Three years after the October 7 attacks on Israel, a Daily Wire opinion piece published this week argues that the anniversary has become a dividing line β not just over how to remember the violence, but over whether the West has passed or failed what the author calls “the moral leadership test of our time.” The article, headlined “People Want To Forget October 7. America Has To Remember,” opens with a blunt verdict: “This is the test of our time; we are failing.”
According to the Daily Wire, the attacks killed more than 1,200 Jews, including 46 Americans, and left more than 250 people taken hostage. The youngest hostage was nine months old; the oldest was 86. The piece notes that neither of those two saw their families again.
The Argument That October 7 ‘Worked’
The central and most contentious claim in the op-ed is that the attack achieved its strategic aims. Daily Wire writes that October 7 “was meant to break the status quo asunder,” targeting the Jews most sympathetic to Gazans and most liberal in their views. The piece argues the assault was also designed to unravel years of diplomatic progress under the Trump administration toward normalizing relations between Israel and Muslim-majority nations across the Middle East.
On that measure, the author contends, the strategy succeeded β pointing to a cascade of countries that have formally recognized a Palestinian state for the first time, naming Spain, France, Mexico, Portugal, Norway, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. “As an ally to Israel, the United States truly stands alone,” the piece states.
The article quotes the writer Douglas Murray’s line about that day β “Sometimes in life a flare goes up, and you get to see where everyone is standing” β and turns it into its own indictment: the flare, the author writes, helped those who hate Jews “discover new ways to find each other.”
Polling on American Views of Israel
The Daily Wire piece cites a striking swing in U.S. public opinion. Where a majority of Americans once held favorable views of Israel, the article says six in ten now view the country unfavorably, and the share holding “extremely unfavorable” views has nearly tripled to 28%. Those numbers, per the op-ed, include a majority of Republicans aged 18β49, 70% of Independents, and as high as 84% of Democrats in the same age bracket.
From that data, the author draws a sobering conclusion: disliking Israel is now “a solidly bipartisan position in America,” and β given the trajectory and where blame has been assigned over the Iran war β it may soon be bipartisan to hate it outright.
A ‘Smiling Face’ on an Old Hatred
The op-ed also takes aim at how antisemitism has rebranded itself for a younger generation. The author describes a “deep-seated inhuman hate” that has “learned the power of a smiling face” β arriving in athleisure, speaking the language of Ivy League colonialists with “eloquent charm,” and trading overt cruelty for messaging indistinguishable from influencer banter. It is, the piece argues, “a curated form of the oldest hatred,” tucked inside the instincts of the 21st-century Left. The line the author uses to capture the slipstream: “Come for the Medicare-for-All. Stay to learn which billionaires need to bleed.”
Elsewhere, the piece invokes a 2016 tweet from the late Norm Macdonald β a sarcastic hypothetical about backlash against peaceful Muslims after a hypothetical attack β to suggest many in the West responded to October 7 with a similar reflex, inverting the moral equation. The article also references a broader online environment where, it claims, prominent accounts tell millions of followers that America deserved 9/11, that Jews deserved October 7, that Hitler wasn’t a villain, and that another Holocaust might be a good thing. The author acknowledges that “may sound like exaggeration” but insists it isn’t.
The Closing Argument
The piece frames the October 7 attackers’ apparent revelry as “their celebration of the end of the world β a world they destroyed with every life they ended,” and says we live in that world now. Its final measure of America is whether the country can summon “the courage to do what is necessary even if the Jew haters at home and abroad shriek, even if the whole world hates us for it.”
The bottom line, in the author’s phrasing, is a choice between two impulses: “People want to forget. America has to remember.”
The piece arrives at a moment when the politics of the October 7 anniversary remain deeply contested β both in Washington, where debates over Israel policy have fractured coalitions in both parties, and internationally, where the wave of new Palestinian state recognitions has reshaped the diplomatic landscape the author describes. Whether the evolving American polling the op-ed cites represents a durable realignment or a wartime snapback is a question that will likely define the next phase of the debate.
What the Daily Wire op-ed makes clear is that, three years on, the argument over October 7 is no longer only about the day itself. It is about what the day revealed β about allies, adversaries, and, in the author’s telling, a West that has yet to decide what it is willing to defend.
Source: www.dailywire.com β https://www.dailywire.com/news/people-want-to-forget-october-7-america-has-to-remember