By Kevin D. Freeman, D.Sc. (h.c.), CFA | October 7, 2026
Three years ago this morning, the world woke to the news that Hamas terrorists had broken through the border fence from Gaza into southern Israel. Nearly 1,200 people were murdered and 251 were taken hostage. At the Nova music festival near Re’im alone, 364 people who had gathered to dance were hunted down and killed. It was, as many leaders said at the time, the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
Today we remember them. We remember the families in Be’eri and Kfar Aza. We remember the grandparents dragged into Gaza and the children who watched their parents die. And we remember that the last of the hostages did not come home until this past January, when the remains of Israeli police officer Ran Gvili, killed confronting the terrorists near Kibbutz Alumim, were finally recovered after 843 days. The Hostage Forum described him in six words: “First to go in; last to return.”
Remembrance is not only grief. It is also a duty to tell the truth about what happened and why. In my new book, The Four Horsemen of the American Apocalypse, I describe four adversarial forces working, separately and together, against America and the civilization we share with our allies. October 7 is one of the clearest places in modern history to see all four riding at once.
The Green Horse: the obvious rider
The Green Horse is Islamist supremacism, and there is nothing subtle about its role here. Hamas never hid what it is. Its own 1988 charter states plainly that it is “one of the wings of Moslem Brotherhood in Palestine.” In the book I trace how the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, became a global movement once the Nixon-era petrodollar arrangement let Saudi money fund mosques, madrassas, and ideology around the world. Hamas draws on that same infrastructure.
October 7 was not “resistance.” Many of the terrorists wore body cameras with the explicit goal of documenting their atrocities. They wanted the world to see. That is what the theology of conquest looks like when it stops pretending.
The Red Horse: stoking the fire from a distance
The Red Horse is Communism, and today that means the Chinese Communist Party. It didn’t send fighters across the fence. It didn’t need to. Its role is to take a tragedy and turn it into division.
This is an old playbook. Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to defect from the Soviet Bloc, described from the inside how the KGB under Yuri Andropov deliberately revived anti-Semitism as a weapon against America and Israel. According to Pacepa, the KGB spread Arabic translations of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion across the Muslim world, while the Soviet Union backed Palestinian terror networks. Beijing has taken that playbook and industrialized it for the digital age.
Others have documented this too. In September 2025, Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies reported that China uses state media and covert cyber operations to push anti-Israel and antisemitic narratives inside the United States, and that it exploited the campus protests after October 7 to deepen American divisions. As INSS researcher Ofir Dayan put it, “China and its proxies play a significant role in the current wave of antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment in the United States.” Israel is collateral damage. The real target is us.
Follow the money and you find the same thing. In August 2023, two months before the attack, The New York Times reported that a network of groups tied to Neville Roy Singham, an American tech mogul based in Shanghai, was mixing progressive advocacy with Chinese government talking points. In the immediate aftermath of October 7, a coalition called “Shut It Down for Palestine” formed to disrupt American institutions seen as supportive of Israel. A July 2025 report from George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, drawing on earlier research by the Network Contagion Research Institute, describes three of its core conveners, the People’s Forum, the ANSWER Coalition, and the International People’s Assembly, as “financially, ideologically, and organizationally connected to Singham and Evans” (Jodie Evans, his wife and a Code Pink co-founder). The report concludes that “the infrastructure surrounding their activism reveals deeper strategic intent.”
In the book I put it this way: “The question worth asking is not only what you believe about Israel. It is who benefits from the division your belief is producing.” The Red Horse doesn’t need Americans to become anti-Semites. It only needs us to stop trusting each other.
The Blue Horse: an old lie in new respectability
The Blue Horse is globalist despotism, the world of unelected international institutions that speak the language of human rights while serving very different ends. No institution has done more to make hostility to the Jewish state respectable than the United Nations.
On November 10, 1975, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” The vote was 72 in favor, 35 against, with 32 abstentions. Arab states sponsored it, and the Soviet bloc supplied the votes: Red and Green, working together, just as Pacepa described. Israel’s ambassador, Chaim Herzog, tore the resolution in half at the podium. It took until 1991 for the General Assembly to revoke it.
