Douglas Murray examines how MAGA-aligned figures now defend Iran’s Islamic Republic, despite its funding of Hamas—backed by $100B+ from Tehran, Qatar, and others—which orchestrated the October 7, 2023, attack killing 1,200 Israelis and seizing 250 hostages. He critiques Israel’s precision strikes against Hamas’ infrastructure and Iran’s nuclear/ballistic missile programs while condemning Western elites—from Princeton to Yale—who glorified Islamist leaders like Yahya Sinoa (deceased) and Hassan Nasrallah, who openly called for genocide. This shift reveals a dangerous erosion of democratic values, where anti-Semitism and anti-Westernism now masquerade as "truth," demanding urgent historical reckoning. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Douglas Murray, the last sane Englishman.
He is now the author of On Democracies and Death Cults, Israel and the Future of Civilization.
Maybe the second most appalling political development in the West has been the left's embrace of Islamism, a movement that represents everything they're supposed to hate, including bigotry, sexism, homophobia, imperialism, and religion.
What a shock it is to see leftists who for years called everyone Hitler suddenly out on their college campuses calling for the genocide of the Jews.
That's the second most appalling political development.
The first is the right-wing's embrace of Islamism, with people like Tucker Carlson and Dave Smith making excuses for Iran, soft-soaping Iran and blaming the Jews for just about everything, claiming they secretly run America, although apparently they don't run America well enough to stop everyone from hating them.
Douglas Murray is the author of The Strange Death of Europe and the Madness of Crowds.
And after October 7th, 2023, he went into the war zone, as he has in other war zones, and he covered the courage and decency of the Jewish people and the Jewish state under siege by murderous savages, to put it kindly.
And he wrote this book again, On Democracies and Death Cults, Israel and the Future of Civilization.
I've already listened to it as I listen to all Douglas' books because I'm hoping his accent will rub off on me.
Douglas, it's good to see you as always.
How are you doing?
No sign of that working yet, Andrew.
I would rather hope that your accent would rub off on me, I have to say.
Yeah, there's no sign of that either.
So you're in good shape.
So here's the thing.
I saw you on the Joe Rogan show, and I'm thinking to myself, you wrote the Strange Death of Europe about the influx of Islamists into England and other countries.
And so you became the darling of the right.
And you wrote a book called The Madness of Crowds, in which you took some of the sexual craziness that's going on and looked at it in this very sane way, very reasonable way.
Again, you're the darling of the right.
Now you write a book about the atrocities in Israel and the courage of the Israelis and fighting back against what you rightly term a death cult.
And suddenly, there are people on the right who are your worst enemy.
What the hell is going on, in your opinion?
First of all, I don't really want or need to be anyone's darling.
If you had said to me, you are the darling of the citizens of Hampshire.
If you said to me, the people of Tucson regard you as theirs.
So whether I'm a darling of the right or the left or something, it doesn't appeal to me if it was the case.
And so it wouldn't particularly bother me if it wasn't the case.
I believe that the only job of a writer is to tell the truth as they see it.
And hopefully people follow you and follow your line of thought and agree with you.
And hopefully some people will change their minds.
But it's sort of inevitable that if you do what we do and you believe that the pursuit of truth and the explanation of truth is, if that's your primary driver, then you can't be bothered by losing people here or there.
And that's happened plenty of times in my career to date, which is now almost a quarter of a century.
Not as long as yours, Anne.
But a quarter of a century is still some time.
So I know also that things come and go.
And it's also, I mean, I don't know if what you just described is true.
I don't keep much of a track of who adores me and who doesn't or who hates me and who doesn't.
Because after all, if you followed that kind of thing, you wouldn't get your work done and you'd be distracted and much more.
And you'd also have the risk that so many podcasters in particular, but writers and others have had in our era, which is to say what your audience wants to hear.
And I quote, I quote the epigraph of On Democracies and Deaf Cults is a quote from one of my great heroes, Vasily Grossman, the great Soviet era war reporter and novelist.
I quote a passage from his searing, unbelievable account as the first journalist who went into Treblinka and who tried to piece together and did piece together pretty well what had gone on there.
And Grossman says there, he says something like, he says, you might say, I'm paraphrasing this because I don't know it by heart.
He says something like, you may ask, you know, why write about these things?
Why remember these things?
