Three Years After October 7, the World Is Cheering the Wrong Side
Three years ago this morning, Hamas began the day by firing rockets into Israel. Nothing unusual there. Hamas commits terrorism, after all, and the world had learned to just live with it. In fact, Hamas had been comparatively “quiet” in recent years.
Then the terrorists came over the border—gliding in on paragliders, smashing through fences with bulldozers, speeding through on motorbikes—and thousands of ordinary Gazans poured into southern Israel behind them.
For hours, men with knives, machine guns, rockets, grenades, missiles and explosives gunned down individuals, couples, families, young children—in the streets, in their safe rooms, in their bedrooms. They burned people alive. They gang-raped women. They hunted down hundreds of young people at a music festival, ending their lives in a bloody mess of rape and execution. They murdered children in front of their parents and parents in front of their children.
The mass murderers called home as they were murdering to brag to their parents about killing Jews. They ambushed, terrorized, ravished, tortured and ultimately murdered 1,200 people that day and dragged 251 hostages back into Gaza. Among them were Shiri Bibas and her two little boys, Ariel and Kfir. Within weeks, all three were dead. By this time last year, 84 more had also been murdered through various means.
And Hamas videoed the carnage, proudly. They wanted the world to see!
And the entire world saw. We were all an audience to the satanic anti-human torture, murder and rape that exploded into reality on Oct. 7, 2023.
Three years later, a documentary connected to this demonic carnival of terrorized death was shown at a top film festival. It received a 25-minute ovation.
What was it about?
Was it about the lives of those that Israel—that the world—lost that day? Was it about the truth of life and death as a hostage in Gaza? Was it about the children, an attempt to honor them or in some way bring their smiles back, to open their eyes, if only for a few minutes, if only on a screen? Was it about the fathers and sons flying and rolling into Gaza to avenge, to rescue, to deter? Was it about those sons of Israel who died there?
Prolonged Applause
At the Venice International Film Festival on September 10, the world was introduced to a new documentary, Naza. What is it about? It constitutes one long accusation against Israel, accusing the Israel Defense Forces of deliberately killing civilians in Gaza. It was made not by Palestinians, but by two Israeli Jews. Its “evidence” rests on anonymous voices said to belong to members of Israel’s elite intelligence division, Unit 8200. No names. No faces. No corroboration. The film was co-produced by the Guardian—a rabidly left-wing newspaper that has repeatedly gotten into trouble for publishing anti-Semitic cartoons.
The film won the festival’s Special Jury Prize. The audience reportedly gave it a 25-minute standing ovation.
Twenty-five minutes! Elon Musk observed that it was the same dynamic that kept Soviet officials on their feet for Stalin: An ovation lasts that long because no one wants to be the first to stop clapping.
Israelis were quick to point out that in 1935, the same festival honored Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi film Triumph of the Will.
British columnist Melanie Phillips captured what happened in that theater: “This wasn’t a normal response. It was a cathartic expression of intense relief that here was an apparently copper-bottomed reason for treating Israel as the acme of evil, a cosmic menace, a plague on humanity—that the evidence had been provided by Israeli Jews, and stellar military ones to boot.”
That is what they were applauding. Not the truth. Permission to be anti-Semitic.
Consider the actual record. West Point urban warfare expert John Spencer has documented that Israel achieved the lowest ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths of any modern urban war: roughly 1 to 1.5 by Hamas’s own statistics. Given Hamas’s well-documented exaggerations, the real figure is likely closer to 1 to 1. All this against an enemy that hides behind its own people so their deaths can be used for propaganda.
Yet the Western world believes the anonymous voices in dark rooms and ignores the footage Hamas itself made. Much of the video recorded on October 7 has been scrubbed from the Internet. The propaganda gets an ovation. The evidence gets deleted.
Israeli historian Gadi Taub put a name to this kind of thinking. By the logic that Israel is guilty because more Gazans have died, he said, the Jews were to blame for the Holocaust—because more Germans died in World War ii than Jews. “This is moral idiocy,” he said. Exactly right.
