Sam Harris speaks with Douglas Murray about Douglas’s new book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization. They discuss Douglas’s recent experience on Joe Rogan’s podcast, the need for experts, conspiracy theories, the origins and aims of Hamas, the moral asymmetries between Israel and Hamas, what makes jihadism a uniquely dangerous ideology, Hamas’s attack on the Nova music festival, Douglas’s associations with Trump and Trumpism, Elon Musk and X, antisemitism on the Right, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.
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Thank you.
I am here with Douglas Murray.
Douglas, it's great to see you again.
Very good to see you, Sam.
So, this has been interesting.
I feel like I'm riding shotgun on at least one car crash of late.
We're going to talk about your experience on the Joe Rogan experience.
And it was an experience.
But we're going to talk about your book as a...
I'm not sure I like the opening about a car crash, but yeah.
Maybe Grand Theft Auto.
It'll be justified.
You get out of a crash and just get into another car.
Yeah. Well, I think that is our method.
But you have a book on democracies and death cults, Israel and the Future of Civilization, which is, I guess, is part of now a quartet of books, The Strange Death of Europe.
The death of the West.
The war of the West.
The war of the West.
And madness of crowds.
And madness of crowds.
Yeah. I mean, all of which hit this same grotesque object of Western capitulation to unreason and a kind of masochistic flight from sanity in the face of the provocation of Islamism and jihadism and other attendant confusions.
I think we will...
I'm definitely going to track through the book with you, but I want to start with the intervention you attempted to perform on our mutual friend Joe.
I hope he's still a mutual friend.
That remains to be seen, I guess.
And his sidekick, Dave Smith, over on the podcast.
Because I thought what you attempted there was fantastic and much needed.
This was a kind of moral intervention, which I thought was very important to do.
I've been attempting my version of it, not directly in dialogue with Joe, but I certainly would do that as well.
I thought what you said was quite brilliant and important, and I think there are probably a few crucial points that were misunderstood, and so I'd like to do a bit of a post-mortem on that.
But I'm wondering what your experience of it was.
How much of the aftermath have you...
No doubt, even if you don't read comments, you're still getting some of the comments somehow, because it's a tsunami.
Yeah, I don't read comments.
I don't really follow very closely.
If I think I've done the right thing, which I try to do routinely, I don't think I ever knowingly mean to do the wrong thing, but if I do something I feel perfectly content with myself in that I can look myself in the mirror the next morning.
I have no interest in seeing what people rampaging across the internet have to say.
So although there is a certain type of almost friend who can never resist sending you the nastiest response they've seen online is saying,"I disagree with this person." I don't think you're nearly that fat or ugly.
I disagree with everyone else.
I like you.
Despite some people doing that and thus giving me a glimpse into it, I really don't.
Although I have a book out, I've been doing a lot of traveling and speaking and so on, so I don't really have time to absorb very much of the podcast, talking about podcast meltdown that I gather has occurred.
I saw your collision on Newsnight.
Oh, that was just a typical BBC thing.
They got me into pre-record for 20 minutes.
I attacked Newsnight.
They edited it down to seven minutes.
And then afterwards, I had a panel of three people to attack me.
In your absence.
I'm sort of used to that.
I find it sort of normal that if I'm allowed to speak on the BBC, they must have, you know, 500 anti-Douglasites to defame me and much more.
And that's fine.
I don't care.
That actually surprised me.
I thought the level of confusion they expressed there in the aftermath is now on Newsnight.
I thought the pendulum had swung back enough in the UK where that species of confusion wouldn't be so prominent.
Not on the national broadcast.
The national broadcast, as I think I told them in one of the bits, so they edited it out.
I said you're just wildly out of date.
Like, this is weird.
This is having a conversation from 10 years ago, and you just haven't updated your software.
Shame. Shame, but that's why nobody watches the program.
So I want to know your, what was your experience of attempting that intervention?
How did it strike you in the moment?
Well, I like Joe and enormously admire what he's done.
He's so good at talking about interesting things with guests easily and for a long time that a lot of other people think that it's extremely easy and it just isn't.
He's a master of it.
I had noticed that he had, in recent years, not really had anyone on who had my views about the Russia-Ukraine conflict or indeed about the Israel-Hamas conflict.
And he had had some people on who I have had to become aware of very annoyingly, like all of us, but who are just retreads of a school of pseudo-history which was seen off a long time ago and which I dislike.
And I suppose I just wanted to Try to say to Joe, as gentle as possible, that I thought that something was going very badly wrong here, and that he was misleading his listeners about what the story is on each of these things.
Specifically, that Ukraine actually does have a right to defend itself against Putin's aggression.
Israel has a right to defend itself against Hamas's brutal invasion of Israel.
And I believe, and just wait for this.
I think Adolf Hitler was a really bad guy.
I do.
As Norma Donald said, I've said it before.
I'll say it again.
I said it before.
It was cool to say it.
I think Adolf Hitler was the bad guy of World War II, and I think Churchill was one of the people in history who saved civilization, almost single-handed at one point in 1940.
And so when I see people just throwing out this absolute rubbish about, for instance, what they try to do is they try to minimize the crimes of Hitler.
They try to maximize the crimes of Churchill.
This is what David Irving used to try before he was completely debunked as well.
And then what you do is you have this thing where you say that the Allies and the Nazis were on an equal footing in World War II. And then you go for your next move,
I can't put up with that.
It's intolerable to sit by and see this stuff going on.
And so, yes, I tried to cite that.
I was, of course, the whole thing was two against one, because although Joe has had people like comic Dave Smith, who, by the way, I have yet to hear being funny on anything.
Maybe, you know, somebody else can point me to it, but he's just spent 18 months criticizing Israel in the most ignorant terms.
And I was annoyed that...
Joe had said, you know, you can only come on if you're on with Comic Dave Smith, whereas just a week before, Comic Dave Smith was on his own, once again sounding off, and he didn't seem to need a bodyguard or tag team double or anything like that.
