Monday Choices Open Commentary

Douglas Murray at the Manhattan Institute’s Dinner Receiving the Alexander Hamilton Award last Monday

The transcript of his remarkable speech:

I think of all the people I’ve seen in Iraq, Ukraine, northern Nigeria—where the Christians are under such terrible and almost ignored persecution—and many other places. But I’ve never seen as much of the best and the worst of humankind as I have in the past six months in Israel and Gaza. I was here in New York on October 7. On October 8, I went down to Times Square, where there were men and women waving signs celebrating the massacre of the previous day. They weren’t calling for a two-state solution. They weren’t saying that we’d awfully like to do some borderline territory swaps in the West Bank. No, no. It was all celebrating the massacre.

and,

And I noted that Moshe had a bullet mark down the top of his helmet, and he hadn’t mentioned anything about it. I asked, “Where’s that from?” He explained that it was from October 7. Every Saturday, he would go down to see a friend of his—who was also in the media—in Kfar Aza, and he drove right into the middle of the firefight on the highway.

He got out and fought and killed three terrorists with his own gun that he carries with him, thank goodness. He fought for the next two days. And he doesn’t expect any applause from it or anything like that; he just did what he had to do.

plus,

And I think of a young woman called Adi Baruch. She was 23, and I was with her family in December in Judea and Samaria. She was a beautiful girl, a photographer—she decided that she had to go and reenlist after October 7. And she did. Her parents begged her not to, but she said that she had to. She was killed on her first day by a rocket that landed on her in Sderot. Her parents shared with me the note that she’d left for them, in case she didn’t make it. In it, she said, among other things, how sorry she was, but she said, “I wanted to live life, and now I want you to live it for me.”

and this,

But I compare this to what I’ve seen in the last six months. Actually, a number of my readers and viewers have said to me in the last six months, “You’ve changed, Douglas.” I sometimes ask them what it is they mean, and they say, “You’ve lost some of your pessimism.”

for this reason,

I spoke some months ago with an older guy in Tel Aviv who said that he’d fought in the 1967 and the 1973 wars. He said, “I owe the younger generation in Israel an apology. I used to say that they didn’t have it in them. . . they like partying. They like being on Instagram and TikTok.” And he said, “I owe them an apology. They’ve been magnificent.” And the thing is, perhaps it does require life to become serious again. Perhaps the students we see at these destroyed universities just need a dose of reality someday. I always pray that that day never comes to them, because it’ll be the biggest wake-up call anyone has ever had. But all I would say is that this country and Great Britain should be so lucky as to have a young generation like the one in Israel. They were weighed in the balance since October 7, and they’ve been found to be magnificent.

Read the whole thing.