Uncensored - Piers Morgan - 20250404_not-going-fast-enough-douglas-murray-on-deportatio
Aired: 2025-04-04
Duration: 46:33


=== Trump's Unwise Ally Tactics (09:00) ===

[00:00:00]  Politics in America is very much a team sport.
[00:00:04]  And if the captain of the team changes his tactics, you go along with it.
[00:00:08]  Donald Trump better be right on this issue because if not, he will have made totally unnecessary enemies of some of America's closest and most historic allies.
[00:00:17]  This is the disruption that Donald Trump promised.
[00:00:21]  The American intelligence report suggests for every Hamas terrorist who's been killed, someone with the same ideology has already stepped up to replace him.
[00:00:28]  This death cult idea that you simply have to educate the next generation to try to annihilate their neighbors.
[00:00:35]  It should be that that stops.
[00:00:38]  Donald Trump was the first person among world leaders to say something new.
[00:00:43]  But Gaza is pretty unlivable at the moment.
[00:00:45]  So why don't we encourage people who want to leave to leave?
[00:00:49]  It's at least a new idea.
[00:00:51]  I'm agreeing with a lot more of what you say, Douglas, and it's becoming increasingly disturbing.
[00:00:55]  It's great news.
[00:00:59]  Douglas Murray has been a powerful and polarizing voice on the two major conflicts of our time.
[00:01:04]  He's also reported on them firsthand with multiple trips to both Ukraine and Israel since their wars began.
[00:01:10]  A recent essay royaled MAGA by accusing the movement of absorbing Kremlin narratives on Putin, which further underscored his status as an independent thinker.
[00:01:19]  But nothing has won him more plaudit or protests than his absolutist take on Israel's war against Hamas.
[00:01:25]  This photograph of Murray illustrates the whole point.
[00:01:28]  He was inside Rafah sitting in the very chair occupied by Hamas leader Yahya Simwa before he was obliterated by an Israeli drone strike.
[00:01:37]  Well, supporters saw a heroic and high-stakes troll of a murderous terrorist.
[00:01:41]  Critics found outrage and a final insult to an apparent martyr.
[00:01:45]  Well, Murray's new book on democracies and death cults is already making waves.
[00:01:49]  And Douglas Murray, I'm delighted to say, joins me on Uncensored again.
[00:01:53]  Douglas, great to see you.
[00:01:56]  It's really good to be back with you, Piers.
[00:01:58]  You know, whenever I think I'm busy or traveling a lot, I look at your schedule and realize I'm not even at first base.
[00:02:05]  There's a hell of a lot going on.
[00:02:07]  We'll get to your book in a few minutes, but there's a lot going on in the world.
[00:02:11]  And since Donald Trump became president, it feels like, you know, depending on what your view is, either incredible high energy or incredible chaos.
[00:02:21]  What do you make of where we are?
[00:02:23]  We're here today on Liberation Day, as Trump is calling it, where the entire planet is about to be tariffed within an inch of their lives.
[00:02:32]  What do you make of all this?
[00:02:35]  I don't think it's chaos, certainly, but there's certainly a huge amount of disruption.
[00:02:40]  The thing is, Piers, as you know, this is the disruption that Donald Trump promised, and it is the disruption that his voters voted for.
[00:02:51]  They asked for exactly the things that he is giving them.
[00:02:56]  They are getting what they wanted.
[00:02:59]  And, you know, people can complain about some of that, but it's not like Donald Trump didn't talk about tariffs on the campaign trail.
[00:03:08]  It's not like he didn't talk about deportations of illegal migrants in the US on the campaign trail.
[00:03:15]  This is literally what people voted for.
[00:03:18]  And the best critique, as far as I can see, that any of Trump's critics can have, apart from criticism of specific policies, is the president is actually doing what the president promised to do.
[00:03:30]  Now, I know a lot of people are unhappy with what he's doing, and other people are unused, really, to actually political leaders doing what they say they're going to do when they get into office.
[00:03:41]  But that is the case with Trump.
[00:03:44]  And we'll see.
[00:03:45]  There are all sorts of quibbles and all sorts of, there are some serious things already, it has to be said, that have gone wrong.
[00:03:51]  But we're more than two months into the new administration now.
[00:03:55]  And I think if you compare this administration to Trump I in 2016 to 20, it's night and day when it comes to the pandemonium accusation.
[00:04:05]  Yeah, I mean, like I say, there's a lot going on.
[00:04:08]  One thing that is not getting enough attention, I don't think, is what he's achieved already on the southern border.
[00:04:14]  You and I have talked about this many times.
[00:04:16]  But there's been an almost complete stop of this extraordinary tidal wave of illegal migration over the southern border in under three months.
[00:04:29]  That's right.
[00:04:29]  That's right.
[00:04:30]  And I mean, one of the things I'm not sure that enough people outside of America are aware of is that this is something, it's not an abstract issue.
[00:04:40]  It's something that affects cities like the one I'm sitting in at the moment, New York.