So, okay, it's two against one.
I've had worse odds.
But it makes it extremely difficult, undoubtedly, because if I'd had a sidekick, they could have mopped up some of my points, but, you know.
Yeah, I mean, I think there are several reasons why It was almost an impossible task.
I should just say, the only tasks worth doing are the impossible.
I'd like to try to track through what I think is kind of the center of their confusion, because I think there's something that's genuinely hard to parse here around the role of expertise and what it is, how we recognize it, when we honor it,
how you avoid arguing from authority, etc.
I think some of that stuff is genuinely confusing, and they were mightily confused by it and quite content to be, and felt that you were simply arguing from authority and urging upon them some kind of mere credentialism.
It's clear to me you weren't doing that, and this relates obviously to both the topics you were touching, the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza.
We'll focus on Gaza because I want to track through your argument in your book, but one thing I would just point out is that The war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza are connected in at least two senses.
One, it's clear which side of those conflicts you should be on if you want to be defending the West and open societies and liberal democracies against their enemies.
And secondly, Vladimir Putin is on the wrong side of both of these conflicts.
And Joe and Dave couldn't seem to untangle that.
And yeah, I just think that's...
It's worth noting.
By the way, there's an additional problem there, which is that I'm supportive of both countries' rights to self-defense.
And unfortunately, because of the degradation of the age and the decision to make politics almost entirely a team sport, whereas on the American right, there's almost, certainly on the mainstream Congress,
Senate, and so on, there's mainstream support for the Israelis in their war against Hamas.
There's increasingly contempt for the right of the Ukrainians to defend themselves against Putin.
And the opposite exists on the left.
So the left increasingly believes that Israel does not have the right to defend itself, but the Ukraine does.
So I suppose I find myself, in the words of Richard Strauss as a librettist in Capriccio, I find myself burning between two fires.
Yeah, well I'm going to try to push you into the rightward fire a little bit because I think you have a problem there.
Honestly, I think you have some...
Unfortunate company that, you know, it's just a matter of time before it becomes too uncomfortable to not notice the differences of opinion.
And Ukraine is obviously a very sore point, but I think it also is worth worrying about the level of anti-Semitism on the right.
And much of the confusion you saw from, had you read the comments, you would have seen a tsunami of confusion coming from Joe's audience.
And much of that...
Audience is not the, I would say most, I would maybe 90% of it is kind of rightward leaning, if not fully in Trumpistan.
It's definitely not the AOC supporting leftward confusion.
But let's talk about expertise.
So I have some notes here because I find this, this is all very clear in my mind, but I find that whenever I talk about this, I fail to track it through systematically enough for people to have their doubts removed.
The first point I think we need to make is that everyone acknowledges, whether they want to or not, everyone acknowledges the reality of expertise and its importance.
And this is a point I think you've made before, and I've made it as well in response to the aftermath of your podcast with Joe, that if you put someone in front of Joe who wants to talk about MMA as though they were an expert, as though they knew something, and they knew next to nothing.
Very, very quickly, Joe would recognize the problem there and begin to turn down the screws, and it would be excruciating.
There's no way you can pretend to know about MMA sitting in front of Joe Rogan when, in fact, you don't.
Everyone, when they got on an airplane, wants their pilot to be a real pilot, not just one who's LARPing as a pilot or who's self-taught in a simulator they have at home.
Unless they don't want to land the plane, right?
In which case, unless they're jihadists, but let's leave that aside.
Yeah, if you go in for brain surgery, and just before you're wheeled into the operating theater, comic Dave Smith appears and says, I'm doing the task.
I'm not an expert, but...
I never claimed to be an expert, but I am carrying out the operation.
Yes, yeah.
I've got a free four hours.
It'll be inside your head.
Okay, so it's just simply indisputable that there's, in any domain that matters, and certainly in any domain that purports to...
Be in touch with reality, any side of it, whether it's journalism, history, science, or just how to get things done, you know, just physically, whether you're a plumber or not a plumber, right?
The difference between knowing something or knowing nearly everything and knowing nothing is extraordinary, and it matters insofar as the topic matters.
So in that context, you can see that a consensus among experts...
is rather often meaningful, right?
So if you have the lone person who's going against the consensus, if 99% of the specialists in a field believe X, and you've got somebody believing Y, maybe somebody who is himself an expert, he has the right credentials, but certainly in the case of someone who isn't an expert and doesn't have the right credentials,
it is more often than not the case that you're not in the presence of a lone genius who's just figured everything out on his own.
You're very likely in the presence of somebody who's mistaken.
Or a crank, or otherwise, you know, has some incentive that is going undetected, and they're going against the mainstream for bad reasons.
Now, that's not to say there's no such thing as there being a lone genius who does overturn a field of knowledge.
Sometimes it's gotta there.
Yeah. But if you had to walk into a casino and bet on prevailing opinion in any field, you would be right to bet on what 99% of oncologists think about this cancer.
rather than your uncle who just has strong opinions about cancer.
And that's just a probabilistic bet we all place every day whenever we're granting credence to knowledge claims.
And we're always tending to go with the mainstream consensus of specialists.
And that's because expertise really is a thing and probability really is a thing.
Right. Well,
I agree with, however, as you probably know, a significant caveat, which is that, as I've said for a long time, one of the things that COVID did was it stripped us of the consensus that the scientists were the last sort of cathedral of knowledge that you really did listen to.
I said a long time ago about this that once trust the science wasn't respected anymore for some good reasons, we were completely stripped of anything in our society that we could trust.
If you said trust the media, Although there's great things in the media, but if you said trust the media, increasingly people would laugh because much of the media would let itself down in the realm of facts and unacknowledged biases.
If you said trust the politicians...
That's been a laugh line for quite some time.
You know, I think generally that every time there's a poll of public opinions about who they trust more, I think journalists are somewhere...
Beneath hookers and politicians beneath us.
