546. The Death Cult That Shook the World | Douglas Murray

Summary

Podcast Summary: "The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast" – Episode 546: "The Death Cult That Shook the World" with Douglas Murray

Release Date: May 12, 2025

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Introduction

In Episode 546 of "The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast," Dr. Jordan Peterson engages in a profound conversation with Douglas Murray, author of Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization. The discussion delves into the catastrophic events of October 7th, when Hamas launched a devastating attack on Israel, and explores the broader implications for understanding good and evil, the role of universities in shaping societal values, and the resilience of Israeli society amidst unprecedented challenges.

Key Events of October 7th

The episode opens with Douglas Murray recounting the harrowing details of October 7th—the day Hamas and allied jihadist groups orchestrated a massive invasion into Israel:

Douglas Murray [00:00]: "The billions of dollars that went into Gaza were largely used by Hamas leaders to enrich themselves to build an incredibly elaborate terrorist infrastructure throughout Gaza."

Murray describes how over 4,000 terrorists breached Israeli defenses early in the morning, exploiting weaknesses in the Israeli security apparatus. Despite Israel's reputed invulnerability, the attackers employed sophisticated tactics, including breaking down fences, infiltrating communities, and utilizing tunnels for strategic advantages.

Douglas Murray [03:45]: "What happened was that about 4,000 or more terrorists invaded Israel in the early morning... They managed to do the invasion not just by land, but by sea and also by air in hang gliders."

The attack resulted in the tragic loss of 1,200 Israeli lives, with thousands more injured and 250 taken hostage—a scenario Murray equates to the loss of 44,000 Americans had the United States faced a similar assault.

Analysis of Security Failures

Murray critiques the failure of the Israeli security system, which had long been perceived as impenetrable. He attributes this lapse to overconfidence in existing defenses and underestimation of Hamas's capabilities and intentions.

Douglas Murray [05:27]: "Impossible to catch by surprise."

He emphasizes that Hamas's investment in underground tunnels and their leadership's malevolent intentions rendered previous assumptions about their complacency and corruption fundamentally flawed.

Understanding Evil and Death Cults

A central theme of the conversation is the concept of "death cults"—groups that not only seek the destruction of their enemies but also glorify death itself. Murray argues that Hamas exemplifies such a cult, driven by a theological framework that venerates death and suffering.

Douglas Murray [08:50]: "An army that fights by the laws of war... encounters an army that not just desires death for its enemy, but desires death for the people it purports to govern."

Peterson and Murray explore the theological and psychological underpinnings of evil, discussing how certain ideological frameworks can foster deep-seated malevolence and sadism.

Jordan Peterson [55:49]: "You need to cover a story for your sadism... combining the worst possible sin with the worst possible action."

The Role of Universities and Western Society

The podcast critically examines the role of Western universities in shaping narratives that dismiss or downplay the existence of malevolence. Murray contends that academic institutions perpetuate an "oppressor-victim" paradigm, which fosters guilt without avenues for redemption, thereby enabling the rise of extremist ideologies.

Douglas Murray [32:54]: "He congratulated the Western students for joining the anti-colonial struggle... but that's a detail."

Both speakers argue that this academic indoctrination contributes to a societal inability to recognize and confront genuine evil, leading to widespread naivety and vulnerability.

Psychological and Social Implications

Peterson and Murray discuss the psychological impact of these societal narratives, highlighting how the suppression of recognition of evil fosters environments where malevolent groups can thrive. They draw parallels to historical examples, such as Nazi Germany and Soviet Communism, to illustrate how denial and projection mechanisms can distort collective consciousness.

Jordan Peterson [80:26]: "There's an immaturity and self-centeredness about psychopathy that's probably intrinsic..."

Resilience and Hope in Israeli Society

Amidst the bleakness, the conversation shifts to the resilience and heroic actions of Israeli citizens and the Defense Forces (IDF). Murray highlights numerous instances of bravery and solidarity, showcasing how Israeli society has rallied in the face of existential threats.

Douglas Murray [11:53]: "More than 1200 Israelis were dead... but also, of course, the failure of much of the security apparatus in Israel."

He recounts stories of individuals like Nimrod, who armed himself and fought back against the terrorists, embodying the spirit of resistance and survival.

Theological Reflections on Good and Evil

The episode delves into theological reflections on the existence of good and evil, drawing from biblical narratives such as Cain and Abel to illustrate the destructive potential of unresolved resentment and bitterness.

Jordan Peterson [73:24]: "Cain's descendants are genocidal and then comes the flood... the stripping away of the heroes leaves a vacuum."

Murray agrees, positing that without a moral framework that emphasizes the sanctity of life, societies become susceptible to chaos and destruction.

Conclusion: The Path Forward

Peterson and Murray conclude with an optimistic yet cautious outlook. They assert that acknowledging the existence of genuine evil is crucial for developing effective defenses against it. The dialogue emphasizes the importance of upholding values that celebrate life and resilience, as exemplified by Israeli society's response to the October 7th attacks.

Douglas Murray [85:30]: "People are being taught culpability with no means of getting rid of it... but here, you have a means."

They advocate for a return to foundational values that prioritize life, community, and moral responsibility as antidotes to the pervasive threats posed by death cults and extremist ideologies.

Notable Quotes

• Douglas Murray [05:27]: "Impossible to catch by surprise."
• Douglas Murray [11:53]: "More than 1200 Israelis were dead... but also, of course, the failure of much of the security apparatus in Israel."
• Jordan Peterson [55:49]: "You need to cover a story for your sadism... combining the worst possible sin with the worst possible action."
• Jordan Peterson [73:24]: "Cain's descendants are genocidal and then comes the flood... the stripping away of the heroes leaves a vacuum."

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This episode offers a deep and critical examination of the intersection between geopolitical conflicts, ideological frameworks, and societal values. Through the insightful dialogue between Dr. Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray, listeners gain a comprehensive understanding of the complexities surrounding the October 7th attacks and the broader implications for Western civilization and the future of global societies.

Transcript

[Douglas Murray]

The billions of dollars that went into Gaza were largely used by Hamas leaders to enrich themselves to build an incredibly elaborate terrorist infrastructure throughout Gaza. A misconception was Hamas leadership were happy with just being corrupt.

[Jordan Peterson]

The terrible hand of Iran is behind Hamas and Hezbollah. Iran has absolutely no compunctions about sacrificing every single Palestinian to the cause. What possible response could Israel have except.

[Douglas Murray]

To roll over and what submit that's not an option. An army that fights by the laws of war, which the IDF does, the civilized army seeks to minimize the civilian casualties. When an army like that encounters an army that not just desires death for its enemy, but desires death for the people it purports to govern. This thing of the ecstasy in bringing death. It's a death cult. A cult that literally worships death.

[Jordan Peterson]

Foreign hey everybody. So I'm talking today to Douglas Murray, who just wrote this book on democracies and death cults, Israel and the future of civilization. That's this. We basically walk through the book chapter by chapter. It's relatively short book, although it doesn't lack in intensity. What happened October 7th when Hamas invaded Israel. What I saw Douglass account of his sojourn through Israel in the aftermath of the catastrophe. How the world turned. We discussed the protests primarily originating on university campuses, much to their eternal shame. The disconnect, the fact that the propaganda exercise and what would you say the Zeitgeist of the west was such so that Israel was demonized almost immediately after the attack for daring to defend itself. And then Douglass's conclusion from defeat into victory? Well, that's where the conversation got a little bit more theological possibly. And it inevitability when talking about the existence of good and evil. We discussed Douglass's observations that the Israelis have been very successful at pushing forward a truly pro life, pro abundance ethos. And the consequence for their thriving, for their resilience in the face of really insuperable opposition. And the meaning of that for hope not only in Israel, but in the west in general. And a hope we most desperately need in these strangest of all times. Join us for that. So Mr. Murray, I read your book on democracies and death cults, Israel and the future of civilization. Yeah, it's pretty rough read in like five different dimensions. It's brutal and unnerving and like terribly relevant and not merely merely because of the situation in Israel. So I think what we should do first is I'm going to ask you questions about each chapter. It's a short book. There's five chapters. It starts with what happened. And there's questions everyone has. How did the Israeli security forces miss this? How could something like this happen? What did happen? Who, who was responsible? So let's start by laying that out. What happened on October 7?

