Interview with author Douglas Murray: 'Canada has disgraced itself'
Bestselling author of eight books, including The War on The West and The Madness of Crowds, Douglas Murray has just released On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization.
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In it, he paints a detailed picture of the minutes, and hours, of the devastation wrought in the Gaza envelope during the massacres of October 7, 2023, as well as the hours, days and months afterwards; the heroism of Israelis who defied orders, and fended off Hamas on their own; the weaponry IDF soldiers discovered in civilian Gazan homes; and the exclusive harrowing accounts of the massacre's survivors. As one of the first outside observers inside Gaza, he recounts the 'pitiful sight' and the 'utterly avoidable devastation' triggered by the Hamas-led attacks.
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Murray takes a microscope to the question of how modern Jew-hatred has reached unprecedented levels since wartime Europe. That includes the global campus demonstrations that sprung up almost immediately, which he describes as 'revolutionary cosplay,' their message communicated with 'bludgeoning' — subsequently thanked by a Hamas leader as the 'great student flood.' He follows the blood-soaked international money trail that has made Hamas leaders billionaires, and details the global web of Jihad supporters — the 'death cults' — as an imminent danger not just to Israel, but to civilization.
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Dave Gordon interviews Murray, a columnist for the New York Post and The Free Press, who has for decades filed stories from Middle East war zones, frequently appears on major broadcast channels, and recently had a much-discussed, tension-filled appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast.
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DM: Three things. One, was I wanted to get down as accurate an overview as possible, of what happened on October 7 in Israel, by collecting first hand testimony, and much more. The second thing was to give a firsthand account of the Israeli response to October 7, the war, and just get as much as possible up close, an account accurately and truthfully, in an era where much is written a lot about it untruthfully.
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And thirdly, to look at this question which haunted me throughout the last 18 months and indeed many years before, which was: why so much of the world finds it so hard to decide which side to be on, in a fight between a democracy like Israel, and a death cult like Hamas?
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DM: I think that much of Western policy making has just ended up in the realm of magical thinking in recent years. Put aside whether or not they deserve one, but there's this completely magical belief that the Palestinians have to get another state, and it will right some great historical wrong. This thinking goes, it would cause an outburst of peace and growth, not just in the Middle East, but in the wider world.
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I think they mucked up in Gaza so badly, by now it's clear that another Palestinian state would just be another terrorist proxy state, another Iranian front state, and that it would have done nothing to improve the lives of anyone in the region or the wider world.
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