[00:04:45]  When the southern border crisis was at its worst, southern governors, absolutely overwhelmed by illegal migrants, started bussing them up to cities like this one.
[00:04:56]  And basically, the city ran out of hotel rooms to give to the migrants, ran out of housing for them.
[00:05:04]  The mayor of New York, a Democrat, Eric Adams, said that the city of New York was facing an existential crisis, a catastrophe.
[00:05:13]  So yes, remedying that is going to be difficult.
[00:05:18]  And I'm sure, and there already have been cases of people who have been deported from the U.S. who appear not to be people who ought to have been deported.
[00:05:27]  And that's terrible.
[00:05:28]  That should be reversed.
[00:05:29]  But it's sort of inevitable when you're trying to reverse something as massive as the Biden-era border weakness.
[00:05:39]  Yeah, I mean, it seems to me on the question of the deportations, what they've got to be careful about, nobody objects to genuine, horrendous criminals who are here illegally in America.
[00:05:49]  I'm in the States as well at the moment, here illegally, you know, who've committed crimes, never mind entering the country unlawfully.
[00:05:57]  No one objects to them being deported.
[00:05:58]  But if you get people who slip through the net, there's a cry, which I think is completely justified, of where's the due process?
[00:06:07]  Are they going a little too fast on some of this stuff, do you think?
[00:06:12]  I don't think they are, actually.
[00:06:14]  I don't think they're going fast enough.
[00:06:15]  And you say that there are people who don't object to it.
[00:06:17]  There certainly are.
[00:06:19]  I mean, there are Democrat senators, Democrat representatives, people like the mayor of Boston, Mayor Wu, it is, I think, who said recently, you know, Boston is a city for everyone.
[00:06:33]  Anyone who is in Boston, whether you've just arrived, you're as much a part of Boston as anyone else.
[00:06:38]  And of course, that's crazy.
[00:06:40]  I mean, you know, I've often said about the situation in our country of birth, the UK, you can either have open borders or you can have a welfare state, but you can't have both.
[00:06:51]  In the same way, no country can actually treat somebody who's arrived illegally, even if they haven't committed a crime in America.
[00:06:58]  Nobody can sensibly pretend that somebody who's just arrived illegally into, say, Boston has all the same rights as somebody whose family has been paying taxes in Boston for generations.
[00:07:13]  So there are certainly people who object.
[00:07:15]  There are certainly going to be mistakes.
[00:07:17]  But one of the reasons why this is so high stakes and important is not actually just for America.
[00:07:22]  That's the most important thing for Trump and his voters, of course.
[00:07:26]  But it's also whether or not other countries can actually do the same thing, whether other countries can secure their borders and make sure that people who are in the country illegally, especially first and foremost, those who've committed crimes, can be deported from the country.
[00:07:42]  Italy is struggling with that.
[00:07:43]  France is struggling with that.
[00:07:45]  Britain is sort of somewhere before the period of struggling with it.
[00:07:50]  But everyone's facing it, and we know that.
[00:07:52]  And it has to be addressed.
[00:07:56]  Like I say, we're here as Trump's about to announce the tariffs.
[00:08:00]  Putting aside all the debate about it, do you actually personally think it will work?
[00:08:08]  I'm open on this.
[00:08:10]  It could work, and it could be a disaster.
[00:08:13]  I mean, it's a long-term vision.
[00:08:15]  That's one of the most important things about this.
[00:08:17]  And the long-term vision on tariffs, as far as I can see, rights a trade problem which the US has had, which Donald Trump, again, for decades has pointed out.
[00:08:28]  But there will be short-term turmoil, without doubt.
[00:08:33]  So we'll see whether it works.
[00:08:35]  But the one thing I would say, though, which I am concerned about, I think everyone should be concerned about, and a lot of Americans, particularly of the left, but also Republicans are concerned about, is the extent to which this is being played against American allies in a way which is unwise.
[00:08:52]  I mean, my own view, there are all sorts of criticisms to make of the Canadian government, both under Justin Trudeau and now under Mark Carney.

=== European Leaders' Fading Hope (11:56) ===

[00:09:01]  There are all sorts of criticisms.
[00:09:02]  I don't think America needs to make an enemy of Canada, you know, any more than I think it needs to make an enemy of Denmark.
[00:09:08]  So I think there is some sort of table thumping and some sort of bully behavior that is unappealing.
[00:09:16]  And Donald Trump might better be right on this issue, because if not, not only will he not improve the American economy, he will have made totally unnecessary enemies of some of America's closest and most historic allies.
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[00:10:28]  We've also seen, and though you had quite strong views about this, the pretty awful scene in the Oval Office when he met President Zelensky with JD Vance piling into Zelensky, then Trump piling into him and so on.
[00:10:42]  It was all pretty unedifying, I thought, at the time.
[00:10:44]  Albeit, I suspect behind the scenes, a lot of that stuff goes on, but we don't normally see it.
[00:10:50]  What did you make of that?
[00:10:51]  And where do you think we really are in getting to a peace deal with the Ukraine war?
