The Hamas Terror Attack Leaves no Place for the Morally Bankrupt to Hide
In the days since the October 7th terror attack on Israel by Hamas, many social media users have tried to return to their usual X experience without getting drawn into the Israel-Hamas conflict. However, they’re finding themselves unable to ‘return to normal’ or they find that their audience isn’t ready to move on just yet. On a platform where users are often emotionally and intellectually jaded from being bombarded by news, opinion, outrage and nonsense, all at hyper speed, this lingering malaise is unusual. There is a collective nagging at the conscience that won’t stop.
October 7th was visceral. Across the world, as people sat down with their Saturday morning coffee, they saw video of the near naked, contorted and broken body of 30-year-old Shani Louk being paraded like a trophy in the back of a pickup by Hamas militants. One passerby spat on her as the crowd cheered, “Allahu Akbar”. Three young women, one of them 19-year-old Karina Ariev, lay terrified and bleeding in the back of an armoured vehicle. 85-year-old Holocaust survivor Yaffa Adar looked on stoically as her terrorist kidnappers mocked her. 260 bodies would later be found at the site of the Supernova Rave Festival where Shani was taken. One eyewitness to the event said, “Women have been raped at the area of the rave next to their friends’ bodies, dead bodies.” In the coming hours and days horrific stories and images of entire families being slaughtered close to the Gaza border wall emerged as the death toll surpassed 1000.
Most X users had never been confronted with raw terrorism like this and it was impossible not to be revulsed. But it was also a new step for X. It was Elon Musk’s Arab Spring moment. The platform was at the cutting edge of devastating world news with gruesome minute by minute updates rolling in while the corporate press slept. And significantly, X allowed the raw, unfiltered truth to spill out before the media could spin or sanitise it. And for the first time in living memory, the Israel-Palestinian conflict was not complicated. It was very simple. Hamas had committed one of the most heinous acts of terror against innocents in living memory, and they revelled in it.
There needed to be a pause where people digested the enormity of what they had just witnessed. It raised a simple question. Do you see the actions of October 7th as cold-blooded murder by a terror group or not?
However, that reflective pause never came. While images of terror flooded in, the usual suspects opportunistically tried to shoehorn these events into previously established narratives and political positions. Lindsay Graham salivated at the possibility of a war with Iran stating that the United States should join Israel in bombing Iran in the case of an escalation. Nikki Haley let her neocon flag fly by echoing Graham’s rush to confront Iran, and declared, “This is not just an attack on Israel—this was an attack on America.” These sentiments were, of course, as predictable as the massive military response by Israel.
On the progressive left too, they fell into line with near identical talking points. On October 8th, Rashida Tlaib released a statement that failed to condemn Hamas but referred to Israel as an apartheid state and called for the US to stop ‘unconditional funding’ for Israel so as to end the ‘cycle of violence’. That same day, Cori Bush released a statement that also avoided directly condemning Hamas’s acts of terror, demanding an end to US support for ‘Israeli military occupation and apartheid.’ One day later, fellow ‘Squad’ member Ilhan Omar called for an end to ‘unconditional weapons sales and military aid to Israel.’ Like the neocons, these responses were also entirely predictable—except this time, they didn’t work. The backlash from fellow Democrats was swift. Representatives Cohen, Torres and Gottheimer condemned the statements with Gottheimer stating, “It sickens me that while Israelis clean the blood of their family members ... they believe Congress should strip U.S. funding to our democratic ally and allow innocent civilians to suffer.”
The rift on the left didn’t stop there. On October 10th Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was forced to denounce a pro-Palestine rally held by one of her grassroots organisers, the New York branch of the Democratic Socialists of America, as Democratic NY Governor Kathy Hochul called it ‘abhorrent and morally repugnant’. AOC issued a statement to Politico stating, ‘It should not be hard to shut down hatred and antisemitism where we see it’. On CNN Jake Tapper called the days after October 7th ‘eye-opening…in terms of anti-semitism on the left.’
Across leftist academia there was shock among liberals at the naked anti-semitism that has infiltrated the halls of America’s most distinguished universities. The Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee released a statement on October 7th that laid the blame for Hamas’s attack squarely on Israel. The backlash was instant with President Emeritus and former Clinton and Obama staffer Lawrence H. Summers writing, ‘In nearly 50 years of Harvard affiliation, I have never been as disillusioned and alienated as I am today.’
At Yale, a self-proclaimed ‘radical Muslim’ associate professor, Zareena Grewal, wrote a series of tweets supportive of Hamas on the day of the terror attack. In one she wrote, “Prayers for Palestinians. Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity.” That same day Jairo Funez Flores, an assistant professor at Texas Tech screamed, “…DECOLONIZATION IS NOT A METAPHOR.” Several other academics and student organisations openly supported Hamas.
Perhaps the most ghoulish and open show of anti-semitism came from BLM Chicago who posted an image of a paraglider with a Palestinian flag and the caption ‘I stand with Palestine’. The reference was to the means by which some of the Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel on October 7th.
But naked anti-semitism wasn’t reserved for the left. Jordan Petersen was roundly mocked for complaining that he was being targeted by anti-semites for his robust support of Israel. Ben Shapiro was smeared by several influential accounts who wrongly accused him of posting a fake AI image of a burned child.
Since the attack of October 7th, friendships and political tribes on Twitter have become dislocated and torn as the left comes face-to-face with the anti-semitism they were assured only existed on the right and as some far-right ghouls capitalise on the attacks to celebrate Israel’s misery. Also, regular users have found it difficult to return to their normal routine having witnessed the raw, uncensored events that were so out of synch with established narratives on Israel-Palestine.
Again: Anyone who saw the attack unfold in real time was faced with an unequivocal moral question that too many attempted to brush past - Do you see the actions of October 7th as cold-blooded murder by a terror group or not?
The answer is an individual statement of moral character that transcends neocon, progressive, academic or far-right point scoring. And until that question is resolved within X’s political tribes, X’s moral compass remains off-kilter and its users cannot move past October 7th.