He says, it's the duty of the writer to tell these truths, and it's the duty of the citizen reader to learn them.
And that's all I try to do.
Well, then, let me rephrase the question then and ask you this.
Are you startled to have the people who made fun of the left's alignment with Islamism suddenly soft-soaping the actions of Iran and condemning Israel, a democratic country that respects human rights?
I don't want to sound like somebody about eight times my age, but nothing like that really surprises me.
There are some things in this life that do still surprise me, thank God, because otherwise life would be boring.
But I'm never surprised that people can fall into what you might describe as awaiting chasms.
And there's a lot of awaiting chasms that exist in any society.
The awaiting chasm of anti-Semitism is just anyone who knows anything about that knows that it can come from right or left.
It can come from religious and non-religious.
It can come from Muslims or Christians.
There's nothing about that that should be very surprising.
I think the only thing that has surprised me a little in the last year, a year and a half, has been a much bigger thing, actually, which is what I regard as being right-wing anti-Westernism.
Right-wing anti-Semitism is just a part of it.
I'd say, put it this way: you and I, and many people watching, will have grown up in, observed, diagnosed, railed against the sort of Chomskyite left view of the world.
That's the sort of post-60s, you might say post-Vietnam, so it wasn't like it came from nowhere, but that view of the world, which was you could get a best-selling book if you said America was responsible.
And if you said, for instance, that a particular sect within Vietnam had significant responsibility, you just wouldn't get that big an audience because who cares about internal Vietnamese politics.
If you said, If you look anywhere in the world in the sort of Noam Chomsky view of the world and all his acolytes in the 60s, you could just look at anywhere in the world and somebody would say, why is this country immiserated?
Or why is it suffering upheaval?
Why is its citizenry trying to leave?
Why do they not have a higher standard of living?
And the answer to everything would be because America.
Something we did.
Now, I always said when that was coming from the left, that this was wildly inadequate as an analysis.
Of course, it's narcissistic.
Naturally, because nothing in the world can happen unless we in the West make it happen.
But it's also a very appealing one because it's just an omni-explanation for everything.
And in the last couple of decades, I suppose, in this case, almost certainly as a fallout from the failures of Iraq and Afghanistan, we see that from the right as well.
And there's that wing.
Some people call it the isolationist wing of the Republican Party.
That's slightly inadequate.
It's not quite isolationism.
But these are also people who look at the world and every problem in the world they see as being America's responsibility.
So the people, including some of the ones you've just mentioned, will say things like, we have caused X country to be a mess.
And X country can be a country we have intervened in, for instance, like Afghanistan.
Or it can be a country which we had minimal intervention in, like Syria.
I mean, after the Syrian civil war kicked off, there were plenty of people who were keen that America should get involved militarily.
American and Western intervention in Syria was minimal.
The main intervening powers in Syria were Iran, Russia, Turkey.
But if you were, again, if you were to say what we have in the region is a problem of Ed Iwanist expansionism, president of Turkey, that's kind of not a sexy subject.
He cares about internal Turkish politics.
Whereas if you say we, America, the West, are responsible for Syria falling apart and falling into more than a decade of appalling bloodbath, you've got an immediate captive audience because there are other people who also want the West and America to be responsible for everything.
I think this is as inadequate an argument when it comes from the right as when it has come and still does come from the left.
I think it's a product of very low resolution thinking and people who have really not looked at this very seriously.
Fundamental Trust Vacuum00:03:00
And unfortunately now, this is being whipped up with what I regard as being a fundamental, it's being whipped up in a fundamental trust vacuum, which the right understandably lives in, particularly since the era of Trump.
The fundamental vacuum of trust in institutions, which is completely legitimate.
I've said this repeatedly.
I said this on Joe Rogan's podcast.
I said, it's inevitable that after COVID and the lab league, let alone, you know, the Russia hoaxes, the, you know, the Hunter-Biden stuff.
It's inevitable that the right would be very suspicious of institutions.
But I'm, as it were, old enough to know that conservatives do have to, as part of their job, try to shore up the validity of institutions.
And that isn't to say you give institutions that fail a free pass by any means.
No one who's ever read my writing would think I do that.
But the because X institution has failed us, burn it all down, is just in my understanding of conservatism is a million miles away from the conservative ethos, which is burn it down is the radical left's response to everything.
