Douglas Murray Returns! Author of ＂On Democracies and Death Cults＂ (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_824)
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Summary
A chat with Douglas Murray, the author of The War on the West, The Madness of Krauss, and The Strangeth of Europe, about the events of October 7th, 2019, and why Israel should have responded in the way it did.
Transcript
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Hi, everybody. The internet has asked and I have delivered. I have with me today the great,
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the brilliant, the gorgeous Douglas Murray. How are you doing, sir?
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Very good to be back with you, Gad. It's been far too long.
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I know. I was actually checking in preparation of our chat. When was the original inaugural
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time that you came on? You care to venture? Do you have any idea when it was?
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That's exactly right. It was in 2016. So probably one of the first places I'm going to ask you to
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start before I just want to introduce you first is have things changed since the last time? And I
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hate to say yes towards the worst, the worsening of things. But for now, number one bestseller right
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here on democracies and death cults, and also the author of The War on the West, The Madness of
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Krauss, The Strangeth of Europe. All right, let's start from the start. October 7th happened. You
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said, I better put pen to paper. And this beauty came out. Walk us through it.
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Well, yes, my first instinct was that I thought that several things were going to happen. And I
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wanted to go and chronicle with my own eyes, my own experience, as much as I could about what had
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happened on the 7th of October 2023, when 4000 Hamas terrorists basically invaded Israel and
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slaughtered their way through the communities there, the people, the young people, the dance
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party. I wanted I had a sense that I think was borne out afterwards to be accurate, that the world was
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going to pass over what had happened and go straight on to Israel's reaction to what had happened.
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And you could see that on the 8th, when the world's headlines were, you know, world awaits
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Israeli retaliation, you know, before the stories were out before the even any of the details really
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had come out of this unbelievable atrocity where 1200 people were murdered and another 250 taken
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hostage. And, you know, I know that some people find it don't like the exercise or can't understand
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the exercise of extrapolating out by numbers, but that's, that's equivalent by numbers of a
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population in Israel of 9 million and population in America of 330 40 or so. That's equivalent to
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about 44,000 Americans being murdered in one day and 10,000 Americans being taken hostage. And,
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you know, I also wanted to, so I wanted to focus on what happened on the day. I wanted to see Israel's
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response because I knew, as you knew that, you know, Israel, just like America couldn't cope, couldn't,
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wouldn't tolerate, shouldn't tolerate captives being taken, hostages being taken. So Israel can't,
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I knew it was going to respond. And I wanted to see the response firsthand.
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But the other thing that the book is about is really this strange thing that's happened,
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perhaps nowhere more so than in your country, Gad, of Canada, where, you know, cities that seemed
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civilized until relatively recently, like Toronto or Vancouver, suddenly just get shut down on a regular
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basis by protesters who side, not with the young people massacred in the early morning at a dance
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festival, but on the side of the people who went raping and butchering their way through that
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dance festival. And that really is the sort of the third thing in the book, which is what the hell has
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happened here in America, in Canada, in Britain, in the West, in Australia. Why have we got so many
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people in a fight between a democracy and a death cult like Hamas? Why have we got so many people
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who support the death cult? So that was my real aim. And I'm very, very pleased that the number of
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readers who already have have absorbed the book and its arguments, it's obviously the greatest thing for
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any writer is knowing you're being read. Yeah, that's wonderful. What are so maybe I want I'd like
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to put myself in the shoes of the typical interlocutor who despises Israel, throw those
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arguments at you and see if this recorded chat can serve as the definitive rebuttal to all of the
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nonsense. Number one, grossly disproportionate. Sure, they should have retaliated any country
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would have done so. But what they've gone is so beyond the pale that it is clear that Israel is
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now the culprit. They no longer have morality on their side. Yeah, I am. I have an open invitation
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to the people who claim this, which is send me your battle plan for the destruction of Hamas,
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the killing or capture of all of the Hamas leadership who perpetrated this atrocity and planned it
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and have been misgoverning the Gaza for 18 years. And send me your plan for the rescuing of the 250
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hostages. And if you have a plan that works that knows how to extract people from a heavily built up,
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densely populated urban environment in which Hamas has had 18 years to build tunnels, entrench missile
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systems in every other house, stockpile weaponry everywhere, and booby trap all these buildings
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throughout the thing. If you do have a plan for that, send it to me. And I will make sure that it gets
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to as many important generals as possible. And I'm sure they'll be thrilled if there's another way.
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But as it is, I don't know of one Israeli soldier who wants to spend another minute longer in Gaza than
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they already have done. But they're there because Hamas is still holding the hostages. And Hamas has
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still got some control of Gaza. All right. I mean, I'm convinced by the argument. But of course,
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we will have many commentators in the section that will offer deferring opinions. Point number two.