But the breakdown of the science trust was devastating, and I think that the breakdown of belief in almost everything in the state, every arm of government, and the attributing of the most appalling actions to parts of the security state,
for instance.
Having somebody like RFK Jr. saying that the evidence that the CIA killed his uncle was overwhelming.
Well, that means that the CIA can kill presidents, which means that you're in a country with a completely rogue intelligence service.
And just all of this added on to it.
But the COVID thing was the last cathedral to fall.
It made science fall, it seems to me.
But I would argue, and this was tacit in some of the things you were saying, whether it was just the fact that you were there saying it, I would argue Joe has more than his fair share of responsibility for that.
And alternative media in general, big podcasts in general.
But Joe, above all, given his taste for conspiracy thinking and given the lessons he has drawn from COVID.
I mean, I'm not...
So I share your concern about the failure of institutions and obviously the woke ideological capture of so many mainstream institutions.
Distorted scientific communication is certainly distorted journalism.
And it has predictably...
To a degree that's intolerable, destroyed trust in those institutions.
But the remedy for all of that is not mere contrarian anti-establishment, no-nothingism, or much less a disavowal of expertise.
It's real expertise, real science, real journalism being aimed at the correct targets, shorn of the dumb ideology that distorted that conversation in the first place.
Yes, and by the way, there's a sort of delineation that's important to make as well, which is I think that Part of the confusion that I'm told has been occurring is, of course, that I think that there are probably realms in our society, STEM, which is just easier to shore up.
If you just make sure that STEM subjects are as protected as possible from wild ideological outside influence, it sort of feels easier.
Although even you had some, I think it was the Smithsonian Institute was declared that...
The math was white supremacists, you know, the notion of objectivity.
Absolutely. I charted this in math and math.
Having a right answer, yeah.
Absolutely don't think that it'll stop at STEM.
But STEM, it seems to me, is more, it could be more disciplined in order to just push that out.
It's easier to see how that happens.
How do you do that in the humanities, including in the study of history?
It's somewhat harder.
And I think that is the case.
Yeah, that's true.
And I think that is somewhere where, let alone with journalism and current events, I think that there is, Probably a harder way for people to pass what expertise would look like.
But as I said in my column in the New York Post today, although journalism has been significantly deracinated of late, we do still have rules.
I mean, one rule, for instance, is that if you are writing from a country...
You are in the country.
You're not allowed to sit in West Palm Beach pretending to be on the front lines of the Ukraine conflict.
And a friend of mine, who I do listen to, said to me after that podcast, maybe you were too annoyed with the lack of any credentials of comic Dave Smith and were just angry that...
And you needed to show that you were right and he was wrong.
And I said, well, of course that.
But I said, the real thing is just that simply on a journalistic level, if you haven't spent your time on the ground somewhere, your ability to write about it or the likelihood that your readers will read about it is very significantly diminished.
And I can't say that I don't resent, rather, spending so much of my life on the ground in places.
Going through the things that my readers know I go through, but I don't go on about.
Only to be told that my witness, my testimony, my evidence, is to be compared with somebody who has never gone further than Wikipedia in their sourcing, or I did the research about the region.
It seems rather galling to me.
Well, this was a genuinely confusing point, because...
So now I'm bending over backwards to be charitable to Dave Smith, who I notice rarely makes the effort in my direction or yours.
When you were saying to him, you were basically shaming him for pretending to know what was going on in Gaza without ever having been there.
And it was quite natural for you to do that because the point you were making really would have been resolved had he been there because what became clear in the conversation was he was reading into certain phrases like...
blockade or, you know, concentration camp or open air prison, a notion that life was such, you know, pre-war in Gaza as to be completely intolerable where, and you said, well, were you ever there?
Did you ever see what life in Gaza was like a few years ago?
And no, he's never been to the region.
And so it was, it was relevant to make that point.
But on his side, he wanted to argue and, you know, generically, I agree with this, that you need not, in order to judge the ethics
Right? Provided you are actually in touch with the facts about it and you're reading good sources and you know what is actually happening, you can judge the ethics and you can know who's on the moral high ground without ever having been to either of the respective countries.
You could obviously judge.
We could be talking about a war that happened 100 years ago and be scholars of that conflict and the burden is not upon either of us to have been to the region.
Well, that was a rather lame The reason why it matters in the now is that if you are litigating A foreign
conflict or domestic conflict that happened 100 years ago.
Much, if not all, of the dust would have settled.
You'd be able to get a rounded view of what was happening, what had gone on, and be able to reflect on it.
When it's something that is happening now, the dust is not settled by any means, literal or metaphorical, and the consensus view has not emerged.
And much If not most of the reporting and what comes out of the region is wildly off.
So I don't think it is possible, actually, to simply rely on some published sources.
No. No, I don't think that at all.
And I think it is the duty of somebody commenting on such a thing to go and see it firsthand.
And that is a journalistic standard.
But there we get into the follow-on problem, which is...
The shapeshifter thing, and I'm not talking about the language in which the far right talks about the Jews.
The shapeshifter thing, which I was also trying to fight in that conversation, is the, I never said I was a historian.
Yeah, I just spent five hours on television this week declaiming about the topic.
I merely, when people introduce me as a historian, I don't demur from the introduction.
And if somebody introduces me as the world's greatest living historian, I don't say, excuse me.
Now you're talking about Daryl Cooper.
If you were to have, at the beginning of this podcast, introduced me as the world's leading engineer of suspension bridges, Douglas Murray, I think I might have.
But if I started to speak as if I was that, at some point, you are pretending to be that.
If you keep being introduced to a historian, but then you have the move of saying, I never said I was a historian.
If you keep saying, I'm a comedian, but I'm not.
I'm a commentator on a particularly febrile foreign conflict.
And then you say, but you don't know about this.
And you go, well, I'm just a comedian.
And you play these endless games of assertion of knowledge followed by, if you get caught, a, okay, I don't know about this.
This is a very, very annoying rhetorical trick that some of us have observed because it means you can never be pinned down.