[00:10:59]  The interesting thing, as you know, Piers, is that people saw the same event in the Oval Office and had wildly different interpretations of it.
[00:11:10]  I've spoken to MAGA Republicans who believed that Zelensky was unbelievably rude and disrespectful toward President Trump and Vice President Vance.
[00:11:20]  Maybe it is always a matter of perspective, but I actually watched that unfold in a dugout at the Ukrainian-Russian front line in a trench with one of the units of the Ukrainian army.
[00:11:34]  And I have to say, personally, I felt absolutely sick to my stomach.
[00:11:38]  And that's for several reasons.
[00:11:40]  One is President Trump had previously said, and I'd written very critically of this, that President Zelensky was a dictator and he implied that Ukraine had been responsible for the start of the war.
[00:11:54]  I disagree with both of those things.
[00:11:56]  I think Vladimir Putin is a dictator, and I think Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022 and had no right to do so.
[00:12:03]  However, it was already a very tense relationship that was going on, and the blow-up in the Oval Office was just, to my mind, at any rate, heartbreaking.
[00:12:15]  President Zelensky is the one whose country was invaded.
[00:12:19]  He is the one who's been trying to defend the territory of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people.
[00:12:25]  And to sort of make him into the aggressor instead of the party that suffered the aggression was very disturbing.
[00:12:34]  The one thing I would say about that, again, it's about a matter of perspective, is, as I wrote in my New York Post column from the front line, I said to one Ukrainian commander I was with, I said, I know you're not meant to keep too much abreast of the news developments and so on, but you must have heard about this.
[00:12:52]  And this Ukrainian soldier said to me, a bleep happens all the time, but I've got a job to do.
[00:13:04]  And I primarily think of and feel for, actually, the soldiers like that on the Ukrainian front line, for whom none of this is a game and none of it is about bust-ups between politicians.
[00:13:17]  It's about people fighting on the front line whose family homes are maybe 30 kilometers behind them.
[00:13:24]  And I really hope that a peace deal can be achieved.
[00:13:29]  And my hope was that the Trump administration's hard ball against the Ukrainians and against Zelensky personally was some kind of precursor to them going to Vladimir Putin and saying, look, we've duffed up the Ukrainians.
[00:13:43]  You better give us something.
[00:13:45]  The problem is, is that that hope of mine is slightly falling apart because perhaps unsurprisingly, the Kremlin hasn't given anything so far.
[00:13:54]  And in fact, its promises to, for instance, stop shelling, sending missiles to key energy infrastructure, they break all the time.
[00:14:02]  They break minutes after making the promise.
[00:14:05]  And I think Vladimir Putin himself is at risk of overstretching, actually, at this point, the goodwill, which, to my mind, slightly inexplicably seems to exist in parts of Washington towards him.
[00:14:21]  I don't think he's by any means an honest actor.
[00:14:24]  I think he's about the most dishonest actor you could have on the world stage.
[00:14:28]  But he should be very careful of riling up President Trump's anger, because if that's directed at Putin, then the game will change yet again.
[00:14:38]  Do you see any way, Douglas, having been on the ground there, do you see any way this ends without Putin retaining the territory he's stolen?
[00:14:50]  Personally, I hope that it does.
[00:14:53]  There are tens of thousands of Ukrainian families stuck behind the Russian lines.
[00:14:58]  I actually, on a recent visit the other week, met with children and some parents who'd managed to escape through Belarus and back into Ukraine from those Russian-occupied territories.
[00:15:11]  I think that's intolerable.
[00:15:13]  I don't think that people who are not Ukrainian should just sort of volunteer up tracts of Ukrainian land gleefully, let alone fall for Kremlin propaganda of sort of the faked up polls they've done to pretend that the four regions in the east of the country desire to be under Putin's rule.
[00:15:33]  I think it's unlikely that Crimea will ever return to Ukrainian hands.
[00:15:39]  But I think it's very unwise for the international community to think that they can just sort of give up these portions of eastern Ukraine and that'll satisfy Putin.
[00:15:49]  And my suspicion is, speaking to European leaders as well since I got back, is that, you know, Donald Trump and JD Vance do have one extremely important point, which is that the Europeans, including the Brits, we regard this very seriously, the invasion of Ukraine.
[00:16:06]  But too many European countries, Spain, for instance, simply have not stood up militarily.
[00:16:14]  They have not stood up their defense spending.
[00:16:16]  NATO members are still, after all of these decades of consecutive Democrat and Republican leaders telling them to increase their defense spending and to step up, have not done so.
[00:16:25]  So JD Vance and President Trump are definitely playing a hard ball against the Europeans.
[00:16:30]  I think that in some ways that's right.
[00:16:32]  But even if Trump manages to pull off a ceasefire deal, in my view, that will be the moment when Europe actually has to step up.
[00:16:42]  Because it may be the case that Putin stops whilst Donald Trump is in office.
[00:16:48]  But the minute Donald Trump is not in office, Putin will make another push.