It is not an admirable thing for people on the right to join in on.
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Yeah, I think the COVID exposed so much deception and corruption in our elites.
Worrisome Conspiracy Theories00:03:49
And the elites, because they were backed by the press and surrounded by the press, thought they were going to just glide over it.
They just thought they were going to glide into the next thing and are shocked to find that people want them gone.
And now, because of the information crisis we're in, it's very difficult for anybody to pin down what is the truth and what's not.
And it leaves people free to come up with these crazy ideas.
I mean, it's, you know, we're living through it literally daily at the moment.
Yeah.
And I mean, one of the reasons why, again, in my understanding, conservatives should be more judicious in their analysis and in their putting forward of solutions and answers to things is that they should know that there are things which if you set them running, you will not be able to stop them.
Right.
You know, I mean, a lot of people are responsible for that.
Remember that before President Trump released the remaining JFK files in March, he had said for a long time, you know, this is going to be big.
RFK Jr., who after all is in the cabinet, had said repeatedly on the record that he believed his father and uncle were killed by the CIA.
And a majority of Americans, not just because of them, but because of that sort of thing going around for a long time, genuinely do believe that the intelligence services in America have killed an American president and at least one American president have killed a viable presidential candidate and his brother.
And I mean, that, just going back to basic societal trust, if that was the case, if I lived in a country where I believed that the intelligence services could pick off anyone they wanted, including the most famous and important person in the country, I would escape that country, I think, because that's a country that would have fallen into tyranny.
But then the files do get released and there's nothing that shows that those conspiracies, those claims were wrong.
You can't even use conspiracy theories anymore because there have been things called conspiracy theories that turned out to be what we used to call true.
So it's all very difficult terrain.
But just consider the fact that, you know, you set a hair running like that with the JFK conspiracy, the CIA one.
You release all the documents.
President Trump releases all the documents.
And I don't know if any minds have been changed.
That's a good small example of the trust deficit which we're all in.
And I'm going to say, I don't think it's, I think there are many things that need reform, but I don't believe burn it down is any more a useful way to talk about the justice system than it is to say, talk about the police in those ways, as the left, radical left did in 2020.
This is a very, it's a very worrying moment for people.
But then, you know, as I always console myself, it's always been a worrying moment.
Yeah, worrying moments seem to be thick on the ground.
You know, talking about this, one of the things that I find, I mean, your book is very moving on democracies and death cults because you went in to Israel and into these places and spoke to the people who were living through what people call everything an existential threat.
But the Israelis lived through this daily existential threat.
It was one of the things in the one trip I've taken there that struck me almost immediately that you could stand on a hill and look into countries that wanted this entire country wiped off the face of the earth.
Daily Existential Threats00:15:22
It's just an amazing experience.
But the book is very touching because you're talking to these people.
And I wonder if you could just address some of the mythologies that certainly the left has spread and now people on the right are spreading that this is Israel is an apartheid state.
It's a colonizer.
It's committing genocide in Gaza, which would be funny if we're talking about genocide and that it's to blame somehow for the Palestinians' troubles.
I mean, what is, as you see it, the general state of this country at this moment and in history?
You know, you can always tell somebody hasn't thought about the region at all if they think anything about it is simple.
There was a prominent figure actually who used to be the head of MI6, Secret Intelligence Service in the UK, who gave an interview the other day to CNN in which he referred to the recent apparent massacres and unrest inside Syria,
which many people predicted because when the former jihadist who has taken over the country post-Assad came into power, many people said, well, this crucible of multiple minorities and religious minorities in the, I mean, it's a veritable Jurassic park of religions, Syria.
But this person who used to be head of the SIS in the UK said, you know, and then there's the Druze that are being attacked and they're Muslims.
And I thought, wow, how amazing that somebody in that position would think that the Druze were Muslim.
But that's because they're one of the groups, the religions that are being attacked at the moment inside Syria.
It's a reminder of the fact that, I mean, the complexity of the region is so extraordinary that people who are meant to be very, very serious people misunderstand very basic things.
At the same time, there are certain parts of it which are quite straightforward, which is the state of Israel came into existence in 1948.
And the Arabs, as they were called at the time, before they were called Palestinians, were also offered a state by the UN and they rejected it.
