Strip Away the Glamor: October 7 Was Pure Ugliness
I am a proud Jewish New Yorker and a proud Zionist. I believe deeply in the dignity of cultures, the necessity of human rights, and the power of communities to build beauty from pain. Precisely because I hold those commitments, I am revolted by any narrative that transforms the Hamas atrocities of October 7 into a romantic revolutionary touchstone.
In its August 10, 2026, article on New York’s emerging SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) cultural scene, New York magazine describes how, in the months after October 7, protests, boycotts, and opinion writing developed into friendships, dinners, restaurants, reading series, and creative spaces. The article says that “out of that resistance, a cultural ecosystem started to bloom.” It later names October 7 and its “hellish aftermath” as one point at which this cultural movement reached critical mass.
The existence of a flourishing Arab, Muslim, Iranian, Palestinian, or broader SWANA culture in New York is not the problem. Cultural confidence is not the enemy. The danger lies in a narrative structure that allows October 7 to disappear as a massacre and reappear primarily as the opening chapter of cultural and political awakening.
How should we respond strategically?
Perhaps we could learn from strategies like the decades-long American campaign that transformed smoking from glamorous into grotesque. That transformation was not achieved by one clever advertisement or a flash-in-the-pan campaign during the 1980s. It required sustained cultural, scientific, legal, and political pressure.
In 1964, the Surgeon General issued the landmark report connecting smoking with cancer and chronic disease. Warning labels followed in 1965. Broadcast counteradvertising expanded in the late 1960s, and cigarette advertising disappeared from television and radio in 1971. The 1986 Surgeon General’s report established the dangers of secondhand smoke, while the 1988 report identified nicotine as addictive. The history of this campaign is important. The 1998 tobacco settlement created new resources for public education, and in 2000 the national Truth campaign directly challenged the industry’s manipulation of young people.
Over decades, the cigarette ceased to signify sophistication, freedom, and sexual confidence. It came to signify addiction, disease, manipulation, and death. The strategic victory was not merely persuading people that smoking was wrong. It was making the mythology surrounding smoking impossible to sustain.
That is the task before us regarding October 7. Every attempt to present that day as the birth of a noble resistance must be confronted with what it actually signifies, eventually even stated by the UN: the murder by Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists of roughly 1,200 people, the wounding of thousands, sexual violence, mass abduction, and the deliberate terrorizing of civilians.
An important note: In order to change this dangerous, emerging narrative, the strategic target cannot be Palestinian or Arab culture. It must be in recognizing, exposing, and rejecting the horrific and repulsive transformation of mass atrocity into a cultural origin story.
There is a parallel lesson in America’s gun violence epidemic. Culture war rhetoric routinely overwhelms practical evidence about suicide prevention. In 2024, according to the CDC, 27,593 Americans died by firearm suicide, more than seventy-five people every day. Secure storage and temporary separation from firearms during periods of crisis can save lives, yet these measures are too often obscured by political identity and absolutist slogans. According to the latest Department of Veterans Affairs report, 6,398 veterans died by suicide in 2023, the most recent year available. That equals approximately 17.5 veteran suicide deaths each day. Firearms were involved in 73.3 percent of those deaths.
Successful public strategy changes not only opinions, but associations. It separates culture from violence, dignity from death, and liberation from the murder of civilians. October 7 must never become glamorous, fashionable, or noble. We must patiently, relentlessly, and truthfully expose the ugliness of terror until no mythology can conceal it.