Yeah. Because you're always shifting your presentation of who you are.
It was one of the things that always made me most irritated about Russell Brand, who I've never wanted to debate with or discuss with, because I always saw him doing this, that he would indeed, 20 years ago,
go on the BBC, announce the need for revolution, and explain how we need to completely change the system of global finance.
He would get shown a chart.
And he would say, I ain't got time for no chart.
I'm a comedian.
This is a very annoying move.
Jon Stewart used to do it as well.
Well, it's tennis without the net.
And you find you can hit the ball rather hard when there's no net.
Yeah, and sometimes your rackets are made of jelly.
I mean, it's sort of just endlessly absurd.
What are they doing in this thing?
Why the constant shifting?
It's for people to work out what's going on there.
The problem is that you're in front of an audience, and Joe has cultivated this audience and perhaps been in turn changed by this audience, that is anchored to some very strong if unacknowledged claims about the nature of knowledge and authority and also certain moral principles.
So for instance, I saw at least two heuristics running in the background of that conversation.
One is, Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
And by sunlight, I mean, let's just turn on the microphones and talk at length.
So there can be nothing, intrinsically, there can be nothing wrong and only goodness in sitting across the table from someone like Daryl Cooper, who is an amateur, self-taught historian, talented podcaster, who has, as you pointed out,
An appetite for a contrarian taboo history of the David Irving flavor about the Holocaust.
Nothing wrong with Joe just sitting with him for four hours and midwifing a conversation from him, which at no point entails Joe pulling him up short on any of the points he's making.
He's simply receiving this person's expertise, even while If you pushed and said, but are you really a historian?
He'd say, no, no, I'm just a podcaster.
I'm a fan of history.
But the assumption is, and again, this is the assumption from Joe's audience, is that if you're talking for hours, people are going to recognize what is true.
You're trusting your audience to know what is true.
And it is just an obvious fact that you cannot trust Joe or his audience to know when an already debunked David Irving talking point is being recycled in front of him.
Unless he's done the homework to know what he's actually in dialogue with.
Well, if I can say so, there are also two other things going on there.
One is, I suspect that what you describe as sort of viewer aggravation with appeals to expertise or indeed defense of expertise feels like a personal assault on a large number of listeners because they feel like they're doing that and they like to do that.
It's elitism.
Yeah. Because they'd like to do that.
They're kind of doing that by listening to long-form podcasting and developing views.
Again, they are welcome to do that.
I'm all for that.
But the point that I keep trying to bring across is that you can still hold on to the principle of truth, of standards, and much more.
And the second thing is, I think there is a very obvious algorithmic Excuse for this, which is that if you do a podcast in which you say Adolf Hitler was bad, definitely the bad guy of World War II and Churchill was a hero,
the algorithm doesn't favor you.
Whereas if you say, aha, I've got this fantastic new view on it, which is that Hitler was trying not to be at all anti-Semitic in the 1930s.
He was keeping the whole stuff down.
But then he had his reasons to dislike the Jews.
I'm going to get into those in the next podcast.
You forgot that part.
There was no intention to kill the Jews.
They just found that they couldn't feed them once they rounded them all up.
So it was more compassionate to put them to death.
Might it not be more compassionate to euthanize them?
Unfortunately, that's what certain people are doing and pushing.
And I was genuinely, I mean, I said at the end, I said to Dave, he says he has a Jewish grandfather, so I think he probably wouldn't be regarded as Jewish in a very orthodox way, but he'd certainly be caught by the Nuremberg Laws.
And Hamas would certainly regard him as full-blown, fully Jewish.
The complete catastrophe, as Tom Stoppard memorably, incredibly describes it.
People like him who are doing this, I just warned him.
I said, you must know.
Because he said something like, you know, there's this sort of fertile ground at one point.
I said, you're doing the watering of it.
You're watering this.
You're bringing it up.
You're conspicuously engaged in the process of trying to grow an extremely poisonous tree.
And it's going to get you and then all of us.
By which I mean, of course, you encourage the most ugly, debunked, destructive bigotries of human history.
And they are always ones which, once they flourish and once they grow, burn everyone.
The crucial point is that you were not saying that Dave Smith couldn't possibly be right because he's a non-expert.
You're saying that...
He's a non-expert, and it shows because he's making obvious errors.
And so it is with Daryl Cooper, and so it is with any of these people that are getting platformed, right?
And so it's just, it's not the consequence of being a non-expert in this case, is that these guys are trafficking in recognizable distortions of fact and coming to the wrong moral conclusions as a result.
And then a very easy way to summarize that problem is, listen, you're talking to people who are non-experts.
Why not talk to the experts?
That's not to deny the fact that people are entitled to their own opinions, that sometimes someone can be self-taught and actually make a valid contribution of knowledge.
And to flip it around, it's also the case that arguments from authority are illegitimate and nothing is true simply because a consensus of Nobel laureates says it is.
It's just that a consensus of Nobel laureates is often a very good guide to the best state of the evidence.
That's shorthand for finding the best evidence and the best arguments.
Sure. By the way, I just would say one other thing, which is what I think a lot of people aren't aware of, but I do believe that when something becomes very fetid on what is roughly your political side, you should call it out,
identify it.
It's very difficult to do this, of course, at the moment, because there was a movement on the right in America and elsewhere which says that anything that is gatekeeping is demonstrably bad, and therefore, let's lift all of the sewer sluices and let all the shit run.
And I think it's worth identifying one other thing, which I don't know, you're probably aware of, but a lot of people aren't, which is that there has Always been a reason why a type of American right-wing figure will play with this stuff,
and it's slightly different to the reason why you get the same stuff on, for instance, the continent of Europe.
On the continent of Europe, when this dark game is played about World War II, what they try to do is, they demonstrate they cannot contend with the utter atrocity.
Of Nazi fascism and try in the end to either downplay it and outplay Soviet communism in some zero-sum game, which is never going to end well.
