Douglas Murray argues in his new book that Western democracies face existential threats from "death cults" like Hamas and Hezbollah, fueled by open borders and mass migration draining welfare states. He contends that only mass casualty atrocities will force political change, citing the Southport stabbings and the lack of anti-Hamas protests post-October 7th as evidence of public deception. Drawing parallels to Imperial Japan's defeat, Murray asserts that superior Western values can prevail if nations close borders and confront these ideologies directly, challenging current governments for their failure to act before further violence occurs. [Automatically generated summary]
And I see from the lampposts big signs saying trust Allah, pay your zakat.
Not planning to do either of those things in the near future.
You can't have open borders welcoming in people who hate you.
If a group of people, in this case the Arabs in Gaza, elect a death cult to rule them in Hamas, And that death cult launches war upon war upon its neighbors.
I don't see why they get to keep the territory from which they wage war.
I think they should lose the territory, and I think they will.
In a fair fight between them and my history, my people, my past, I don't think they have a chance.
We're not going to fall into the hands of these idiots.
Not going to.
We've got much better story, a much better past, a much better literature, a much better culture.
There's a reason why you don't see people fleeing from the West to enter Muslim country.
And I know which side I'm on.
I believe that if other people want to choose the other side, that's fine.
It just kicked off this morning, and obviously they're talking about democracies, and there's a subtext of death cults that are doing some damage to democracies at the moment.
But when I tweeted that I was in London yesterday, almost every response Said London Stan in it.
I just said I'm here in London and almost every response said London Stan.
You've been talking about all of this for a long time.
Strange Death of Europe and at least a decade you've been on all of this.
What is going on in this country and in this city specifically?
And then we'll dive into some of the stuff in the book.
But I'm not really sure we've got the brightest and the best from around the world.
And we certainly haven't got the people we needed the most.
Driving here this morning, I can't say that I'm thrilled when I drive through the wasteland of what the Luftwaffe managed to achieve in the 1940s and what post-war planners achieved after that.
I can't say I'm thrilled when I drive down what remains of the streets in this wasteland of East London and I see from the lampposts big signs saying, trust Allah, pay you as a cat, not planning to do either of
those things in the near future.
But yes, I mean, I think that Post-war immigration policy and much more has led us to a place I've warned about for 20, 25 years now.
And all the warnings were not heeded, and everything's got worse.
I think that there are some technical things you need to do, and there's some deep substrate things you need to do.
On the technical thing, it's just obvious it's what our politicians haven't done, and that's to stop the mass migration of people from the developing world who...
...are, among other things, largely non-skilled workers who we just don't need.
We just don't need more of them.
And we certainly don't need illegals who arrive by boat in the South Coast, something American viewers and listeners will...
...know about and have heard about in their own context.
And you can just get on a boat from France and come in and the British Coast Guards will pick you up.
And all these young men from across the developing world come in with no skills and they'll all be a drain on the welfare state and they'll all cost taxpayers.
And yet we have politicians in the UK who all pretend that these are...
Just, you know, heart surgeons and computer programmers who we can't do without and who are going to pay their way.
And that's just flat out a lie.
But I think there's other things as well.
I think that we've had, as I said in A Strange Death of Europe, this very strange period in which we've said for many decades that a place like Britain is basically somewhere that could be the home for the whole world.
And I don't buy that.
I think that Britain is a country with a very rich culture.
It took a long time to meld Britain together between four nations, and it's been pulled apart in the process of about two generations.
But, you know, that can be rescued and turned around, but it would simply require political will.
No, my own assumption is it won't happen until another set of mass casualty terrorist atrocities occur, and there'll be a lot of people who'll die, and then people will realize.
You can't have open borders welcoming in people who hate you.
Not everybody hates us who comes in, but lives number do, and there's no price to pay for hating the country you're in if you move to the West.
And so I'm afraid, yes, that's my rather bleak prognosis.
There were 14 years of very inept Conservative rule, which is going to take a while for the Conservative Party to get over, reputationally.
And then, I mean, the Labour government effectively is, I think it'll prove totally incapable of doing almost anything.
But they have shown no inclination to shut the borders or deport those who shouldn't be here.
And what they do seem to be wanting to do, and this was most evident after Southport, is to simply say the public mustn't notice what is being done to them.
And I'm afraid I foresee huge problems down the road from this.
Well, this new book on democracies and death cults is principally a reflection on the last year and a half of war in the Middle East, but also the last many decades of war.
It's partly a first-hand account of my coverage from Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, and so on.
But it's also a reflection on not just the history of that, but on something which I noticed after the 7th of October that was really very striking to me, which was that we had basically no anti-Hammaz protests in the West.
Outside of Israel, the protests were all against Israel.
Israel was barbarously attacked on the 7th of October by the death cult of Hamas.
And from American college campuses to the streets of the city we're sitting in in London, all of the energy immediately from the 7th was against Israel and indeed in support of the death cult Hamas.