The lie never died. After October 7, the UN’s own investigators found that nine employees of UNRWA, the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees, “may have been involved” in the attack. And now the old slogan is back. Just three days ago, on October 4, Britain’s Green Party voted 1,022 to 813 to adopt a “Zionism is racism” policy, declaring that Zionism will be “treated as any other form of racism.” Isaac Herzog, now Israel’s president and Chaim Herzog’s son, answered: “Those who claim the antisemitic lie that ‘Zionism is racism’ deliberately endanger Jews and Israelis everywhere.” Days before the third anniversary of the massacre, a Western political party revived a Soviet-era UN resolution. That is how the Blue Horse works. It takes a lie, launders it through institutions, and hands it back to us as respectable opinion.
The Yellow Horse: the cowards and the useful fools
The Yellow Horse is the one I ask readers to sit with, because it is us. Yellow is the color of cowardice. In the book I describe America’s traitors, cowards, and fools: people who enable the other three horsemen for money, for comfort, or simply to avoid conflict.
After October 7 we saw the Yellow Horse everywhere. The presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT were asked before Congress whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their codes of conduct. None gave a simple yes. Their answers turned on “context.” Executives and pastors who will comment on almost anything went quiet. Many ordinary people knew what they had seen with their own eyes but were afraid to say it, because the crowd was moving the other way.
Then there are the useful fools. Consider the “Queers for Palestine” banners. In February 2016, Hamas executed one of its own senior commanders, Mahmoud Ishtiwi, after accusing him of “moral turpitude,” widely understood as code for homosexuality. Marching for Hamas under a rainbow flag makes no sense. It only makes sense as a narrative someone else wrote for you. That is what a useful fool is.
The Yellow Horse doesn’t ride on only one side, either. Some on the right have been pulled into conspiracy theories and contempt for Jews by the same algorithms. The Red Horse doesn’t care which seam splits, as long as something does. As I write in the book: “If younger conservatives and older conservatives are fighting about Israel, they are not fighting the CCP.”
The Charlie Kirk view
My friend Charlie Kirk understood all of this. My book is dedicated to him. It was Charlie who framed our civilizational struggle as a Red-Green axis, and when I urged adding the Blue and Yellow horses, he agreed.
Charlie loved Israel and the Jewish people. In a private letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu dated May 2, 2025, made public after Charlie’s death, he wrote that “everything written here is from a place of deep love for Israel and the Jewish people,” and warned that “Israel is losing support even in conservative circles.” He called that a five-alarm fire.
Charlie also believed it is perfectly acceptable to criticize the Israeli government. On Megyn Kelly’s show in August 2025, he observed that he sometimes had less freedom to criticize the Israeli government online “than actual Israelis do.” He was right. Israelis argue about their government in the Knesset, in the press, and in the streets every week. That is what free people do.
That is the view I share, and it is the heart of what I want to say today. You can disagree with Israel’s government. You can question its policies, its leaders, and American foreign aid. None of that excuses October 7. No policy dispute justifies the murder of families in their homes, the rape of women, the burning of homes with families inside, or the kidnapping of grandmothers. Anyone who answers “October 7” with “yes, but” has stopped thinking for themselves and started reciting someone else’s script.
What remembrance asks of us
The Yellow Horse is the one horseman we can defeat ourselves, because the choice is ours. Cowardice is not a permanent condition. Here is what remembrance asks of us today:
- Say what happened. Plainly and without qualification. Atrocities that go unnamed get rewritten.
- Ask who benefits. When an outrage spreads faster than the facts, ask whose interests the division serves.
- Refuse the recycled lie. “Zionism is racism” was a Soviet-era slogan in 1975. It hasn’t improved with age.
- Keep the distinction Charlie kept. Criticizing a government is fair game. Excusing terror never is.
- Recover the history. A generation that knows what the KGB, the Brotherhood, and the UN have done is much harder to fool.
Light a candle tonight. Say a prayer for the families who still have an empty chair at the table. And then choose courage, because the horsemen are counting on us not to.
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