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May 12, 2025 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:35:03
The Death Cult That Shook the World | Douglas Murray | EP 546
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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.
The misconception was Hamas leadership were happy with just being corrupt.
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 to roll over and what, submit?
That's not an option.
An army that fights by the laws of war, which the IDF does, this 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.
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 a relatively short book, although it doesn't lack in intensity.
What happened October 7th when Hamas invaded Israel?
What I saw, Douglas' 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' conclusion from defeat into victory.
Well, that's where the conversation got a little bit more theological, possibly.
Inevitability when talking about the existence of good and evil.
We discussed Douglas' 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 a 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 was responsible?
Let's start by laying that out.
What happened on October 7th?
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 guards and workers would come through each day and where aid lorries and indeed commerce occurred.
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 Simkat 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 7th, 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.
Impossible to catch by surprise.
Impossible to catch by surprise.
It's 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 7th.
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 these 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.
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 7th, said the same thing to me.
The thing they said was that they'd 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'd 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 described, 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 metal 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, we're on fire, would just hurtle to the scene and save lives.
And that's why I say that The Morning of the Seventh was a story of catastrophic evil from Hamas.
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, 1,200 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 44,000 Americans killed in one day.
Well, and the hostage situation is also...
And 10,000 Americans taken hostage.
That's by proportion of population, if you extrapolate it out.
It would be 10,000 Americans 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 in 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 logjam.
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 didn't really surprise me, 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 is...
How is that not 100% if everything isn't locked down and there's any semblance of freedom whatsoever?
So the explanation you offered about the mythical status of Israeli invulnerability seems to me to be the most effective explanation.
That and one other thing, 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 taxpayers.
Well done for us.
Yeah, that's for sure.
Really, really quite something.
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 were leadership.
We're happy with just being corrupt.
They were living in luxury, you know, penthouses.
Corrupt was sufficient.
Corrupt was sufficient.
Rather like the Soviet Union 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.
Right.
Hedonistic materialism trumps fanatical malevolence.
That's quite the theory.
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 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, Yachiyah 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 kefir.
He was the one who had such a remarkable obituary in the New York Times, if I remember correctly.
One of many.
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...
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 Sinwar was exchanged, and by the way, having had his life saved by an Israeli doctor in prison, Sinwar went back to Gaza, seized back control of Hamas, said repeatedly in public statements that he wanted to...
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.
There is nothing you'll do in life that's more challenging, difficult, and rewarding than being a parent.
Nothing with greater highs or lower lows.
You have little kids for a very short period of time.
It is a major mistake not to notice that and not to appreciate it.
We're dealing with a pattern of misbehaviors with our son, who's three years old.
Whenever we want to leave the house, he starts running away.
We have to be places at certain times.
When a disciplinary issue arises, you need to make space to master it.
I have to not do what I thought I was going to do for ten minutes to set this right.
Our 13-year-old throws tantrums quite often when he doesn't get his way.
We spoiled the heck out of him.
When you spoil a child, so to speak, you take away from them the opportunity to develop their own competence by doing too many things for them.
The consequences of his abdication of thought is that other people think for him.
That's what'll happen.
Our daughter was bullied at her school.
As this is happening, our son turned to some substance abuse.
Look for mood changes and behavioral changes and then you can tell your kid, look.
It might be an unpleasant conversation that we have to have, but I'm not going to let you be miserable and drift away.
Discuss the disciplinary strategies.
Discuss the rules.
Discuss what it is that you want from your child.
Talk that through so that you're the same person.
The more effective you are in laying out these disciplinary rules, the more they'll like you.
Rules consistently applied with minimal force and plenty of patience.
You don't want to let your worry destroy the pleasures of the moment.
Just because children know less about the world doesn't mean they're not paying attention and certainly doesn't mean that they're stupid.
They're not stupid, and they're watching.
*music*
He did.
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, is a...
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.
Victims we haven't understood yet.
They may have had a bad childhood.
