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In defence of Piers Morgan

Piers Morgan
 Getty Images/PA/Cate Warde
EXPLORE THE ISSUE 14 June 2025
issue 14 June 2025

‘What happened to Piers Morgan?’ asked a Spectator writer last weekend. The answer, according to slavishly pro-Israel commentator Jonathan Sacerdoti, is that I’m now ‘dark, degraded, dismal and debased’ – because I’ve become more critical of how Israel is prosecuting its war in Gaza. For a long time on my YouTube show Uncensored, I defended the country’s right to defend itself after 7 October attacks. But I now believe Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has crossed the ‘proportionality’ line with its recent food and aid blockade and relentless bombardment of civilians. Self-evidently, Israel is failing in its mission to eliminate Hamas and get the remaining hostages released. Its forces have been killing and starving a horrendous number of children as they go after the terrorists – and if finance minister Bezalel Smotrich is to be taken at his genocidal-sounding word, its new mission is to kick all Palestinians out of Gaza, which would constitute ethnic cleansing. Even former Israeli prime ministers now say it’s committing war crimes. When I defended Israel, I was subjected to a ferocious onslaught from pro-Palestinian trolls who branded me a ‘Zionist genocide-enabler’. Now, I’ve had an equally vile barrage of abuse and threats from pro-Israeli trolls branding me a ‘Jew-hating anti-Semite’. How can I be both?

Amid the pro-Israeli hate, I criticised Dawn French for offensively downplaying 7 October as just ‘a bad thing’ in a mocking video, and I described the insufferably tedious Greta Thunberg as an attention-seeking narcissist for preposterously claiming she’d been kidnapped by the IDF on her puerile selfie-yacht stunt. I was instantly attacked as an Israeli stooge by the same pro-Palestinian trolls who’d been lauding me and praised by the pro-Israeli trolls who’d been howling ‘Hamas lover!’ at me for days.

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