[Douglas Murray]

What happened was that about 4,000 or more terrorists invaded Israel in the early morning. The Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other jihadist groups in Gaza started firing hundreds and hundreds of rockets at about 6:30 in the morning, almost exactly 6:30 in the morning. So air raid sirens went off across the country, but then something. And sadly that's kind of usual in Israel. It's quite common to have air raid sirens, particularly in the south. Has been for 20 years. What became clear was very unusual was that across multiple parts of the Gaza Israel border, thousands of terrorists broke in. They broke down the fences, they broke down. They went to the checkpoints where Gazan workers would come through each day and where aid lorries and indeed commerce. They went to those crossings as well, attacked the soldiers, overwhelmed them. In quite a lot of places. It was a religious holiday. It's the holiday of Simchat Torah. And so a lot of people were at home with their families. It was 50 years to the day since the Yom Kippur War, when Israel's Arab neighbors invaded in a surprise attack as well. So you might say, well, how come it's a surprise? That was one of the things. As soon as I got to Israel straight after the seventh, one of the things I was trying to find out was what the hell went wrong. Because the Israelis have always had, certainly since 1973, a sort of invulnerability. It's not true, of course, but they were seen to be invulnerable by many of their neighbors.

[Jordan Peterson]

Certainly impossible to catch by surprise.

[Douglas Murray]

Impossible to catch by surprise. So what I call the founderization of Israel, the sort of idea that it's eyes in the sky everywhere, nothing that can be done that could surprise them. And that wasn't the case. Massive amounts of the security apparatus of Israel failed. Hamas were also very, very clever. They'd done a lot of reconnaissance using, sadly, Gazan workers in Israel to do the reconnaissance. It has to be said, in the months and years ahead of the seventh, they knew how to take down things like communications, they knew how to take down the security apparatus at the border. And by the time that hundreds and then thousands of people were flooding into Israel, invading, they were going community by community through the south, village by village. They're called kibbutz. They're small communities of sometimes a few hundred, sometimes A thousand people. And these were peaceful communities, farming communities. And they started to go house by house through these communities, massacring the people inside. Kidnapping as well they came across, of course, because they managed to do the invasion not just by land, but by sea and also by air in hang gliders. They managed to come into the dance party, the Nova party, where thousands of young people were dancing in the early morning. And there's a debate about whether or not the terrorists knew that they were going to get this really easy pickings of unarmed young people dancing in the morning. But whether it was luck or design, they managed to get to the party and came in on military jeeps and trucks and motorcycles and started massacring their way through the young people in the early hours of the morning. There were a lot of questions I asked about what went wrong on the Israeli side and there's a lot to find out about and some of the answers I think I've come to. But although many people in their homes, who I spoke to in the hospitals and in the communities in the aftermath of the seventh said the same thing to me. The thing they said was they told their children as they were hiding in the bomb shelters, as their homes were on fire and they could hear people at the door trying to break in, they said that they told their children, you know, don't worry, the army will be here in moments. And it wasn't. But it didn't fail entirely. There were some army in the area who put up a very good fight and some of the army managed to get down fast, some elite units managed to get to the south swiftly, had very, very intense firefights. But one of the other things that happened was that there were a lot of people who I describe Arab, Druze, Jews, Israelis, who were what I call self starters, just people who realized that everything was going wrong, the country had been invaded, it was war. And who through some extraordinary mettle or insight or whatever, sometimes just information, somebody who happened to know somebody in one of the communities in the south who was saying, you know, were on fire, would just hurtle to the scene and save lives. And that's why I say that the morning of 7th was a story of catastrophic evil from Hamas and Islamic Jihad and indeed the Gazan civilians who came in to join in the raping and the stealing and the kidnapping. By the end of the day, 1200 Israelis were dead, many, many more injured and 250 taken hostage into Gaza by proportion of population. If people extrapolate that out to America, it would be about 44,000Americans killed in one day.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, the hostage situation is also.

[Douglas Murray]

And 10,000Americans taken hostage. Right. That's by proportion of population. If you extrapolate it out, be 10,000Americans being dragged out of their homes and taken into enemy territory by terrorists. But the story was, first of all, of the evils that Hamas committed that day, secondly, and the suffering that they imposed. Secondly, of course, the failure of much of the security apparatus in Israel, from which lessons will have to be learned, and not just by Israel, but by her allies. But thirdly, as I say, it's also the story of extraordinary people rising to this terrible moment and doing unbelievably heroic things. I tell a lot of the stories of people. For instance, there's somebody who's become a friend called Nimrod, who hurtled south in his car. He had been in the army, was called back to base by his commander. But by that point, Nimrod was driving south and he managed to pick up a gun on the way, a single revolver with, I think, eight rounds of ammunition, went through every military checkpoint and just. He said he didn't see a live Israeli till the early afternoon. But when he did, he fought and killed many terrorists. There are other people, like, there was a young man at the party I mentioned the book, whose girlfriend I met, who had realized the situation, managed to get a car out of the party. The terrorists were massacring everyone as they came out by car, so they were shooting the cars. So then there was a log jam, but this young man managed to find a way out on another route. And he took four or five young people in the car, drove them 30 minutes, dropped them off, came back, took another car full of young people, drove again, took them back. Every time they said to him, don't go back again. It's hell, it's death. But he kept doing it. And then the last time he did it, he was killed. But there are lots of terrible stories from the day that I recount. But as I say, it also seems to me to be important to credit the people who survived and who didn't, who showed unbelievable heroism. It.

[Jordan Peterson]

It didn't really surprise me. I. I suppose that there were security lapses. I mean, if you're dealing with an enemy that's absolutely committed, the probability that over some long span of time they're going to find a way through your defenses.

[Douglas Murray]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Is how is that not 100% if everything isn't locked down and there's any semblance of freedom whatsoever.

[Douglas Murray]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

So the explanation you offered about the mythical status of Israeli invulnerability seems to me to be the most effective explanation.

[Douglas Murray]

That and one other thing, which is. Which was what was known as the conception, which I spoke about with military and other political leaders. It's a very interesting thing, this. The conception was effectively. Well, it was obviously a terrible mistake, but was a belief in some of the security infrastructure in Israel that Hamas were effectively, like so many terrorists and radical movements throughout history, that they had been misgoverning the Gaza effectively since Israel withdrew in 2005. But they'd stolen billions of dollars of international aid. All the leaders of Hamas were billionaires, thanks to the Canadian, American, European, British. Seriously, well done for us.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, that's for sure. Really, really quite something.

[Douglas Murray]

Taxpayer funds. The billions of dollars that went into Gaza were largely used by Hamas leaders to enrich themselves, to build an incredibly elaborate terrorist infrastructure throughout Gaza. Miles and miles of underground tunnels, very, very elaborate systems, some effectively crawl spaces, others large enough to drive military vehicles from one end of Gaza to the other. And they built that whole infrastructure over the 18 years or so that they governed Gaza. And that was the other way in which they used their money. But the conception, which turned out to be a misconception, was that part of the security apparatus in Israel believed that Hamas leadership were happy with just being corrupt. They were living in luxury, you know, penthouses.

[Jordan Peterson]

Corrupt was sufficient, malevolent sufficient.

[Douglas Murray]

Rather like the Soviet Union. And by the 80s, you know, the leaders didn't believe it anymore. They just wanted to drink and have whatever they could in the time they had.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, and hedonistic materialism trumps fanatical.

[Douglas Murray]

Exactly.

[Jordan Peterson]

Fanatical. Malevolence. And, of course, quite the theory.

[Douglas Murray]

Yeah. And many times in history, that has turned out to be true. A lot of revolutionary movements have done that, but this turned out to be completely wrong in the case of the Hamas leadership. They wanted to enrich themselves and they wanted to do what they said they were going to do, which was to annihilate the Jews. And if you look, why not have both? They managed to try to have both. But if you look at, for instance, one of the central figures of the book, Sinwar, Yahya Sinwar, one of the leaders of Hamas, who'd been in an Israeli jail until 2011 for killing Palestinians with his own hands, literally throttling them with his own hands and with a kafir.

[Jordan Peterson]

He was the one who had such a remarkable obituary in the New York Times, if I remember correctly.

[Douglas Murray]

One of many. Yeah, they. Yahya Sinwar was a true psychopath. And I'd known about him for years. A lot of people who studied the region had. He was a. He was a what would have been called a true believer after he'd been released in a prisoner exchange for one Israeli soldier who they'd kidnapped in the late 2000s. After Sinuah was exchanged, and by the way, having had his life saved by an Israeli doctor in prison, Sinuar went back to Gaza, seized back control of Hamas, said repeatedly in public statements that he wanted Hamas to go into Israel and tear the hearts out of the bodies of the Jews. On the 7th, he took his best shot at it. And it turned out that what Sinwar said he wanted to do, he did.

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[Douglas Murray]

He did.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's very common for people who are extremely malevolent to tell you exactly what they're going to do and then do it. Far more common than people think. And the fact that people are blind to that that reality points to something that we'll have to discuss in more detail. This insistence by naive people in the west that no such thing as malevolence exists. Right? All perpetrators are victims until Proven otherwise.