Well, no doubt they did, but there's plenty of people who've had bad childhoods who don't turn into malevolent psychopaths.
That's my observation.
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 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 Israel, right?
The U.S. and Israel.
That seems appropriate?
Absolutely.
Okay, so what the hell...
I went to Oxford, you know, and the first bloody thing that those halfwits asked me when I was on stage was if I was happy about this tweet I made on October 8th, 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 possible response could Israel have, except to roll over and what, submit?
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.
It's actually a good story for Joe Biden.
Being Joe Biden, he's told it a lot.
But he, when he was a young senator, he once met Golda Meir, former prime minister of Israel, indeed the prime minister during the 1973 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, 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 1948, 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...
I heard the terrorists at, for instance, the Nova Party debating which of the young girls they should shoot and which they should kidnap.
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.
They'll exchange hundreds of terrorists or single 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, One of the things that's striking about your book is your continued explication of the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists,
psychopaths, their willingness to exploit every element of human decency to wage the most destructive possible of wars, right?
So the tunnels, 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 fact.
Longer than London Underground, and as I joked to the British military friend, rather better run.
6,000 entrances, many of them in the bedrooms of children.
Oh, almost always where the tunnel entrances come up, they...
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 all understood.
Sufficiently victimized perpetrators have no reason to abide by any standards.
How about that for an argument?
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 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.
Or a hospital or a place of worship.
As a member of the Israeli...
None of those words have the same meaning in Gaza that they do in the West.
None at all.
Whenever it's reported that a hospital has been hit, it's usually reported in the world's press, as Hamas wants, 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, Gadi Eisenkot, who I quote in the book, because he lost his son fighting in Gaza in the aftermath of October 7th, 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 Eisencott'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 them.
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, this Hamas leader was asked by a friendly Arab journalist, why...
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 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, well, the international community.
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.
Yes, but it's even worse than that, 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 on for the last 18 months.
And believes Hamas reports.
And believes Hamas reports.
Which, why would anyone ever believe Hamas reports?
Go to a mass murderer to find out their account of their actions, you know.
But the point is that 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.
One of the underlying things in this book, as you know, which we'll come on to 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?
Suffering and death.
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, 2023.
Possessed by the spirit of Cain.
Yes.
And that accounts for some of the anti-Semitism, 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.
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.
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 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 it seems to me, Douglas, that something like that is going on right now.
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 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 Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
You saw that the Ayatollah, this is the most amazing thing.
The Ayatollah himself congratulated the American universities, or the universities of the UK for that matter too.
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.
That 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.
Yes, it's an ignorable detail, clearly.
And there's another issue that seems to be operating at the universities.
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 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 that female sympathy can, what would you say, 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, and people overall, I think, in the West have no idea how pathological the universities have become.
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.
Yeah, absolutely.
And by the way, there's a very healthy dose of narcissism thrown into the whole thing, which is that...
To the extent that any students at American universities get taught anything about the Middle East, they will be taught Edward Said's theory, claim of Orientalism, which of course is a claim that is, by Said's own admission, spilt 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 would he...
Especially without giving some due credit to the fact of Western eyes.
Well, people like...
I mean, when Napoleon goes to Egypt, one of the things he does is to order a massive catalogue of all of the riches and treasures of ancient Egypt, a catalogue 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.
Another detail.
Why do you need to know that when you can say...
This is what Saeed really gifted.
Those Western eyes who defined ancient artifacts as treasures to begin with.
Right.
Then it becomes self-evidence, right?
But just consider the enormously advantageous aspect of narcissism to this mix.
Because the narcissistic thing that Saeed helped 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?
We'll be the way.
But everything is interpreted.
So this is just not fit for purpose for understanding the world.
But it's hugely narcissistic because, among other things, and you can see this in the spilling out of protests across America 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 was waiting for your opinion exactly in counter-terrorism 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 world?
Really?
Really?
You're at the center of world events by sitting in the middle of your quadrangle in a tent?
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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 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.
Yes, yes, yes.
Right?