[00:16:52]  And there's no one in Ukraine who thinks otherwise.
[00:16:55]  They know that that would be a temporary pause, in which case that then is a challenge to the Europeans.
[00:17:01]  Can Britain, the Europeans, actually walk the walk that we've talked in terms of arming the Ukrainians and training them during that period?
[00:17:10]  We'll see.
[00:17:10]  But, you know, Piers, we have all of these European leaders and Kier Starmer is as bad as any of them talking about what an enormous challenge this is to the security of Europe and then saying, and as a result, we'll have a 0.25% rise of GDP defense spending in the next 10 years.
[00:17:29]  And I just think you either mean it or you don't.
[00:17:32]  And if you mean it, you have to step up.
[00:17:35]  Yeah, no, I completely agree.
[00:17:37]  What's fascinating talking to you, Douglas, is you're perceived to be one of the sort of more strident conservative voices in American political discourse.
[00:17:46]  And yet you know, and I know there are a lot of people, particularly on the MAGA side of conservatism in America now, who completely disagree with you and me about Ukraine and the narrative around it, who see that they think Zelensky's the bad guy, that Ukraine brought this on themselves, that America was also complicit in driving NATO ever closer to Russia's border, and that poor old Putin had no option but to do what he's doing.
[00:18:14]  But it's a real thing, this.
[00:18:16]  And I've been really struck and sort of bemused by it.
[00:18:20]  Can you really put your handle on how this has happened?
[00:18:25]  Why is it that so many conservatives in America actually believe this?
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[00:20:04]  Now on with the show.
[00:20:07]  I am slightly bemused by it as well.
[00:20:09]  I can't offer a full explanation, but I can offer a partial explanation.
[00:20:13]  First of all, you know, politics in America, perhaps more than any other country we know, is very much a team sport.
[00:20:20]  And if the captain of the team changes his tactics, you go along with it.
[00:20:25]  I'm not a team player like that.
[00:20:27]  I think you're not.
[00:20:30]  But it's very striking seeing people falling in line, including, it has to be said, Republican senators and members of Congress who were very supportive of Ukraine until Donald Trump's re-election and in the recent weeks have stepped much further away.
[00:20:46]  There are several things.
[00:20:47]  One is it is perceived on much, well, on the MAGO right in America, it's perceived to be Biden's war.
[00:20:54]  And that means that it's therefore not their war.

=== Learning From Gaza Hostages (15:14) ===

[00:20:57]  The second thing is that the two occasions before the invasion of 22 where MAGA voters really heard anything about Ukraine, and it's a big world, there's lots going on, there's no reason why they have to obsess about it, and it's continents away from them.
[00:21:13]  But the two occasions they heard about Ukraine was one, the so-called perfect phone call, where Democrats really appallingly tried to impeach President Trump over a phone call he had with Zelensky.
[00:21:26]  And the other, of course, is the whole Hunter Biden sitting on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, and getting paid millions of dollars to give advice about something that Hunter Biden knows absolutely nothing about.
[00:21:38]  And so then they saw the undoubted corruption that does exist in Ukraine, and they decided, therefore, Ukraine is a corrupt country and we can't support it.
[00:21:48]  One of the many corrections I would just quickly add to that is if you're concerned by corruption that has occurred in Ukraine, does occur, it is ranked as a relatively corrupt country by Western European standards.
[00:22:02]  I mean, just look at Putin's Russia.
[00:22:05]  If you want to see corruption, you can see it there on a mega scale.
[00:22:10]  And so just because there are legitimate criticisms of Ukraine does not mean, and I cannot understand why parts of the MAGA right decide they should give some kind of free pass to Putin.
[00:22:22]  The final one on that, there are, of course, those people who wildly mistakenly believe Putin's self-projection of himself, which is that he is some kind of valiant defender of Christendom or of Christian values.
[00:22:34]  And I'm sorry, but among other things, if he were, he would not have sent Chechnyan jihadists to fight Ukrainian Christians since 2022.
[00:22:45]  He would not have enlisted 10,000 North Korean soldiers to fight against Ukrainian troops in recent months.
[00:22:51]  And he wouldn't have fired missiles at, for instance, the glorious cathedral in Odessa, which almost destroyed one of the greatest treasures of Ukrainian faith.
[00:23:05]  It's extraordinary to see these people parroting what Putin says about himself as if Putin can be accurately quoted as an expert on Putin and as if what comes out of his mouth is true.
[00:23:19]  I'm deeply concerned about that.
[00:23:22]  Yeah, and I mean, some of the MAGA right have really gone for you about this.
[00:23:27]  Jack Pozobic said the following.
[00:23:29]  Let's play the clip.
[00:23:30]  Got to respond to this new column claiming that MAGA is wrong on Ukraine from Douglas Murray.
[00:23:38]  And Douglas, Douglas, Douglas, I read your column, the one where you're taking the swing at us, and I got to say, you lost the plot, mate.
