Douglas Murray told Fox viewers on America’s Newsroom that the anniversary of October 7 should be a sober moment of truth for the West, not an excuse to pursue half measures that leave our enemies intact. He warned plainly that if the international community settles for a ceasefire that preserves Hamas’s power, it will amount to surrender — and that is exactly what some in the diplomatic class are proposing.
Israel marked the second anniversary of the October 7 massacre with memorials and rallies as talks about a ceasefire and hostage releases resumed in Egypt, mediated by regional and international actors. Those negotiations have produced hopeful press releases but no durable guarantees that Hamas will be dismantled, and the stakes could not be higher for Israeli security and regional stability.
Murray’s central point — which he has hammered repeatedly in columns and interviews — is uncompromising: the best outcome is the elimination of Hamas as a governing force in Gaza, because anything less guarantees another horror down the line. This is not warmongering; it is realism. The alternative is endless cycles of terror punctuated by weak ceasefires that reward brutality.
Enough of the moral equivocation from the institutions that cheered at the UN while Israeli victims were being denied justice. Murray has rightly called out the media and Western elites for their double standards and their rush to treat moral balance as if terrorists and their victims are interchangeable. America and its allies must stop treating security as a bargaining chip in theatrical displays of “even-handedness.”
The so-called peace plans floating in diplomatic circles, including proposals involving staged Israeli withdrawals or partial hostilities, are fantasies if they ignore Hamas’s capacity for violence and its ideological commitment to Israel’s destruction. Reports of multilateral talks and proposed frameworks make headlines, but the hard reality is that any plan which does not neutralize Hamas’s military and governing apparatus is a recipe for future catastrophe.
Conservatives who love liberty and value human life should stand unequivocally with Israel’s right to defend itself and demand that our diplomacy reflect that ironclad principle. We owe it to the victims of October 7, to the hostages still held, and to our own national security to back strategies that aim for decisive victory, not performative pauses. If America returns to the business of leadership, Hamas will find itself with nowhere left to hide.
Let no one pretend that compromise with terror is compassion; it is surrender dressed up as benevolence. On this anniversary we should honor the dead and the taken by refusing to repeat the mistakes of appeasement and by supporting policies that end the threat permanently. The choice is stark: stand for real victory or accept a future of recurring bloodshed — and if America abandons its principles now, history will judge us harshly.