Try to get around the mountain of the Holocaust and in the end find a way to absolve their country's history of this.
And I understand this, but it's also lamentable because they have to contend with histories of collaboration and fascism and much more.
One of the reasons, again, why, in an incredibly British way, I reassert the fact that some of us, historically, our countries didn't do that.
So, I'll have the right to feel some pride for that.
But the thing on the American right that's always existed on this is that World War II was a catastrophe to enter into, as was World War I, because America should have let the Nazis and the Soviets battle it out, and we didn't need to get involved.
And that's the dream.
That itself is an interesting revisionist exercise, and it's one that's happened for years.
I saw Pat Buchanan argue this years ago when he had a book out, very unconvincingly, but it was stimulating in a way, and stimulating to see him prove wrong.
But in any case, that's a game, because Clive James used to say, we're here because history happened.
There's a sort of limit to which you can play this book.
So why do you want to play it?
You want to play that dark game.
Because you want to get on to a different game now.
Yeah. There's also, I don't know if you have the same degree of conspiracy thinking in the continental version of this.
Yes, the Jews are often at the bottom of many conspiracy theories going back over 100 years, but it seems to me that there's an appetite for conspiracy thinking in America now.
Again, I locate the epicenter of this somewhere near Joe's podcast, unfortunately.
That is, I mean, it is being, you know, algorithmically boosted to a degree that it seems in danger of subsuming everything else.
It's a complete disaster because, of course, people need to hold in their heads the thing that some things that are called conspiracy theories turn out to be true.
Right. The COVID lab leak.
Obvious example.
Obvious example.
In recent time, it fell apart in recent time.
But when you look at the fact that, for instance, a majority of Americans believe the CIA was involved in the assassination of JFK, President Trump releases the last JFK files, and to the amazement of many, it seems that the man who the Dallas police fingered for this a few hours after the assassination of the president was the person who did it.
And the man, Lee Harvey Oswald, who had a gun that his wife noticed was missing that morning from the house, and who, when the police come to her house, say, Was it my husband who did it?
It seems like probably Lee Harvey that did it.
And that, you know, the one member of staff of the book depository who was heard to be firing rounds on the floor above and was the only person to run out of the book depository immediately after the shooting.
May have done the shooting.
And the shooting, which supposedly was impossible for one man to accomplish, but has been replicated by several shooters.
You know, that no sharpshooter could possibly do this, but it's demonstrated.
And Lee Harvey Oswald was a practiced sharpshooter.
But it just goes on and on.
But my point is simply that I made this point a little while ago about Bobby Kennedy Jr., which is, I said, you know, if I was living in a country where I honestly believe that my father...
And my uncle, two of the most important people in the country, had been assassinated by the government.
I think I'd hot-footed out of the country quite fast.
I think it's a dangerous place to be.
So that's just one.
But you can do this on multiple areas of American public life.
Look, America is the only country where the citizens are encouraged to Generate conspiracy theories about America's successes.
Look at the moon landing on the great successes of American engineering and exploration.
And significant chunks of the American public do not believe that America did this.
And one of the things, by the way, that's fascinating about that is if you speak to Russians who grew up under Soviet communism, where you were lied to about everything, everything was a lie.
This year's crops are particularly good.
Always a lie.
But even in that world of lies, they didn't think that Yuri Gagarin didn't go up into space because they were proud of it and they wanted it to be the case.
So I do think, and I know now I can predict there will be a flurry of, ah, you haven't seen the way in which the flag holds up.
The shadows are in the wrong direction.
The shadows are in the wrong direction.
I can imagine the inbox now.
Joe used to be one of those guys.
And I gather he reversed course because he ended up recognizing that America couldn't have got away with faking the moon landing because the Soviets would have exposed it.
Yeah, that's a nice counterpoint.
All right, so I want to get to your book, and we're not leaving the current topic because the goal here is to make the case that the moral confusion you were up against in that podcast interview is as bewildering as your temper suggested.
I mean, it was just, the moral high ground is so obvious here, and the wider concern, I mean, it's one thing to view this as Israel, it's...
Specific history with the Palestinians, its right to exist, the legitimacy of Zionism, and get sort of wrapped around the axle of all of those specifics.
It's another to actually look at the conflict in Gaza and in Israel's history generally as part of this larger picture of a jihadist and Islamist conflict with the West, which is what I tend to do.
Now that your book doesn't focus on that, but it's important to keep that in view.
And it becomes...
Incredibly clear where the moral high ground is when you look at the details.
But let me just, before I let you run, I want to point out that there are two very different lenses through which people look at this conflict and they explain the impossibility of discussion.
The lens that certainly Dave Smith and his fans have here is that the extremity of Hamas' violence demonstrates The fact that they would behave this way,
it can only be attributed to the fact that they've been pushed past the point of sanity by the Israelis.
So in some strange way, the onus for the atrocities of October 7th and other atrocities, the sort that you saw during the Second Intifada, and this reasoning gets mapped onto jihadist atrocities everywhere, the onus gets put on the victims of the atrocities.
And this is a point that Paul Berman made brilliantly 20 years ago in his book Terror and Liberalism.
So there's that weird distortion.
The opposite way of seeing this, and I'm convinced and have been convinced for more than 20 years as the true one, is that jihadism is an independent variable.
And you can find this death cult behavior in people who have been immiserated by occupations and been treated badly, and you can find it in people who have not been immiserated.
And so it's the ideas that give you...
The death cult.
And conversely, you can find people who have been treated far worse than the Palestinians, and they never manufacture an endless supply of suicide bombers.
So it's the ideas, it's the culture, and so the most glaring scotoma in Dave Smith's non-expertise is a complete failure to appreciate the reality of jihadism and just what Israel is actually dealing with in Hamas.
I believe that it's also a strain of anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism, which is a belief that nobody in the world can do something wrong and bad unless we have somehow pushed them to it.
Yes, this is Noam Chomsky's gift to our politics.
Yes, yes.