[00:23:46]  You claim MAGA is wrong on Ukraine because we've never been there, never seen the stakes up close.
[00:23:50]  Well, let me set the record straight.
[00:23:52]  I've been to Ukraine.
[00:23:53]  And here's the thing.
[00:23:54]  The world that you're seem to be talking about doesn't exist anymore.
[00:23:58]  There's this fantasy of an Anglo-American-led global order where some noble chessboard where London and Washington move the pieces and everyone just kind of nods along.
[00:24:09]  Well, that era is dead and it's been bleeding out since Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, all the endless wars that all of the neocon buddies cheered for.
[00:24:17]  Trump sees this.
[00:24:18]  MAGA sees it.
[00:24:20]  I mean, it's interesting because I would say that perfectly articulates their side of the argument.
[00:24:26]  To me, it's completely delusional.
[00:24:28]  But what do you feel when you hear it directed at you like that?
[00:24:33]  I mean, I don't care for personal criticism at all.
[00:24:36]  It's really water off a duck's back for me, as I'm sure it is for you, Piers.
[00:24:39]  I mean, I hadn't seen that.
[00:24:41]  I admire Jack Pasobic for going to Ukraine and actually seeing this firsthand.
[00:24:47]  And I do think that too few journalists do.
[00:24:50]  That's a big problem of the commentary at trade these days.
[00:24:54]  But the substance of what he's saying rather than the character of it, the substance of what he's saying, I would say is deeply concerning.
[00:25:02]  You can say that, and I concede this, that there have been badly mishandled wars in recent decades.
[00:25:11]  You can easily say, and I agree with it, that the era of Anglo-American dominance is potentially bleeding out, as he says.
[00:25:21]  I think the difference in perspective is I don't say that when I say it with any relish.
[00:25:28]  In fact, I say it in a spirit of lament.
[00:25:30]  I'm sorry if the era of American dominance, particularly the American dominance, is bleeding out.
[00:25:39]  Because one thing is for sure, if America isn't a dominant or the dominant power in the world, others will be.
[00:25:48]  Others will be.
[00:25:49]  And people like Jack Pasebik, I suppose, I don't really follow his work, but people like him, that argument seems to positively relish the idea that America can and should retreat from the world.
[00:26:03]  I think America and his allies should act judiciously in the world, and there will be disagreements on what that looks like.
[00:26:09]  But, you know, the America First Brigade have this very, very fundamental problem in their thinking.
[00:26:18]  It's not about the facts and everything like that, just at a very deep level.
[00:26:21]  And the fundamental problem with their thinking is they seem, in most cases, I don't know about that guy, but they seem most of them to actually still want America to be the world's superpower.
[00:26:34]  They want America to be the world's premier power, but yet they don't want to be involved in the world in any way.
[00:26:42]  And the thing is, other people do.
[00:26:44]  China is very keen to patrol the world's seaways if America doesn't want to protect them.
[00:26:52]  And I would just say one final thing on that, which is, you know, it was part of the Pax Americana, which that guy and others may be so delighted to see retreat, but it was part of it that we did not reward countries that rolled tanks into neighboring countries to seize their territory aggressively with no cause.
[00:27:15]  And so, no, if we are in an era where Putin's tanks can roll over any border and America simply says, well, we don't care because the American era is over.
[00:27:25]  I think that's terrible for America, but it's terrible for the world as well.
[00:27:30]  Yeah, I agree.
[00:27:31]  I completely agree.
[00:27:32]  Let's tell you your book on democracies and death cults.
[00:27:36]  So sell it to me in a couple of paragraphs, Douglas.
[00:27:39]  What's the thesis here?
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[00:28:13]  Well, it's really, as you know, Piers, it's a book that starts with two dates.
[00:28:18]  One is the 7th of October 2023, when Hamaz broke into Israel, invaded Israel, and massacred 1,200 people and stole and kidnapped another 250, many of whom are still in captivity in Gaza a year and a half later.
[00:28:37]  It starts from that date and also from the moment in 1979 when the Ayatollah Khomeini's plane left Paris and arrived back in Tehran and the Islamic Revolutionary government installed itself in power through very bloody means.
[00:28:54]  It starts with descriptions of firsthand what happened on the 7th and in the aftermath of the 7th, but also what the ideology is that has led to that, that did lead to that.
[00:29:08]  I say in the book repeatedly, it's partly, as you know, it's partly my first-hand eyewitness accounts of my time in Israel, Gaza and Lebanon and elsewhere during this conflict.
[00:29:20]  But it's also an attempt to explain several things.
[00:29:24]  First of all, the mindset, which I think the Western mind is still, after all of these years, incredibly poor at understanding the mindset behind death cults like Hamas.
[00:29:37]  I call them deaf cults for a very good reason, and of course I explain it in the book.
[00:29:42]  The second thing is to talk about the response and the Israeli response.
[00:29:47]  Not just what they did and where and what I saw, but what I think the lessons are for the wider world.
[00:29:54]  And part of that is that, you know, many people, including you, Piers, have quite rightly said since the 7th of October 2023 that what happened that day was the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
[00:30:07]  That's absolutely true.