[Douglas Murray]

Victims we haven't understood yet. Or they may have had a bad childhood.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, no doubt they did, but there's plenty of people who had bad childhoods who don't turn into malevolent psychopaths.

[Douglas Murray]

That's my observation.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes, it's definitely the case. Let's delve a little bit deeper into what happened. I want to lay some propositions before you. When. When October 7th made its presence known, the first thing that occurred to me, and correct me if I'm wrong about this, if I have some misapprehension, the terrible hand of Iran is behind Hamas and Hezbollah. Iran has absolutely no compunctions about sacrificing every single Palestinian to the cause in as brutal a fashion as possible to capitalize on the public relations scandal that can be made of that. They've got no feeling whatsoever for the Palestinians. They're pure cannon fodder in the eternal war against the Great Satan and Isra. Right. The U.S. and Israel. That seems appropriate.

[Douglas Murray]

Absolutely.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so what the hell? I went to Oxford, you know, and the first bloody thing that those half wits asked me when I was on stage was if I was happy about this tweet I made on October 8, which was give them hell, Netanyahu, which I paid quite the price for, let me tell you. And although not so much a price as many people have paid, put it that way. And so what's Israel to do when they're faced with a disposable people, so to speak, that will be sacrificed at a moment's notice by their own leadership, by their own corrupt philosophy, and by the mullahs of Iran? What. What possible response could Israel have except to roll over and what, submit?

[Douglas Murray]

Well, a lot of people would like them to do that, of course, but that's not an option. There's a famous story that Joe Biden tells, is actually a good story for Joe Biden. Being Joe Biden, he's told it a lot. But when he was a young senator, he once met Golda Meir, former prime Minister of Israel, indeed the prime minister during the 73 war. And she famously said to Joe Biden when she was showing him around, you know, you forget, Senator Biden, we have a secret weapon. And Biden thought that Golda Meir was going to tell him about Israel's nuclear project, and he was all ears. And he said, what's your secret weapon? She said, we have nowhere else to go. So anyone who thinks that rolling over is a possibility for Israel is simply somebody who wants them to be gone. What is clever about Hamas and its backers in Iran, the Iranian revolutionary government, is that they know exactly how to put Israel in an even more intolerable situation each time they attack. So, for instance, they know that if you kidnap Israelis, one of the absolutely central things of the fabric of Israeli society, as with most Western societies, is you don't allow your citizens to remain behind, just like you don't leave your soldiers behind. That if you fall behind enemy lines, if you are taken behind enemy lines, the state will do everything it can to get you back. And that has been a compact in Israel since the foundation in 48, and a really central thing. So Hamas knew, and I have lots of testimony from people who, for instance, overheard terrorists on the morning as they were lying dead, or other things, heard the terrorists at, for instance, the Nova Party, debating which of the young girls they should shoot and which they should kidnap. And, you know, there were debates that they might have had too many people, too many girls to take back, for instance. But Hamas did the kidnapping, knowing that to have 250 Israelis in captivity is to have an unbelievable advantage over the Israelis, because they're going to have to come in, they're going to try to save them, they're going to try to rescue them.

[Jordan Peterson]

They'll exchange hundreds of terrorists for single.

[Douglas Murray]

Israelis, as happened recently, an exchange of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails for committing acts of terrorism, preparing suicide vests, trying to carry out bombings and much more knife attacks. They will exchange sometimes hundreds of those Palestinians for, as happened the other week, the coffins of two Jewish babies. So.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, one of the things that's striking about your book is your continued explication of the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists, psychopaths and their willingness to exploit every element of human decency to wage the most destructive possible of war. Right, so the tunnels. Let's. Let's go into that for a minute. So Gaza is 11 by 11 miles, approximately 140 square miles, 350 miles of tunnels. Right. Longer than the London Underground, which is a stunning.

[Douglas Murray]

Yes, fact.

[Jordan Peterson]

Stunning fact.

[Douglas Murray]

Longer than London Underground. And as I joked to the British military friend, rather better run.

[Jordan Peterson]

Six thousand entrances, many of them in the bedrooms of children.

[Douglas Murray]

Oh, almost always where the tunnel entrances come up, they come up in children's bedrooms, in houses throughout Gaza. They come up inside mosques, they come up inside hospitals. Even in 2014, the BBC acknowledged that the Hamas leadership were coming up from tunnels underneath the Shifa hospital, which is one of their command headquarters, by the way. All of that is for anyone who cares about this. Completely against Every law of war, the Geneva Conventions, every convention of war is you are not allowed to fight. You're not meant to fight in civilian clothing. You're not meant to fight and fire from places of worship. You're not meant to stockpile ammunition in hospitals. You're not meant to make civilian homes targets. For reasons that our species thought we.

[Jordan Peterson]

All understood sufficiently victimized perpetrators have no reason to abide by any standards.

[Douglas Murray]

No. And of course, militarily, this is all to Hamas's enormous advantage, because again, they know that if there is a stockpile of ammunition or a terrorist in a. Or a tunnel entrance or whatever in a civilian home, and even if the Israelis tell all the locals to get out, the world's media will say that Israel bombed or invaded a civilian home.

[Jordan Peterson]

Or a hospital or a place of.

[Douglas Murray]

Worship as a member of the Israeli.

[Jordan Peterson]

None of those words have the same meaning, none of them in Gaza that they do in the West.

[Douglas Murray]

Not at all. Whenever it's reported that a hospital has been hit, it's usually reported in the world's press as Hamas once, that the Israelis just decided to bomb a hospital. As if they're so evil, these Israelis, that they even bomb hospitals. There was a member of the Israeli War Cabinet, Gaddy Eisencot, who I quote in the book, because he lost his son fighting in Gaza in the aftermath of October 7, and the next day he lost his nephew, also fighting in Gaza. His nephew was killed because as the Israelis were trying to do this incredibly delicate military operation to not to get back the hostages, destroy the leadership of Hamas and minimize any possible civilian casualties. Gary Eisenkot's nephew was fired upon from a mosque by Hamas terrorists who gleefully opened fire on him and his unit. And they were meant to be sticking to the Hamas were doing that. The Israelis were trying to stick to the normal laws of conflict and not just destroy the mosque. And so they lost soldiers. This is another example of the way in which Hamas do this. Any normal society that valued the life of their own civilians, like America, Britain, Israel would, if it knew that its people were going to come under bombardment, often do what the Israelis did in the south, and indeed across much of the country, which is you build bomb shelters in every home and you have bomb shelters in every civilian area. And across the south of Israel, that's the case as it is in the north, because it's been being shelled by Hezbollah for 20 years. But only in Gaza do you get a situation where, and I quote, one of the Hamas leaders saying this in an interview with Al Arabiya last year. He's asked why, he's asked, this Hamas leader was asked by a friendly Arab journalist, why, if you say the civilian casualties in Gaza are so high, why can't you allow the civilians of Gaza to shelter in your tunnel networks that you've built underneath Gaza? And the Hamas leader says, but the tunnel system is not for the civilians. The tunnel system is for our fighters and for our weaponry. And the interviewer says, well, who's to look after the civilians? And he says, the international community.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, that's just testament to the fact that the Palestinians are essentially cannon fodder for the eternal war against Israel and the United States.

[Douglas Murray]

Yes, and it's even worse than that, of course, an army that fights by the laws of war, which the IDF does, like the American army, like the British army, makes mistakes, for sure, like the American army, like the British army, but that fights by the laws of war when it encounters a terrorist army like this, the civilized army seeks to minimize the civilian casualties, as the IDF has done. And anyone who claims that it hasn't just does not know what's been going.

[Jordan Peterson]

On for the last 18 months and believes Hamas reports.

[Douglas Murray]

And believes Hamas reports, which, which, why.

[Jordan Peterson]

Would anyone ever believe Hamas reports?

[Douglas Murray]

It's, it's, it's. I mean, why go to a mass murderer to find out their account of their actions? You know? But the point is, is that when, when an army like that encounters an army that not just desires death for its enemy, but desires death for the people it purports to govern, and with a kicker in it seeks death itself. This is a realm of fanaticism. And what I call. It's a death cult, a cult that literally worships death. The leadership of Hamas, who I quote in the book, have for decades boasted about the extent to which they love death, embrace death. And one of the underlying things in this book, as you know, which we will come onto doubtless later, but is what happens if a society that actually values life encounters a death cult that worships and glories in death for its foes, but also for itself.

[Jordan Peterson]

And we have seen suffering and death.