And this builds obviously out of stuff I've been thinking about and writing about for a long time, but one of the central...
Questions of the book which I seek to answer is how did this happen?
How did this happen?
How did we end up in the situation that young people in America and large mobs and crowds in the UK are content with boasting?
They are on the side of Yahya Sinwa and Ismail Hanir and Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah.
Yeah. But then underneath that, you have a very significant number of people who've been misled into thinking that the Israel-Palestinian issue is the great issue of the day and they must throw their lot in with the Palestinians because the Israelis are,
you know, settler colonialists, white supremacists, and genocidists, and a set of other flat-out lies.
So these people have been effectively miseducated and misinformed into that.
Then there are other people who just want to be what they see as being the forefront movements of their time and much more.
But how do you clean up the confusion with young people who think some of those patently ridiculous things, that the Jews have nothing to do with this, or that somehow a state of Palestine existed, which it did not?
I mean, we can do the whole history lesson.
But trying to get people out of that type of brainwashing after they've been to American colleges, it ain't easy.
I mean, there's kind of technical answers to that.
Obviously, you cut federal funding to any university that's promoted this nonsense, the miseducation of America.
And there's much more you can do.
It'd be very good if some of these universities closed, actually, because they're factories for trying to create radicals.
They're not educational institutions.
They can't really try to pretend they are anymore, some of these.
So I really hope that there's a...
A real change in the weather with that.
But just think for a moment about the fact that the former head of intelligence in the US, one of the former heads of intelligence in the US, during the Biden administration said...
That there was significant evidence that the campus protests, the anti-Israel pro-Hammaz protests on American college campuses, had been funded by foreign entities, including the revolutionary Islamic government in Tehran, including also, by the way, by Qatar.
Very much looking forward to those revelations coming in.
But just consider the fact that we now know, and we have known for some time what many of us intuited, which is that this is foreign government interference in the United States.
That is the sort of thing which everyone's meant to care about, are they not?
Go a step beyond that.
How come when last year the leader of the revolutionary Islamic government in Iran, Issues of thank you to American college students for coming out and protesting against Israel.
This great...
Khamenei and his friends called it the great, you know, attack on the so-called colonialist power of Israel.
In our day, the biggest colonial power in the Middle East is...
Right. And
all of the numpties around them, they're all flat out wrong on every single one of their facts.
And as you say, we could shoot them down on it.
But clearly, it's not just about that.
Clearly, it's about something much deeper that these people are seeking for, which is evident.
I give examples in the book of students who say, you know, who said.
You know, I learned about the rich history of protests at the university when I came here, and I thought, great, when the protests start up again, whatever they're for, effectively.
I want to be right in the center of it.
Well, this is like the Japanese warriors in the medieval times, you know, I've spoken to you about before, the Ronin, who after their liege lord is killed, stagger around the countryside looking for another lord to swear allegiance to.
These are effectively hollowed out individuals, and I think it's very important that as well as critiquing them, analyzing them, ridiculing them, and much more, people say, you know, there is another way you can run your life.
It doesn't have to be like that.
And that's why, I mean, one of the things that I try to bring across in the book is that, to my mind, and I've had enormous encouragement in the last year and more, being with the young men and women of the IDF,
the IAF, and the Israeli Defense Forces, who seem to me...
To be an example to all of their contemporaries in the West, which is that these young men and women know what they're fighting for.
They know their values.
They know the importance of their mission.
They do it without hate, but with love for the protection of their country and their people and their civilization and their families and their faith and much more.
And it seems to me that, you know, there's one of those kind of, whither do you go, Western man?
Yeah. Do you want to go down this route of, you know, crapping in a bucket in the center of a campus in America, hollering the same boring slogans in the belief you're finding meaning in your life?
Or would you actually like to have something to fight for?
And the young Israelis I've spent much of the last year with have shown their answer.
And I know which side I'm on.
And I believe that if other people want to choose the other side, that's fine.
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To connect this to where we started,
is that the strange part that there's this tiny little country that has extraordinary security issues just because of the geography and the size and all that stuff and the endless focus?
And yet, by what you just said, it seemingly is set up to succeed maybe more than where we are right now.
I mean, you know, a nation can go adrift over time, sometimes quite swiftly, with enormous ease.
You know, you just have to deracinate it, you have to demoralize it, you have to...
Claim it doesn't have any culture worth defending.
You have to claim that there is no culture.
You have to claim that everything else is better.
And that's all been done to Britain in my lifetime.
But, you know, one of the things that's very positive about the post-October 7th period in Israel has been that many people queried whether or not young Israelis had also fallen into this trap.
And they've answered it.
I've said this very often since the seventh.
They've answered that question, which is that the people who thought, are the younger generation in Israel up to it?
Have they become weak?
Have they become, you know, flaccid and, you know, so liberal that they just want to party and so on?