Okay, so now the protest, see, it's not only that the students are characterized by this overweening certainty in Western, what would you say?
Dominance and malevolence.
Yes, yes.
It's that by...
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 the prideful twist.
It's 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.
I quote a student at Columbia who described himself as a first-generation, low-income student, 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 in Colombia and remembered thinking, when it kicks off again, I want to be at the center of it.
Now, you know, I don't know about you, but I think student days should be used for many things.
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, Well, that's taught.
That's taught.
That young man was taught that.
By the culture, too.
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 in 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.
The Iranian revolutionary government says that the Jewish state is a colonialist enterprise.
The Iranian revolutionary government is colonizing the Middle East since 1979.
There's nothing colonist about Islam.
No, it was only the fastest growing empire in the history of the world.
And as you know, Muhammad, when he spread Islam, only did through by persuasion and kindness.
And that still obtains today.
We'll get back to that.
But every time I mulled on this subject in recent years, 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 the students were accusing the Jewish state of?
Genocide.
Ethnic cleansing.
White supremacy.
Sorry, we would laugh at that one.
It's a good one.
That's a good one.
But anyway, so ethnic cleansing, genocide, white supremacy.
The various sins, they will always lob at Israel.
And they were throwing this at Israel from October the 7th, 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 on 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.
Now you can see the protests as a manifestation of that attempt to expiate.
Exactly.
One of the conclusions I come to is 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.
Well, they see Israel as the vanguard of Western colonialism.
Exactly.
It's the whole story.
And so this is a giant mechanism of projection.
Which is why I say, when it comes to these protesters, particularly the 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.
Right, of course.
You were taught that you're guilty of.
And no wonder that people rebel against that, because how the hell else are they going to expiate the guilt?
Absolutely.
But here is a way.
And with the added thing that the Iranian proxies across the West, the Qatari money that has flooded through Western universities, not least American universities, the propagandists, the organized movement.
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.
Culpability with no virtue.
That's one of the most striking experiences.
I was probably 40 bloody years old before I knew who Wilberforce was.
Hmm.
You know, to my eternal shame...
It's all part and parcel of the message that 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?
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 slave traders.
Right.
Compare that, by the way, to the fact that...
The reparations.
Yes.
At the same time, the Islamic world was gloriously still slaving away.
And much of the Islamic world still does, by the way, across Africa and the Middle East.
It's still doing slaving.
Unrepentantly.
Unrepentantly.
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 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.
Canada leading the pack perhaps.
Canada perhaps the world leader.
Australia, New Zealand, they could...
They're doing very, very well.
They are.
But into this vacuum, something was always going to step.
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.
Intifada terrorism in the center of New York.
What it is, is there's no reason why this death cult ideology should find itself worshipped 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.
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.
Yes, oppressor-oppressed, colonizer-colonized.
Proletariat-bourgeoisie, it's the same bloody story.
There's another strand to that, by the way, which I gave a lecture on this in New York last year for 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 is 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.
The facade is banal.
There was nothing about Eichmann that was banal.
He just fooled Hannah Arendt.
But she, through her half-baked theory...
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 Guardian said it was a sort of...
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 Demoxys 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.
So when did you decide, when did you come to that conclusion?
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 machinations.
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.
Well, I would say one of those, and you know this well from your work on the Bible, but one of the things I suppose that would stand out as a definition of evil is doing it knowingly.
And gleefully.
And glorying it.
And that's one of the things.
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 cult.
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 understanding.
Or serial killing pathology.
Serial killers.
I think we still might be able to identify Jeffrey Dahmer or the Yorkshire Ripper as...
Worshippers of death and suffering, right?
Sadism taken to its extreme.
But imagine that with a theological framework around it.
Such as the kind that jihadists have.
This is why, when you ask why I sort of was mulling 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 the glee, the sheer orgiastic glee of the terrorists.
At least the Nazis tried to hide their crimes.
Well, this is a point I've made that has occasionally got me into trouble.
What happened on the 7th 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.