[Douglas Murray]

We have seen such movements throughout history. We have seen them, but most of the world has forgotten about them. And I would argue that Israel to a great extent forgot about them until 6:30 in the morning on October 7.

[Jordan Peterson]

2023, possessed by the spirit of Cain. Yes, and that accounts for some of the antisemitism too. So let me run something by you. I want to flip to how the world Turned. So it is the case that when people develop post traumatic stress disorder, they relatively rarely develop it in response to a tragedy, even if it's a painful tragedy, they tend to develop it. One risk factor is being naive. Seeing the world through rose colored glasses, let's say, assuming goodwill on everyone's part, including your own, and then encountering a situation, sometimes a situation that you're deeply involved in, where malevolence raises its head. The west is very sheltered and I would say blind to malevolence, blind to its existence. In the academic realm. There's no discussion of good and evil. Evil is an archaic term. And malevolence is a consequence of trauma. Right? A consequence of privation. And that's simply not the case. And it's Now. I read a book a while back and I don't remember which one it was, unfortunately, but it described the erasure of the Byzantine Empire from the Western imagination. I was a relatively old person before I really had any sense at all of the extent of the Byzantine Empire or the catastrophe of its demolition. And the author of this particular book believed that the.

[Douglas Murray]

The.

[Jordan Peterson]

Defeat of the Byzantine Empire by the Islamic world and maybe by the psychopaths of the Islamic world was so traumatic to the west that we just erased it from our historical memory. And then I. It seems to me, Douglas, that something like that is going on right now. Yes, I mean, you. Look, let's talk about the universities for a moment. Now, there's a fair bit of pathology in the universities. A fair bit. It's like top to bottom, they're absolutely incorrigible as far as I'm concerned. Especially the Ivy Leagues. They should be ashamed of themselves. They should be deprived of all funding as far as I'm concerned. In any case, the protests that emerged there and all across the world, you detail out and with some, with some great sadness and amazement. But I think part of it is that it's not within the purview of the people who are protesting to replace their theory that the victims are uprising with the notion that a malevolent cult of death that worships sadistic suffering and annihilation exists. It's too far outside their worldview. Now, there's more to it than that because Iran is. You saw that the Ayatollah. This is the most amazing thing. The Ayatollah itself congratulated the American universities, or the universities of the UK for that matter, too.

[Douglas Murray]

He congratulated the Western students for joining the anti colonial struggle, not mentioning to the students that of course, he, Ayatollah Khomeini had ordered the gunning down of their contemporaries across the streets of Tehran in 2009 and on many other occasions. A minor issue when Iranian students come out on the streets to protest against the actual oppression of the Islamic revolutionary government in Tehran. Ayatollah Khomeini, who congratulates the Western students for uprising, shoots the students who uprise in Iran. But that's a detail.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes, it's an ignorable detail. Clearly, then, there's another issue that seems to be operating at the universities.

[C]

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[Jordan Peterson]

A disproportionate number of the protesters or the protester puppets, you might say, are young women, right? And so there's something to that too, because it's in the nature of Young women, I would say, to adopt the mien of sympathy towards victimization and fail to see the predators lurking underneath the. Underneath the rocks, let's say. Women haven't traditionally fought wars. They're not necessarily equipped to identify actual enemies. Their proclivity is sympathy. And that's exacerbated in the case of naivety. And there's a great intermixture of pride in that too, in the female sympathy can, what would you say, overcome. Overcome the pathology of victimization. That's Eve, as far as I'm concerned, clutching the serpent to her breast. And the universities have become feminized to a great degree. And then there's this incredibly deep. People overall, I think in the west have no idea how pathological the universities have become. They, it, the social sciences, the humanities run on an oppressor victim narrative. And everything is seen through that light. And you can learn the tenets of the oppressor victimizer narrative in five minutes and then you can explain the world.

[Douglas Murray]

Yeah, absolutely. And by the way, there's a. There's a very healthy dose of narcissism thrown into the whole thing, which is that to the extent that any students in American universities get taught anything about the Middle east, they will be taught Edward Said theory claim of Orientalism, which of course is a claim that is by Said's own admission, spilled way beyond even the claims that he made in his book. Said's insight, if you can call it that, was that when Westerners approached the Arab and Muslim world, they did so through the eyes of Westerners, which is an observation so banal that only the academy could extrapolate out a whole course from it. I mean, what eyes were especially, especially.

[Jordan Peterson]

Without giving some due credit to the fact of Westernized.

[Douglas Murray]

Well, people like, I mean, when Napoleon goes to Egypt, one of the things he does is to order a massive catalog of all of the riches and treasures of ancient Egypt, a catalog which Egypt itself had not produced to that point. And one of the people who Napoleon gets on to do this and who founds the Cairo Museum, by the way, ends up also being one of the people who breaks the code of the Rosetta Stone, giving the lost languages back to the region. But anyway, people don't need to know any of that.

[Jordan Peterson]

Another detail, another detail.

[Douglas Murray]

Why do you need to know that? When you can say this is what.

[Jordan Peterson]

Said really Westernized, who defined ancient artifacts as treasures to begin with, then it becomes self evident, right?

[Douglas Murray]

But just consider the enormously advantageous aspect of narcissism to this mix, because the Narcissistic thing that said, helps to give American and other Western students was. Nothing in the world happens unless you in the west make it happen. You make it so the Palestinians, like all the Arabs, the Muslim world, the developing world as a whole, does nothing of its own volition. It can't even make mistakes on its own dime. It's you that made them do it. What did we in America do to cause this? Is the lens, the only lens through which an American student will be taught to look at the world? Why is this happening in China? What did we do to China will be the way that everything is interpreted. So this is just not fit for purpose, for understanding the world. But it's hugely narcissistic because among other things, I mean, and you can see this in the spilling out of protests across American and other Western campuses. One of the things I say at one point in the book is what level of delusion and narcissistic delusion do you have to be in to think that you at the University of Columbia or Berkeley or Yale or Princeton or Oxford can dictate war policy two continents away? Who. Who was waiting for your opinion?

[Jordan Peterson]

Exactly.

[Douglas Murray]

It's an extension in counterterrorism strategy in densely built up urban areas. When you say that your university is central to the funding of Israel's war, what do you mean? What do you mean you at your campus. Your campus is at the center of the war. Really? Really. You're at the center of world events by sitting in the middle of your quadrangle in a tent.

[Jordan Peterson]

Let me put a twist on that. Tell me what you think. So it seems to me that the pride story is slightly, perhaps more complicated than the tale that you laid out. So there's this initial presumption of Western centrality, let's say that you pointed to. But see, one of the things I saw at the University of Toronto, shortly before it became impossible to me, impossible for me to work, there was this insistence by my colleagues that there was no moral pathway, no more productive and moral pathway that a student could be invited to take than the pathway of protest.

[Douglas Murray]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. Okay. So now the prote. It's not only that the students are characterized by this overweening certainty in, in Western, what would you say?

[Douglas Murray]

Dominance and malevolence.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes, yes. It's that by. So they, they see, they posit this malevolent force that's centered in the west, but then they position themselves as adversaries to that force. And that's. That's the prideful. That's the prideful Twist. Well, like, we're so horrible here in the west, but I'm so good that even though I'm part of the West, I'll do everything I can to oppose that. And then they're egged on by their idiot professors.

[Douglas Murray]

I quote a student at Columbia who described himself as a first generation low income student, the first in his family to go to university, certainly the first to go to Columbia. You would have thought, most of us would have thought, damn, I'm lucky. But he describes how straight away he was taught what he described as the rich history of protest at Columbia and remembered thinking, when it kicks off, off again, I want to be at the center of it.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Douglas Murray]

Now, you know, I don't know about you, but I think student days should be used for many things. But, but the idea that you should make yourself central to the protest movements of your time as your demonstration of virtue in your years of study is. Well, that's taught. That's taught. That young man was taught that. It's because. It's because.

[Jordan Peterson]

By the culture too.

[Douglas Murray]

By the culture. It's because the professors at totally pointless studies institutes and other things and sometimes in serious programs are actually telling their students this. There are a number of former faculty of Columbia that I've spoken to and some present still who say this to me. We were teaching this for years. This was all being boiled up by us, by the faculty, for years ahead of this. But the other thing that happens then, just to add to your riff on the sin of it, is that, as you know, one of the conclusions I come to about this is that this has been projection on a vast scale. And it really took talking with quite a lot of psychologists and psychiatrists about this phenomenon the last 18 months to work this out. There's this rule, as you know, that I go into in the book that I've mulled on a lot that I got from the great Soviet Jewish writer Vasily Grossman, who appears intermittently throughout the book. And Vasily Grossman had this terrific dictum in the Middle of Life and Fate, where he says, tell me what you accuse the Jews of. I'll tell you what you're guilty of. And this is unbelievably relevant again and again and again. You know, the Iranian revolutionary government says that the Jewish state is a colonialist enterprise. The Iranian revolutionary government is colonizing the Middle east since 1979.

