This Is What Happens When We Worship Victims Instead Of Heroes | Douglas Murray - PT 1

Summary

Impact Theory Podcast with Tom Bilyeu Episode: This Is What Happens When We Worship Victims Instead Of Heroes | Douglas Murray – PT 1 Release Date: April 15, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Tom Bilyeu welcomes Douglas Murray, renowned war correspondent and author, for a deep-dive discussion on the current state of Western civilization, the crisis of collective facts and morality, and the cultural and ideological conflicts defining our era. The conversation examines the shift from hero-worship to victim-worship, the “Second Dark Age” of information overload, and the challenge of confronting violent ideologies in a fractured world. Central to their dialogue is Murray’s latest book examining the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel through the lens of death cults and the West’s complex, sometimes self-defeating, responses to violence and victimhood.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Crisis of Agreement: Facts, Morality, and Shared Reality

• [00:30–02:15] Fragmented Realities

  • Douglas Murray describes the shift due to social media:

    “In other words, having a different opinion is very 20th century. In the 21st century, we have different facts… The increasing inability to agree on what just happened is one thing that is massively dividing all of our societies.” (Douglas Murray, 01:11)

  • While acknowledging greater access to information, he warns that “none of us can actually be on top of everything” and that confirmation bias is being supercharged by algorithms.

• [02:15–04:39] The ‘Second Dark Age’

  • Murray compares our era to a “Second Dark Age”—not from ignorance, but overexposure:

    “Our Dark Age is characterized not by an inability to access knowledge, but by a surfeit of knowledge...” (Douglas Murray, 02:26)

  • The pressure to “have opinions on everything” is contrasted with the reality that expertise is fleeting and often determined by trending topics.

2. Loss of Moral Anchor & Identity

• [04:39–09:58] The Breakdown of Shared Morality

  • Tom Bilyeu reflects on American and Western loss of “moral clarity,” comparing the Cold War’s relative unity to today’s confusion:

    “We don’t have an anchor by which we can navigate through these things.” (Tom Bilyeu, 04:39)

  • Murray cautions against demoralization, quoting C.S. Lewis and Milan Kundera to highlight the perennial nature of living through “the fog” of crisis.

• [11:42–15:04] Self-Criticism vs. Self-Loathing

  • Murray discusses Western society’s slide from healthy self-critique to destructive self-loathing:

    “…there is some liminal moment when the self-criticism can be pushed upon you by people who want you to go further down that path because they want you to do it for a reason.” (Douglas Murray, 12:38)

  • He sees American youth as increasingly taught to view their country and its values as uniquely bad, echoing problems previously charted in Europe.

3. Democracies and Death Cults: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

• [15:04–21:23] Defining “Death Cults”

  • Murray’s new book “Democracies and Death Cults” is unpacked. He distinguishes between those who “worship death” and those who defend “the value of life.”

    “There are some people who literally not only do not value life, but literally worship death… Hamas, like Hezbollah, is a similar death cult. Its leaders, its members literally have spent decades saying, we worship death, we love death.” (Douglas Murray, 17:55)

• [21:23–24:11] Death Cults Beyond Religion

  • While conceding that jihadist ideology is at work, Murray broadens “death cult” to any ideology where death is valorized, citing examples from 1930s Spain and revolutionary movements.

• [24:11–27:10] Revolution and Human Psychology

  • Tom analyzes the psychology of revolution:

    “Once you have this thing is worth dying for, to actually manifest that in the world, you’ve got to share that idea. You’ve got to get that idea to take shape in the minds of everybody around you.” (Tom Bilyeu, 25:10)

4. Moral Equivalence and Asymmetric Warfare

• [27:10–29:36] Israel’s Dilemma

  • Addressing the charge that Israel is on the verge of mirroring its enemies, Murray emphatically distinguishes “fighting for death” from “fighting for life.”

    “There is every difference in the world, morally and strategically, to fight for death and to fight for life.” (Douglas Murray, 27:17)

• [29:36–33:28] Anchoring Morality

  • Murray explicitly roots his morality in loyalty to civilization and democracy:

    “I’m unashamed to say that I’m on the side of my own civilization. I'm on my own side, as it were. I want my own societal side to win out against when it's challenged in a fight.” (Douglas Murray, 29:37)

  • He counters critics with a stark hypothetical:

    “What Israel suffered on 7 October is the equivalent of about 44,000 Americans being murdered on one day... Nobody can persuade me that America wouldn’t want to have a strategy to reverse that...” (Douglas Murray, 32:18)

5. The West’s Strange Sympathy for Death Cults

• [33:28–38:33] Victim Narrative and Selective Empathy
  • Tom proposes that some regard Israeli suffering as the “price to pay” for colonialism, and Murray unpacks the logic holding Israel and the West to uniquely harsh standards.
  • Murray highlights the hypocrisy:

    “If America is being accused of all the same things that Israel has been accused of, in what world would we say that the murder of thousands of Americans ... is a reasonable response to historical injustices carried out by Americans who are long dead?” (Douglas Murray, 34:53)

6. Elite Institutions and the Breakdown of Discourse

• [38:33–43:22] University Presidents, Campus Antisemitism, and Legalese

  • Murray dissects the infamous non-answers of university presidents on calls for genocide:

    “Sometimes ChatGPT can be more moral than the president of Harvard.” (Douglas Murray, 41:00)

  • He sees these failures as both self-protection and symptomatic of deeper confusion about moral boundaries.