[00:30:09]  But one of the things is that some people have had the courage to say that, although it shouldn't require courage.
[00:30:15]  What has been very lacking, I would suggest, is, in that case, why are people not identifying who the Nazis are?
[00:30:24]  And the follow-on from that, why are there so many of those Nazi supporters in our midsts?
[00:30:29]  Why, in a city like the one I'm sitting in, New York, were people, when the attack was still going on, coming out onto the streets to celebrate the rapists and the murderers?
[00:30:41]  Why, as we now know in London, did the anti-Israel groups put in their requests to have a demonstration on the 8th of October against Israel on the 7th of October?
[00:30:52]  Can you imagine?
[00:30:53]  What is it about our societies in the West that we have so many people, hundreds of thousands of people in our midst, who will look at the rape and the murder of people in Israel and say, great, this is the time to smash Israel more.
[00:31:11]  And I think it's that part of the equation that has not been looked at enough and what I try to dig into in this book.
[00:31:19]  One of the things that blew up from an interview you did with Lex Freeman, who's, I think, an excellent interviewer, and it was a fascinating three-hour or so interview you did with him.
[00:31:28]  But one of the things that went viral from that was you inferring that there are no kind of innocent civilians in Gaza.
[00:31:34]  Let's take a listen.
[00:31:35]  There is not a hostage who's come out who I've spoken with who found any Gazan Palestinian who expressed even the slightest human kindness to them.
[00:31:49]  If you look at the footage from the seventh, it's all celebration.
[00:31:54]  I'm sure you've heard the audio recording of the young man who ends up in one of the communities in the south of Israel.
[00:32:01]  And he says, I've killed 10 Jews with my own hands.
[00:32:04]  Oh, father, your son has killed 10 Jews.
[00:32:06]  You go, I want to show you, Dad.
[00:32:08]  I want to show you.
[00:32:08]  I've killed Jews with my own hands.
[00:32:10]  Your son put mother on the phone.
[00:32:14]  That incident you talked about, I remember it's utterly horrific.
[00:32:17]  And there's no doubt that, I mean, Hamas, I've always called them terrorists from the start.
[00:32:21]  They are disgusting terrorists and should be treated as nothing better or worse.
[00:32:26]  Where I would take issue with the categorization of there are no civilians in Gaza, A, half the population is under 18, which means a lot of the people there are genuine kids, right?
[00:32:37]  And I think all kids are innocent in these situations.
[00:32:41]  They might be in a home where people older than them are trying to direct them and whatever, but they're still innocent people.
[00:32:49]  And secondly, we are beginning to see protests against Hamas in Gaza.
[00:32:53]  People are being executed for taking part in these, but we are seeing some protests, which would suggest to me that there is a rising grindswell of people in Gaza who do not agree with the doctrine of Hamas.
[00:33:07]  You can see how bad it's been for the Palestinian people, for Gaza, and what nothing to do with this.
[00:33:14]  So, I mean, now you've seen how it's blown up.
[00:33:17]  Would you reframe what you said there?
[00:33:21]  Would you clarify it?
[00:33:23]  I hadn't seen that it had blown up.
[00:33:25]  I'm happy to clarify.
[00:33:26]  No, I never said there are no innocent civilians in Gaza.
[00:33:29]  Of course, I regard children as being innocent civilians, of course.
[00:33:33]  Well, the point I made was there is a lot that we ought to learn outside of this conflict about what it means when you see the events of the 7th of Israeli hostages being taken into Gaza and being greeted by cheering crowds.
[00:33:51]  I would submit that if a group of terrorists came into the center of London with a truckload of young women whose tendons they'd cut and who they'd raped and paraded them through London, I'd like to think that Londoners would be decent enough to stop them and at least not to stand by and cheer the great rape parade.
[00:34:16]  But that's not what happened in Gaza.
[00:34:19]  And you can go back a lot further and talk about all of the history and the animosity between the sides.
[00:34:26]  But, you know, the citizens of Gaza did have a choice after the withdrawal by Israel of all Jews from Gaza in 2005.
[00:34:34]  They did have a choice on who to vote for.
[00:34:36]  Perhaps unwisely, the George W. Bush administration pushed for elections in Gaza.
[00:34:41]  And as the Palestinian Authority and others were worried about, Hamas won the elections.
[00:34:45]  And they never had another election since.
[00:34:48]  Hamas has obviously used the 18 years it had to misgovern the Gaza, not to create the flourishing Palestinian state.
[00:34:55]  They could have created, not to do that, but to indoctrinate their children into hatred, to build tunnels in which they hide their missiles and not their civilians.
[00:35:05]  A member of Hamas was interviewed a few months ago, and as an Arabic interviewer, I think it was an al-Arabiya, who said, why don't you allow the Gazan civilians to take shelter in the tunnel network that you've got all across Gaza?
[00:35:18]  He said, no, but the tunnels aren't for the civilians.
