Hamas livestreamed its massacre to the world – that’s public domain

On October 7th, when Hamas terrorists stormed into Israel, murdering more than 1,200 people in a single day — the single deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust –  they shot babies in their cribs. They raped women and dragged them through the streets. They burned families alive in safe rooms meant to protect them, and kidnapped hundreds into the tunnels of Gaza, 50 of whom are still there. And they filmed these atrocities as they committed them.

They livestreamed their footage to the world. They called the families of their victims to watch their loved ones’ murders in real time. They made no effort to hide what they were doing. They were not ashamed. No, it was their propaganda that they wanted the world to see.

I actually found out that someone I knew was murdered because I was sent a photo of his corpse on Telegram after I posted that he was missing.

Less than two years later — while hostages are still rotting in terror tunnels — the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) has decided this story is too risky to show, not because it is false (obviously, it is not), and not because it is inflammatory, but because the filmmakers did not obtain permission from the perpetrators of the massacre.

This is narashkeit.

These moral cowards pulled “The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue,” a documentary about Maj. Gen. Noam Tibon’s daring mission to save his family and others from the slaughter at Kibbutz Nahal Oz. The official reason: “lack of legal clearance” for Hamas-shot footage, along with unspecified concerns about “security” and “logistics.”

Let that sink in.

A major international film festival is effectively saying: unless the murderers sign a waiver, the massacre cannot be seen.

My eyes are rolling so far back in my head I may swallow them.

As comedian and commentator Benji Lovitt put it:

The Toronto International Film Festival has canceled the screening of an October 7th documentary because the filmmakers did not receive permission from the Hamas terrorists whose clips are in the film. Imagine the Nuremberg Trials refusing Nazi footage because they didn’t get Goebbels to sign a waiver.

The comparison is brutally apt. The Allied forces did not stop the Nuremberg Trials to get a Nazi propaganda minister’s signature. They used the footage as evidence — not because they condoned it, but because the world needed to see the truth with its own eyes.

Film festivals have shown films that use footage from Nazis, from ISIS, from warlords and death squads across the globe. No one demanded copyright clearance from Osama bin Laden’s estate. No one sought permission from the Khmer Rouge.

So why now? Why here? Why this story?

The answer is as uncomfortable as it is obvious: Jewish suffering has become politically inconvenient.

In a cultural moment where victimhood is currency, Jews are too often cast as the “wrong” kind of victims — and their murderers, the “right” kind of cause.

Film festivals like TIFF don’t just curate art. They curate memory. By refusing to show this film, they are telling the world that the testimony of October 7 is conditional — that the truth of a massacre can be blocked by paperwork, or by the political discomfort of seeing Jews as prey rather than predator.

This is not about clearance. This is about fear. Fear of protests, fear of disruption, fear of the headlines that might follow. And — I believe — fear that folks will also have to reckon with Jewish trauma and suffering.

And so TIFF has chosen the easy path: remove the film, issue a technical-sounding statement, and hope the outrage burns out faster than the news cycle.

Let’s be honest: TIFF does not need Hamas’s approval. The only permission they are seeking is from the cultural arbiters who will punish them for telling the story plainly: for showing Jews bleeding and broken at the hands of those who have been awarded the label, “resistance fighters.”

This is not courage. This is cowardice.

The survivors of October 7th do not need TIFF to validate their truth. The families of the dead do not need a red carpet. But the world does need to see what happened — unvarnished, unblurred, unedited by the sensitivities of the comfortable.

Hamas terrorists filmed their crimes for the world to see. They have continued to release horrific propaganda videos as well, in the long months since that day. If the Nuremberg Trials didn’t need Goebbels’s permission, TIFF doesn’t need that of Hamas. But TIFF’s decision is to look away — and to ask the rest of us to do the same.