It used to be on the left, and now it's on the right as well.
This is a profound and deep anti-Americanism, which I cannot sign up for and will not.
Profound anti-Westernism.
Sees the world.
Actually, funnily enough, Edward Said, to the extent that his theory on Orientalism holds it all, might have found this trend interesting of Westerners now looking at the rest of the world and saying,"They can't do anything unless we make them." Totally without any moral agency.
It robs agency of all the people you would otherwise give agency.
No moral agency.
And if there is an explanation for why somebody goes and blows themselves up and everyone that they can kill on a bus in Jerusalem, it's because of something To do with British mandate policy 80 years earlier.
I completely reject this, and I reject it for many reasons.
But one is that riding shotgun with the claim that only the West, only America can lead anyone to do bad things, is what you rightly identify, Sam, as the utter inability to recognize that some people seek utterly different things than we do.
You remember there was a story some years ago that seemed to me to be emblematic.
I must look it up again.
I think it was actually reported in the New York Times of an American couple.
A nice, nice couple.
I don't wish to make any sort of laughs at their expense, but they decided to give up their jobs somewhere in San Francisco and cycle around the world.
And they kept a blog.
And the aim was that they wanted to show their belief that essentially everyone in the world wants what they did, which is, you know...
Security, comfort, well-being, happiness, a bit of money to bring up your kids well, and, you know, love and peace.
And their journey log ends when they're cycling through, I think, Uzbekistan.
And unfortunately for them, a truckload of ISIS fighters are driving the other way.
I can't believe their luck that there are these two Americans on a tandem and stop and torture and kill them.
And there's where their story ended.
I use it as an example because it's a particularly unpleasant one, but emblematic of a total failure of imagination or study from many people in the West who do not realize that when it comes to what I'd call the death cult ideology,
which has manifested on the right and the left in history.
It manifested in Spain in the 1930s with the Franquist chanting to Miguel de Ionamuno, you know, vive la muerte, long live death.
Spanish philosopher of his era realizes his life, his work is just done because it's over because he's at a university in front of a group of young men chanting long live death and it's over.
It's over.
Reason and rationalism will no longer work.
Well, the death cult that I write about here is the death cult of Hamas that really could have not done what it did.
And as I say in one of the...
You know, passages in the book, you know, after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, there was a Palestinian state in Gaza.
They were even encouraged to have elections by the George W. Bush administration, Condoleezza Rice and others.
They had elections.
They voted in Hamas, which states that it's a genocidal terrorist organization which wants the annihilation of the Jewish race and then get on to everyone else.
They voted in Hamas.
Hamas immediately used the billions of dollars that came in to make sure they built up a terror infrastructure tunnel systems, not for the citizens of Gaza, but for the rockets and for their fighters, kept on importing rockets and other military hardware to fire at Israel.
And after many iterations of the war in 2023, 4,000 of their terrorists flood into Israel and massacre their way through the South.
This is the fruit of Hamas.
This is what Hamas wanted.
This is what his leadership wanted.
And they do not want to live in peace and coexistence.
They want to murder and slaughter, and they even want to die themselves.
And I think that, I mean, we're sitting here in LA.
Why would anyone in Los Angeles?
Understand this.
It's just...
I mean, you do, but...
Well, we had 9-11.
We had our own...
Insofar as you're a student of the news, I mean, this is of a piece with what happened in Paris on multiple occasions, the Bataclan most horrifically, in your country, the Manchester bombing.
I mean, this is just...
I mean, we memory hole it and other things, other bright, shiny objects capture our attention, but it's the same species of confusion.
And anti-Western bias that caused people to blame the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists for having the indecency of getting murdered by jihadists.
And then you had the Penn America Foundation rescind the award that we're going to give them for courage.
I mean, this confusion is everywhere.
I want to actually just draw a few bright lines where people can see them to show the moral high ground here.
There's some striking differences between the two sides that you elucidate in your book.
I mean, one is that one side takes hostages, even young children and old women, and its community, it's, you know, the non-combatants receive these hostages, not with looks of horror, but with,
you know, open celebration, right?
It's like it is completely intelligible from a cultural standpoint within Gaza.
That this is exactly what you do.
The good is on your side for stealing these infants and young children and old women and forcing them underground for years at a stretch.
One side uses its own civilians as human shields.
One side murders its civilians when they try to flee to safety.
And if you try to flip this, if you try to imagine the other side, that is the Israelis, doing any of these things, Obviously unthinkable.
And anyone who is standing in criticism of their behavior, I think, still wouldn't go so far as to imagine that the people of Tel Aviv are capable of using their own women and children as human shields.
Or that they would celebrate, you know, that the IDF would want to seek to maximize civilian casualties on its own side.
I mean, even that is not...
As confused as people are, no one, it seems to me, is confused about that, and yet they don't see the relevance of these differences.
Lots of reasons.
One is they don't want to.
If you were supporting a side that turned out to have done October the 7th, and some people say to me, oh, no, no, no, the world's sympathies with Israel.
No, they weren't.
No, some of the world's sympathies were briefly with Israel.
But in London on the evening of the 7th...
Hundreds of people gathered in the streets of Knightsbridge to wave flares and celebrate the ongoing massacre.
On the 8th of October, I relate in the book that I was in Times Square to see a pro-Hamaz protest as the massacre was still going on.
This started very early.
And we get back to that strange collection of simultaneous thoughts that people can have.
Hamaz GoPros and records and Instagrams their atrocities.
And their followers can, it's another one of these double moves, these jujitsu moves.
They say how thrilled they are about the atrocities, and also the atrocities didn't happen.
And that then, the third move is the atrocities are actually carried out by the other side.
You set your watch and you'll see it.
Last year, there was a claim that IDF soldiers had gone into Gaza and were raping the women of Gaza.
There were many reasons why this is completely implausible.
And not just implausible, but deeply offensive.
But all these people who were relating this, repeating this smear of the Israeli Defense Forces, were all the people who were denying that Hamas had raped women on the 7th.
