Ben ShapiroDo you remember the video of Shani Louk, aged 22, her body mutilated and broken, being driven through Gaza as crowds of Palestinians cheered and celebrated and spat on her?
That’s what October 7 was about: evil people doing evil things in the name of an evil ideology.
And every day since has been about people in the West making excuses for it, defending it, and bolstering it.
That spells the end of our civilization if we do not course correct — right now.
The October 7 massacre was the deadliest terror attack on Earth since 9/11. It was the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust, driven by the genocidal desire of Hamas and its Palestinian supporters to wipe Israel off the map and wipe Jews off the planet.
The terrorists carried GoPros and phones. They wore body cameras to document executions, home break-ins, and kidnappings on Facebook Live and Telegram, and their victims’ personal devices, so the carnage could be streamed to the victims’ own families as it happened.
I want to remind you today what happened, because it’s important in order to understand the magnitude of what happened next.
At the Nova festival, Hamas terrorists broke through the barrier between the Gaza Strip and southern Israel, took paragliders, and proceeded to murder everyone they could find. The victims were simply people who went to a dance party. Between 364 and 378 people were murdered at the festival site, including 344 civilians and 30 security personnel and first responders.
People tried to run away. They were shot. People tried to hide. They were murdered. People who were providing medical care were murdered.
Hamas is monstrous. In many ways, its supporters are just as monstrous. Hamas dragged out 250 Israelis back into the Gaza Strip. Miraculously, 162 returned alive. That did not include the Bibas children. These young children were murdered with the bare hands of terrorists in terror tunnels in Gaza. So was their mother. Forensic examination later found the kids were murdered with blunt-force violence.
Meanwhile, some of the Israeli hostages celebrated Hanukkah in the tunnels before they were murdered execution-style — a bullet to the back of the head — in a tunnel. As Israeli soldiers came close to freeing them, the Hamas terrorists simply murdered them by shooting them in the back of the head.
Hamas starved its prisoners. One was forced to dig his own grave, and then Hamas released the pictures of him looking like something out of Auschwitz.
What came next after October 7? On a global level, there was a gigantic, unprecedented outburst of Jew and Israel-hatred in the modern era. That is the reality. The political Left in the West fully embraced hatred of Jews and Israel. Certain swaths of the Right have done the same.
There is a reason for that, and it is not — contrary to the media narrative — Israel’s deliberate and meticulous and targeted response to that genocidal terror assault.
Israel’s opponents, including New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, were yelling “genocide” before Israel had even started its ground assault in Gaza.
If you look back at history, people have been shouting “genocide” at Israel since its creation.
The global reaction to October 7 was not motivated by Israel’s response to October 7. It was motivated by something else.
There’s a flag that appears anywhere we see a radical movement motivated by envy and rage and hatred of the West. It’s the same flag celebrated and flown by the people who cheered October 7 in Khan Younis, Gaza City, Nablus, and Jenin. It appears at radical trans rallies. It appears at Black Lives Matter rallies. It appears in anti-Israel rallies. It appears at anti-Trump rallies. It appears at communist rallies. It appears at Macklemore concerts.
Wherever people who wish to tear down the West congregate, there the flag flies: the Palestinian flag.
Why has the Palestinian flag become the symbol of the global scavengers, the people who hate our civilization and wish to see it torn down?
It’s because the Palestinian flag represents exactly that — and it always has. Since the beginning, the Palestinian flag has not represented the aspiration of a people for a territory of its own. It never has. It represents a desire for the destruction of Israel.
This is why, historically speaking, there was no clamor for a Palestinian state during Jordan’s rule of the so-called West Bank, Judea, and Samaria, or Egypt’s rule over the Gaza Strip between the foundation of Israel in 1947 and the Six-Day War in 1967.
That is why Palestinians have refused, over and over and over again, a so-called “two-state solution,” because they don’t want a two-state solution. They want Israel destroyed. When Israel unilaterally abandoned the Gaza Strip and removed, by force, Israelis who were living there, Palestinians promptly burned all the greenhouses, synagogues, and homes that Israel left behind, elected Hamas, a group whose stated purpose was the destruction of the Jewish state, and used all the aid flowing in to build a terror tunnel network larger than the London Underground.
The people flying the Palestinian flag in solidarity know this. When they say “Free Palestine,” they don’t care about a free Palestine. If they did, they’d be protesting against Hamas, which shoots dissidents while ruling Gaza and sells women into sex slavery.
They might protest the Palestinian Authority (PA), one of the most corrupt entities ever devised, and a source of terror in its own right. The PA literally pays bounties to terrorists who kill Jews.
Or perhaps they would have protested Jordan or Egypt between 1947 and 1967. Even Palestinians living there didn’t do that at the time.
No. When people shout “Free Palestine,” they mean “destroy Israel.” And “destroy Israel” means something even deeper to them: Destroy the West and, in particular, America.
Every single critique laid at the feet of Israel is a critique aimed at the West. When they say that “Israel is a settler colonial state,” what they mean is that America is a settler colonialist state because Americans don’t belong here.
When they say “Israel is an apartheid state,” they also mean, “So is America with regard to its minority citizens.”
When they say that “Israel is a capitalist exploiter,” they mean that much more about America. When they say that “Israel is a military state intent on subjugation of third-world peoples,” they believe that exponentially more about the United States.
Never mind that these critiques are nonsense. What matters is the overall claim: The West is exploitative and evil. Israel is an outpost of the West. Therefore, Israel is evil.
