Douglas Murray on How the West Can Defeat Hamas

Best-selling author Douglas Murray argues that the West must confront the evil of Hamas to fully defeat it. While Hamas and its allies glorify death, the West, at its best, cherishes life

Best-selling author, columnist, and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Douglas Murray wrote a new article in the Daily Mail, in which he argues that the October 7, 2023 massacre in Israel exposed not only the barbarity of Hamas, but also the West’s alarming moral confusion. He contends that the attack — marked by mass rape, torture, and slaughter, often recorded and broadcast with pride — laid bare Hamas’s ideology of death.

But even more disturbing, Murray writes, was the response across Western cities and institutions such as protests supporting the attackers, media focus on Israeli retaliation rather than the atrocities themselves, and silence around the role Western aid played in funding Hamas’s terror infrastructure. His core claim is that if the West can’t clearly identify and confront evil, it won’t be able to defeat it.

Western Complicity: Willful Blindness and Funding Terror

Murray points to a disturbing pattern: while Israel was still reeling from the attacks, protests erupted not in solidarity with victims, but in support of the attackers. From Times Square to university campuses, slogans like “From the River to the Sea” and “Resistance is not terrorism” rang out — even as the world knew rape and mass murder had occurred. For Murray, this is not just denial. It’s complicity.

Pro-Hamas protestors gathered in Times Square on Oct 8, 2023, with signs titled, “Resistance is Justified.” Credit: The People’s Forum

He lays blame at the feet of Western governments too, citing years of aid to Gaza that was diverted by Hamas to build terror infrastructure. Billions in funding — from the UN and foreign ministries — helped construct the tunnels, rockets, and arsenals used in the attacks. Worse still, Hamas embedded these within schools, hospitals, and homes, weaponizing civilians to provoke Israeli retaliation and win the PR war.

Denial and Double Standards

Murray highlights a dangerous instinct in Western discourse: the shift from confronting the horror of October 7 to focusing almost exclusively on Israel’s response. Even survivors of the attack, when visiting the UK, were treated as suspects rather than victims. A pair of young festival attendees were interrogated by British authorities, asked if they “planned to do in the UK what you’re doing in Gaza.”

This, he argues, reflects a broader failure of moral nerve. Rather than acknowledge that the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust had occurred, much of the West seemed to want to move on or even justify it.

The Enemy Loves Death — The West Must Choose Life

The ideological core of Murray’s argument lies in one significant contrast: Hamas and its allies love death, while the West, at its best, loves life. The former chants “We love death more than you love life.” The latter, in moments of fear, sings songs like Don’t Look Back in Anger. But what, Murray asks, is wrong with righteous anger in the face of barbarism?

In Gaza, he met Israeli soldiers. None relished their mission, but all understood its necessity. They weren’t fighting for conquest, but for survival — for the ability to live freely, to build families, to love and create. “Choose life,” one of Judaism’s oldest imperatives, becomes, in Murray’s telling, the moral backbone of the West.