There's a muppet of a journalist, not a journalist, a sort of commentator, agitator in the UK, who passed around the libel that the IDF was raping women in Gaza, who, when he saw a version of the 43-minute atrocity video, came out of it and reviewed it by saying it was disappointing because you didn't actually see any women being raped,
and therefore it seems unlikely any rapes occurred.
This has become, as you know, I call it Grossman's Law now.
After Vasily Grossman, this thing of, tell me what you accuse the Jews of and I'll tell you what you're guilty of.
Absolutely 100% application of this law.
The side that says it's both good to kill babies and denies that they kill babies, then attack the IDF and IAF for killing babies.
It's everywhere, this form of projection, I suppose, which is one of the things it is.
And it's deliberate desire to not recognize the difference between deliberately maximizing civilian casualties, as Hamas did on the 7th, and deliberately trying to minimize them, as the IDF has.
If the IDF had wanted to carry out a genocide in Gaza, it could have done.
They were accused of having a genocide in the Gaza since 2005, which is weird because the population doubled after 2005 up to 2023.
But then...
It's not like consistency is particularly important, it seems, in this era.
After all, the same people who claim that, who say that there is a genocide in Gaza are the same people who say, why don't the Israelis realize that they are operating militarily in an area with a disproportionate number of people under the age of 21?
You have a line in your book, forgive me if I don't get it verbatim, but it was something like, how do you fight an army?
That wants to maximize the loss of life on its own side.
Right? I mean, this is, it is, people don't, it seems to me, make contact with how, one, how just morally perverse that situation is, but two, what an insuperable obstacle it is to actually practically fighting a war so as to minimize the loss of civilian life.
I mean, hundreds and hundreds of Israeli soldiers have been killed in the last 18 months.
Because they are going methodically and in exceptionally dangerous situations, house to house, in areas of Gaza that are meant to have been cleared of everyone but Hamas fighters.
Hundreds and hundreds of young Israeli men, primarily, have been killed by, instead of carpet bombing an area, going assiduously through it at enormous personal risk.
They have every soldier you speak to.
Has the same stories of, for instance, people coming out of a civilian area with their hands in the air, and then from their midst, a group of Hamas terrorists come dressed exactly the same as the civilians and start firing at the soldiers.
In the knowledge that the soldiers either have to just receive the incoming fire and lose their own lives, or they have to fire back and risk killing some of the civilians that Hamas has so gleefully sprung out.
None of this is just, all of this is what every soldier has faced for the last 18 months, every single one.
And Hamas' leadership say, there was an interview on Al Arabir the other month with one of the remaining leaders of Hamas, who was asked, if the Israeli airstrikes from the air that you describe as so devastating, why don't you allow the citizens of Gaza to shelter into your very extensive tunnel system?
And his reply was, because the tunnel system is not for the civilians of Gaza.
The tunnels are for our rockets and ammunition and for our fighters.
And asked who should build shelters for the citizens of Gaza, he said the international community.
That's their responsibility, the international community.
They're the same community that gave them billions and billions of dollars to build those tunnels effectively over 18 years.
And I have a genuine, genuine offer I'll put out there.
I can't attach a cash prize this time, but this is a completely sincere offer to anyone listening to pick me up on the following challenge.
Your listenership, I'm sure, Sam, is intelligent enough to understand what it is to extrapolate out civilian or other casualties by ratio of population.
Not everyone gets me on this.
But, of course, Israel is a country of 9 million people.
America is a country of about 340 million people.
Nobody knows how many people there are in the UK, so it doesn't work there.
Well, we soon won't know how many people are in America, given all the doging.
And again, just preempting any of the morons who want to claim that I'm saying that a Jewish life is worth 10 American lives.
No, it's extrapolating out from population.
So, if October 7th had happened in America by proportion of population, It would have been 44,000 Americans murdered and burned alive in their homes in one day, and another 10,000 Americans taken hostage.
So, my challenge is, whether in Gaza with 1,200 civilians in Israel murdered and 250 taken hostage, and the two stated war aims of the Israeli government, the return of all the hostages and the destruction or capture of all of Hamas' leadership and fighting brigades,
whether it's in the case of Israel trying to Carry out this operation of rescue and so on in Gaza, or whether it would be how America would get back 10,000 hostages in an equally built-up, intensely booby-trapped terrain.
If anyone watching has a battle plan for how to do that, send it to me, and I will send it to everybody I know in Israel, because I'm sure that if there is a military genius watching and listening...
Who knows how you would carry out that operation with no civilian casualties on the side of the Gazans and minimal to no casualties on the side of the IDF, I can assure anyone watching, I and many others would be all ears.
But I hear no such thing.
I hear no such thing.
The best I've had, I think it came up in that Rogan debate, the best I've heard is the hostages That have been released have been released by getting around a table and negotiating.
Horseshed said by people who don't know what they're talking about.
The only reason Hamas has released any of the hostages to date, including the dead bodies of babies, is because of the kinetic military force exercised for 18 months by the young men and women of the IDF.
Only military pressure has made Hamas give any of the hostages back.
They would all still be sitting in underground tunnels and in the basements of Al Jazeera journalists and much more if there had been no military action in Gaza.
Sinwar would still be alive if the IDF had not painstakingly fought in Gaza for a year.
People simply do not understand this.
And when they say things like, but why don't the Israelis just get around the table with Hamas?
I'm afraid you completely demonstrate you know nothing about Hamas.
Yeah, yeah.
What do you think Israel's policy should be going forward around hostages?
I know this is difficult for you to answer, perhaps, given the fact that you know many of these families, but I can only imagine that there are very few people in Israel now who think that the Gilad Shalit deal was wise in retrospect.
You might summarize what that was, but that...
It was, I think, the 1,027 terrorists-to-one hostage exchange that freed Sinoir to mastermind October 7th.
That piece of history looks increasingly untenable.