And they've answered it.
They've shown the answer is no, and actually will fight.
For all of these rights, and we'll defend our people.
And there is a great hope in that for other countries in the West, including Britain and Western Europe, which I think, apart from Canada and maybe Australia, are the worst affected by this deracination.
They have actually shown that, you know, maybe people in these other Western countries can step forward too.
Maybe they realize that there's stuff they have that's worth defending.
They have stuff that's worth fighting for.
And at the moment, all they have to do is fight for it metaphorically.
At the moment.
And that's the chance to think in advance of what the situation might be down the road and where you would like to stand.
So what would you say to somebody who's watching this who's going, well, I just don't care about the Middle East and I live in the middle of America and I don't really care that much about the UK and I don't really care that much about Europe and everything else.
America is lucky in her neighbors, lucky in her geography, lucky in not having been ever having faced a serious land invasion since the foundation.
And so for most Americans, the situation of Israel, for instance, in being invaded and with Two deaf cults trying to actually annihilate it simultaneously from the North and from the South seems a world away.
I mean, there's lots of reasons to care about abroad, even if you're, you know, not that interested in it.
But I would say the main one for Americans I try to bring across in democracies and deaf cults is clearly this isn't just about Israel.
I mean, clearly.
And I have a sort of good standard on this, which is, if I can say so myself, which is, find me a pro-Hammaz, anti-Israel protest in America that has anyone carrying an American flag.
Find me a protest of that ilk that ever finishes with the singing of the Star Spangled Banner.
There's a brave young Iranian in London who occasionally turned out the anti-Israel protests with a sign saying Hamas is a terrorist organization, which is a designation by...
Almost all Western governments.
And every single time the pro-Palestinian protesters attacked him physically.
And that should tell us something about this movement.
But just to go back to this thing, you know, nobody who does those anti-Israel protests is pro-American.
They're not.
In the same way that you'll notice that the pro-Israel protests that do sometimes happen, the pro-Israel rallies that have happened occasionally in America and elsewhere, They're always filled not just with Israeli flags, but American flags.
And if you go to any of the small number of pro-Israel rallies in, say, Britain, they all finish with, they always have Israeli flags and British flags, and they finish with the singing of Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem, and the singing of God Save the King.
Yeah, all of this is said by people who've never been anywhere near conflict and don't understand anything about conflict.
First of all, you can defeat Hamas.
And the IDF has spent the last year and a half doing so.
People who say you can't defeat a death cult, first of all, are being defeatist by definition.
And secondly, don't realize that you can.
I would give many examples from history, but perhaps one which is one of the less used but is very, very important is just look at the ideology in Imperial Japan until 1945.
This was an ideology which had been in place for centuries and very, very deep-rooted.
And, you know, as you know, the Allies, when they were moving through the Pacific, always thought, You know, this is an entire population that's willing to kill and die for the Emperor.
Well, Imperial Japan was defeated, and utterly defeated.
And once it knew it was defeated, it actually had the opportunity to reboot.
And now Japan is among the community of nations and a great ally, and the death cult that was there in Imperial Japan is effectively dead.
Fine. Same thing can happen with Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and all the others.
And they're much easier to defeat than Imperial Japan was.
And they are infinitely easier to defeat.
But in order for it to happen, they have to know they've lost.
It's not just they have to be killed in large numbers.
It's not just they have to be defeated on the battlefield.
They have to be defeated in the realm of ideas, which shouldn't be the hardest one.
It should be the easiest one.
But they also have to know they've lost.
And that's why, you know, I'm very excited by the suggestions that President Trump has put out about Gaza because fresh thinking is going to be needed.
But I don't see any reason why if a group of people, in this case the Arabs in Gaza, elect a death cult to rule them in Hamas.
And that death cult launches war upon war upon its neighbors.
I don't see why they get to keep the territory from which they wage war.
I think they should lose the territory, and I think they will.
And once they've lost territory, perhaps in time they'll realize that they've lost in other ways.
This isn't impossible at all.
The people who say that it's impossible to destroy a death cult have never seen a death cult destroyed, and they don't know the good work that can be done by democracies in destroying them.
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Let me just ask you one or two other things.
So how concerned would you be that some of this is just a numbers game, that they're multiplying faster, that there's more of them, and I mean that in the Middle East, but I mean that in your country, I mean that in my country, that there's a numbers issue here,
for sure, just in terms of reproduction and the focus on the ideology, where Western people focus on different things?
Whether you want to look at this as an atheist, liberal, it's worth it.
Much better to fight for the right of the kids to dance at a dance party than to fight for the rights of the people who would come in and rape and kill them.
But it's also worth it.
Because these people know what they're fighting for and they know they're fighting for their faith, for their family, for their society, for their future.
And so, yes, it has probably changed me the last year and a half.
And I would say it's my honor and privilege that, among other things, it's probably changed me for the better.