‘Anti-Semitism is an early-warning siren for a sickness in society’ Douglas Murray on the scapegoating of Israel, the fascism of Hamas and the moral disintegration of the West.
Has the West failed the moral test of 7 October 2023? From the moment news emerged that Hamas terrorists were tearing through southern Israel, butchering, raping and kidnapping civilians, a sizeable proportion of Westerners, including among the elites, failed to understand what was at stake. Here was a Western liberal democracy under attack by an army of Islamist anti-Semites, hell-bent on the destruction of the Jewish State. Yet every attempt by Israel to defend itself has been cast as an act of unjustified aggression – or worse, an attempt at genocide. Instead of inspiring solidarity, the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust fuelled a wave of anti-Semitism across much of the West, with self-described progressives at the forefront. Jihadism marched under the banner of social justice.
Douglas Murray’s new book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel, Hamas and the Future of the West, looks at how we got here, the real meaning of 7 October and how we should respond. This week, he joined spiked’s Brendan O’Neill on his podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show, to discuss all this and more. You can watch the whole thing here.
Brendan O’Neill: At what moment after 7 October did you know the West had lost its mind?
Douglas Murray: There was a very specific moment on 8 October, which I describe in the book. I saw a pro-Hamas demonstration taking place in Times Square. At that time, the massacre was still ongoing in the south of Israel. Yet here were hundreds of people in New York, all celebrating and waving placards saying things like ‘by any means necessary’. I just thought, what is happening?
Of course, it’s possible to favour the creation of a Palestinian state. But why would you choose the moment when Hamas’s massacre is still going on to support the people doing the killing? This was before Israel had even done anything in response. I knew something had gone wildly wrong, and that I had better gear up. I realised too that we were about to enter an era of denial. Of hearing statements like ‘it didn’t happen’ and ‘it would be good if it did happen’ spoken simultaneously.
O’Neill: Did it make you think we were in more trouble in the West than you had initially believed?
Murray: Yes. It occurred to me that there is something about the Israelis in the minds of some of the general public which makes them uniquely undeserving of empathy. Survivors of the Nova festival – young people who were dancing in the early hours of the morning, and who were set upon by Hamas terrorists, massacred and raped – are treated wherever they go as if they themselves are the culprits. It’s totally different from the way in which Britain remembers things like the Manchester Arena bombing of 2017. We would be amazed and horrified if two young women who had survived the suicide bombing at the Ariana Grande concert travelled elsewhere in the world and were treated as if they’d done it. Nobody would tolerate that. But for some reason, the Israelis are uniquely undeserving of understanding.
I see this as a psychological projection on a vast scale. Israelis are accused of things which they haven’t done or aren’t doing, by people who either want to do those things themselves, or would like the Israelis to suffer those things, or who have been told that these are things that their own nation has done. It is an extraordinary phenomenon.
We see young people from Britain to Australia, Canada and America, who really don’t have a dog in the fight, accuse the Israelis of things like colonialism, genocide and white supremacy – all of which are offences that these young people in particular have been told that they themselves are guilty of. As I wrote in my last book, The War on the West, it is unclear what you are to do, as a generation taught that you are guilty of crimes for which you have no responsibility. It is an unsolvable situation. But the Jewish State presents an answer – a scapegoat on to which you can project all the crimes you were told you were guilty of.
O’Neill: How do you interpret 7 October in historical terms? What did it represent?
Murray: It represented an almost orgiastic eruption of the hatred that has been inculcated for years. The thing that most Westerners find hard to recognise is that those who committed these atrocities really do mean what they say. It seems crazy to us when Yahya Sinwar, after being released from an Israeli jail for killing Palestinians, goes on to retake control of Hamas in Gaza and plans the 7 October massacre. It seems crazy when he promises to rip the hearts out of the Jews. The Western mind instinctively interprets it as metaphorical, as if what he’s actually saying is that he wants a two-state solution – just in a slightly more ‘poetic’ way. But no. When he says he wants to kill Jews, that is literally what he wants to do, and what he succeeded in getting people to do on 7 October 2023.