People who fly the Palestinian flag know this. They embrace it. They don’t care one whit about freedom or democracy. They care about destroying the West because they believe the West is fundamentally evil.
So why has the Palestinian cause, of all the different anti-Western causes, become predominant? Why has it become de rigueur for Democrats to lie and say that Israel committed a “genocide” in Gaza?
The answer is almost too obvious to state out loud. But we ought to — for the sake of clarity. Nobody cares about other separatist, anti-Western movements among anti-Western radicals because those movements are not fighting Jews.
Israel routinely receives more media coverage per capita than any country on Earth. Over the last decade, in per capita terms, the media covered Israel 71 times more than Brazil, 86 times more than China, and 283 times more than India. It’s a tiny country, and it receives inordinate media coverage.
But why the Jews? Why the constant, unremitting focus on Israel above all other conflicts on planet Earth?
It’s not about the nature of the conflict. After all, since October 7, more people by far have been killed in the Russia-Ukraine war. More have been killed in the Sudanese Civil War. The Iranian government killed far, far more innocent people in a single weekend in January than Israel killed during the entirety of the Gaza War. Before October 7, far more people were killed in the Tigray war in northern Ethiopia. In Congo, there have been tens of thousands of direct killings between 2023 and 2026, including 7,000 killings in the first two months of 2025 alone.
So why Israel? Why the Palestinian flag?
The answer is this: The West is currently experiencing a deep crisis over what it is and what it ought to be.
On one side are those who look at the prosperity, freedom, and strength of the West, in particular the United States, and attribute it to the founding ideals: an inalienable right to life, liberty, and property given to us by nature’s God, protected by a constitutional system, designed by the wisest political minds who have walked this earth.
On the other side are people who reject those principles.
They believe they are victims of the system, that the system has been twisted against them by nefarious, conspiratorial voices. That the meritocracy, the idea that you ought to rise if you have merit, is actually fake or empty. That those who succeed in our purported meritocracy aren’t actually meritorious but corrupt and manipulative, and that those who succeed in America must be the villains of this story.
That story easily crosses streams with conspiracy theories about Jews and Israel. If Jews in the West are disproportionately well-educated and high-income, which they are, they must be the great manipulators. If Israel is disproportionately and puzzlingly successful in the worst area of the world, they must be the villains somehow. They must be manipulating President Trump into doing their dirty work.
This isn’t just stupid. It’s dangerous because it is symptomatic of a broader malady. It is not about Israel or the Jews in particular. It’s a symptom. It’s a rejection of the foundational principles that make the West and America, in particular, great.
And that malady, the hatred of the meritocracy of founding principles, of the basic idea that people are successful because they work hard and make the right decisions, is spreading like the ideological cancer it is. It unites the Left with the horseshoe Right. It’s embraced by celebrities, politicians, and journalists.
So how do we fight this as people who care about the West?
First, we can fight it at the ballot box. We can fight against candidates who pledge to undermine the very basis of what it means to be American or Western. We can vote against Abdul Rahman El-Sayed, James Talarico, and others like them.
Secondly, we can stand with our allies who stand against our common anti-Western enemies. That doesn’t just mean standing with Israel. It means standing with Ukraine. It means standing with Taiwan.
Third, and most importantly, we can look within.
We should recognize that in a free country like the United States, with all its problems and flaws, responsibility lies in our hands. Conspiracies don’t make your life better. They make it worse.
Every year, Jews read the Torah, the five books of Moses, cover to cover. We completed that cycle with Simchat Torah this week. It was on Simchat Torah, in the Jewish calendar, that Hamas attacked and slaughtered over a thousand Jews and took hundreds hostage. And the world largely responded by targeting Israel and Jews.
This week, Jews began the cycle of reading the Bible again. We are reading the first section of the Book of Genesis, which contains the most vital story in the history of mankind: Cain and Abel.
This is the crucial section of the Bible, because if we’re talking about human nature, the Bible is very true.
Now Abel kept flocks and Cain worked the soil. In the course of time, Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil as an offering to the Lord. And Abel also brought an offering: fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock. The Lord looked with favor on Abel and his offering, but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor.
So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast. Then the Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door. It desires to have you, but you can rule over it.”
Now, Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go out to the field.” While they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him. Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where’s your brother Abel?” “I don’t know,” he replied. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” And the Lord said, “What have you done? Listen. Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. Now you are under a curse, and driven from the ground which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you. You will be a restless wanderer on the earth.”
Listen closely to that story, because it speaks to us. In the story, Cain is clearly closer to God than Abel. Cain speaks with God directly. He’s high-level. Abel never does. In the story, it’s Cain’s idea, not Abel’s, to bring sacrifices to God in the first place. But God chooses Abel’s sacrifice and not Cain’s. And we’re never told why.
But I’ll tell you why. Because God didn’t want Cain’s sacrifice.
He wanted to teach Cain a lesson. “If you do what is right, will your sacrifice not be accepted?” Don’t give in to jealousy. Don’t attribute failure to your brother or to God. Your future is in your hand, but sin crouches at your door.
But Cain doesn’t listen. Instead of going to talk with his brother and learning what his brother did differently or working with his brother, he kills him and then poisons the very ground because of his action.
The choice remains in our hands, just as it was in Cain’s: Will we do what is right? Or will we poison the ground of Western civilization with the blood of our brothers, out of jealousy and envy and hatred of our own civilization?
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