Two Years After October 7: The Moral Confusion That Still Haunts Us

Two years ago today, Hamas terrorists launched the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. More than 1,400 people were murdered: families slaughtered in their homes, young people executed at the Nova Music Festival, nearly entire communities burned to the ground. Hamas filmed its crimes for the world to see: rape, kidnappings, beheadings, the killing of children, proudly livestreamed as spectacle.

Over 250 people were taken hostage. Every Jew I know, gay or straight, religious or secular, remembers exactly where they were when the news came in.Before Israel even buried its dead, activists across Western campuses were celebrating. Columbia’s Students for Justice in Palestine had their “resistance” posters ready before the blood dried, posting “We are back” three minutes before the attacks even began. Activists and social media influencers declared that “the oppressed” had a right to slaughter civilians.

Let’s be honest: the “Free Palestine” movement has never been about peace or dignity for human life. If it were, its leaders would have condemned Hamas for using hospitals as command centers and children as shields. They would have spoken out against Hamas’s executions of its own civilians and its theft of humanitarian aid. They don’t, because the goal isn’t liberation, it’s destruction.

Hamas’s own numbers put the Gaza death toll at roughly a tenth of what progressive activists repeat online; and still, they inflate it further. Somehow a terror regime notorious for propaganda has become their most trusted source.

Based on their conduct here at home, it’s hard to see many of these so-called “advocacy” organizations as anything but burgeoning and active terrorist cells. They rally under the banner of human rights while cheering for terror. They coordinate campus disruptions, intimidate and harass Jewish students, while flooding city streets with chants calling for a global intifada. Their intent is transparent: to fracture American unity, to weaken the institutions that keep our borders and our communities safe, and to import the language of violent revolution into our civic life. Jews are being targeted for execution outside of synagogues, museums, and schools simply for being Jews: These activists and their enablers supply the moral permission for it to happen.

A deal brokered by President Trump and his administration lies on the table; one that would end the war, free the hostages, and create the conditions for a lasting peace. Yet the same Western activists shouting “ceasefire now” urge Hamas to keep fighting. This may be the only “genocide” in history where the accusers are offered an end to bloodshed and insist on prolonging it.

I grew up in New York City. I watched the Twin Towers fall on 9/11. I remember the smoke over Staten Island and my neighbors walking across the Verrazzano Bridge to get home. Back then, the world knew what evil looked like. We didn’t debate whether it was “complicated.” We said “never again,” and meant it.

Somehow, that clarity vanished. Evil now hides behind hashtags and cultural appropriation.
Antisemitism no longer belongs to the fringe of one side. On the left, it cloaks itself in “liberation” and “decolonization,” while revising history to distort reality. On the right, it reappears through conspiracy theories about Zionist control of banks and media; pushed by influencers like Tucker Carlson and Candance Owns, who to her credit, is such a craven opportunist that she blamed Israel for Charlie Kirk’s assassination before his wife had even laid him to rest.

Within the gay community, the moral confusion is especially jarring. The same people who once demanded facts over fear during the AIDS epidemic now parrot Hamas talking points on Instagram. The same activists who fought to be seen as human now deny that same humanity to Jews. “Queers for Palestine” has become the emblem of that contradiction. As a gay man, I’m tired of being the punchline to the joke they have made of themselves.

The gay rights movement was built on moral courage: on the refusal to surrender truth to ideology. We fought to reform medicine, academia, and held the media accountable because we believed the truth could overcome fear and prejudice. That same courage is needed now, when antisemitism has gone mainstream and too many in the LGBT community excuse it as “activism.”

And yet, despite every attempt to make it so, we do not stand alone.

Some of the clearest voices since October 7 have come from LGBT conservatives and centrists: Dave Rubin, Douglas Murray, Eve Barlow, Caitlyn Jenner, and above all, Bari Weiss. Weiss, who left The New York Times rather than surrender her integrity, has become the Lois Lane of our time: fearless, principled, and unwilling to let truth be distorted by fashionable falsehoods. Nearly two years to the day of the massacre, she was named Editor-in-Chief of CBS News: a moment that should remind us that truth still has defenders, and we are gaining the high ground.

For every politician who used this anniversary to “All Lives Matter” this day rather than make space to center our grief and stand with the Jewish people: your voters can see you, your hypocrisy is on full display.

To every LGBT organization that couldn’t muster a tweet, a statement, or a post: your silence is its own confession.

The Log Cabin Republicans remain the only National LGBT Organization to issue a statement on October 7th at the time of this publication.

Forty-eight hostages remain in Hamas terror tunnels. Their families wait. The Jewish people know that our best hope of their return is in the diplomacy spearheaded by President Trump and this administration.

History will record who stood with life, and who decided ours were expendable.

And for that matter, so will the midterms.