You need to expand your thought process. Don't be just a follower as, unfortunately all the people being killed around the middle east. The people from Israel and Palestine are humans. It is the leaders who are deciding the fate of their own people regardless of the cost to them. Netanyhu doesn't want peace, or he will end up in the ICC and Hamas are to busy with there own agenda. Wake up Simon.
Yeah. The standard of posts around here has absolutely plummeted in the last 6-12 months. It’s no wonder most people can’t be bothered any more.
https://open.substack.com/pub/drewpavlou/p/the-world-after-october-7?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web Shattered Forever I was sitting down at home when I saw the first footage hit social media. Hamas fighters in black on the back of pick up trucks near Sderoton October 7th, Within minutes I saw the first photographs of corpses. The first belonged to a bunch of elderly Jewish grandparents, massacred while waiting at a bus stop in Southern Israel. I saw a lady who looked like my own yiayia lying twisted on the ground in a sickeningly unnatural pose, her skull torn open by a gunshot wound, her grey hair matted by blood. More and more footage hit Twitter. With virtually no censorship restrictions post-Elon, my entire feed was blanketed with live Hamas bodycam footage. I watched jihadist militants go door to door through kibbutzim, executing entire families. There were piles of dead Jews in tiny rooms painted with their own blood, having been herded into these makeshift death chambers like cattle before being shot. I saw dozens of corpses strewn in the dirt at the Nova music festival. Piles and piles of bodies twisted in the dust. Hamas fighters even executed a disabled, wheelchair-bound young girl with muscular dystrophy who had been attending the festival with her father. She could not hurt a fly and yet they executed her in cold blood. So I knew what was happening from the very start. I knew that this was an absolutely heinous massacre. I watched it unfold before me live. I knew exactly what Hamas did. And yet I watched my progressive friends celebrate. These people were my friends. I had known them for years; broken bread with them, attended class with them, gone to protests with them. They were completely normal people who would otherwise absolutely abhor violence in their day-to-day life. Yet their immediate reaction was joy. And I watched people I previously admired take to social media to celebrate. A young Australian progressive feminist leader and Rhodes Scholar named Yasmin Poole immediately posted: ‘‘Do you support decolonization as an abstract academic theory? Or as a tangible event?’’ She was an official spokesperson for the pro-Indigenous Voice campaign and she’d received international awards from the Martin Luther King Jr Center. Apparently she thought the massacre of hundreds of people our age at a music festival by terrorists constituted a great moment of inspiration. This was the general mood among progressives that day: almost delirious, giddy joy. Dozens upon dozens of progressive girls I knew from university took to Instagram to proclaim their allegiance to the ‘‘resistance.’’ A young Somali writer for Teen Vogue in the US wrote an ultra-viral post which taunted those outraged by the terror and horror: ‘‘What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.’’ Several university friends shared it to their Instagram stories that day. And I remember just sitting there and thinking about all this. Ruminating on this massive, world-historic betrayal, this irreversible rupture in my progressive worldview. I juxtaposed the images I had seen - the piles of corpses and bodies that I saw at the Nova music festival - with the gloating, the celebrations, the joy. The corpses of murdered grandmothers at the bus stop. The photographs of dead pet dogsexecuted by Hamas fighters in family homes and the charred corpses of people burned alive. In my mind I juxtaposed the glee that self-described progressive feminists like Yasmin Poole displayed with the footage I saw showing Hamas terrorists parading the shattered, half-naked body of Shani Louk through the streets of Gaza on the back of a pickup truck.1 Shani’s skull had been split open by a bullet wound; she was clearly dead. Her limbs had been broken and shattered at sickening angles. It was a macabre display, something that would instinctively repulse any normal human being on a very deep and profound level. Yet I watched dozens of joyous Palestinian men pile around the truck in celebration, some even leaning over the side to spit directly into the open wound on her skull. What I experienced on October 7 was horror. Pure, total cosmic horror. Like an unbearable nightmare. And yet somehow, having watched the same massacre, self-described progressive friends experienced something entirely different that day: joy. Pure, unadulterated bliss at the sight of mass murder and pack rape. And there was simply no way for me to reconcile the gulf between our reactions. Everything I thought I believed about the world shattered at once. If you had asked me for my stance prior to October 7, I would have probably called myself a soft Palestine supporter. I had even attended a pro-Palestine protest in 2021. Now I was being asked to sign onto mass murder, door-to-door executions, sickening pack rape performed by leering jihadists. This was the new purity test for progressive orthodoxy. It was not enough to simply support universal public healthcare - you had to sign onto Palestinian militants breaking Shani Louk’s limbs and spitting into a gaping bullet wound on her skull. Straight away, my politics changed forever. My entire worldview changed forever. My progressive friends insisted that this is what ‘‘decolonisation’’ looked like. Leaders in the Palestine movement made it clear that they wished to extend their theory of ‘‘decolonisation’’ to the entire West. Nasser Mashni - one of the top leaders in the Palestine movement in Australia - made it clear that he intended to target each and every ‘‘settler colony’’: Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada. Other Palestine activists in Australia also made it exceptionally clear at their rallies. One leader screamed: ‘‘Just like Israel, Australia does not have a right to exist.’’ Keiran Stewart Assheton (great name) of the Australian “Black People’s Union” posted a direct call to extend the October 7 attacks to the mass murder of white people in the West: ‘‘The myth of the ‘Innocent Israeli’ is as false and dangerous as the myth of the ‘innocent white woman.’’’ So these people showed us what they meant by decolonisation on October 7: race war massacres against people they perceived to be ‘‘white colonial settlers.’’ Then, they insisted that they would one day universalise these atrocities against Australia and every other Western country. I realised that these people wanted to kill me and my family, and that they would celebrate should my loved ones ever find themselves broken on the pavement at the hands of Islamist extremists in the name of ‘‘decolonisation.’’ Very well, then, I concluded. If this is what ‘‘decolonisation’’ looked like, I resolved to make myself into an utterly ****ing implacable foe against it, forever, until the day I died. The Atrocities I will never be able to get the horror out of my mind. The things they celebrated that day will haunt me forever. Palestinian men wearing civilian clothes filmed themselves attempting to behead a Thai migrant worker with a garden hoe while screaming “Allahu Akbar.’’ Hamas fighters then executed a random Tanzanian international student. They stomped on his corpse and took photographs stomping on his lifeless head. One Australian Hamas supporter publicly defended the execution of the Tanzanian on the grounds that it would ‘‘send a message to foreigners.” The New York Times then reported the grim news that first responders had found the corpses of multiple dead women ‘‘with their legs spread and underwear missing - some with their hands tied by rope and zipties.’’ One Arab-Israeli volunteer medic testified to finding the corpse of an executed Israeli woman with her hands tied behind her back and her clothes ripped off. One dead woman was found ‘‘tied to a tree, naked.’’ Other October 7 survivors testified to witnessing acts of extreme sexual violence involving the sexual mutilation of victims. A United Nations report found reasonable grounds to believe that at least some Hamas fighters raped the corpses of Israeli women on October 7. When I made a post condemning this horror, I received multiple replies gloating over the rapes: ‘‘October 7 was a blessing. Many Jewish girls received their first orgasms.’’ Later, a UN report would detail the sexual torture female Israeli hostages endured at the hands of Hamas. The constant stream of atrocities was simply relentless. A New York Times investigation into the October 7 massacre in Be’eri found the oldest victim was 88, and the youngest was less than a year old. Hamas even cut off the fingers of an 80 year old Jewish man before executing him. The body of a naked teenager was found dead in the rubble. They took babies hostage and posed with the captured infants like trophies while holding machine guns. Mother Adi Vital-Kaploun was executed in front of her three and four year old children. Hamas fighters then boobytrapped her corpse and hid it in her house - set to explode upon being encountered by first responders. Again, Hamas fighters took celebratory, gloating video footage with the infant captives. A neighbour testified that they shot one of the children in the leg, and that she saw the children ‘‘crawling and crying’’ after witnessing the execution of their mother. Hamas Strategy and Ideology What was the strategy here? The strategy behind otherwise senseless, soul-shattering mass murder? I think on one level Hamas truly believed they would destroy Israel on October 7. They were so ideologically committed to this insane idea that they held conferences in Gaza detailing plans for keeping Israeli Jewish engineers and doctors enslaved in a future Arab Palestinian ethno-state as “reparations” post the destruction of Israel: “Educated Jews and experts in the areas of medicine, engineering, technology, and civilian and military industry … should not be allowed to leave.” To this end, I think they hoped that the brutality and genocidal ferocity of their attack would simply terrorise the Perfidious Yahud into fleeing their homes and decamping to Brooklyn en masse. This was, of course, Nasrallah’s delusional ‘‘spiderweb’’ theory - the notion that with enough killing and bloodshed the Yahud would simply decide to give up and voluntarily submit to the sword. You still hear this delusional idea repeated frequently by Islamists all across the world, including by one woman at October 7 celebration rallies in Britain in 2025: ‘‘I think freedom will be achieved when the Israelis go back to where they were born, which is probably America, Poland, whatever.’’ Without any real knowledge or understanding of Israeli society - the fact, for instance, that more than half of Jewish Israelis descend not from Europe but from Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa which ethnically cleansed their families - all the jihadists had was the desperate hope that with enough rape and mass murder the Jews would give up and go to Brooklyn. So they tried terror. They tried total terror and horror. Security camera footage showed Hamas fighters stopping to methodically behead the corpses of murdered Jews outside a kibbutz on October 7. Stopping amid battle to methodically behead the corpses of murdered civilians makes no sense from a military perspective - it only makes sense if your entire strategy is predicated on terror. It’s something very few people in the West understand. Try to inhabit for a moment the moral universe and psychology of a Hamas soldier stopping mid-battle to methodically behead the corpses of murdered civilians. Try to inhabit the moral universe and psychology of the Hamas soldier who called his parents mid-massacre to inform them with great pride and joy that he had murdered Jews with his own hands: ‘‘Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!” Try to inhabit the moral universe of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh as he demanded the mass killing of his own people so as to harden the resolve of his soldiers: “The blood of the women, children and elderly … we are the ones who need this blood, so it awakens within us the revolutionary spirit, so it awakens within us resolve.” You can’t. It is simply utterly impossible for people like us to understand them. Which is why Western progressives simply ignore the actual ideology of Hamas and instead project their own abstract values onto them. Ismail Haniyeh must be fighting for public healthcare, transgender rights, third world liberation. There can be no queer liberation without a free Palestine, blah blah ****ing blah. All very nice stories that neglect to take into account the fact that he took to Arab television to demand the mass murder of Palestinian children so as to boost the morale of his own war fighters. I have never seen a Western leftist try for even a single second to come to grips with the true ideological insanity of Hamas. It is literally the politics of collective suicide. Jonestown politics. Some of the most extreme Western leftists at least understood this part - the insistence on personal and collective suicide. Feral communist DC Comics author Gretchen Felker-Martin responded to the massacre by declaring that she would support the right of Native Americans to form a Hamas-style terror organisation and hunt her down and brutally kill her. For her, this was the historical burden that all white people simply had to shoulder from birth as the descendants of colonizers. Original sin without any prospect of spiritual redemption other than by having your head sawn off by a jihadist. Civilisational Conservatism Witnessing all this, I personally decided that I opposed the concept of having my own head sawn off by Third Worldist jihadists in the name of race communism. This is just the stand that I chose to make: opposing the idea that everybody I love should have their heads sawn off by raving jihadists in the name of ‘‘decolonisation.’’ I still supported universal public healthcare, but if my own personal reluctance to be beheaded by jihadists made me anathema to the left, I was fine with that. Unlike drug-addled depressed communists like Gretchen, I loved life. So I didn’t yearn to bare my neck to the executioner’s blade as some kind of penance for having been born as a Westerner in a first world country. After October 7, I realised that deep down I was a philosophical conservative, simply because I liked my country, my culture and my civilisation. I didn’t hate myself and crave my own oblivion and destruction. I didn’t hate my parents and my family members and my loved ones. So I rejected the radical left’s deep yearning for personal and collective suicide and self-destruction. And I rejected their blood libel. October 7 taught me that all their decolonial talking points targeting countries like Australia as inherently ‘‘genocidal’’ settler colonies - it’s blood libel designed to prepare the road for terrorist violence in the West. It’s blood libel meant to justify terrorist violence to destroy liberalism and democracy and Western civilisation more broadly. Our culture, our way of life, our loved ones - they would heap everything we love onto the bonfire and destroy it if they could. Because they don’t share our morality. Nothing we love has any value to them. We saw what their ‘‘decolonisation’’ looked like and it was demonic. It’s ultimately as simple as this: if you spent the past 24 months cheering on jihadist pack rape and murder and mass killings while promising that your most ardent desire was to extend this bloodshed to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the US, all the ‘‘Western settler colonies’’ - we are ****ing enemies. It’s as simple as that. I refuse to go meekly to my grave and offer my neck to the executioner’s blade like Gretchen. I’m not going quietly. I choose Western civilisation over barbaric jihadism and suicidal Third Worldist race communism. And like the Israelis, I choose to fight rather than roll over and die. Drew Pavlou 9th October 2025
What I experienced on October 7 was horror. Pure, total cosmic horror. Like an unbearable nightmare. Truth