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Again, I am the Free Free Palestine representative right now. Douglas Murray conveniently chooses to use
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October 7th, 2023 as the time as the period where time began or the clock began. But do you not realize
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that there is nearly 80 years of the systematic genocide and subjugation of the noble, peaceful
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Palestinian people? Why are you such a bigot that you choose October 7th as your starting point, Douglas?
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Well, as it happens, I don't. I actually choose January of 1979, when the Ayatollah Khomeini took the flight
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from Paris to Tehran and then succeeded in the Islamic revolution there, from which moment not only have
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the people of a great civilization, Persia, been subjugated by these fanatical mullahs, but they've colonized
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not just Iran, but Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, as you know better than anyone. And so no, I don't. I started
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in 1979 for that one. As for and of course, the Iranian revolutionary government being the ones who pay
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for train and arm Hamas, Hezbollah, and the other terrorist death cults that try to rampage through
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the region. So no, I don't start on the in October 2023. I suppose there are people who think and it's a
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very interesting tendency that has been teased out by some people's reaction since the 7th of October,
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2023, is that there is a certain type of person who thinks of themselves maybe as a noble and
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principled person, who seems to believe that if you that something was done wrong at the origin of the
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state of Israel in 1948, and that because the Arabs rejected another state and rejected coexistence with
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the Jewish state, that somehow something happened that was wrong at the beginning, and that that can be
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litigated now in 2025. And I think that's flat out wrong. As my friend and colleague Natasha Hausdorff
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said some time ago, you know, if a couple are pregnant, usually it's the woman, of course, doing the
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hard lifting, and we can say that now. But if if a couple are expecting a baby, the woman is pregnant, they might
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have a discussion about whether to bring the pregnancy to full term. This is an ethical and interesting
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question of its own about abortion, and so on. But once the child is born, let alone when the child is in
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its 70s, we're no longer talking about abortion, we're talking murder. So the people who think we just have to
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rectify something that happened in 1948 should know, first of all, that's what they're talking
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about. And they should be proud of it. They should be proud of the stance they are taking. The second
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thing is, if they think that the Palestinian people haven't been, the Arabs have not been offered another
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state again, and again, and again, and rejected it again, and again, and again, seeking to annihilate
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the Jewish state, rather than creating another state of their own. If they really think that, then
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they clearly haven't read any of the books. Well, and I mean, I just I discussed this in one of my books
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where I say, look, history is really the accounting of, you know, which group of folks took which land
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from whom I mean, that's, that's all that history is. And so if we were to litigate, go back to
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whichever time we prefer to go back to, and say, but in 1702, you did this, and I did that, then no
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one could move forward. And I always exactly, and I always present my own personal history. And let me,
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let me share, I mean, I think you probably know it, but perhaps not. So of course, I grew up in Lebanon,
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we had to leave Lebanon under imminent threat of execution, Palestinians stole our home, my parents were
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kidnapped and tortured by Fatah. Many things were badly done to all of us. My ancestors, just two
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generations removed, fled from Syria, because we were Syrian Jews. My brother-in-law's family left from
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Alexandria, Egypt, because they were Egyptian Jews. My wife's family are Lebanese-Armenian. They also had to
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leave Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War, but they also are the product of the Armenian genocide.
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And yet we've all been able to integrate that within our tragic personal histories, but move on. I don't
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hold hatred and genocidal desires to exterminate all Palestinians because of the things that were done to
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me and my parents by Palestinians, but somehow the Palestinian people can't arrive at that. They are
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always litigating the past. Is there any hope for us to get them to be as accepting of their history as I was of
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mine? Not so long as people teach them that the victimhood mentality and the multi-generational refugee
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mentality is going to lead them to victory sometime. If Hamas ran Gaza for 18 years, they could have
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brought up a new generation. Of course, they had no intention to because they're Hamas, but they could
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have educated a new generation of Gaza and Palestinians in that time to actually build the state that they'd been
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given in 2005. They could have created a flourishing society. They could have taught the young to live
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in peace with their neighbors, and it could all have gone another way. But instead, Hamas were voted
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in by the Palestinians in Gaza. Hamas decided to go for war after war with their neighbor, and there's a
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price for starting war after war and losing. But yeah, it could all have gone differently. It could all have gone
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differently if Arafat and co. Hadn't have, in the early 1960s, founded the PLO and pretended that
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all of Israel was occupied. They would have had a state in 1964, in 1967. It couldn't have had any time.
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Indeed. When you went on your visit prior to writing the book, is there anything, I mean, I presume you
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came with some a priori, you know, conceptions of what you were going to see. Did anything surprise you,
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either in the positive or negative sense of that term? Oh yeah, lots of things surprised me. I'd
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spent plenty of time in the region before, but was there for most of the year after the 7th.
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Yes, lots of things surprised me. On the positive, I was surprised by, most of all, by the extraordinary
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resilience of the young Israelis in particular, young men and women who joined back up in reserves,
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or who were already serving. I was amazed by the courage of young people who are so like their American
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and British counterparts, with the one exception, that when they were called upon, they fought.