[Jordan Peterson]

There's nothing colonist about Islam.

[Douglas Murray]

Oh, no.

[Jordan Peterson]

I mean, no, it's only the fastest growing empire in the history of the world.

[Douglas Murray]

And as you know, Muhammad, when he spread Islam, only did through by persuasion and kindness. Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And that still obtains today. We'll get back to that.

[Douglas Murray]

But every time I mulled on this subject in recent years, the Grossman's Rule absolutely applied. People using the Jewish state, just as they have the Jewish people throughout history, as a projection mechanism for their own failings. And the place where I realized this became very relevant to the American university and the Western universities was what were the things students were accusing the Jewish state of of genocide, ethnic cleansing, white supremacy. So you would laugh at that one.

[Jordan Peterson]

You got it. That's a good one.

[Douglas Murray]

But anyway, so ethnic cleansing, genocide, white supremacy, the various sins that they will always lobby at Israel. And they were throwing this at Israel from October 7, as they had in the years before. But they really got a push on it after that. And I was thinking throughout this period, as I saw the protests in the West, I thought, why are these terms so familiar? The conclusion I came to was, and it actually was a follow on from my previous book, the War on the west, where I talked about what was being taught to a generation. And as you know, one of the things I said in that book was, we are teaching young people born in the 21st century in America and the rest of the west that they are guilty by dint of being born here. You are guilty of colonialism because some of your ancestors may have engaged in colonialism. You're guilty of genocide. You carry the guilt of genocide because 300 years ago, people who may not be ancestors of yours but looked like you did this thing, and so on and so on. And I said in the war in the west that this was a very, very dangerous thing because it's a mechanism of guilt with no alleviation, mechanism for forgiveness. There's no way to alleviate the guilt. You're just being told you're guilty and you're stuck with it.

[Jordan Peterson]

Now you can see the protests as a manifestation of that right? To expiate.

[Douglas Murray]

Exactly. One of the conclusions I come to is that this protest movement has been projection on a vast scale. The students accuse Israel of things that the students have been told that they themselves are guilty of, that they themselves.

[Jordan Peterson]

They see Israel as the vanguard of Western colonialism.

[Douglas Murray]

Exactly.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's the whole story.

[Douglas Murray]

This is a giant mechanism of projection, which is why I say, when it comes to these protesters, particularly students in the West, I say, tell me what you accuse the Jewish state of. I'll tell you what you were taught you're guilty of.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, of course.

[Douglas Murray]

Taught that you're guilty of y.

[Jordan Peterson]

And no wonder that people rebel against that, because how the hell else are they going to expiate the guilt?

[Douglas Murray]

Absolutely. But here is a way. Yeah. And with the added thing that the Iranian proxies across the west, the Qatari money that has flooded through Western universities, not least American univers, the organized. The organized movements, it's not an accident that the same movement crops up everywhere with exactly the same slogans. Is it generic that students at Princeton again the other week are chanting, glory to our martyrs. This is totally imported propaganda just placed over them. And these dolts repeat and repeat and repeat. But all of this has been done so expertly because it plays to the psychological weakness that exists in so many people in the west who have been taught their guilt, have been taught culpability with no means of getting rid of it. But here, here you have a means.

[Jordan Peterson]

Culpability with no virtue. One of the most striking examples of that, I believe, is, you know, I was probably 40 bloody years old before I knew who Wilberforce was. You know, to my eternal shame, it's all part and parcel of the message that what the Western colonial powers were responsible for slavery, when the truth of the matter is that the Great Britain in particular waged war for what, 175 years on the high seas to eradicate slavery for the first time in history.

[Douglas Murray]

We not only eradicated. We, the British not only eradicated it in the British Empire, but eradicated it on all the high seas, Right. And lost thousands of sailors throughout the 19th century. And every British household paid far more in household goods throughout the 19th century because we weren't trading with. With. With slave traders. Right. Compare that, by the way, to the fact that there's the reparations at the. Yes. At the same time, the Islamic world was glorious, gloriously still slaving away. And much of the Islamic world still does, by the way, across Africa and the Middle east is still doing slaving. So unrepentantly, unrepentant, no apology whatsoever, but positively beaming that at the same time they can teach people in the west that Westerners born in the 21st century are guilty of 18th century slaving. So this is a. An extraordinarily dangerous moment, it seems to me, because the ground that you and I and others have identified for many years of deracination of populations, demoralization of populations, stripping away of all legitimate heroes or ignorance of them, whether it's Wilberforce or Churchill or anyone else, that the stripping away of the heroes, stripping away of the national story in country after country across the west leaves this vacuum.

[Jordan Peterson]

Canada leading the pack.

[Douglas Murray]

Perhaps Canada, perhaps the world leader, Australia, New Zealand.

[Jordan Peterson]

They could.

[Douglas Murray]

They're doing very, very well. But into this vacuum, something was always going to step.

[C]

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[Douglas Murray]

And there is no reason why American or other Western universities or streets, because it's not just at higher education institutions, it's, you know, Union Station in New York shut down again the other week by hundreds of people chanting for intifada. Yeah, intifada, Terrorism in the center of New York. What it is is there's no reason why this death cult ideology should find itself worshiped in the free west, apart from the fact that we have allowed ourselves to be deracinated and demoralized and allowed the weakest and most pernicious imaginable ideology to step into the vacuum.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes, an assortment of weak and appalling ideologies, most particularly the idea that the world can be explained in consequence of the oppressor victim narrative.

[Douglas Murray]

Yes, oppressor, oppressed colonizer, colonized proletariat, bourgeoisie.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's the same bloody story.

[Douglas Murray]

There's another strand to that, by the way, which I gave a lecture on this in New York last year. Last year for the New Criterion, which is even if somebody does use the term evil in the west these days, and people are very uncomfortable about using it because of its theological framework. If you do hear the word evil used in the west in the Western press, I give examples of this. What will people describe it as? Almost inevitably, they will resort to Hannah, arendt's lamentable definition of the banality of evil. And if anyone's interested, they can go and read the essay online that I wrote about against Hannah Arendt's appalling, misguided and provably wrong theory on the banality of evil, which she applied to Eichmann, the leading Nazi and architect of the Holocaust.

[Jordan Peterson]

The facade is banal.

[Douglas Murray]

There was nothing about Eichmann that was banal. He just fooled Hannah Arendt. But she, through her half baked. That's the last bit of the use of evil. I notice in the public realm, something will happen. Like for instance, when a drummer, Lee Rigby, was beheaded in broad daylight on the streets of London in 2013. The next day, a columnist at the Telegraph, a conservative newspaper in the uk, described the act as banal. The guardians.

[Jordan Peterson]

That means it didn't happen.

[Douglas Murray]

Said it was a sort. Yes, yes, exactly. It's hard to see decapitation as banal unless you just have no other word to use in the environment of evil. But one of the things I want readers to come away from on democracies and death cults thinking about is exactly this. Maybe there is such a force in the world. Maybe evil really does descend. Maybe it actually exists.

[Jordan Peterson]

So when did you decide? When did you come to that conclusion? Like what? And is that a theological conclusion? I mean, when you start talking about the landscape of good and evil, you're perilously close to the religious world, or you're in it. You know, when I dealt with my clinical clients that were severely hurt by malevolent actors, the language became religious because there was no other way of discussing it. And that had nothing to do with my imaginations. There was no language they could use to describe what happened to them that wasn't profound enough to touch on the religious because the depth of horror was so great that no other language sufficed.

[Douglas Murray]

Well, I would say one of this, and you know this well from your, your work on the Bible, but the. One of the things, I suppose that would stand out as a definition of evil is, is doing it knowingly, gleefully, gleefully and gloryingly. And that's one of the things.

[Jordan Peterson]

There's a level underneath that it's doing it knowingly and gleefully to spite God. Right. And you don't understand evil. I don't think you understand evil if you don't understand it as the ultimate in rebellion against the fact of existence itself, the spirit of existence. Well, hence death culture.

[Douglas Murray]

Well, that's. But then the layer underneath that is where death is offered up as a form of worship. Now, this is something the Western mind finds incredibly hard to understand within the death cults. Within Islam, we have some understanding about it when this arises in the form of Nazi fascism or Soviet communism. Some understanding or Maoist communism, even less.

[Jordan Peterson]

Understanding or serial killing pathology.