The 1930s All Over Again
And now the rot is reaching back into history itself.
In a recent interview, Tucker Carlson told former British politician Jacob Rees-Mogg, “I never understood why fight the Second World War in the first place.” He went on to argue that “the idea that Hitler just randomly rolled into Poland is a lie” and that Britain destroyed its empire fighting a war “they still pretend was a good idea.” Rees-Mogg, to his credit, pushed back: It was “the classic good versus evil.”
Think about where we are. Three years after the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, popular commentators are rehabilitating Adolf Hitler and making Winston Churchill’s Britain out to be the villain.
Meanwhile, the hatred has spilled onto the streets. Britain’s Telegraph reports that in the first six months of 2026, there were 1,926 anti-Semitic incidents in the United Kingdom—double the level before October 7. In April, two visibly Jewish men were stabbed in Golders Green in London, following a spate of arson attacks on synagogues. Phillips reports that a Jewish patient in a British hospital was told by a doctor that Jews shoot children for “their own amusement.” A nurse received a Nazi salute. And in the last few days, a hijacker tried to kill a pilot and crash a plane largely full of Israelis.
At the same time, radical Islam is advancing in America. In Texas, developers are planning a 400-acre Muslim development four times the size of Disneyland—what its own marketing material calls “the epicenter of Islam in America.” In Dearborn, Michigan, calls to prayer blare from loudspeakers across the city.
And look at what is happening in the minds of young Americans. Polls released by Our Republic and Rasmussen show that a quarter of Americans ages 18 to 35 would support a community adopting sharia law as the legal code for an entire town if a majority desired it. Among voters ages 18 to 24, 46 percent would support completely dismantling the Jewish state and replacing it with a Palestinian-led nation in exchange for an end to the Iran war and lower gas prices.
These are the products of our schools. Most don’t even know what sharia law is. But they know whom they are supposed to hate.
Melanie Phillips concluded that “the West is in the grip of a pathology created by the alliance between left-wingers and Islamists.” What an alliance! The radical left, which hates its own nations, has locked arms with radical Islam, which wants to conquer them.
Notice that this sickness rages most fiercely within the nations descended from ancient Israel—America, Britain and the Jewish state itself. As Taub put it, “The Israelis defeat themselves in the propaganda war.” The self-loathing left does Hamas’s work for it.
Why the Jews?
No secular explanation can account for this. How can the world look at a terrorist army that filmed itself raping and murdering and conclude that its victims are the problem?
In his book The Key of David, my father, Gerald Flurry, writes, “Most people who hate the Jews don’t even know why they do.” There is a spiritual force behind this hatred. Jesus Christ identified the devil plainly: “… He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it” (John 8:44). Lies and murder—that is exactly the combination we are witnessing.
Why would Satan single out the Jews? Because of the role God has given them. God established the royal throne of David in Judah. Judah stood with that throne when the other tribes of Israel abandoned it. “For it is evident that our Lord sprang out of Juda …” (Hebrews 7:14). Jesus Christ was a Jew, and He did not apologize for it. He said that “salvation is of the Jews” (John 4:22). Understand how God uses the Jews, and you understand why the devil goes after them so viciously.
Satan knows his time is short. “… Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time” (Revelation 12:12). That wrath is boiling over in our day. The Prophet Jeremiah saw “a seething pot” (Jeremiah 1:13)—a world boiling with hostility toward the modern nations of Israel. America and Britain are collapsing, and little Judah is not far behind.
A Burdensome Stone
This week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed that anyone involved in the October 7 attack “is living on borrowed time.” But this war cannot be won by military strength alone. The real battle is spiritual.
Bible prophecy warns where this leads: “Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of trembling unto all the people round about …. And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it” (Zechariah 12:2-3).
The world is gathering against Jerusalem right now. You can hear it in the applause in Venice, in the chanting in London and New York, in the polls of our young people.
Three years after October 7, the world is cheering for the wrong side. The question is whether you can see what is driving it—and whether you will heed the warning before that seething pot boils over.