And then the universities celebrated it.
I quote a late friend of mine early in the book, as you know, who fled 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.
Well, hell is a bottomless pit, you know.
Absolutely.
Really.
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 it doesn't diminish anything.
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 ten Jews in my own hands.
I've killed ten 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 7th, 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-Hawbah that we're forever told now is simply like, it's just a prayer.
Like saying, seek Heil in America is just a quoting of German.
The use of Al-Hawbah by the terrorists as they're removing a young man's head with a shovel or raping girls and then killing them.
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You need a cover story for your sadism, Douglas.
Well, that's one way of seeing some of it, yes.
Well, 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 the 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 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.
If I'm a Machiavellian, the only reason I'm communicating with you is to gain something only for me now.
Right.
No communicative intent other than that.
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 it is part of that satanic delight to take what's highest and to subvert it most entirely.
Yeah.
Yes.
This is...
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, and still enjoying it.
There's a story I tell...
You're enjoying it because it's wrong.
Right?
That's part of that.
And also, with another layer, which is that you have been taught that the people you're doing this to are subhuman.
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.
There was a rather heavy, I'll do it quickly, but a 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 in this.
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 a 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.
Pretty gruesome.
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 shelter staggering, 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 of 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?
And then the terrorists 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...
That's how you demonstrate that the suffering is irrelevant.
Right.
With that casual consumerist gesture.
Yes.
Right, and that, what would you say, that perversion of hospitality.
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 were, you know...
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.
Sinoir 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 part of that aside is 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.
To strive for attainment.
To strive for it.
It's all very well documented, but the soldiers who were going house to house, 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 kill 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 the 7th.
And look at it.
It was a catastrophe for the Israelis and it's turned out to be an utter disaster for the citizens of Gaza.
There's an immaturity and self-centeredness about psychopathy that's probably intrinsic.
So, and it does vary to some degree with temperament.
Like, there are violent two-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 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.
It's not that I have anything against children and I think they're delightful, but before they're socialized, they're not social.
Yes.
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 his...
Of the failure of his second-rate offerings, instead of to learn.
And he kills Abel, and he fathers the genocidal masses.
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's GDP...
The Abraham Accord signatories deign to notice that and thank God for some small mercy.
...that 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 1948.
There's no land except desert.
There's no water except the sea.
There's no oil.
It's one darn bit of the region where there's no oil.
And yet they make a success of it.
And if you look around the rest of the region and you see...
Colonial enterprise, Douglas.
I know.
But you look around the rest of the region, if you were Israel's neighbors in Jordan or Egypt or certainly, you know, Gaza and the...
Saudi, the Gulf, anywhere.
It's a perfect subject for resentment.
They're all victims of the colonial enterprise, right?
They bear no responsibility for their own misery.
There's endlessly someone to blame.
That's convenient.
That's very convenient.
Very.
And someone to hate.
Someone to hate.
That's even better.
And that's a great unifying thing among much more.
And, boy, the worst of your people can really delight in that, and you just have to let them loose and encourage them.
But just think about how this has, how taking the wrong route, Cain and Abel-like, has been such a disaster.
Well, Cain's descendants are genocidal, and then comes the flood.
Right.
That's the progression of the story, and it's causal.
Yes.
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.
That's one of the reasons why, I mean, as you know, I do get theological in this book eventually, because you can't not...
That's the problem with looking at evil.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
That's right.
It's really...
But it's two things really, Jordan.
It's first is...
That as you say, I think we agree that it's hard to contend with evil unless you have some kind of theological appreciation of it.
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?
Yeah, right.
Well, that's the next question that arises, right?
That's exactly what...
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 Mao's 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 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.
If Israel goes, Europe goes.
Well, that's certainly always been my belief, and some people might say, 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 state.
And it's not exactly 80 years old.
No.
And so, if you realize...
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.
Like Iran, for example.
Whether it's 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 that.
The protesters are right.
Israel is the vanguard of the West.
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.
The spirit that possesses them means it.
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.