• [43:22–46:34] Magical Thinking & Intersectionality

  • Some activists, he argues, think that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will unlock all other global injustices, an “Age of Aquarius” fallacy:

    “Some people actually seem to believe that if you address the issue of Palestinian statehood once and for all, you also address women's rights, trans rights, gay rights, economic injustice, historical injustice, colonization, and so on. It's magical thinking of a very familiar kind.” (Douglas Murray, 45:05)

7. The Futility of Silver Bullets

• [46:28–46:34] Rejecting the Search for a Single Cause
  • Murray closes by rejecting the belief that solving one “umbrella problem” resolves everything, warning this mentality breeds fanaticism.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “We have different facts.”
  (Douglas Murray, 01:11)

• “Our Dark Age is characterized...by a surfeit of information and stories, details and much more.”
  (Douglas Murray, 02:26)

• *“If mankind had put off the search for beauty, meaning, purpose, until the conditions were right, the search would never have begun.”
  – C.S. Lewis, as quoted by Douglas Murray, (06:38)

• “Complete destruction of Western civilization. Interesting. Interesting. At least they say it. At least they're open about it.”
  (Douglas Murray, 43:22)

• “Sometimes ChatGPT can be more moral than the president of Harvard.”
  (Douglas Murray, 41:00)

• On the ‘Death Cult’ difference:

  “Carrying out an unprovoked, unnecessary attack on peaceful people... and going into Hamas stronghold and trying to either kill the leaders of Hamas or get the hostages back... These two things stand as opposites.”
  (Douglas Murray, 27:17)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:30 — Intro to the crisis of shared facts and the question: “Who are the good guys and bad guys?”
• 01:11 — Murray on the change from differing opinions to differing realities
• 02:26 — The “second Dark Age” and information fatigue
• 06:38 — Quoting C.S. Lewis: living “on the edge of a precipice”
• 11:42–12:38 — The danger of self-criticism becoming self-loathing
• 17:55 — Definition of a “death cult” and specific application to Hamas and Hezbollah
• 27:17 — The “life vs. death” distinction and critique of moral equivalence arguments
• 29:37 — Murray explains his civilizational loyalty and framework for moral judgment
• 32:18 — The scale of Israeli losses put into American context
• 41:00 — ChatGPT’s “moral clarity” vs. elite equivocation
• 43:22 — Activists' candid calls for “the complete destruction of Western civilization”
• 45:05 — The allure of magical thinking and intersectional “silver bullets”

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Tone & Language

Douglas Murray’s tone throughout is direct, erudite, and sometimes biting—particularly in his critique of elite institutions and Western self-hatred. Tom Bilyeu brings rigorous curiosity and self-doubt, pressing for predictive frameworks and challenging conversational complacency.

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Takeaways

This episode is a must-listen for those wrestling with the morality of modern conflicts, frustrated by the West’s often confused responses to violence, or questioning the cultural movement from self-critique to self-destruction. Murray challenges listeners to resist magical thinking, reclaim moral clarity, and understand the true nature of ideological extremism, warning of the existential perils if Western societies can no longer distinguish heroism from victimhood, or life from death.

Transcript

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[Podcast Host]

These are not academic questions. We are waging both economic and kinetic wars right now as we violently renegotiate the world order. How we decide to move forward will affect generations to come. And few people have thought more about these issues than Douglas Murray. As a war correspondent, bestselling author, and lauded public intellectual, he's been at the heart of many of these crucial debates and can help paint a way forward. And today he's with us. So without further ado, I bring you Douglas Murray. How do we make sense of the fact that we can't even agree on who the good guys are and the bad guys?

[Douglas Murray]

Well, I mean, that's a perennial problem. Of course. It's been something that in any conflict, any political situation is normal. I think that the there's been a change since the age of social media, which I've described before as being the move from the era about disagreeing about our interpretation of events to not agreeing on what just happened. In other words, having a different opinion is very 20th century. In the 21st century, we have different facts. And I think that that is one of the things in our era which has proved especially divisive, has all sorts of positives. Greater access to knowledge, greater access to a wider range of opinion. These are all good things. But I think that the increasing inability to agree on what just happened is one thing that is massively dividing all of our societies.

[Podcast Host]

Is there a world on the other side of that? Or do we have to somehow some way come to a shared understanding of facts? Or this is just There is no way to reach common ground.