[Douglas Murray]

Serial killers. I think we still might be able to identify Jeffrey Dahmer, you know, or the Yorkshire Ripper as worshipers of death.

[Jordan Peterson]

Worshippers of death and suffering. Right. Sadism taken to its extreme.

[Douglas Murray]

But imagine that with a theological framework around it, such as the kind the jihadists have. This is why, when you ask why I sort of was marling on this, it was because of something I couldn't get out of my head from the 7th onwards, which was that the. I've seen quite a lot of war and how people act in war and regard myself as relatively unshockable or at least aware of the capacity of human evil. But from the moment I started seeing the videos that Hamas took themselves on the morning, and I started seeing them very early, I then saw an awful lot of them and then far more even before going to the massacre sites myself and the hospitals and the morgues and so on. But one of the things I could not get out of my head was, was the glee, the sheer orgiastic glee of the terrorists.

[Jordan Peterson]

At least the Nazis tried to hide their crimes.

[Douglas Murray]

Well, this is, by the way, this is a point I've made that occasionally got me into trouble. You know, there are. It's not. What happened on the seventh was as if for some hours in Treblinka, the Nazis had live streamed to the world what they were doing and were proud of it and wanted everyone to know.

[Jordan Peterson]

And then the universities celebrated it.

[Douglas Murray]

I quote a late friend of mine early in the book, as you know, who fled Nazi Germany, Nazi Austria in 1938. And he said towards the end of his life to me and to a historian friend, he said that he had spent his last years thinking, actually maybe there was a level of anti Semitism even worse than the Nazis.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, hell is a bottomless pit, you know.

[Douglas Murray]

Absolutely, really. And. And it required somebody who had fled Nazism and lost much of his family to Nazism to be able to in a way make that point. But the thing we don't need to get into the competition of, as it were, which is how people see it, but. But it doesn't diminish anything but this thing of the ecstasy in death, the ecstasy in bringing death. I quote the young man who phones back to his family in Gaza on a cell phone and says, father, Father, I've killed 10 Jews in my own hands. I've killed 10 Jews. Get mother on the phone. Turn on to WhatsApp video. I can show you the endless cries of Allahu Akbar, which, as I said shortly after the seventh is not something I wanted to hear chanted on our streets. Much more knowing this isn't simply an offering of prayer like the Lord's Prayer. And if Christians had in recent memory been massacring people whilst screaming the Lord's Prayer in ecstasy, I think that Christians would have the decency to pipe down a bit about shouting it in public squares en masse. But the cry of Al Awhba that we're forever told is now is simply like. It's just a prayer. Like saying Sikh hail in America is just a quoting of German. The use of Al Ho Akbar by the terrorists as they're removing a young man's head with a shovel or raping girls and then killing them.

[Jordan Peterson]

You need a cover story for your sadism, Douglass. The most effective cover story for the worst acts of sadism is precisely the use of God's name in vain, right? Because then you combine the worst possible sin, which is demeaning of what's most high, with the worst possible action, with it gleeful delight in the suffering of others. And what do you get? You get two for one if you're on the side of the sadists. You know, when psychologists start started to study non, what would you say the manifestation of psychopathy in the normative population? They identified three cardinal traits to begin with. Machiavellianism, use of language for instrumental purposes. Weimar Machiavellian. The only reason I'm communicating with you is to gain something only for me now, right? No communicative intent other than that, Right? So it's a false offering. Psychopathy. So that's parasitical predation. Right. And narcissism, the desire for unearned status. Okay, well, that was the dark triad, but they had to add sadism to it because those three things in combination appear to inevitably lead to sadism, which is exactly that. Gleeful delight. And then once you've compiled those four demonic traits within you, once you've turned yourself over to that spirit, why wouldn't you claim that you're doing it in the name of what's highest? How the hell else would you live with yourself? How would you not stop your soul from shredding? Well, and. And it is part of that satanic delight to take what's highest and to subvert it most Entirely.

[Douglas Murray]

Yeah. Yes. These are bottomless pits, as you say, Jordan. But there is something, I think one can say about the awareness of what you're doing as being wrong to this extent that you. That. And still enjoying it. There's a story I tell you.

[Jordan Peterson]

You're enjoying it because it's wrong. Right. That's part of that.

[Douglas Murray]

And also. Well, also with another layer, which is that you have been taught that the people you're doing this to are subhuman.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. And you're pretty damn willing to learn it, too, because, boy, that gives you absolute license to do whatever the hell, whatever possesses you, wants you to do.

[Douglas Murray]

There was one. It was a rather heavy. I'll do it quickly, but rather heavy day when I went in to see the Hamas terrorists that had been captured alive. And one of them I recognized, and that was a moment where I really did think again about the nature of evil. And yes, it's hard not to think of it in a theological context.

[Jordan Peterson]

In this.

[Douglas Murray]

There was a family who, on the 7th, were in their home in a small community in the south, and the oldest boy was a teenager, had already gone to the beach with friends, and the landing craft of Hamas came in and they killed him and his friends. And then they went to the community, and the father of the family was there in the house and ran into the bomb shelter with his two teenage sons. I think the boys were 10 and 12 or thereabouts. And the terrorists came in, and the father. I've seen the video several times, it's pretty gruesome, but the father takes his two sons into the bomb shelter with him, and the Hamas throw a grenade in, and the father threw himself onto the grenade to save his sons. And they come out of the shelters staggering. I mean, both in their underwear. And, you know, and one of them, his eye had been blown out of his socket, and the other one had lost his hearing, his ear was off. And they come into the main room, the house, and again, it's all on video. And they're both completely disorientated. Of course, one of them is saying, where's father? And the other one is saying, didn't you see him? You know? And then the. The terrorist who killed their father walks into the room with a Kalashnikov and just looks at the boys, goes to the fridge, opens the fridge and gets out a Diet Coke and starts drinking it in front of them. And also later asks where their mother.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's how you demonstrate that the suffering is irrelevant.

[D]

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[Douglas Murray]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

With that casual. That casual consumerist gesture.

[Douglas Murray]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. And that. What would you say? That perversion of hospitality.

[Douglas Murray]

Yeah, yeah. So inevitably, yes, you get to the question of, how do so many people get taught this or encouraged into this? And I was very struck. This is very much in your wheelhouse, but one of the reunions of the survivors of the Nova party, I got talking to a remarkable woman who was a therapist who was working with them. And these were of course, all deeply, deeply traumatized young people who have difficult time for the rest of their lives. But there was a therapist who'd been working with them, who I spoke with, who said to me then, and it was something I thought about a lot, which was, you know, don't forget, Douglas, that a psychopath is probably born. Cinois was a type of psychopath, clearly. But she said, don't forget, sociopaths, you have to make. And that was something I thought about a lot, because, of course, what would happen if you had control of a civilian population, like the almost 2 million people in Gaza, a population that doubled in the time that Israel was said to be doing? A genocide there, by the way. But park that aside, as a mere fact, what would you do if you had a civilian population for 18 years and you were a death cult and you ruled it, you would teach what Hamas taught in Gaza, which was to teach the young Gazan Palestinians how to join the death cult, to admire it, to be part of it, so that.

[Jordan Peterson]

When to strive for attainment, strive for it.

[Douglas Murray]

If you, it's, it's all very well documented, but the soldiers who were going house to House from 20 in 2014, there was a relatively minor war in Gaza compared to this one. And there are many soldiers I spoke to who were involved in the relatively minor conflict in 2014 who were also in Gaza since October 2023. They all said that they noticed when they did house to house clearing, going through, trying to find hostages, trying to find weapons, trying to find tunnel entrances and trying to find the architects of the massacre. They all said the same thing, which was that in 10 years there was a marked radicalization in the books, in the households, in the learning materials, in everything from, and it's not satire, you know, math textbooks of, you know, if you killed two Jews and kill another two Jews, how many dead Jews do you have? You know, this is the way you learn arithmetic in Gaza under Hamas. This is something that many of us noticed and had warned about for years. But the fruit of this education system, the fruit of this indoctrination was October 7th and look at was a catastrophe for the Israelis and it's turned out to be an utter disaster for the citizens of Gaza.

[Jordan Peterson]

There's an immaturity and self centeredness about psychopathy that's probably intrinsic and it does vary to some degree with temperament. There are violent 2 year olds, most of them are socialized by the time they're four. And the ones who aren't are never socialized. They burn out in their 20s. But immaturity itself is egocentric and pleasure seeking and power dominant. There's no reason to assume that you couldn't maximize that with the proper training. I mean, we train people. I know it's a rough realization if your soul is Rousseauian and you believe that there's nothing but good in the heart, even of children. And it's not that I have anything against children and I think they're delightful. But before they're socialized, they're not social.