It's a microcosm of the world.
Right.
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.
Yes.
And, of course, one of the...
If not the absolutely central things in the West, which is the tradition of the Bible.
The point I'm getting to is...
You talked about that in terms of the celebration of life, right?
Life more abundant, for example.
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, you know, maybe everyone else doesn't want what you want.
Maybe they want something totally different entirely.
But...
Like they're women to be covered from head to toe so they can only see out one eye and never talk.
Maybe they want that.
Maybe they want that.
Since they're pursuing that.
And, you know, one of the things I thought of a lot when I was thinking, when I was covering the, obviously this is also, as you know, a first-hand 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 realize that it's there in our texts.
It's there in the books.
Therefore choose life.
Therefore choose life.
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 distantly apart, who used to say things like, well, the Ten Commandments, they're so obvious.
I mean, why do we need to be told not to murder?
Because you were murdering.
Because humankind didn't know that you shouldn't murder.
There was envy.
We could talk about envy.
If you don't think that's an a priori condition, you are very naive.
So I heard that for many years about the Ten Commandments, and it was done in, I think, usually naive and flippant way.
But when it comes down to this one, literally, the commandment to choose life in the face of whatever odds.
Yeah, whatever odds.
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.
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.
Yes.
Because the enemies aren't united by anything transcendent.
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 infidels' 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 can terrify them with your orgiastic celebration of death.
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 Rafa, 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 above...
The UN.
Yes.
Again, Sinwar's bodyguard paid for with our taxpayer dollars.
But when the Architect of the Seventh finally comes above ground in Rafa, which, of course, the military expert Kamala Harris had told the Israeli army not to go into because she looked at the maps.
But it turned out when they went into Rafa, 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, you know, 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?
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 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.
No.
I mean, I would say there's a saying, I quote somebody saying in the book, a sort of 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.
Well, they've been taught that.
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.
Right, right, right.
War, yeah.
Well, 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.
As 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.
And the other one I come across is people, by the way, 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 here Those were victims done this.
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've said repeatedly since the 7th, you know, what do 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.
Well, and that's that last-ditch attempt to, what would you say, to salvage the oppressor-victim narrative.
That's the core.
That's the staff in the center of the belief system.
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.
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.
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...
Face down by a death cult that outnumbers them geometrically.
The Israelis are still there.
Yes.
And they're thriving.
Yes.
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?
Yes.
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 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 a transcendent good that's encapsulated in the Jewish scriptures and in Christianity as God.
God's the spirit that demands that life be...
Valued above all, really, above all.
Not above God, perhaps.
And that's more like a definition, you know?
And then the question is, and I've 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 antinatalists abandon their belief in the goodness of life.
The cascading consequences of that are genocidal.
That's where it ends, always.
And that's what's happening.
But the opportunity to see the opposite of that.
Yeah.
To see the opposite of the antinatalism, for instance.
Yeah.
Israel has the only positive birth rate in the Western world.
And not just among the religious, among the secular as well.
Which is blowing the minds of a lot of demographers.
As it should.
As it should.
You'll notice that your most secular Tel Avivians, The Israelis have pulled that off and the Hungarians haven't even been able to manage it even though they're trying very hard.
Yes, but that points to one of the central things in it.
You probably can't fake that stuff up.
The Hungarians, for instance, and I think the Poles, when they wanted to encourage people to have more children...
Economically.
Economically.
If you have a fourth child, you will pay no income tax on the tenth year of this.
Maybe people don't structure their lives like that.
Why is it that...
So there's an anti-Marxist thing to say?
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, a 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.
Nations 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.
Right.
That's called a precondition, Douglas.
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.
That's right.
Yeah.
All right, sir.
For those of you who are going to follow us over to the Daily Wire side, 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 Douglas.
If you want to join us on the Daily Wire side, that's where we're headed next.
Thank you, Mr. Murray.
Thank you.
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.
Thank you.
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, to the film crew here in Scottsdale for making arrangements to have this happen today.
Bye-bye.
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