[Douglas Murray]

Well, I mean, my hope is that there is a way. We'll never find common ground, but we can agree on certain principles, perhaps, or say what the ground is that we're standing on and whether it's desirable ground. I mean, I think that the era we're in I've occasionally described as what I call the second Dark Age. That is the first Dark Age was characterized by an inability to access knowledge or information. Literally, people didn't even have access to or knowledge of the one Holy book. In our age, it's quite different. Our Dark Age is characterized not by an inability to access knowledge, but by a surfeit of knowledge, a surfeit of information and stories, details and much more. So that none of us can actually be on top of everything. But there's an expectation that you're meant to have opinions about everything. I've characterized this as the, the oddity that you, you will have noticed as well online of the people who are experts on tariffs this week were experts on Ukrainian mineral deposits last month, and before that they were experts on how to withdraw from Afghanistan and also on pandemics. Some of these things are so important that we do have to have. We certainly have the right to have. Most sensible people would want to form opinions about them, but even that is dictated increasingly by what is pushed your way by the confirmation bias that we're all have a tendency to already hardwired into us, but the confirmation bias of the algorithms and much more. But my hope is that we can push through this second Dark Age as we did the first as a species, and that we will get a better knowledge. Maybe it'll come in our lifetimes, maybe afterwards, I hope in our lifetimes of where we can actually agree on what just happened and then get to the substance.

[Podcast Host]

All right, talk me off a ledge. I have. So my whole thing in life is I'm not interested in being right, but I'm deeply interested in identifying the right answer, an answer that has high predictive validity, that if I think in this way, make these base assumptions, that I can both look backwards at history and go, yeah, that all makes sense based on what I believe. And then ideally that means that looking forward, I'll have some sense. Too much complexity to get things perfectly right. But am always trying to update my thinking. The way that I think about this moment is it's this profound renegotiation of everything in a time where we don't share facts and more importantly, in a time from where I'm sitting anyway, where we don't share morality. And so we're. We don't have an anchor by which we can navigate through these things. And so when I think about what happened in the Cold War against Russia, when it was US v. Russia, they. It was a Cold War, but they were fighting over whose ideology was better and there was an actual winner. Like the USSR ran out of economic steam and they were no longer able to fight. And if they wanted to have any sort of allies whatsoever, they had to tear the wall down, they had to give up their system. And you said when you were talking that we pushed through the Dark Ages. And when you said that, I thought, ooh, there's a lot of lives lost in that very simple statement. And so my concern is that this moment is going to be devastating in loss of life as the whole world sort of gets thrown up in the air, whether it's the economic warfare between America and China, whether it's the hot wars that you've been reporting from on the lines of Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Gaza. Do you think that that is too dark of a view and that we're going to be able to find a way out of this without fighting for supremacy of ideology, or do we have to fight?

[Douglas Murray]

We'll see. I mean, I'm very fond of quoting something that C.S. lewis said in a sermon in Oxford in 1939, when he pointed out that although the age that his country, my country of birth was in was not in a propitious moment, nevertheless, he said, human life was always lived on the edge of a precipice, that if you look back, even times that seemed relatively peaceful, Europe in the late 19th century, when you look back at it, we're also like our age, like C.S. lewis's age, were filled with alarms and panics and crises and much more. The important point he makes, which is one that I've always tried to live by and which I always say, particularly when I have the opportunity to speak to university students or anyone young, is to say what C.S. lewis went on to say, which is that if mankind had put off the search for beauty, meaning, purpose, until the conditions were right, the search would never have begun. And I take great comfort in that, that although you always live in the middle of the whirlwind, know that that doesn't mean you should be distracted from doing what you should do.

[Podcast Host]

Does this moment feel different to you, though? Like, as somebody who grew up in the 80s, this moment feels distinctly different.

[Douglas Murray]

It's extremely hard to say because everybody has the ability. In the rear view mirror, everything looks clear. I'm very fond of a quote from the great Czech writer Milan Kundera, who said in a book of his in the 90s testaments betrayed, he said, mankind walks through life in a fog, and we stumble along and we create a path as we walk it. That's not the interesting thing. The interesting thing, as Kundera said, is that if you look back, you see the man and you see the path, but you don't see the fog. Everything looks clear. In hindsight. In hindsight, people of our generation might look back and view the 1980s as a time of relative tranquility. But I have no doubt in my reading of the era talking to people from the areas, and it felt very different from that at the time. Everyone now expected that the Soviet empire would crumble, but in the 1980s, by no means everybody did. Same thing with the 1990s. Some people look at it and say, look what a halcyon time it was. The whole world was talking about a single blowjob. But in fact the 90s were filled with their own crises and alarms and so on. So yes, it always feels different, it always will feel like that. And sure, there are certain things that characterize our own era and are particularly concerning, but I don't think that they're uniquely so and I don't think they're irrecoverably so. I certainly don't think we should be demoralized in the face of that.