[00:35:21]  They're for our fighters, our terrorists, and our rockets.
[00:35:25]  Well, look, that undoubtedly makes it an incredibly difficult place to operate in militarily.
[00:35:31]  Incredibly difficult.
[00:35:33]  And that is what Hamaz planned.
[00:35:36]  And I think that Western media, Western observers and others at least have to recognize that.
[00:35:42]  Hamaz did this atrocity, started this war, and it knew that whatever way Israel responded, innocent civilians would be harmed.
[00:35:54]  Yes, there would be buildings, including hospitals and others, that would be damaged, because Hamaz, guess what, operates along none of the rules of war.
[00:36:07]  Israel, like the British Army and the American Army, the IDF has to operate along the rules of war.

=== Destroying Hamas Death Cults (08:44) ===

[00:36:12]  Hamaz not only doesn't operate along those rules, it actually uses the rules against its enemies.
[00:36:18]  And, you know, you've known this since the start of the conflict.
[00:36:21]  I've known it.
[00:36:22]  Many other people have remained woefully ignorant about it.
[00:36:25]  But it has made it inevitable that there would be high civilian casualties.
[00:36:30]  I don't believe they're as high as the figures that Hamaz puts out and which much of the Western media parrots with no problem.
[00:36:37]  But of course there are going to be civilian casualties.
[00:36:40]  And that is the result of the war that Hamas started.
[00:36:44]  And there is a solution to this.
[00:36:46]  There is an answer to this, which is that if Gaza is to have any future as a Palestinian entity, its young people are not brought up to believe their purpose in life should be the annihilation of their neighbors.
[00:37:02]  You know, Hamas had 18 years.
[00:37:06]  They could have educated their young in a different way, but they didn't.
[00:37:12]  And now, if anything, is the time when they could.
[00:37:16]  And these brave Gazans, who finally, thank God, have started to uprise.
[00:37:21]  And we'll see how real it is, but it's clearly real because people, there was a very brave young Gazan man the other day who stood up against Hamaz and his body, he was tortured and his body was dumped on his family's front door by Hamaz a couple of days later.
[00:37:37]  We'll see if these protests have any results.
[00:37:42]  But one thing that is important to remember is it's perfectly likely, in fact, it seems overwhelmingly likely to me that these protests against Hamas that are trying to kindle in Gaza are not because they are, and again, I'm reading this, but it seems likeliest to me.
[00:38:01]  It's not because these are people who you and I, the average American or Brit or anything, would love to sit down with.
[00:38:10]  It's that they have decided they've had enough of Hamaz's rule because it was Hamaz's rule and misrule and its corruption and then its starting of a war that has led the people of Gaza to this terrible position.
[00:38:27]  A final quick thing on that, if I may, which is also, let's not forget that in the lies upon lies that have been built up in the last 18 months, so many people have been able to simultaneously point out the considerable youth boom in Gaza.
[00:38:42]  And they're the same people who have been saying since 2005 that the Israelis are committing genocide in Gaza.
[00:38:49]  Choose, guys.
[00:38:50]  Choose which of these things is true because they can't both be.
[00:38:55]  How do you think this war now ends?
[00:38:58]  Does the ceasefire sort of unraveled?
[00:39:04]  It's hard to argue that a lot of Gaza's been completely destroyed.
[00:39:09]  Trump has called for the complete displacement, of course, of two million Palestinians.
[00:39:13]  I don't think that's going to happen.
[00:39:15]  And he's obviously trying to force people to get together and work out what is going to happen.
[00:39:18]  But what's the end game here?
[00:39:20]  But one of the more worrying things I saw was the American intelligence report suggesting that they think for every Hamas terrorist who's been killed, someone with the same ideology has already stepped up to replace them.
[00:39:32]  Well, that's a perennial problem in fighting against deaf cults, is that there's always this claim that if you kill their leaders, their leaders will simply be replaced.
[00:39:44]  I'm actually not sure that people like Yahya Sinwa and Hassan Nasrallah are easily replaceable figures.
[00:39:50]  In fact, I think they're not at all easily replaceable figures.
[00:39:53]  But for the level of people below them, there's this quandary.
[00:39:57]  It's been a quandary that America faced after 9-11 and answered in part, but unsuccessfully in other parts, which is, you know, if you're attacked by terrorists, and there is always a cohort of people who will say, if you kill those terrorists or attack those terrorists, you'll create more terrorists.
[00:40:15]  And that's just a circular logic that certain people can't get out of.
[00:40:20]  My own belief is that there has been, and I've seen the destruction of Gaza myself.
[00:40:26]  Hamas booby-trapped so many buildings across the place, and much of the destruction that we see on the ground, and I've seen myself, is the result of the Israelis having to set off explosions that set off all the secondary explosions of all of the other bombs, IEDs, and other booby traps that Hamas has placed around the Gaza.
[00:40:48]  The current status quo opinion, until Donald Trump made that intervention the other week, the status quo opinion seemed to be that there would be a ceasefire at some point.
