Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, the fearless duo behind hard-hitting documentaries like Not Evil Just Wrong and Mine Your Own Business, are set to shake up Washington D.C.’s cultural elite with their play ‘October 7’ landing at the Kennedy Center. This isn’t some sanitized Broadway fluff—it’s a raw, unfiltered reckoning with the Hamas terror attacks that slaughtered over 1,200 Israelis, including the brutal massacre at a music festival and the infamous kibbutz raids. Drawing from eyewitness testimonies and survivor accounts, the play strips away the propaganda veil, forcing audiences to confront the human cost of jihadist savagery without the usual media spin. For a venue like the Kennedy Center, historically a playground for progressive theater that often whitewashes Palestinian terrorism as resistance, this booking is a seismic event—like inviting a grizzly bear to a vegan potluck.
In the broader culture war, this production hits like a pressure-tested AR-15 round: precise, powerful, and impossible to ignore. McAleer and McElhinney have a track record of bucking censorship—remember how their climate skeptic play got blacklisted?—and ‘October 7’ arrives amid a surge of campus antisemitism and pro-Hamas riots that echo the very radicalism the attacks embodied. For the 2A community, the implications are crystal clear: this is a frontline dispatch from a war where soft power meets hard reality. Just as Hamas used AKs, RPGs, and paragliders to bypass Israel’s defenses on October 7, the playbook for terrorists worldwide thrives on disarmed populaces and elite denial. An armed citizenry isn’t just a check on tyranny; it’s the ultimate deterrent against the kind of hordes that overran those kibbutzim, where armed security made all the difference between survival and slaughter. Data from Israel’s own post-attack reviews underscores it: communities with robust civilian carry saw higher survival rates amid the chaos.
As D.C.’s theatergoers file in, expect backlash from the usual suspects—protests, cancellations, maybe even ADL pearl-clutching—but that’s the point. ‘October 7’ isn’t entertainment; it’s a wake-up call reminding 2A advocates why the right to keep and bear arms transcends borders. In a world where evil doesn’t RSVP, this play spotlights the stakes: free speech, self-defense, and the thin line between civilization and carnage. Grab tickets if you can—it’s pro-2A theater at its most visceral, proving that truth-tellers with a stage are as vital as patriots with a trigger.