[Douglas Murray]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

And so it's not that hard to maintain not being social. And then the consequence of not being social is you're alienated, you trust no one. So then you live in a society where what's it like to live in a Society where you can trust no one, where there's no social groupings, where everyone's hell bent on destruction, well, it's going to turn you against the world. And that's a temptation to begin with. You know, in the Cain and Abel story, Cain's temptation is to nurse resentment in consequence of the failure of his second rate offerings instead of to learn. And he kills Abel and he fathers the genocidal masses.

[Douglas Murray]

Well, this is one of my conclusions about the nature of specifically of anti Semitism goes back to that Grossman quote, that it acts as a mirror to the failings of the person who suffers from it. So that for instance, Israel's neighbors could notice that the society is gdp, the.

[Jordan Peterson]

Abraham Accord signatories deign to notice that thank God for some small mercy that.

[Douglas Murray]

This country is doing awfully well considering the existential threat to it constantly from its neighbors since its creation. Since literally the minute of its creation in 48.

[Jordan Peterson]

There's no land except desert. There's no water, there's no oil sea, there's no oil.

[Douglas Murray]

It's one darn bit of the region where there's no oil and, and yet they make a success of it. And if you look around the rest of the region and you.

[Jordan Peterson]

Colonial enterprise, Douglas.

[Douglas Murray]

I know, but you look around the rest of the region, if you were Israel's neighbors in Jordan or Egypt or certainly Gaza and Saudi, the Gulfs, anywhere, it's a perfect subject for resentment.

[Jordan Peterson]

They're all victims of the colonial enterprise. Right. They bear no responsibility for their own misery.

[Douglas Murray]

There's endlessly someone to blame.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's convenient.

[Douglas Murray]

That's very convenient.

[Jordan Peterson]

Very. And someone to hate. Someone to hate, that's even better.

[Douglas Murray]

And that's a great unifying thing among much more.

[Jordan Peterson]

And boy, the worst of your people can really delight in that. And you just have to let them loose and encourage them.

[Douglas Murray]

But just think about how this has, how taking the wrong route, Cain and Abel like has been such a disaster.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, Cain's descendants are genocidal and then comes the flood, right? That's the progression of the story and it's causal. It goes from the failure of the individual, the willingness to turn to resentment and bitterness and then murderous sadism and then to be the father of the genocidal masses.

[Douglas Murray]

That's one of the reasons why, I mean, as you know, I do get theological in this book eventually because you can't notice.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's the problem with looking at evil.

[Douglas Murray]

Yes. Yeah, that's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's really. There's, there's.

[Douglas Murray]

But it's it's, it's two things really, Jordan. It's. First is that as you say, I think we agree that, that it's, it's hard to contend with evil unless you have some kind of theological appreciation of it. And, but the second thing is, of course that comes from that is that one of the things I think about in the book is, well then what's the opposite of that?

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, right. Well, that's the next question that arises. Right. That's exactly. What would you say the sequence of thoughts that occurred to me after I spent 20 years studying Auschwitz and the death camps and the Soviet Union and Maoist China, it's like, well, there's hell, there's some way out of that. There's some place that's not that. There's a place that's as far away from that as you could imagine and there's a pathway to that. Yeah, well, the mythological landscape is the world of good and evil. No doubt about it. So let's turn to the end of your book, two parts, the disconnect. We've covered that to some degree from defeat into victory. So one of the things that, that struck me about your book, and I believe this to be the case, is that as Israel goes, so goes the West. The reason that we're all obsessed with that part of the world when there's many wars we could be talking about is because what is it? That's where the tire hits the road.

[Douglas Murray]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

If Israel goes, Europe goes.

[Douglas Murray]

Well, that's certainly always been my belief. And some people might say, well, well, how could a state that's not yet 80 years old be so central to the West? It's not because it's just any other.

[Jordan Peterson]

State and it's not exactly 80 years old.

[Douglas Murray]

No. And so if you realize, if you consider, if you begin to contend with what it is the death cults are onto and what their supporters in the west might be onto when they call for the destruction of Israel, they always do it as a precursor to the downfall of everyone else in the West.

[Jordan Peterson]

And like Iran, for example, whether it's.

[Douglas Murray]

The ayatollahs in Iran with the little Satan, Israel, great Satan, America, Britain, Canada, medium sized Satans. Whether or not it's the Iranian revolutionary government doing it for them, the protesters.

[Jordan Peterson]

Are right, or whether Israel is the vanguard of the West.

[Douglas Murray]

Well, here's the thing. You see when students at Columbia, when their group, as well as vandalizing their campus, chasing Jewish students across campus, assaulting janitors and much more, all of course in the name of fighting for the oppressed. When they call in their statements for the complete destruction of Western civilization, they do mean it.

[Jordan Peterson]

The spirit that possesses them means it.

[Douglas Murray]

It's just that they recognize that a country of 9 million people in the Middle east, surrounded by countries that wouldn't mind its demise, is an easier thing to destroy than a country of 340 million people like the one we're sitting.

[Jordan Peterson]

Here in love of the world. Because the civilized so called countries of the world are a tiny fraction of the countries of the world. And so Israel in its existential condition replicates the condition of the west in a microcosm.

[Douglas Murray]

Yes, and of course, one of the, if not the absolutely central things in the west, which is the tradition of the Bible, that the reason. The point I'm getting to is you.

[Jordan Peterson]

Talked about that in terms of the celebration of life. Yes, life more abundant.

[Douglas Murray]

The point I'm getting to exactly is that when these people, whether it's the protesters in the west or the death cult itself in Hamas, Hezbollah and others, I think they might have chosen their target well. I think they're onto something. They do know that if you take this out, everyone else is vulnerable. Next. It's very clever target selection, not just because of size, but because of theologically. Theologically, what it means. Absolutely what it means theologically. And that's why I get onto this thing that you see. Again, it goes back to your thing about how ignorant we are in the west about the reality of evil, among much else, is the presumption that everyone wants what we want, for instance, which among other things is also just narcissistic projection. I mean, maybe everyone else doesn't want what you want. Maybe they want something totally different entirely. But one of the things like their.

[Jordan Peterson]

Women to be covered from head to toe so they can only see out one eye and never talk.

[Douglas Murray]

Maybe they want that, maybe they want.

[Jordan Peterson]

That, since they're pursuing that.

[Douglas Murray]

And you know, one of the things I thought of a lot when I was thinking, when I was covering the. Obviously, obviously this is also, as you know, a firsthand account of Israel's response in the conflict. One of the things I thought about a lot was what the spirit is that animates in response to the death cults. And I realized that it is. It's there in our texts, it's there in the books.

[Jordan Peterson]

Therefore choose life.

[Douglas Murray]

Therefore choose life. Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy. Choose life. That you and your descendants might live. When I was thinking about that, I thought I was reminded of that phase of the new wave atheists in the 2000s, of which I was disappointed consistently apart, who used to say things like, well, the Ten Commandments, they're so obvious. I mean, they don't need to. Why do we need to be told not to murder? Because you were murdering. Because humankind didn't know that you shouldn't murder.

[Jordan Peterson]

There was envy. We could talk about envy. In fact, if you don't think that's an a priori condition, you are very naive.

[Douglas Murray]

So I heard that for many years about the Ten Commandments, and it was done in, I think, usually naive and flippant way, but. But when it comes down to this one, literally the commandment to choose life in the face of whatever odds.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, whatever odds.

[Douglas Murray]

As the psalmist says, that's the story of Job. Exactly. And as the psalmist says, I shall not die, but I shall live. One of the things that I recount in the book is just the number of examples I came across from people who had stared right in the face of death, right in the face of evil, and who even in the face of it and in the aftermath of it, had at the core of their being, I shall not die, but I shall live. And even in a military response, you see the difference between these things.

[Jordan Peterson]

The max, Right, you talk about Hezbollah breaking apart and everyone fleeing after the leadership is taken out. Right. Well, that's why the 100 men possessed of the proper spirit can defeat 12,000 enemies, because the enemies aren't united by anything transcendent.

