Three years ago today, Hamas terrorists poured across the border into Israel and murdered and raped men, women, and children in their homes, at a music festival, and in the streets. The victims were not soldiers on the battlefield; they were civilians at work, play and in their homes.
They raped women and then celebrated. They murdered infants. They dragged bound kidnapped hostages through the streets of Gaza while crowds cheered.
They filmed themselves doing it. That is not “resistance.” That is not a “dispute over land.” That is the unmasked face of evil.
This regime and the nation that sponsors them, Iran, have no place around the table of civilized nations that want to live in peace among other nations.
Iran sponsors this. Hamas executes it. The videos are the evidence. Civilized nations do not sit at the same table with people who record gang rapes and infant murders as propaganda. They isolate them, starve their war machine, and refuse to pretend that “both sides” share the same moral universe.
Palestinians were offered a state of their own. President Bill Clinton brokered it. Israel’s prime minister accepted the framework. Yasser Arafat walked away. That is not ancient history. It is the record. Every subsequent “peace process” that treats rejectionism as a bargaining tactic rather than a confession has failed for the same reason: one side wanted a state next to Israel; the other wanted a state instead of Israel. Oct. 7 was the latest proof.
It is equally grotesque that American Jews now face harassment, vandalism, and violence on campuses, in cities, and in public life as if this were 1930s Europe instead of the freest nation on earth. Synagogues need extra security. Students hide their Stars of David. Crowds chant for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state while administrators and politicians parse language so they do not have to name the hatred.
That is not “protest.” It is a moral collapse. A country that cannot distinguish between a democratic ally that was attacked and the terrorists who filmed the slaughter has lost its compass. Decency is not complicated: you do not celebrate the rape and murder of civilians. You do not excuse it with history lectures.
Do not wait for the political class, the networks, or the universities to recover their nerve. They will not lead us out of this. Many of them spent years softening language around Hamas, inflating “occupation” while ignoring charters that call for Jewish death and treating antisemitism as a branding problem instead of the evil that it is.
What this country needs is not another hashtag, social media meme or appeasement to the Socialist Left. It needs a grassroots movement of people who still love the founding principles — individual liberty, equal protection, that our rights come from a Creator of heaven and earth, not government, and the right to live in peace without being hunted for who you are. That is the durable source of moral clarity this moment requires.
Socialism, identity grievance, and the worship of power have marched through our institutions. They produce exactly the confusion we now see — elites who cannot say Hamas is evil without a footnote, campuses that treat Jewish students as the problem, and a public square that has forgotten that some acts place you outside the family of civilized nations.
Oct. 7 was a stark reminder of what unrestrained evil looks like when it no longer hides—when it is brazen, unapologetic, and proud of itself.
Our response cannot be managed decline, carefully managed language, or manufactured guilt. It must be a return to first principles: truth over narrative, courage over complacency, and a people who have not forgotten what makes America—and those who proudly call themselves Americans—different.
Kendall Qualls is a U.S. Army Veteran, businessman, husband of 40 years and father of five.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not represent an official position of Alpha News.
Kendall Qualls
Kendall Qualls is the President of TakeCharge, Minnesota which is an organization committed to supporting the notion that the promise of America works for everyone regardless of race or station in life. Mr. Qualls was a Republican candidate for Governor of Minnesota. Prior to his candidacy, he was a health care executive and served in the U.S. Army as an Artillery officer. Mr. Qualls has been married for 36 years and has five children.
