The last we heard from Piers Morgan, he was accusing the IDF of a war crime for killing civilian in Jabaliya in order to kill one Hamas commander. Jabaliya turned out to be a significant Hamas intelligence and command center in northern Gaza, where the tunnel systems built by Hamas with international aid money got destroyed and a trove of intel captured.

Morgan tried trotting out the same “collective punishment” argument with Douglas Murray a day ago, arguing that ordinary Gazans bear no responsibility for Hamas’ war. Murray has little patience with that argument as he argues with Morgan from the Gaza frontier, under rocket fire. When Morgan argues by quoting Barack Obama that Israel may be radicalizing the Palestinians by prosecuting a war against Hamas to its finish, Murray clearly can’t believe his ears.

“If you just follow the logic of what Barack Obama said,” Murray scoffs, “then you just shouldn’t do anything, if you’re Israel. You should just be attacked, and sit back and say Great, we’ll wait for the next one.” Murray then goes after Morgan’s assumption that a vast population of peace-seeking Gazans actually exists.

In 25 minutes, Murray utterly dismantles Morgan’s argument, as well as the arrogance of British commentators and politicians attempting to dictate terms to Israel. There is about five minutes of overlap between the two halves of this interview (via Power Line):

Most of the clarity about Gaza from Murray comes in the second video. The first part focuses more on the British reaction to the massacre, and perhaps that of the wider West as well. Murray talks about the “despicable quandary” of allowing terrorist leaders to reside in the UK and agitate for terror. “If you are calling for jihad,” Murray says, “you are calling for terrorism.” Murray and Morgan get into a debate over free speech, but the UK doesn’t have a guarantee of free speech. They police speech all the time, but Murray points out that they are policing it selectively, which Morgan admits, but then says there shouldn’t be restrictions on anti-Israeli protests, which more or less makes Murray’s point.

That leads to this exchange at the eight-minute mark:

MORGAN: You don’t honestly think they’re all pro-Hamas, these people [protesters in UK].

MURRAY: Well, I think that anyone who for instance chants things like ‘from the river to the sea’ is — is in fact what you described —

MORGAN: Yeah, but they’re not all doing that —

MURRAY — or is criminally ignorant. Oh, well, they are! There are masses of videos of them marching past Westminster Abbey last week saying exactly that. [crosstalk argument]

MURRAY: Well, here’s a challenge, Piers. If you decided to go on some kind of march, and in week one, you discovered that you had the BNP alongside, calling for instance for the murder of all black people. Would you not wonder whether or not you should go on week two? Would you not drop out by about week three? Id have thought so — I would.

MORGAN: That’s a good question, and … yes, I would.

MURRAY: Good. So we can tell something about the marchers.

Well, Murray can. Morgan continues to deny reality.

Don’t just assume that the title of the second video encompasses the entire discussion. Murray does rebuke Morgan for buying into the idea that the Gazans, and the Palestinians, are inclined at all toward peaceful co-existence. Murray goes on at length about how the Gazans had a golden opportunity in 2005, when Israel ended its occupation and forcibly removed 50,000 Israeli settlers, to turn the Strip into “Singapore,” as Murray says, especially with the flood of aid that followed. Instead, Gazans elected Hamas to run the territory and stood by them for 17 years of constant war and missile fire into Israel. (In fact, Murray has to duck some incoming fire momentarily in the interview.)

Murray and Morgan then get into an argument over the cheering crowds that greeted Hamas terrorists returning on October 7 with dead bodies and live hostages. Morgan sniffs that the videos only showed a “few hundred” Gazans celebrating, but Murray retorts that it didn’t show anyone objecting either. Besides, who does Morgan think were the target audience for all those GoPro videos? Hamas intended that as a political and morale booster for the Gazans, who have spent the last 17 years marinating in the Jew-hatred that the Hamas cult calls ‘education,’ largely funded by useful idiots in the West.

Murray makes several references to having watched those captured GoPro videos in the interview, and wrote a column for the New York Post about them and his tour of massacre sites as well. He argues that the West has edged into scrupulosity in lecturing the IDF on the particulars on warfare while giving a wide pass to Hamas atrocities, and he’s right:

The scale and catastrophe of what happened is still becoming clear.

Yet the world seems to have moved on.

Already the international media are focused not on the atrocities Hamas committed against Israel but on the response of Israel to the terrorists of Hamas.

Every day the New York Times and other papers give their views on how Israel should bring the war to a draw.

And every day there are protests across the world made up of people who are either evil or ignorant.

Israel isn’t ‘radicalizing’ anyone in this operation. Gaza has become a nest of genocidal radicals, and the only solution left to them is to destroy its command and control and force Gazans to reckon with their own choices. As Murray argues, that’s precisely what Britain and the West did with Germany and Japan. No one was arguing that Allied air strikes and ground operations in Germany were creating new Nazis, and Nazi Germany actually did have some anti-Nazi efforts before and during the war. Gaza has had no analogue to that dissent in the last 17 years, at all.

In short, or even at length, Murray rebuts practically every tongue-clucker in the West that turned a blind eye to Hamas’ 17-year rocket bombardment on Israeli civilian centers and numerous attacks culminating in the October 7 massacre, and who now wring their hands over “collective punishment.” This is not “punishment” — this is war, a war cheered by Gazans and conducted for nearly two decades by Hamas. The Israelis are putting an end to this war the same way that the Allies put an end to the Nazis — by defeating their enemy utterly.