We Cannot Afford To Forget The Horrors of October 7th

Last week, British comedian Dawn French posted on X what she presumably thought was an amusing, cutting refutation of Israel’s war against Hamas. In a mocking, baby-talk voice, she sarcastically mimicked the arguments of the pro-Israel camp: “‘Yeah, but you know they did a bad thing to us’… Yeah, but no. ‘But we want that land and there’s a lot of history…’. No. ‘These people are not even people, are they really?’ No.” 

French was forced to delete the 40-second clip after facing considerable (and deserved) backlash. She also released a half-hearted apology statement, claiming that “it was never my intention to mock, or dismiss, or diminish the horror of what happened on October 7th 2023 and what continues to unfold from that brutal, unthinkable, unforgivable, savage attack.” Rather, it was her “intention was to mock and point the finger of shame at the behaviour of the cruel leaders on ALL sides of this attricious [sic] war, who have continued to behave like the worst, dangerous, sickening bullies and seem to relish the tyrannical and childish one-upmanship of violence.” 

Why French ever thought it was a good idea to publish this video is frankly baffling. It is hard to imagine a more callous moment to make Israeli grief the butt of a joke. On June 5th, the same day French posted that clip, the Israeli authorities announced they had recovered the bodies of two hostages being kept in Gaza. Gad Haggai, 72, and Judi Weinstein Haggai, 70, were a husband and wife couple taken during the October 7th attacks. A few days later, the body of another hostage—Thai national Nattapong Pinta—was also recovered by the Israeli Defence Forces. As it stands, there are 54 remaining hostages in captivity in Gaza, of which roughly 20 are thought to still be alive. 

According to French, however, the fact that over 1,200 people were killed in Israel—most of them civilians—is not a good enough reason for Israel to wage this war in Gaza. The fact that people were raped, murdered, kidnapped, and tortured by an enemy whose express intent is to wipe out the Jewish people is not important. The fact that these atrocities were committed not as collateral damage but as a central feature of a genocidal ideology—one proudly broadcast by Hamas in real time and celebrated by its supporters across the world—is, apparently, irrelevant.  

This was not merely an attack. It was a pogrom—deliberate, premeditated, and proudly advertised. The killers filmed themselves mutilating and burning Jews alive. They uploaded the murders to social media. It wasn’t just about inflicting death; it was about making Jews feel hunted, degraded, and alone in the world once again.

Like so many other celebs who have thrown themselves blindly behind the pro-Palestine cause as the latest woke cause célèbre, French seems to think that Israel is conducting this war simply out of bloodlust. Take Greta Thunberg, former climate activist and professional truant. She recently set sail in a so-called Freedom Flotilla, accusing the Jewish State of “genocide” and boasting that she and her band of celeb activists would break Israel’s “siege” in Gaza. On Monday however, Thunberg’s boat was intercepted by Israel and its attention-seeking occupants have been arrested—or, as Thunberg describes it, “kidnapped.” 

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz has said that, once they arrive in Israel, the activists will be shown footage of what happened on October 7th. They will get to see with their own eyes the horrors that Hamas inflicted that day—what French dismisses as simply “bad things.” They will be confronted with images of bound, tortured civilians, of corpses defiled, of the savage slaughter of babies and the elderly alike—not despite their identity, but because of it. This may well change Thunberg and Co’s minds, but we shouldn’t hold our breath. These people sincerely believe that the nation simply woke up one day and decided, for no reason at all, to start murdering Palestinians. 

This is part of a larger, insidious trend among the pro-Palestine set in the West. There is a scourge of hand-waving taking place when it comes to October 7th, ranging from minimising the event as unimportant to suggesting that it wasn’t as bad as Israel claims to denying that anything happened at all. Particularly widespread is the belief that October 7th was the Palestinians’ natural and justified response to ‘apartheid’ Israeli oppression. “Before 7 October, there was 6 October,” said one academic in the Middle East Eye, just a month after the massacre, “and before that was a succession of dates and facts in a murderous colonial project of domination and dispossession.” In this way, Hamas’s atrocities are dismissed, in the words of American philosopher Judith Butler, as “an act of armed resistance” and “not a terrorist attack and … not an antisemitic attack.” Even UN chief António Guterres had the audacity to argue that October 7th “did not happen in a vacuum.” 

The mainstreaming of these kinds of attitudes means that many don’t fully grasp the horrors or the significance of October 7th. In one poll from 2023, 60% of young Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 said that October 7th could be justified by the grievances of Palestinians. Meanwhile, a survey of British Muslims in 2024 found that only 25% believed that rapes or murders had taken place—37% were unsure and 39% outright denied that the massacre happened. We then see these ideas parroted mindlessly, in the forms of false-flag conspiracy theories on social media and even in the mouths of well-known public figures. Former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters has arguably gone the furthest down the October 7th denialism rabbit hole, claiming that there was “something fishy” about the massacre and saying that there was “no evidence whatsoever” of mass rape. 

Of course, Dawn French did not go that far. But her video did point to an alarming trend of minimising the awful events of that day. What she glosses over with glib sarcasm was a day of unspeakable horror, the likes of which few of us in the West can imagine. In just one day, almost 1,200 people were killed and over 4,000 were injured. A 92-year-old Holocaust survivor was murdered in his safe room. The youngest victim was a baby, just 14 hours old. Entire families were wiped out, some of them burned alive in their homes. Soldiers and civilians alike were killed, kidnapped, and tortured. Women were raped and mutilated. And as all of this unfolded, Hamas supporters across the region danced in the streets. They handed out sweets. They filmed the bodies and cheered. There was no shame, only pride. That anyone feels able to downplay this speaks to a moral sickness that is spreading fast. 

What happened on October 7th can never be justified and should never be dismissed. It is the very reason why Israel must keep fighting against Hamas. To forget that—to reduce it to a “bad thing” or to try to ‘contextualise’ it—is to hand victory to the army of Islamist antisemites who carried it out. October 7 was not just a massacre. It was a declaration of genocidal intent. And to excuse October 7th is to excuse the plainest act of evil many of us will ever witness.