[Podcast Host]

I like that take. Let me give you why I think that in my language there's higher predictive validity to see this moment as a different time, certainly from my lifetime. I'm sure this is repeated in history a gazillion times, but there was what I'll call moral clarity in the 80s. America good, Russia bad. It was really simple. And so we, I mean, you're never going to get 100% of anything. But it really felt like everybody was prepared to fight for, for America. We had the confidence of our beliefs, we felt good about who we were, about our country. And one of the things that your book really does a phenomenal job of is holding up a morally repugnant act and then following the chain of. But there are a whole lot of people that don't think this is morally repugnant. Now, it may just be that with social media you can see all the people that you thought the same thing back in the day, you just couldn't see them. But now I'm being confronted with, whoa, I don't see what the non relevant relativistic moral ground is that I'm meant to stand on. And that makes us feel particularly strange because the internal fighting inside of my own country, certainly the UK has got its woes as well, and that makes sense. And obviously I'm very familiar with your work on the strange death of Europe. And so it's like that feels like the very thing that set the stage. And so that book and this book to me feel like there's some compendium nature to them. And it's like failing to get that Common ground leads to the strange death of Europe.

[Douglas Murray]

I agree. I actually moved to America some years ago, which you might take as being telling in itself about my views of the old continent. I haven't given up on it entirely. But one of the things that has concerned me in recent years is that what I charted in the, let's say, the demoralization, among other things, of Europe in the last 80 years, a demoralization that starts from very obvious reasons, ends up with a sort of a healthy societal self criticism turning into a very unhealthy societal self loathing and eventually self destruction. This is a very complicated process because as I've often said, Western self criticism, the tradition of self criticism, is one of the great advantage points of the Western civilization. It's good to adapt. When you're doing something that's wrong, you don't want to keep doing something that's wrong, either technologically or morally or anything else. But there is some liminal moment when the self criticism can be pushed upon you by people who want you to go further down that path because they want you to do it for a reason. I believe that America has undergone, maybe resisting at the moment a bit more, but has undergone a period of similar demoralization and self laceration to the version that Europe has been through in recent decades. And what I mean by that really is where American self criticism turns into the self hatred which has been pushed on many young Americans in particular. Where instead of believing, if there was a time when young Americans brought up to believe that America was uniquely good, they are very often brought up now to believe that America is uniquely bad. And if any group abroad or other system of governance may in the past have been portrayed as innately inferior, a generation is to a very great extent being brought up today to believe that any other form of government or system of values is innately superior to ours. I think that's where the problem comes for America. I analyzed that quite a bit in my last book, the War on the west, where I was very interested in why America was engaging in this not healthy revisionism, but deeply unhealthy self destruction whereby everything from the origins of America onwards were being seen in the most negative light. I regard that as being a civilizational turning point. Because I think it's perfectly natural for any group of people, wherever they're born in the world, to have a natural predisposition to feeling that their way of doing things is good and that it's an unhealthy position for any society, let alone the world's Foremost, democracy. To get into the position of thinking that anything they do in the world or at home is uniquely bad. And that's where I start. Have started to worry in recent years about America following Europe's path.

[Podcast Host]

Stick around. When we come back, Douglas makes one of the most controversial claims I've ever heard about the international response to Israel. You are not going to want to miss this. All right, we're back. Let's get into it. Yeah. So reading the most recent book on democracies and death cults, you're really confronted with a stark reality of you don't mean this metaphorically. So if. If you don't mind, walk us through what is a death cult and why in the book? Because the book is largely. I don't know if you'll like this encapsulation, but it seems so true to me. It's largely a looking at October 7th and what happened in Israel with the Hamas attack through that lens. And so it is this unrelenting recantation of all the things that happened. And it was stark. Reading it, like, I've obviously been paying attention to it, but whoa, like, when you hear it one after another, like, following that timeline, it's. It's pretty grave. And so I walked away, and I don't know if you wanted me to, but I walked away feeling coming to the conclusion that solving this problem is going to require total victory on one side or the other. And we'll get into that because I have beliefs that I think YouTube at large takes deep exception with. And so we'll see if. If you can beat it out of me or if we rile each other up. I don't. I don't know how that'll play out. But one, does that feel like a fair read of the book? And then two, what is a death cult? Very succinctly.