And from 1948, the attitude of Israel's neighbors and indeed of what came the Palestinians has been we would rather destroy the Jewish state than have another state of our own.
And that has been the cause of war after war.
And that's caused the armies to invade in 67 and 73.
After the failure of the 73 attempt to wipe out Israel, the Khomeiniist revolution, of course, came in in Iran.
One of the reasons I start this book in 1979 is because the flight that took the Ayatollah Khomeini from exile in Paris to Tehran and then the institution of the Islamic Revolutionary Government in Tehran can be seen as being,
should be seen as being maybe the most important development in the region in our lifetimes, because it's that that allowed the colonializing Iranian revolutionary government to spread its terror networks across the regions to take over and dominate countries like Lebanon, increasingly in recent years, as I mentioned, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Gaza, and so on.
And they have basically continued that war that the traditional armies stopped after 73, which was they decided, the Arabs decided after 1973 they couldn't wipe out Israel by traditional military force like that.
But the Iranian revolutionary government recognized that you could perhaps do it if you surrounded Israel with terrorist armies.
And on the 7th of October, Hamas, funded by, supported by, armed by the Iranian revolutionary government, Qatar and some others, took their best shot at wiping out Israel, the best shot they'd had since 1973.
And they did so in the hope that Hezbollah, another one of Iran's armies, this one in Lebanon, would join in the attack from the north, not just with rocket fire, but similarly invade so that Hamaz would come up from the south, Hezbollah would come from the north and they'd meet somewhere in the middle, and effectively garat Israel like that.
A lot of people don't realize that that was the ambition.
A lot of people still don't realize the scale of the attack.
But the people who think, who just accuse Israel wildly, by the way, which they've done since literally since the 8th of October, 2023, the people who accuse Israel of all of these things, genocide and so on,
not only are not looking at the situation in any way truthfully, and not diagnosing it in any way truthfully, they're also not answering a question which I have put to such people and never had answered adequately, which is, what would you do?
What would you do?
In population terms, you know, the United States is what, 340 million people.
We don't know, do we?
But I mean, something like that.
Something like that.
We don't really know.
But about that.
And Israel is a country of about 9 million people.
1,200 people were massacred in their homes and dancing in the early morning, Nova Party on the 7th of October, and another 250 taken hostage in Gaza.
If you extrapolate that out by population to America, you would have a situation of roughly 44,000 Americans killed in the American homeland in one day and a further 10,000 Americans abducted and taken hostage and held in tunnels and tortured underground.
Tell me in that situation two things.
One, whether there's anything you wouldn't do to kill or capture the people who carried out that attack on the American homeland.
And secondly, what would you not do to get back your hostages that you knew were every minute and every hour of every day, now for almost two years, the remaining hostages being held in conditions of such horror.
What would you do?
And I have yet to hear any serious person, and I mean that amateur, professional, can be anywhere, right in competition.
How would you achieve those war objectives of punishing your enemies and getting back your hostages?
And all I hear, we've heard from people since the war began, this particular phase of the war, is things like, you know, well, you've got to get around the negotiating table.
You think, wow, yes, to assume that Hamas wanted to annihilate Israel, did the most barbaric acts of violence against the Israeli citizenry, filming it as they went, boasting about their depravities, kidnapping people, the idea that they would take them into Gaza, the hostages, including the bodies of dead hostages, because they value those as bartering tools as well.
The idea that on October the 8th, you could then appeal to the humanity of Hamas is so preposterous.
And yet serious or formerly serious people actually talk like that.
In actual fact, the only way you can achieve any of the war aims that Israel had as America would have if that scenario, that nightmare scenario unfolded in America, is to wage a war and to win it.
And that is actually what, for the last more than 18 months, Israel has been doing.
It's extremely difficult, particularly in Gaza, because of the buildup of the tunnel networks and the weapons dumps and the whole terrorist infrastructure which Hamaz built up in Gaza after the withdrawal by the Israelis in 2005.
They have made Gaza the hardest place on earth to fight a door-to-door campaign with an effort, as the Israelis have, to minimize civilian casualties in the same way that the American US and British armed forces, when involved in operations, have to try to minimize civilian casualties quite rightly.
They've done that.
It's not finished, sadly.
Everyone wants it over as soon as possible.
There's not one Israeli soldier who wants to spend another hour in Gaza.