We could do with studying this type of fanatical mindset, because there are clearly so many people in our own countries who want to emulate it. In Britain we have hundreds of thousands of people who are sympathetic to Hamas. I think we are going to have to consider very carefully the fact that so many people in our midst know exactly what happened on 7 October and still support it.
O’Neill: How do you describe Hamas’s particular brand of fascism?
Murray: From the moment I started seeing the footage coming out of Israel on 7 October, the thing I couldn’t get out of my head was the glee in the voices of the attackers. There was a phone call recording I quote in the opening of my book, in which a young man from Gaza phones his family back home and says, ‘Father, father, I’ve killed 10 Jews. With my own hand, your son has killed Jews.’ I thought about that a lot. It would be like if the Nazis had livestreamed from Treblinka and wanted the world to know.
O’Neill: Has the response to the attack from young, liberal people in the West been particularly surprising?
Murray: Yes. The other week at Princeton University, hundreds of students were chanting ‘glory to our martyrs’. This is a completely imported, semi-cultish belief system. There might be some Palestinian students attending Princeton on lucrative scholarships, but they certainly don’t make up the majority. So who are these students who are saying ‘glory to our martyrs’? And what is ‘our’ in this phrase? These young people have adopted the lexicon and the dress of Islamic extremists. It’s buffet politics – you just take everything that’s there. And before you know it, you’re dressed in a kefiyeh and pretending to be a Palestinian jihadist in the middle of Columbia University or Yale. It’s deranged and, as I’ve said many times before, indicative of the fact that the adults have left the room.
O’Neill: How big is the problem of Muslim anti-Semitism?
Murray: The issue is that it is ‘Islamophobic’ to mention Muslim anti-Semitism. I think governments, police forces and other institutions have just decided that this is a numbers game – there are more Muslims than there are Jews, especially in countries like Britain, and therefore it’s just easier to give them their ‘Islamophobia rights’, and this will all go away as a problem. I think this is profoundly misguided. Islam has an anti-Semitism problem from the roots of the religion, and it remains undealt with.
Christianity has had a long history of anti-Semitism, but if a Christian pastor or bishop or priest stood up in a pulpit and said, ‘We must kill all the Jews’, it would be frontpage news. The leadership of the church would denounce the person in question, and they would have no future. By contrast, we have the videos from within mosques not only in the Middle East, but also in England, of such statements being made. These are posted on their own websites. It’s not like they’re hiding it.
Countries like the UK are in denial. We’ve imported a lot of Islamic extremism through mass immigration. We’ve imported a lot of people who hate Jews and hate Britain. I think that there is a general sense of ‘let’s allow them to continue hating the Jews, and we’ll worry about the rest when we come to it’. It’s very misguided.
O’Neill: What can we do to remedy the moral rot we’re facing in the West today?
Murray: Firstly, we have to be honest with ourselves. Admit to the problems, admit that something has gone badly, badly wrong. Then we can ask why, and then start to turn things around. Most of the problems you and I have written about come back to a central question, which is whether the liberal democratic states we live in can develop the ability to say, ‘No, we won’t put up with that’ – because if not, we’re in real trouble for the foreseeable future. We need to be able to say that if you want to bring down the West, if you want to kill the Jews, if you hate liberal democracy and you want to subvert it, then there are lots of places you can live, but this ain’t one of them. But the pussy-footing around topics like these in recent years has been extraordinary.
It’s alarming to me that in British politics in particular, we often talk about drawing the line somewhere, but we never enforce it. The other day, Keir Starmer was tweeting about how angry he is about the small boats coming at the southern border of the UK – but that’s all he does. He tweets that he’s angry about it. Anyone with an X account can do that. But if you’re the prime minister, don’t you have any power to stop it? I’d like to see it done. I’d like to see these lines drawn more often.
Anti-Semitism is one of the early-warning sirens of a deep lack of health in society and, indeed, in a person. That’s why it matters. That’s how I respond when people ask why I’m so focussed on this issue. As a writer, you should be alert to these warnings, and do what you can to raise your voice in the hope that people will listen. Because there’s not much pleasure in being proved right after everything’s gone wrong.
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