And given the understandable pressure brought to bear by the hostage families throughout this war, given the fact that the leverage is undeniable, once you have hostages, you have leverage, how does this get broken in the future?
Let me preempt that by saying that There are similar cases around.
When I was reporting from Ukraine recently, I was, among other things, interviewing families and children who had been behind the enemy lines, had been in a territory captured by Putin's forces.
It's thought that around 20,000 Ukrainian children have effectively been kidnapped by Putin and the Russians.
This includes people in orphanages, but it also includes children that were encouraged to go to summer camps, and their parents sent to summer camps and then were disappeared.
I found out something very interesting the other week when I was looking into this story and trying to bring some more light to it, which is that there seems to me to have been an almost deliberate attempt to the Ukrainian side not to maximize this story.
Right. Because, and this is something of a supposition speaking to some of the people campaigning for the kidnapped children, that the Zelensky government knew that the minute that it is about getting the children back, you will get...
Intolerable pressure from your domestic population because anything is worth it to get the children home.
It's just a terrible, terrible thing.
And I suspect that some of their thinking on that has been influenced by watching the Israelis being pushed into this intolerable position.
It's incredibly hard in Israel because not only is there the religious edict to fight for life and That this is one of the commandments central to the faith.
But it is also a commandment that then is central to the state.
Everybody, when they join the army, the air force, everything, everyone flying a dangerous raid over enemy territory is told, if something happens, we will come and get you back.
We'll come and get you back.
We tear up the earth to get our people back.
Everybody in the IDF knows no man left behind.
No man left behind in the battlefield.
And so Hamas, like Hezbollah, know that that is the Israeli view, that they put an exceptionally high price on life.
And by the way, that isn't just the life of Jews to preempt one inevitable line of attack.
It is literally to get back every Israeli.
And the Israelis who have been captured, by the way, included Bedouin, Arabs, Druze, and others.
But it's agonizing.
It is completely agonizing as Hamas knew it would be.
Some families of the hostages refused to engage in the Hostage Families Forum and its work because they said,"We know, and our child knew." And sometimes the child had left a message saying,
"Please don't swap me.
It's not worth it.
Other families will suffer." And they really do.
I mean, in one of the swaps, I myself, having spent all this time there and getting to know so many people involved, victims and families and more, I myself had one the other month where one of the hostages released was someone whose family I know well,
and one of the terrorists released in swap from the Israeli side was A man who killed the brother of a friend of mine in Israel some years ago.
So one family is celebrating in a way which is just like a miracle.
Yeah, you cannot begrudge that celebration.
And on the other hand, there's a family who knows that their loved one's killer is free after only a few years in prison.
So this is all just horrible, and it's deliberately horrible because Hamas makes it so.
The torture porn they push out on videos, videoing hostages, watching the release of other hostages in order to double, double up the pressure.
Interviewing a hostage, they're releasing, knowing that his family has been killed, but he doesn't know it.
Yeah. That was...
Every permutation of this is so...
He got back.
The Beaver's father gets back, believes, because he's been separated from his wife and kids, that they must be alive.
Finally, he's released from over a year of torture and deprivation in the underground tunnels of Hamaz and then discovers that both his babies and his wife are dead.
But I think, if memory serves, I think they asked him on camera whether he was looking forward to seeing his family, knowing the status of his family.
That's right.
It can't be understood enough, this, from the Western viewpoint.
The reason I use the term death cult is that...
Some people, some groups, literally worship death.
They glorify in death.
They love death.
We love death more than you love life.
That has to be taken at face value.
Yes, and as Nasrallah said in 2004, he said, the great weakness of the infidel is their love of life, and we will use it against them.
But as you know, that's one of the things I meditate on in this book, is what is the answer to that?
Because for much of my life, I thought it was almost unanswerable.
What do you do against a movement that not only glorifies in your death, but glorifies in the deaths of their own side, and sometimes in the deaths of their own family, like Ishmael Hania, who finds out that his sons, all Hamas' leaders, have been killed in an airstrike?
Yeah, we have the video.
We can see his reaction to that knowledge.
He's happy.
He's happy.
So this is a piece that I think is very difficult for I'm not saying that there isn't evil to be found here or that there isn't hate to be found here,
but misguided religious exaltation, misguided religious triumphalism.
It allows for actually psychologically normal and otherwise compassionate people to be part of a death cult.
So I was reading your book and I had this thought that the framing, the evil framing was somehow not capturing what I was worried about here.
And I've been worried about it again for now going on something like 25 years.
And I remembered that I saw an ISIS video, this had to have been at least 10 years ago, maybe 2014, of ISIS members.
Throwing gay men and boys or men and boys who they claimed were gay off of rooftops.
I think they were also toppling walls.
These are traditional punishments.
But I remember seeing some video where there was actual tenderness being expressed by the ISIS fighters toward the people.
They were about to kill.
I remember seeing, and I wasn't sure whether I hallucinated this or just that it was fabricated in memory.
I remember seeing the reassurance, like, it's going to be okay, bro.
We have to do this to you, but you say the Shahada and you're going to be fine, right?
It was clearly not an expression of hatred.
And just before this, I did a search.
I couldn't find the video, but I found a still from what I'm sure is the video.
And I want you to look at this.
Because there's so much contained in this image.
Yes. Psychopath and,
you know, a sadist, and we have a tremendous amount of testimony on that point, much of which you give in the book.
But what is worse is that it's possible for a death cult ideology to subsume the values of even good people, even normal people.
Once you recognize that these people actually believe that they know the moral structure of the universe and how to live within it, and they know how...
They know there's one way to get to paradise, and that's the only thing that matters.
And this world is worthless, right?
This is just an antechamber to either hell or paradise, and the only thing that matters is that you're going to the right place.
Then I think we're in the presence of a very different phenomenon, which is quite a bit scarier.
What is scary is that when you think of something like the Nova Music Festival, which you write about in such a searing way in the book, I mean, that for me crystallizes this collision between Western freedom and tolerance and compassion.
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