HIMS CEO of supporting Hamas, a Palestinian militant group behind the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks in Israel.
In his May 1 X post, Dudum wrote the following,
Moral courage > College degree. If you’re currently protesting against the genocide of the Palestinian people & for your university’s divestment from Israel, keep going. It’s working. There are plenty of companies & CEOs eager to hire you, regardless of university discipline.”
via Andrew Dudum/X
Dudum’s post then linked to job openings at his men’s telehealth company.
The Palestinian-American CEO’s statement drew backlash in comments from Jordan Fried and many others. Fried wrote, “Translation: $HIMS hires antisemites. If there was ever a sell signal, this is it.” In the meantime, Jordan Schachtel added, “Violation of fiduciary duty in support of Hamas. Bold move, Cotton.”
Does Andrew Dudum really support Hamas?
As comments responding to Jordan Schachtel pointed out, Andrew Dudum’s statement alone does not mean he supports Hamas, necessarily. “Condemning the horrific actions of Israel is not the same as supporting Hamas,” Kiwi Investor wrote in response to Schachtel’s criticism.
Perhaps clarifying his position on the conflict, Dudum also reposted a Senator Bernie Sanders interview with journalist Christiane Amanpour in which Sanders stated, referring to the campus protests, “[The students] are out there for the right reasons… they are out there not because they are ‘pro-Hamas.’ They are out there because they are outraged by what the Israeli government is doing in Gaza.”
Dudum, who says he descends from Palestinian refugees who fled the Nakba in 1948 as well as Holocaust survivors, has spoken out in support of a ceasefire in the past. In 2007, he founded LendforPeace.org, an organization “providing direct micro-loans to Palestinian women in the West Bank and Gaza,” according to its website.
Furthermore, in a Medium opinion piece published after Oct. 7, Dudum wrote that he believed in “… [P]roactively dismantling the overly simplistic perspective that there are two sides to every issue and acknowledge that multiple truths do exist … [I]n the case of Israel and Palestine, the difficulty is not in identifying those truths, but in holding multiple truths together, simultaneously,” he added.
Israel says the Oct. 7 Hamas-lead attack inside Israel killed 1,200 hundred civilians, according to NPR. Israel then attacked Gaza, in what authorities said was an offensive against Hamas, but since then, Israeli forces have killed an estimated 30,000 Palestinians, many of whom were civilians.