It seems like only yesterday, but it was in fact three years ago when David Adler rang me on that dreadful Saturday afternoon.
David was, of course, the head and founder of the Australian Jewish Association, now run by the very talented Robert Gregory.
David and I had been friends for several years, and he was a regular contributor to this magazine. So, it wasn’t unusual for me to get a text or a phone call from him on a Saturday, the day before my live TV show Outsiders on News24.
But this day was very different.
What had begun as shock at the first reports coming in from Israel about some kind of shootings and kidnappings at a music festival had become, over several hours, the chilling realisation as to what was occurring: the worst massacre in modern history, October 7.
I can still remember the shiver that ran down my spine that Saturday afternoon. It was a lovely sunny day, when David said to me on, I think it was the second or third call, ‘Rowan, I’ve got a really, really bad feeling about this.’
During a subsequent call, it was clear he was fighting back the tears.
But David came into the Outsiders studio in Ryde on the Sunday morning, composed but traumatised, as always, as he struggled to try and relay and comprehend to our viewers the scale of the events as we understood them at the time. I doubt David had slept a wink.
October 7 exposed, for those with eyes to see and minds to think for themselves, the utter depravity of the radical Islamist anti-Zionist so-called ‘political cause’.
The other day I was looking back through my texts from David. One text that I could never have imagined in my wildest nightmares sums up the horror of October 7: ‘Beheaded babies have been found in a kibbutz.’
Let me be crystal, crystal clear.
There is no political cause on the planet that justifies the level of evil, sadistic depravity that took place that day. None. It shouldn’t need saying, but it does need saying because the sinister moral relativism of the Left has allowed Islamists, radical Palestinian supporters, neo-Marxists, and other ratbags and scumbags of the Left to put forward some kind of sick and perverted rationalisation for that horrific crime, summed up in the fatuous comment ‘hurt people hurt people’.
No. Sorry. Savages behave savagely … is how I would put it.
The moment you seek to justify in any shape or form or even show a skerrick of sympathy for the vile monsters who plotted and carried out that orgy of pure evil you have lost any credibility, let alone any sense of morality.
As I said the day after October 7, and have repeated many times since, every single individual responsible for that pogrom must be brought to justice, and either be killed or imprisoned for life.
There was, and is, only one course of action that the Israeli government could pursue, in my opinion, and that is precisely what they have done: to rescue the hostages and eradicate Hamas. Full stop. And as for the Americans? The only acceptable response, in my opinion, was to destroy the Islamist regime in Tehran that has been sponsoring Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and its other terrorist proxies for decades.
Three years on, where are we? Hamas has largely, but not yet entirely, been wiped out. That task needs to be completed. Much of Gaza is rubble, but the blame for that rests squarely on the shoulders of Hamas.
Back in 2005, the Israelis handed sovereignty of Gaza over to the Palestinian authorities as a precursor to further land-for-peace deals. Even then I personally thought they were nuts to do so. In the process, some eight or nine thousand Israelis were forcibly removed from their own homes to give the Palestinians what they craved: a Palestinian Gaza free of Jews.
Look what they did with it, and with the billions of dollars in aid that came from the taxpayers of the West.
Did they build a free and prosperous Gaza, with its own market economy and culturally enriching institutions? No. After first literally smashing to pieces the Israeli-built glasshouses and market gardens of Gaza that had been the Gazans’ economic bedrock, Hamas built, we now know, a society that to all intents and purposes, from the education system to the construction of a vast underground network of tunnels, to the purchase of ammunition and weapons, was ultimately geared to and dedicated to the bloodshed, terror, and murder of October 7.
Pay-for-slay was one such program, where Hamas rewards murderers of Jews with money and other luxuries, as we reported in The Spectator Australia and on Outsiders, in certain instances, via Australian tax dollars. Indeed, thanks to the constant Israel-bashing from the socialists and globalists of the United Nations and mealy-mouthed leftist Western governments, the putrid Hamas government was not only tolerated but arguably encouraged in its vile anti-Zionist, anti-Israel hatred, and ideological pursuit.
Partly thanks to that article for the Speccie and his appearances on Outsiders, David Adler, by the way, with the help of Pauline Hanson and others, managed to convince Foreign Minister Julie Bishop to cancel ten million per year of your tax dollars going to UNRWA, the UN body that employed numerous individuals subsequently linked to Hamas. Penny Wong, shamefully, on becoming Foreign Minister in the Albanese government then promptly restored and even increased that amount.
But what none of us foresaw was the disgusting reactions to October 7, starting that very next night with this appalling and disgusting display from the western suburbs of Sydney. First the fireworks… Then a horror show in Lakemba. And from there it seems things only got worse.
Cover by Sarah Dudley, illustration by Ben Davis
The disgusting scenes the next night on the steps of the Opera House, described on the cover of The Spectator Australia as a pogrom at the opera, where the only person the police were interested in stopping was a man with an Israeli flag, and where pictures of Australians screaming F-k the Jews were beamed all around the world.
And then, in no particular order, we got scenes at Sydney Uni where Randa Abdel-Fattah led a protest where children chanted ‘from the river to the sea’, and ‘intifada, intifada’. We got Grace Tame going one step further and screeching the repugnant slogan: ‘From Gadigal to Gaza, globalise the intifada!’
Randa Abdel-Fattah, meanwhile, is currently touting her book and her repugnant views around Ireland, where she has declared that antisemitism is not her concern because it’s a problem for white people, or some such drivel. Penny Wong, last week, popped up at the UN again this week and as usual, spouting what appears to be utter garbage about Israel and the West Bank, as Natasha Hausdorff bravely pointed out at the United Nations last week.
Natasha Hausdorff, United Nations Watch, skewers the world leaders, Australia's Foreign Minister, Penny Wong lied when she said "more than 15,000 children were driven from their homes in the west bank."
When will Penny Wong appologise? @rowandean
Outsiders UN pic.twitter.com/7yN230ptFg— Timjbo ?? (@TimjboAU) October 4, 2026
We’ve had a Clayton’s Royal Commission into antisemitism and social cohesion that seems to have largely managed to ignore the obvious headline act known politely as ‘radical Islam’. We’ve had the Albanese government fatuously ‘recognising’ the non-existent state of Palestine. We’ve had the disgraceful Sydney Harbour Bridge march, a national day of shame for all involved, in my opinion. We’ve had any number of outrageous antisemitic attacks on synagogues, cars, shops, and of course, the pure unadulterated evil of the Bondi Beach massacre, the first anniversary of which is only a couple of months away.
Opera House. Sydney Harbour Bridge. Bondi Beach. Three of Australia’s most iconic locations sullied and stained by the repulsive actions of those who have chosen to show some level of moral support, directly or indirectly, with the barbarians and savages of October 7.
I spoke again this week to David Adler on the phone. On a different number. Because David now lives in Israel. After all the death threats and vile abuse he and his wife endured after October 7, merely for speaking up against the rise in antisemitism and the radical Islam, David feels safer in Israel than he does in Australia.
We must never forget the true horror of October 7, the savagery and the depravity. And never, ever, allow anyone to try and justify that perversion and orgy of sexual violence into some kind of political resistance. It was sick. It was evil.
David deserves his peaceful retirement. But here is just a reminder of a few of his cover stories and articles, going back nearly ten years, for The Spectator Australia. Read them and be amazed at just how prescient his columns always were.