[Douglas Murray]

Firstly, I don't mean the book to be unrelenting. I think I tried to relent a bit at various points. I certainly try to finish by the end on a somewhat positive note, which I feel it's not faked by any means. On democracies and death cults starts with the morning of October 7th, because for me, several things happened that I thought were enormously telling. And that's why I spent most of the last year and a half in the area covering the war in Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, elsewhere. I've also been in Ukraine and so on, but it's largely about the Israel, Gaza war, because when the news started to come out from Israel on the 7th, having reported from there and been there many times. I was, first of all, of course, horrified by the. The things that were coming out. I secondly knew that this story of what had happened, the murder of 1200 civilians, the kidnapping of 250 civilians from Israel by Hamas, was going to be passed over quite swiftly because the world media, for various reasons, tends to like to talk about Israeli retaliation more than they do the thing that's caused Israel to retaliate. But I was aware from 24 hours after the massacre, firstly, that I needed to go to Israel to get firsthand what had happened. But secondly, I became aware that there was going to be something going very badly wrong here at home in America and in other Western countries. And I knew that because I had a glimpse of it in Times Square on October 8, when the massacre was still going on. And I went down to Times Square because there was a protest, a pro Hamas protest, an anti Israel protest that was glorifying the massacres. And I thought, okay, get ready. This is going to get a heck of a lot worse. Because this is before any Israeli reaction to the atrocities had even started. You ask what a death cult is. I mean, in a way, I put the title on democracies and death cults. I put it in clear antithesis because I believe they are absolute opposites. We've seen many death cults in history. What unites them is they do not share what many people in America and the rest of the west assume is the natural predisposition of mankind. Ask your average college student, you know, do people in the world feel roughly the same, everyone want the same things? And they'll say, yes, of course. Everyone in the world basically wants the same thing. And my inclination, having traveled very widely in the world, is to say, whoa, hang on there. Many people want different things, and the more you travel in the world, the more you realize that. But the thing that I write about here is something which many people, most people in the world of peace, simply cannot comprehend, and that is that there are some people who literally not only do not value life, but literally worship death. We have seen this many times before in history. In the 1930s in Spain, a great Spanish philosopher of the era, Miguel de Unamuno, who wrote the book the Tragic Sense of Life, gave a lecture at his university in which the Francois the fascist students who he was trying to pull back from the brink, resist his attempt to civilize them, and end up chanting, viva la muerte. Long live death. And Unamuno live, leaves and dies. Shortly afterwards, an extremely disappointed and disillusioned man as he says this necrophilic chant, Long live death. Well, Hamas, like Hezbollah, is a similar death cult. Its leaders, its members literally have spent decades saying, we worship death, we love death. They say we love death more than you love life. The now late leader of Hezbollahas and Nasrallah said for years, the great weakness of the west is that they love life, whereas we do not. We love death. And the fact that that exists is an extremely troubling and difficult fact. And it's a particularly troubling and difficult fact for Israel because it happens to have neighbors who have this view really fast.

[Podcast Host]

Is that definitionally born of Islam or is this just a, an algorithm that can be tripped inside of the human

[Douglas Murray]

mind, as I hope I showed by giving the example of 1930s Spain. It is something that can be created for many, many different backgrounds, many directions. It can come from the left, it can come from the political right, it can come from the poor, the R, the advantaged, the disadvantaged. It can come from absolutely anywhere. But in the case of the death cults that Israel faces, Hamas and Hezbollah and their backers in the Iranian revolutionary government in Iran, it obviously has its origins in a very violent, the most violent and most appalling version of the Islamic faith, which is the jihadist death cult. That, yes, believes in martyrdom. The highest value in life is to die in the cause and indeed to take other people with you to kill and to die in the name of the cause. Some people may think I'm exaggerating this. I'm not at all. I mean, I give example. In the book of the Hamas leader Ishmael Hanir, who was living in a luxury apartment in Qatar, he gets the news that his three sons, who are also Hamas leaders, have been killed in an airstrike in Gaza. And he's absolutely joyful that they have been. Much of the Western mind cannot comprehend how any father could be joyful that his sons have all died. But he is, because he believes that they have died in this cause. And I believe that this is very, very hard for the Western mind to comprehend. The people in the south of Israel who stared this in the face literally on October 7th, they know what this is. Now, I don't think many other people in the rest of the West, Western Europe or America, North America, do understand, but there is this follow on question which I spend much of the book meditating on, which is why are there so many people in our own midst who want to excuse or to promote or to even admire the death cults and I think this is a very, very important question for us to ask because we should have some ability, as we were saying earlier, to have the zones of agreement. And the zones of agreement should include not supporting the deliberate rape of women. Not.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, one. One would hope. All right, I have a read on this. I'll be very curious to get your, I'm sure, far more thoughtful take. But as a student of history, I look at that, and I recognize in what's going on in Israel and Gaza, the revolutionary mindset and the framers of the Constitution here in the US Understood very clearly. The reason that what happened in France or anytime that you have a revolution, it tends to lead to tyranny, is because once you click over that algorithm, once it turn in the human mind, everything becomes about revolution. It is a revolutionary frame of reference in which you can tear anything down. No one prizes stability. It's fighting for the sake of that idea, whatever that idea is. And once you have this thing is worth dying for, to actually manifest that in the world, you've got to share that idea. You've got to get that idea to take shape in the minds of everybody around you. And once you create that, or I should say, once that momentum is. Gets going, it is extremely hard to stop. And so hearing Alexander Hamilton and George Washington both talk about, like, hey, we've got to get these guys to chill, because otherwise we're going to go from overthrowing the British government to a civil war that just tears us apart. We've got to get people outside of that mindset. And so if I always look at humans as a superorganism, and there's just so many patterns that we don't feel as individuals. We always just feel like we see the world the way that it actually is. All these other idiots, they're caught up in something. But if you instead go, oh, this is. This is a thing inside the human mind that has a justification, which is we. I have a thesis that humans, as a superorganism, abhor plateaus. And so we have something in us that runs, that says, oh, we're getting mired in something. We're getting stuck, we're being oppressed, whatever. Boom. That algorithm kicks in, the first person realizes they would rather die than sit still. We get thrilled by that. I mean, there are plenty of people in history where we're like, yo, they died for the cause. It's incredible. You talk about some people in your book that were like, we revere them for their willingness to go try to save lives and to be willing to give over their life. Coming up next, Douglas breaks down how Western journalists became activists and why that's one of the most dangerous shifts in modern media. Book a loved by guest property with VRBO and you get a top rated