[Douglas Murray]

One of the things that Hassan Nasrallah, the now late leader of Hezbollah, had said for many years was the Jihadist death taunt. He had said it many times. There's a famous time in the 2000s when he says it in a speech in Beirut when he says, the infidel's great weakness is that they love life, but we, we love death, and this is our great advantage. He and others around him really meant this. They wanted. Just like kidnapping children, kidnapping civilians. They knew that if you go to a society focused on life, even to the extent of the minimization of deaths of their enemies, that if you go for a society that loves life, desires life, fights for life, that you can terrorize them, you could terrify them with your orgiastic celebration of death. But as I described toward the end of the book, as the year of conflict starts to turn around, as Hassan Nasrallah goes to meet his maker from a Beirut bunker, when sinwar finally crops above ground in Rafah with only three other people with him, one by the way, a bodyguard who was working for the un, a UN agency, when Sinwar comes about. Yes, again, Sinwar's bodyguard, paid for with our taxpayer dollars. But when the architect of the seventh finally comes above ground in Rafah, which, of course, the military expert Kamala Harris had told the Israeli arm not to go into because she looked at the maps. But it turned out when they went into Rafah, they found their enemy. And when you see these people, there is an answer to the death cults. There is an answer to the cult of death, which the IDF has shown is the destruction of their leaders, the killing of the psychopaths who would lead a society in this way, and a demonstration of the values of your own society. Now, that has been incredibly hard because there hasn't been a day, I've been with the Israeli Defense Forces in the last year and a half when I haven't seen how they've been operating. And then read the world's news the next day and read it as if these were polar opposites of each other. As I say, Israelis enter hospital. Yes, because the hospital was somewhere where there's footage of hostages from the 7th being taken in on the 7th and not for care. Whether it's hospitals, schools, anything else, there was just nothing the IDF could do from the moment they went in. Indeed, from the moment before they went in, when they were not going to be misrepresented by the world's media in a grand way. But. And I've been asked many times in the last year and a half, why are the Israelis so bad at communicating? The truth is, it's extremely hard to communicate what you're doing to a world which in significant part has already decided that you're the bad guy, and one.

[Jordan Peterson]

That'S manipulated as well, very profoundly by the actors behind the scenes. And all the things that we talked about play into this. The refusal of the west to admit to the existence of malevolence, our inability to understand the difference between a just and an unjust war, our willingness to hide in the shibboleth that war is bad. Which is hardly a moral claim at all.

[Douglas Murray]

No, I mean, I would say the people. There's a saying, I quote somebody saying the book is idiot. British student survey in which a large number of people said they wouldn't be willing to fight for their country even if it was under existential threat.

[Jordan Peterson]

When they've been taught that.

[Douglas Murray]

Well, yes. And when you dig down on the reasons why they said they wouldn't even be willing to fight for their country under existential threat as the young men and women of Israel have had to do for the last 18 months, the most common reply among young British people of the same age was war doesn't solve anything.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right, right. War. Yeah, yeah. Well, in the. And you think about how easy it is to make the moral claim. For example, I've heard many people make this claim, I'm against the death of women and children. As if that's some sort of moral claim.

[Douglas Murray]

Well, once.

[Jordan Peterson]

If that's not the basis of common humanity, no one can capitalize on that. Yes, on that what? On that profession of their morality.

[Douglas Murray]

Well, the other one I come across is people, by the way. And they don't really mean it, by the way, because again and again, the people who say that Israel is killing women and children are apologists for at best and supporters for at worst. A group that videoed themselves killing women and children. And many of the people who say that the Israelis. Douglas, Many of the people who say that the Israelis are doing this are the same people who say that Hamas did not. I mean, that's another level of the psychopathy now in the west. It's like I said repeatedly since the seventh, you know, what did we have in the 2017 period? Believe all women turned out. Don't believe women. If they're Jews, don't believe it then. Don't believe. If the rape is caught on camera by Hamas and they're boasting of it, don't believe them. But then a year down the road in the war in Gaza, these same people who deny that Hamas raped women on the 7th will say that Israeli soldiers are raping women in Gaza every single time. It's some form of projection.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, and that's that last ditch attempt to. What would you say to salvage the oppressor victim narrative? Excuse the core. That's the staff in the center of the belief system.

[Douglas Murray]

But yes, I mean, to go back to the main point. Yes. The main response that I hear is people who say things like, I don't like war. Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Now your book ends and we should wrap with this because we're coming near the end, like your book ends, I guess, on a quasi theological note. Right. It seems to me that the underlying conclusion that you drew, having admitted to the existence of evil, let's say in a theological sense, at least technically. Right. Because it's a language that expresses that landscape. It's at least that. And it is a pointer to the opposite. Right. That's the thing. To say it again about contending with evil is once you admit to its existence, especially in its lowest forms. You're forced to grapple with the fact that the opposite exists, and then that points you towards heaven, so to speak. Now, you structured your book so that your conclusion, which is actually somewhat optimistic, is that despite being faced down by a death cult that outnumbers them geometrically, the Israelis are still there.

[Douglas Murray]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

And they're thriving.

[Douglas Murray]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

And there are forces within the Islamic world that have recognized that and that are doing their best to what? Not even so much reconcile themselves to that fact, but perhaps even to welcome it.

[Douglas Murray]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

And that. That's held after October 7th, which was a complete bloody miracle. That was the Abraham Accords. And that's what I want to talk to you on the daily about. On the daily wire side, because I would like to talk to you. We didn't get into the issue of Islam versus Christianity and exactly how that might be conceptualized and mediated, but I'd like to do that on the daily wire side for all of you who are watching and listening. That worship of life. Right. It's the axiomatic presupposition that. It's no different than the presupposition, I think, that people are made in the image of God. It's just different language. And that points to. That points to a transcendent good that's encapsulated in the Jewish scriptures and in Christianity as God. God's the spirit that demands that let life be valued above all. Really? Above all?

[Douglas Murray]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Not above God, perhaps, but yes. And that's more like a definition, you know.

[Douglas Murray]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

And then the question is, and I thought about this for a long time. Well, what if you abandon your belief in the goodness of life? Job refuses to do that. The. The antinatalists abandoned their belief in the goodness of life. The cascading consequences of that are genocidal. That's where it ends, always.

[Douglas Murray]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

And that's what's happening.

[Douglas Murray]

But the opportunity to see the opposite of that, to see the opposite of the antinatalism.

[Jordan Peterson]

For instance, Israel has the only positive birth rate in the Western world, and.

[Douglas Murray]

Not just among the religious, among the secular as well, which is blowing the minds of a lot of demographers. We thought this is as it should. You'll notice that your most secular Tel Avivians will be having more children than themselves. They're more than two children, a couple on average, per.

[Jordan Peterson]

The Israelis have pulled that off, and the Hungarians haven't even been able to manage it, even though they're trying very hard.

[Douglas Murray]

Yes, but that point is to one of the central things in it. You probably can't fake that stuff up. The Hungarians, for instance, and I think the polls when they wanted to encourage people to have more economically, it's economically, if you have a fourth child, you will pay no income tax on the 10th year of this. Maybe people don't structure their lives like that.

[Jordan Peterson]

Why is it that so there's an anti Marxist thing to say.

[Douglas Murray]

But how about if. I mean, look at the difference between a Hungarian couple who are working out the tax break advantages of having a fourth child, but deciding not to have a second child versus an Israeli family in a war zone still creating life. That's not a tax incentive thing. That is at a far, far deeper level. And it is to do with a commandment. It is to do with a commandment. And you know, I would just add one other thing to that, which is I was talking the other day with a friend, biblical scholar, and he said, you know that famous quote on the walls of the un the quote from Isaiah. And he shall judge among the nations and shall rebuke many people and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. Now that's magnificent sentiment, of course, and who wouldn't want to follow it? But the thing that I just realized is look at what comes before it. Let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, and he will teach us of his ways and we will walk in his paths. For out of Zion shall go forth the law and the word of the Lord. From Jerusalem, Right?

[Jordan Peterson]

That's called a precondition, Douglas.

[Douglas Murray]

You don't get the idea of war being no more or peace breaking out among nations unless the word goes out from Jerusalem. You can have one, but you can't have it without the other.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's right. Yeah. All right, sir. For those of you who are going to follow us over to the Daily Wireside, I'm going to talk to Douglas with equal seriousness about the interplay between religious fundamentalism and psychopathy, with particular attention to the Islamic world. Why? Because there are signs of hope for a rapprochement between Christianity, Judaism and Islam, mostly in the form of the Abraham Accords, perhaps in the actions of the United Arab Emirate and perhaps the Saudis. Now, there are many things to untangle before that becomes a reality. And I would like to discuss some of those thorny issues with Douglass. If you want to join us on the daily wire side. That's where we're headed Next. Thank you, Mr. Murray.

[Douglas Murray]

Thank you.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes, that was a hell of a read. And it's quite a remarkable thing to have managed. And I'm amazed you're still in one piece, both physically and psychologically.

[Douglas Murray]

So thank you.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, you bet. You bet. And thank you to all of you for your time and attention. And to the Daily Wire for making this possible. The film crew here in Scottsdale for making arrangements to have this happen today. Bye. Bye.