Even Natasha Hausdorff missed Piers Morgan’s biggest error

When Natasha Hausdorff appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored last week to discuss Israel’s war against Hamas, the exchange quickly turned combative. Hausdorff raised concerns about the use of AI-generated imagery in early reports on an Israeli airstrike that allegedly killed several children in Gaza. Morgan cut her off, called her “despicable,” and went on to interrupt her dozens of times.

In response, Hausdorff wrote a piece in The Spectator titled Why can’t Piers Morgan handle the truth about Israel?, arguing that Morgan – and much of the Western media – are unwilling to confront the legal and moral facts about Israel’s conduct in the war. She accused him of censorship, emotional grandstanding, and a refusal to engage seriously with pro-Israel voices.

There’s truth in her critique. But her answer to the question posed in her title – why Morgan can’t handle the truth – falls short. She frames it as media bias and ego: “Defence of fake images in pursuit of a ‘good story’ is, of course, old ground for Morgan.”

But the reality goes deeper. Morgan’s problem isn’t just hostility or theatrical journalism. It’s moral evasion. And Hausdorff, in focusing on media bias, lets him off too easily.

Morgan isn’t just parroting anti-Israel talking points – he’s not a propagandist. He’s something else: a man deeply uncomfortable with what moral clarity in this war actually requires. He wants to believe there’s a way to conduct this war that doesn’t involve so much suffering. But the brutal truth is: there isn’t.

Hamas constructed Gaza to ensure that any meaningful attempt to dismantle its terror infrastructure will require maximum civilian suffering. The suffering isn’t a side effect – it’s the central feature of Hamas’s strategy: to embed among civilians, to ensure civilian casualties, and to weaponize those casualties as part of a global propaganda campaign aimed at weakening Israel’s international standing and forcing a halt to the fighting before Israel can achieve its goals.

Any honest conversation begins with this premise: if Hamas makes Israeli self-defense contingent upon Gazan civilian deaths, then either Israel needs to forgo adequate self-defense, or it has to accept those deaths as the price of achieving its own self-defense. The moral answer is that Israel may – and must – defend itself, even at this terrible cost.

Hausdorff accuses Morgan of past hypocrisy, performative outrage, and media malpractice. She’s not wrong. But her response fails to address the real tension. She dismisses Morgan as just another biased hack when what’s actually going on is a much deeper moral discomfort – a refusal to accept the logic of a war that Hamas has designed to be unwinnable without horror.

Morgan doesn’t want to live in a world where adequate self-defense necessitates widespread civilian death. So instead of confronting that fact, he denies it. He insists, in various ways, that there must be another way. But there isn’t. And by refusing to face this, he ends up implying – whether he means to or not – that Israel must not do what is necessary to defend itself.

That’s the deeper evasion. That’s the reason for the emotion, the outrage, the moral indignation aimed at Hausdorff when she questioned the presentation of a tragic story. He interprets doubt as cruelty because he cannot tolerate the moral complexity at the heart of this war.

If Hausdorff had addressed that truth, either during her conversation with Morgan or in her subsequent article, her position would have been far stronger. Instead, by treating Morgan like a propagandist rather than a man struggling with a hard truth, she misses the moment – and fails to articulate the moral clarity this debate so badly demands.