[00:40:59]  Of course, as I've said since the beginning of the conflict, the conflict could have ended at any moment or at least ceased if Hamas had given back the hostages and they still haven't given them back because only a death cult like Hamaz uses even the dead bodies of their enemies as a shield to protect their own lives.
[00:41:19]  But park that aside for a moment, the presumption seemed to be that there would be some kind of ceasefire arrangement, an ongoing release of live, brutalized Israeli hostages and the dead bodies of Israelis, and then yet more Palestinian terrorists handed over from Israeli prisons and that there would be a ceasefire.
[00:41:45]  The problem with that paradigm is, always was the same, which is the international community and Israel would then be expected to build the Gaza back up again.
[00:41:58]  Nobody knew who was going to rule Gaza under the next iteration, and one of the two Israeli war aims was always to destroy Hamas, at least that is to make them operationally incapable and effectively unable to rule Gaza.
[00:42:12]  But the Palestinian authority doesn't want to run Gaza.
[00:42:16]  Egypt doesn't want to run Gaza.
[00:42:18]  Israel certainly doesn't want to run Gaza.
[00:42:21]  So what would happen?
[00:42:22]  Most likely thing is the international community would be asked to chip in yet more billions of dollars to Gaza to rebuild it for Hamas or a Hamas-like group to seize control again and for a war to be launched again several years from now and for the same thing to happen.
[00:42:38]  I think that is a hopeless paradigm which left and right labor conservative Republican Democrat have been on the side of for too long.
[00:42:47]  What they don't realize is this is one of the reasons why this conflict has kept on going.
[00:42:53]  It's because people, every time the Hamas or other terrorist groups start the war, Israel applies to it, that you stop at the status and you go back to the status quo ante.
[00:43:06]  That's what I mentioned in my book was a case in 2006, the first war in Lebanon and Israel that I witnessed.
[00:43:13]  At the end of that conflict, there was a ceasefire.
[00:43:16]  One of the deals was that with an international peacekeeping force, Hezbollah would not be allowed to build up its weaponry in the south of Lebanon.
[00:43:24]  Guess what?
[00:43:25]  International peacekeepers who frankly have no beef in this, Irish, Sri Lankan, and other so-called peacekeepers just stood by.
[00:43:34]  Hezbollah amassed about 160,000 short and long-range missiles exactly where they weren't meant to in the 2006 ceasefire.
[00:43:42]  They fired them for years, and on the 8th of October 2023, they let go their barrage day upon day into central and northern Israel.
[00:43:53]  I'm at any rate fed up with the paradigm that continues the perpetuation of this conflict.
[00:44:00]  I don't believe this should be just the most recent Gaza war.
[00:44:03]  I think it should be the last one.
[00:44:05]  I don't want it to be the third Lebanon war.
[00:44:08]  I want it to be the last one.
[00:44:10]  And in my view, for that to happen, the death cults of Hamas and Hezbollah have to not just be destroyed, but to have their putative supporters and their real supporters have to realize that they have lost.
[00:44:25]  That there is no future for them or the region in sustaining this death cult idea that you simply have to educate, as it were, the next generation to grow up to try to annihilate their neighbors.
[00:44:39]  It should be that that stops.
[00:44:41]  How it happens, we'll see.
[00:44:43]  But Donald Trump the other week was the first person, first person among world leaders to say something new, like, as he said, the Gaza is pretty unlivable at the moment.

=== Piers Morgan Uncensored Mission (01:37) ===

[00:44:56]  It's largely true that.
[00:44:59]  It's largely true.
[00:45:00]  It's very smashed up.
[00:45:03]  But he said it's basically unlivable, so why don't we encourage people who want to leave to leave?
[00:45:09]  Of course, that has caused outrage elsewhere, but it's look, it's at least a new idea in the paradigm, which otherwise is going to be stuck in this perpetual violence cycle.
[00:45:21]  Yeah.
[00:45:21]  Well, Douglas, unlike a lot of people who talk about this, you go.
[00:45:26]  You've been to Ukraine repeatedly.
[00:45:27]  You've been to Israel repeatedly.
[00:45:30]  And your reporting always carries with it a sense of somebody who's actually been there, which I think makes a big difference.
[00:45:37]  The book is called On Democracies and Death Cults.
[00:45:39]  Like all your books, it's a fascinating, incredibly well-researched read.
[00:45:44]  I won't agree with all of it, but I agree with all of it.
[00:45:47]  And I find myself as I get older, I turn 60 at the weekend.
[00:45:51]  I'm agreeing with a lot more of what you say, Douglas, and it's becoming increasingly disturbing.
[00:45:57]  Well, happy 60th birthday, Piers.
[00:45:59]  It's great news.
[00:46:02]  It's great to see you.
[00:46:03]  Thanks for coming back, huh?
[00:46:04]  Good to see you.
[00:46:05]  Thank you, Piers.
[00:46:08]  Piers Morgan Uncensored is proudly independent.
[00:46:10]  The only boss around here is me.
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