A poll conducted last year revealed a deeply unsettling reality: only one in four British Muslims believe that Hamas committed rapes and murders during the October 7, 2023 massacre in Israel. This is not a minor discrepancy. It is a crisis of truth and moral clarity. Why do so many in our society believe lies, even when the evidence is overwhelming?
I travelled to Israel as soon as I could following the October 7 attacks, driven by a need to see and hear the truth for myself. I interviewed survivors, spoke with families of the murdered and raped, walked through the scenes of horror, and embedded with the Israel Defence Forces in Gaza and on the Lebanese border. I did this because I knew what was coming: denial, distraction, and distortion.
On that day, 1,200 Israelis were slaughtered in cold blood. Another 250 were dragged into Gaza as hostages. The evidence of Hamas’s barbarity was captured not just by Israeli security forces, but by Hamas’s own body cameras and smartphones. And yet, in Britain, thousands marched in the streets, not to condemn the killers, but to celebrate them.
The first question is obvious: why did so many rush to defend the indefensible? The second is even more important: why does this persist?
The attack on October 7 was not a political statement or a military act. It was a massacre. It was the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Hamas’s objective was not to negotiate for a state or plead for peace. Their mission, as laid out in their founding charter, is the destruction of Israel and the annihilation of the Jewish people.
In 2005, Israel gave up Gaza. It uprooted its citizens and withdrew completely. The people of Gaza had a choice — they chose Hamas. And from that moment, Hamas began turning the Strip into a fortress of hate and terror. They murdered political opponents, silenced dissent, and embedded weapons in schools, mosques and hospitals — turning civilians into human shields by design.
Billions in international aid, including from Britain, flowed into Gaza. But instead of building hospitals and homes, Hamas built tunnels and rockets. Their leaders — like Ismail Haniyeh — live in luxury in Doha while the people of Gaza suffer under their rule.
Why is this narrative so often ignored or excused here in Britain?
Perhaps part of the answer lies in the ideological confusion that has gripped sections of the British public. In the rush to identify with the oppressed, too many have mistaken murderers for freedom fighters. They have ignored the brutal truth: that Hamas does not seek peace or co-existence. It seeks blood and war.
Some of those who chant “Free Palestine” from the streets of London mean well — they want a two-state solution, peace, dignity for Palestinians. But too many others shout slogans that echo Hamas propaganda. They wave flags of a terrorist organisation, not a liberation movement.
Hamas is a proscribed terrorist group in the United Kingdom, as it is in the United States, European Union, and elsewhere. To side with it is to stand with a death cult — one that slaughters civilians and trains its youth to glorify martyrdom.
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When 4,000 Hamas terrorists stormed into Israel, they weren’t targeting soldiers. They hunted down civilians — babies, elderly women, teenagers at a music festival. I spoke with survivors of the Nova festival. Their only crime was dancing. Many of them dreamed of peace. Some even worked for Palestinian causes. And yet, they were massacred.
The war that followed has been brutal. But it is a war Hamas wanted and prepared for. It is Hamas that embedded rocket launchers in nurseries and turned hospitals into command centres. Every civilian death in Gaza is a tragedy — one Hamas anticipated and exploited.
My new book confronts this uncomfortable truth: when a death cult attacks a democracy, why do so many in our society back the death cult?
This is not just a foreign policy debate. It is a moral crisis at the heart of Britain. And if we do not answer it, we risk surrendering our values — and our future — to those who cheer for tyranny, even as it burns.