[Douglas Murray]

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[Podcast Host]

All right, we're back. Let's get into it. For Israel, this is a dangerous moment where now they run the risk of becoming the death cult who's like, well, we now have our thing that we're willing to fight to the death for. Do you see that risk?

[Douglas Murray]

There's always risks and as I say, from every direction. I believe, however, that there is every difference in the world, morally and strategically, to fight for death and to fight for life. I believe there's all the difference in the world of carrying out an unprovoked, unnecessary attack on peaceful people in their homes on a Saturday morning and for instance, going into Hamas stronghold and trying to either kill the leaders of Hamas or get the hostages back. I believe that although some people claim that there is no difference between these two things because if death is a result, it's it all comes out in the wash. I disagree with that. I think that somebody who goes into a firefight to save lives, as I give examples of in the book, many, and I could have given many, many more. Going into a place of conflict to save lives is the exact opposite of going into a conflict with the expressed desire to take as much human life as possible. And Hamas aim everywhere, always like Hezbollah, is to take as much human life as possible. And even, and this is one of the added perversions even to, to make your enemy take as many lives on your own side as possible. I believe that's very, very different thing. These two things stand as opposites and I'm very happy to, to argue through why that exists that difference.

[Podcast Host]

I think that would be helpful because one thing I want to know is what do you anchor your morality on? And the bad news for this conversation is I share your anchor or at least as I interpret you. But some people clearly they need, they need an anchor and it seems like they're anchoring off of weak, good, strong, bad. Very simplistic, but it's an anchor and it's giving a lot of fervor to the people in the West. What. What do you anchor? The. What is to you and I obvious that if you're fighting for life, that's very different than if you're fighting for death?

[Douglas Murray]

Well, one thing is that I'm unashamed to say that I'm on the side of my own civilization. I'm on my own side, as it were. I want my own societal side to win out against when it's challenged in a fight. I want it to win against other visions of how to organize human life. I'm on the side of the democracies winning against communism, but that's a fight for previous generation. I'm obviously on the side of the democracies that fought against and destroyed Nazi fascism. I believe that in a conflict between your, your friends, your allies against people who are not just their enemies, but yours as well, it isn't that hard to know which side to be on. That doesn't mean, of course, you shouldn't be or can't be critical of your side's actions. And certainly when your side does something which is wrong, that should of course, be criticized. But I think that one of the things that has caused a lot of disputation in the last 18 months since this war's been going on is that, first of all, I mean, many people do not actually understand anything about the nature of war. I have yet to hear from any of my critics any scenario in which they know how you would rescue 250 people from a densely packed area in which they're being hidden underground by a group that uses its own civilians as human shields and uses its tunnel networks to store its weaponry. But literally, as a leader of Hamas said the other month when he was interviewed on Al Arabia, the interviewer said to him in Arabic, why, why don't you allow the Gazan civilians to shelter from any bombings from the air? Why don't you allow the shelter in the extensive tunnel network which you spent 18 years building in the Gaza? Nisham, as the leader, said, the tunnels are not for the citizens of Gaza. They're for our fighters and for our rockets. I have yet to hear a decent explanation from anyone, a military historian or an amateur or interested observer or anyone else. I've yet to hear anyone say how they, in a situation like this, would retrieve the hostages and destroy the leadership of the terrorist death culture that abducted them and killed 1200 of their fellow countrymen. And just to put it in some perspective, I know your audience will be able to understand this, but I know some audiences who haven't been able to understand the idea of extrapolation out from population size. Israel is a country of only 9 million people and obviously the United States is many times that size, population wise. But if you do the extrapolation of numbers out, what Israel suffered on 7 October is the equivalent of about 44,000Americans being murdered on one day on the American homeland soil and about 10,000Americans being abducted from their homes and held in a neighboring country. Nobody can persuade me that if 10,000Americans were being held hostage and 44,000 have been massacred and raped, much more, nobody can persuade me that America wouldn't want to have a strategy to reverse that, to address it, to stop it from ever happening again. And if you do agree with that, what is your plan for retrieving the hostages and for killing the leaders who did this or bringing them to justice?

