October 8

As dawn broke on October 8, the full horror of the previous day settled over Israel like a suffocating shroud. Throughout the battered south, ZAKA teams and forensics medics continued the heartbreaking, grisly task of retrieving bodies—sifting through the ruins of scorched homes, bomb shelters littered with bullet casings and blood, and fields scarred by violence. Ambulance sirens echoed on loop. Hospitals overflowed with the wounded, while volunteers tended to thousands of children now orphaned or desperately searching for missing family. Whole kibbutzim emerged as mass graves, their silence broken only by the murmured prayers of shattered survivors. Eyewitnesses, reporters, and medical professionals wept openly at the scale of devastation. With mobile networks strained, relatives frantically shared names and photos online—an ever-growing tapestry of the missing and the murdered. In these first hours, Israel reeled, paralyzed by trauma but already summoning the grim determination to rescue hostages, defend its borders, and recover from unfathomable loss.

Yet as this national tragedy unfolded, a parallel outrage erupted far beyond Israel’s borders. By noon on October 8, even as Israeli parents clung to one another in hospital waiting rooms and soldiers combed the fields for hostages, university quads across North America and Europe filled with students waving flags not of peace, but of Hamas. The rallying cries were not for justice for the murdered or solidarity with the abducted, but for “resistance”—a grotesque euphemism for the savage massacre of civilians. In a matter of hours, the world’s leading institutions of higher learning—Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, UCLA, NYU, and dozens more—became platforms for insidious anti-Israel and antisemitic hatred masquerading as and “progressivism.”

University Campuses

It would have been impossible to imagine, just a short time before, that the very same places that prided themselves as “safe havens” for minorities and open debate would transform overnight into stages for the worst celebration of Jewish suffering since the Holocaust itself. On October 8, faculty and student organizations at Harvard signed a public letter, crafted by the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee, which blamed Israel entirely for the massacre—stating, without shame or qualification, that “the Israeli regime alone is entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Similar statements ricocheted between Ivy League campuses and were quickly adopted by student groups at Columbia, Stanford, MIT, Northwestern, and the University of California system. Their message was not ambiguous: The murder, rape, and kidnapping of Israeli civilians was either justified, “resistance,” or even “liberation.” “Glory to the martyrs!” shouted crowds in Manhattan and Cambridge, echoing the language used by Hamas in its own videos of atrocity.

In New York, campus rallies were hastily organized via encrypted group chats and anonymous “solidarity” networks. At Columbia University, Palestine student groups staged a “National Day of Resistance,” turning the massacre of Israeli children into a moment of triumph. Mobilization was so rapid and uniform across dozens of campuses that it became immediately clear that these were not random displays of student anger. They were the results of deeply entrenched, well-funded, and meticulously orchestrated radical movements that had for years been incubated within academia by foreign funding and activist networks devoted, not to peace, but to the demonization and ultimate dissolution of Israel.

The Foreign Hand

As media scrutiny grew, it was quickly revealed that many of these well-choreographed protests and statements were the product of years of foreign investment—chief among them, the oil-rich monarchy of Qatar. Qatar, which had long provided billions in cash to Hamas and played host to the terror group’s political leadership in Doha, had also invested staggering sums in American academia, think tanks, and media. The Al Jazeera network—operating with near-total impunity on university campuses and with a sprawling digital influence ecosystem—provided a steady stream of pro-Hamas propaganda from the very first moments of the attack. The messaging was clear, unified, and consistent: the massacre was not only justifiable, it was a righteous blow in the “struggle for liberation,” while Israel’s defensive response was to be resisted at any cost.

Investigative reporting in the days and weeks that followed revealed a dense web of interlocking organizations: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), and dozens of splinter groups. Emails uncovered from SJP chapters showed rapid coordination with activist networks in the UK, France, and even South Africa. Protest playbooks circulated within hours of the massacre, complete with chants, talking points, and pre-fabricated signs printed with the Hamas slogan: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—a call for the eradication of Israel. These groups did not merely express political outrage at Israeli policy; they openly celebrated the butchery of Israeli civilians. Financial records and Congressional testimony later confirmed that many leading organizers received direct and indirect support from Gulf states—predominantly Qatar—which was eager to export its ideology and launder the reputation of genocidal terror as legitimate “resistance.”

The Online Offensive

The campaign was not limited to physical demonstrations. In parallel, a digital assault raged across Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), and Facebook. Within hours, anti-Israel hashtags trended globally, often boosted by professional botnets and echo chambers rooted in the Middle East. Gruesome videos of the massacre, gleefully uploaded by Hamas terrorists themselves, were given new captions and context, transforming victims into aggressors and terrorists into “resistance fighters.” The interviews of Hamas leaders, posted without challenge or correction by outlets like Al Jazeera, were clipped and remixed for viral consumption amongst Western youth. In this online maelstrom, truth and fact collapsed—the world’s greatest atrocity against Jews in modern times was swiftly reframed and, in many circles, justified or denied entirely.

Antisemitic rhetoric soared to record levels. “Globalize the Intifada!,” “Death to Israel!,” “Zionists are not people!”—these and worse poured from screens, spilling into the real world. Jewish students at elite universities found themselves harassed, threatened, even physically assaulted. University administrations, terrified of offending the vocal pro-Hamas minority, issued diluted statements or equivocated in the face of calls for genocide, insisting on “academic freedom” even in the face of incitement to violence and thinly veiled Nazi slogans.

The Justification

The horror was compounded by the response of academic elites—faculty and public intellectuals who had spent their careers warning of the dangers of “Islamophobia” and “colonialism” now twisted logic and morality into a defense of ethnic cleansing. Entire classrooms became sites for the “contextualization” of atrocities; history professors revised lectures to defend “decolonization by any means,” student editors published treatises on the “legitimacy” of killing Jewish civilians, and social science departments elevated those who justified violence as heroic. What might, in another era, have been dismissed as radical fringe ideology was now sanctioned by the mainstream—in some cases, even rewarded with speaking invitations, media platforms, and academic prizes.

Major newspapers and news websites, meanwhile, mirrored this moral distortion. Editorials at the New York Times, the Guardian, and even some American broadcast networks urged viewers to “understand the context” in which such violence occurred, or to see it as the “inevitable result” of Israeli policy. The same pundits who, on October 6, might have condemned terrorism in the abstract now found excuses for rape, mass murder, and child abduction. The “cycle of violence” trope was resurrected, with politicians and celebrities weighing in to caution Israel against seeking “revenge”—as if asking for justice for murdered families constituted vengeance. The notion that violence against Jews might be justified became, once more, acceptable public discourse.

The Day Still Unfolding

Thus, on October 8, the day after the bloodiest pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust, while Israel wept and buried its dead, whole swathes of the Western elite reveled in grotesque shows of solidarity not with the victims, but with their murderers. The murdered of Kfar Aza, Be’eri, Sderot, and the Re’im festival had not yet been buried when their deaths were being rationalized or denied. The Jewish children burned alive in Sderot, the infants stolen into the tunnels of Gaza, the elderly women slaughtered in wheelchairs—these, in the eyes of too many, were transformed overnight from victims into villains. The message was clear: Jewish blood did not shock the world. Jewish pain, once again, was negotiable, a price to be paid for other people’s political ambitions.

As Israelis struggled forward, battered but unbroken, the perverse celebrations of October 8 revealed the true nature of the ideological war being waged—not just against the State of Israel, but against the very right of the Jewish people to mourn their dead, defend their existence, and live free from the terror of annihilation.