I can assure you of that.
But they have, the Israelis have, in the period since October the 7th, almost completely decimated Hamas to the extent that its rule in Gaza is on a knife's edge all the time now.
They have got most of the hostages back.
They have killed almost all the leadership of Hamas.
They have decimated Hezbollah in Lebanon to the extent that Lebanon actually has a chance as a country to survive without Hezbollah throttling it all the time from the government level downwards.
The Assad regime has fallen in Syria, partly because Iran's proxies were so decimated everywhere else that they fell apart inside Syria as well.
They have taken out, the Israelis, all the air defenses of the Iranian revolutionary government.
They have destroyed most of the weaponry, including the ballistic missiles that the Iranian government has been stockpiling.
They have destroyed the nuclear program, which the Ayatollah has worked without doubt, despite the claims of some people from the right now, that they were without doubt developing in order to develop the world's most dangerous weapon, a nuclear bomb.
The Iranian regime is holding on again on a knife edge.
The Houthis in Yemen, who couldn't do anything on their own, but who've been given all these ballistic missiles from Iran, are increasingly cut off and incapable of acting.
I wonder sometimes, you know, if Yakya Sinois, who planned the October 7th massacre, could have foreseen all of this, would he have done it?
You don't know, of course, among other things, because he's dead and also because he was a psychopath.
But I say at one point in On Democracies and Death Cults, when I got the news that Sinoa had been killed by the IDF in Gaza, I went into Gaza the next day to visit the place where he'd met his end.
And I mentioned, as you know, at one point in the book, I sat down in the armchair he was killed in because I wanted to see what he'd seen at the end of his time on this earth.
And outside in Rafah was what is without doubt the scene of utter devastation.
Not a house that was undamaged, a scene of rubble where the civilian population had all had to evacuate.
At the end of his life on this earth, Yahya Sinoa was sitting alone and he had the chance to look out of the window and this is what he had achieved in his life.
What a stupid, wicked thing to do with the gift of life.
And I would just add to that, of course, imagine being one of these young dolts.
We often talk about campuses.
I dislike it in a way because most people in America, thank God, don't go to Ivy League universities.
And I don't like giving the Ivy Leaguers more attention than they deserve.
But imagine being one of these DOLTs at Princeton or Columbia or Yale, who actually celebrated Yahya Sinoa and then mourned his death.
Imagine being one of the people who knew of Hassan Nasrallah years afterwards, after he had killed hundreds of American troops in the Beirut bombings in the 80s, after killing hundreds of allies of ours.
Imagine that this man who said that his life's work would be to show that he loved death more than the Jews and the other infidel loved life, and he would use that against all of us, all of us non-Islamists.
Imagine that you discovered that man before he was then killed by an IAF missile in Beirut.
Imagine you discovered that man and you thought he was your guy.
And then when he died, you thought he was my guy.
This is one of the most appalling moral crossroads a person could be at.
And there are plenty of chestbeating, pseudo-tough guys on social media and so on who like to say things like, how can you justify what the IDF is doing in Gaza?
I say very easily, actually, because I've seen it all up close.
I've seen how it works.
I've seen the devastation.
I've seen the army's attempt to respond to the devastation.
But I think that the question, a much bigger question, which of course is not asked as much, is simply, how could so many people who thought that they were the good guys have ended up being the supporters of the worst Islamo-fascist tyrants of our time?
And will the people who ended up on that side ever notice the horrific moral error that they committed?
There is one sign that they might, which is they might notice at some point that all the guys they were hottest for are six feet underground, if not a lot deeper.
Yeah, yeah.
I got to stop there, Douglas.
I'm sorry.
I'd love to talk to you some more on Democracies and Death Cults is the book, Israel and the Future of Civilization.
Very clear-eyed, courageous in going into those areas when you did.
It's great talking to you.
I always love to talk to you and hope to see you again soon.
Thank you for coming on.
It's my great pleasure.
Thank you.
Douglas Murray, again, the author of On Democracies and Death Cults, Israel and the Future of Civilization.
Worth reading if you are immersed in some of the stupid, ignorant, and morally unjustifiable lies that are being told about this conflict.
Douglas is a terrific writer, as he's a terrific speaker, and so he's always worth reading.
Also worth coming to the Andrew Clavin Show on Friday.