[Podcast Host]

The bad news is their reasoning. They're gonna have a bullshit answer. They'll give you one. They're going to say that's bad, you go in softer, you negotiate, you blah, blah, blah. All the things that will never be able to run the counterfactual. But I think that there is a moment earlier in what you were saying that you actually schism away from the people that you're trying to get that answer from. And I think I am very much mind reading. And so you're closer to the problem. By all means, correct me if you see something wrong, but this is my mental map that they would say that's the price you pay. You are a colonial power, you have been occupying people. This is an act of resistance. And yeah, you don't have the right, full stop to come in and have a disproportionate response. So I don't know what you want me to say. You don't get to. You need to negotiate, you need to find a way to free these hostages. That's non military. Like that's crazy.

[Douglas Murray]

Well, yes, Israel is accused of every single sin that the rest of the west is accused of. It's accused of colonialism, just as America is accused of, of colonialism, just as Britain is accused of colonialism. By the way, in the case of Britain, it's a valid accusation, I have to concede, but not for some centuries. I should stress in the case of Israel, it's also accused of genocide and much more, which it's not guilty of and which I lay out why that's obviously a slur in the book, but America is accused of the same things. So just, just run with me for a moment on this. If America is being accused of all the same things that Israel has been accused of, in what world would we say that the murder of thousands of Americans on American soil and the abducting of many thousands more is a reasonable response to historical injustices carried out by Americans who are long dead? You don't even have to do that with this country. You could do it with any, even rival country or even a challenger country, or even a country whose leadership professes itself to be an enemy of the United States. Like the revolutionary Islamic government in Iran. The revolutionary Islamic government in Iran that backs Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and others who are waging war on Israel and others. They, they have had Iran in captivity, that regime, since 1979 and beleaguered and, and much oppressed one of the great civilizations, I think, in the world, the Persian people. If, however, a group was to go into Iran, select peaceful people, going about their lives, burn them alive in their homes, kidnap other Iranians and so on, I could make the argument that, and I will make it quickly now, that Iran, the Iranian revolutionary government today, is literally a colonialist power. It is the most colonialist power in the region, perhaps in the world. In my own lifetime, it obviously colonized Iran. The ayatollahs went on to colonize Iraq after the vacuum left by America. It colonized Syria, it colonized and helped to destroy the formerly great country of Lebanon, and it has colonized Yemen. So Iran in our own day is literally guilty of the greatest amount of colonialism of anyone in the era. And yet if on a Saturday morning any group went in and started randomly slaughtering and raping Iranian women because of this colonialism and said, well, you're guilty by dint of being Iranian. I would like to think that everybody in my friendship circle and anyone I wanted to know would say, it doesn't matter. That's still wrong. Why has that ability to make a judicious judgment seem to evade so many people in the West? Why do so many people, elite institutions from UCLA to, and Berkeley to Columbia and much more, why do they find it so hard to believe all women or not victim blame? Why do they want to make excuses for the most violent, anti Semitic, but also anti Western terrorist groups of our time? It suggests a profound breakdown in our ability to be judicious, for sure. And it's one that should trouble us all.

[Podcast Host]

Do you have an answer for that? Like what, what algorithm are they running that makes that so it's, it's conflict free in their mind, like watching even. I mean, this is obviously much lighter than some of the things you just painted, but watching Claudine Gay try to tap dance, use legal language around the genocide. Yeah, genocide. It does create a problem. I'm just going to say it. She just wasn't gonna bring herself to do that. But I think, and look, I'm often accused of mind reading and I will admit I try to mind read as much as possible. I feel like I have a high predictive validity take on what she is doing. Do you have a sense of the narrative that she tells herself or whatever that governs her morality?

[Douglas Murray]

Yeah, absolutely. When those three university presidents sat before the congressional committee, I knew that they were reading out statements that they had been given by the university's legal team. They wanted to make sure they weren't opened up to class action, lawsuits and much more. And since many Jewish students on their campuses and others have been racially attacked in the last 18 months. Just two days ago at Princeton University, Jewish students had chance of. Of being told to go back to their own homelands. Which is interesting, of course, because it seems the Jews can never do anything right. If they're in the Middle east, they should go back to Poland. If they're in Poland, they should go to Auschwitz. If they're in America, they should go back to somewhere. It's a very dark thing that. But the universities where that's happened on have happened across the country, by the way, would not be agreed on from anywhere else. It would not be agreed on from any other direction if, if black students on an American campus had right wing maniacs screaming at them to go back to Africa. I would like to think not only that those students or the people doing it wouldn't get away with it, but all of us would join in a condemnation of that. We would all join in the condemnation of that. We wouldn't say what if or but you have to understand the context or anything else. But with Jewish students it's different. It's for some reason. Well, for various reasons I outlined in the book, it's been made into a different case. But, but the interesting thing with Claudine Gay and the other university heads was that they were reading out lawyer like statements clearly to protect their own backsides. And of course that didn't work. But when it happened, I phoned a friend of mine who was teaching at one of these universities. And I said to him, what they were reading sounded to me he like legalese. And he said, really? It sounded to me like chat GPT. And so, as I say in the book, we tried an interesting experiment, which was to type the questions that Representative Stefanik and others put to them. Is it legitimate to call for genocide? Is it right? And so on. And we put that into Chat GPT. And Chat GPT was very clear. It said genocide is recognized as being wrong in all known moral systems. And as I say in the book, it just goes to show that sometimes chat GPT can be more moral than the president of Harvard. The point is, is that these university heads and others are basically trying to cover their own backsides against legal challenge and so on. But what they do in the process of it is to nod through the utterly reprehensible. And I understand, I think, the place they're coming from, and I understand, I think, the place that the people that the students who are actually doing the aggressing are coming from. I think the students and others who are doing the aggressive actions and the intimidation and the thuggery and much more are under the belief that Israel is actually doing the things they're accusing Israel of. They believe themselves to be anti colonialists, and they believe that Israel is a colonialist power. They believe they are anti racists and they believe that the world's one Jewish state is a racist power. They believe that they are anti Nazi and they believe that Israel is a Nazi country. So some of them are simply wicked, simply side with the death cult, simply pro Hamas, and profoundly anti Western in every way, stated and otherwise. By the way, the Columbia students group who've got quite a lot of attention in the last year in their objectives, they state that one of the things they want is the, quote, complete destruction of Western civilization.

[Podcast Host]

Fun.

[Douglas Murray]

Complete destruction of Western civilization. Interesting. Interesting. At least they say it. At least they're open about it. Yeah. So some of them, they simply want to turn over the whole darn table. They are the people that the founding fathers and others recognized in their time and others recognized throughout history. There are some people who just want to wade through blood, other people's blood, or their own. And they think the spilling of blood gets you somewhere. It's a very dark and ugly aspect of some human minds. But others of those people who agree with them are simply, massively, massively lied to. They actually believe the things that they're chanting. They actually believe that if you make the Jews leave their historic homeland and clear them out from the river to the sea, from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean, something great will happen. Now, they're never quite clear what. And I think to some extent, we're in the realm here not of geopolitics or of the ethics of war, but in the realm of magic. A lot of people seem to explain well, most of my adult lifetime, I've heard from politicians of the left and the right, Conservative, Republican, Democrat, labor. I've heard the claim that if the Palestinians have another state, and I say another state because my view, they already have two, or they had another chance, most recently with Gaza, if they had another Palestinian state, the region would all be okay. It would be good. In fact, the argument is that it's the key. If you solve the Israeli Palestinian dispute, it's the key that unlocks every other problem in the region. I always thought that was rubbish. I always knew it was rubbish. Because in my observation, even if there was another Palestinian state, it doesn't mean that the economy of the Yemen is going to blossom. Even if there was another Palestinian state, it doesn't mean that women in Iran are going to be given equal rights. And even if the Palestinians were given another stage, it's not like the gay bars would open up in Riyadh. It's obviously nonsense, but the idea is now beyond the region because the intersectionalists and others believe that all oppression is interlocked, and to unlock one oppression is to start to unlock the others. Some of these people actually seem to believe that if you address the issue of Palestinian statehood once and for all, you also address women's rights, trans rights, gay rights, economic injustice, historical injustice, colonization, and so on. It's magical thinking of a very familiar kind. If we just solve this one problem, the Age of Aquarius will come.

[Podcast Host]

Do you think there is one umbrella problem that if you solve that gets moving in the right direction, or no?

[Douglas Murray]

No. I think it's fantasy thinking and is one of the things that can cause fanaticism, of course. Because if there was one thing that would, if addressed, solve all the world's problems, what wouldn't you do to get that one thing sorted?

[Podcast Host]

This is exactly why I wanted Douglas on the show. He is unflinching. Whether you agree with him or not. He is calling out what so many are too afraid to say. And this moment demands that kind of clarity. But we are just getting started. In part two, we go deeper into the breakdown of Western institutions, the weaponization of empathy, and how Douglas believes we get out of this mess. Do not miss it. And if you're not already, please make sure you're following the podcast and leave us a review on Apple or Spotify. It really helps other people find the show, so we can keep bringing you conversations just like this. Until next time, my friends. Be legendary.

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