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And that made a huge impression on me. The negative one that surprised me, I suppose, was
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that I have been flawed in the last 18 months by the lack of compassion, or even understanding or empathy,
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that much of the so-called civilized world just has not shown to the victims in Israel.
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What do you think is driving this, Douglas? I think one thing is the level I just described,
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this thing that Israelis are uniquely undeserving of sympathy, uniquely undeserving of sympathy,
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that of all of the world's victims, somehow you can treat even a one-year-old Israeli baby
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is regarded by much of the world in a lesser light than any other one-year-old, as if the baby even
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has done something wrong by being born in a state which is so defamed by the world.
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I have examples I give in the book, multiple examples, but one that really stood out to me was
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having spent a lot of time with survivors of the Nova Party and parents of people who were murdered and
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and more. When there was a commemoration, memorial of the Nova Party that traveled around a bit of the
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rest of the world a year after the atrocity, it came among other places to America, it came to LA,
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it came to New York. And in New York, it was protested by crowds of of activists against Israel,
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chanting for Intifada and chanting against the Nova Party. There's a father who lost his daughters at the
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party who had to walk through the street in New York through people celebrating the murder of his daughters.
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This is a level of sickness that, yes, I think is shocking. If if parents of people killed on 9-11
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traveled anywhere around the world or parents of the 49 people killed in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando,
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Florida, or parents of the young women murdered at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester in 2017,
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if parents of those people went to a civilized city in the in in in a place like New York and stumbled
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upon hundreds of people celebrating the murder of their child, we would say and they would say,
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what the hell has gone wrong with us here? But with Israel, it can be different. That has that has surprised
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me. I have to say, I the the normalization of of that is has been not unexpected, but still shocking.
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You know, I would have gone along with what you said in terms of, you know, it's what I would have
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said that it doesn't surprise me that there's so much Jew hatred, given what I've seen in my life.
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But I must admit in in unison with what you said that I have been taken aback, not so much by the
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Islamic based hate, because that one I could have predicted, but I'm astonished at the level of
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orgiastic depravity that Westerners have in their Jew hating, you know, quote, logic. And so I'll give
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you an example that's near and dear to your heart, because I'm going to refer to the Muslim grooming gangs.
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And so this is based on a game that I coined six degrees of Jew, which is I give you any calamity
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in the world and you have up to six causal degrees to explain why it is the Jew that did it. But now
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you're going to love this one because, again, it speaks to a unique reality that happened in Britain
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with the with the Asian grooming gangs. By the way, I'm Asian. I'm from Lebanon and I don't remember
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Lebanese people doing this, but certainly Lebanese.
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No. And to date, to date, we have no anecdotes even of Japanese males busily raping.
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Apparently, they're not Asian. But anyways, so I will post online, Douglas, an image with the say,
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let's say the 20 Huddersfield. So this is one of many grooming gangs. So I'm picking the Huddersfield
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one because that's the one I used. And let me sort of summarize the name of the 20 guys.
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Muhammad, Muhammad, Muhammad, Muhammad, Muhammad, Muhammad. Take a break. Muhammad, Muhammad, Muhammad.
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And then I post in my usual satirical way. I'm not smart enough. I don't have a big data analytic brain
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to be able to link all of these into some unifying rubric. Could somebody help me? I will get a tsunami of
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replies, Douglas. Not satirical. Not facetious. Saying, yes, asshole. It's the Jews. It's Jews.
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I say, but how? You mean the Mohammeds are Jews? They said, no. Who led them into Britain? And so there
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I created a mathematical equation, Douglas, which might interest you. When three Mohammeds gang rape your
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daughter, it's really Mordechai that's to blame. So three Mohammeds equals one Mordechai. So how can
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you fight against this level of departure from decency and logic? Do we have any hope, Douglas?
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Yes, we do, I think. I think your six degrees of separation, I think by now we can probably tighten
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it and it's about two, maybe one most of the time. I see one degree of separation being pushed by
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lots of people that I'm rather surprised by, I have to say. The Jews in terms of number,
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the minority percentage and visibility in certain fields are almost perfect as a scapegoat
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for malcontents whose lives are not going well. And instead of realizing their lives are not going
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well because of themselves, the Jews are the perfect scapegoat. I mean, Girard and others
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completely persuaded me of the scapegoat theory. And the Jews are almost just desperately, unfortunately,
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of the size and visibility that means that anyone looking for an explanation for their own failures
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will be able to blame the Jews. It's a perennial, I'm afraid, historically. But what's interesting to me
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is that we have in our societies in the West, some considerable understanding of Christian antisemitism.
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And we have some considerable understanding of far-right antisemitism. We've learned something
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in recent years, the faster learners have learned something about left-wing antisemitism. And we know
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that it doesn't come wearing jackboots. It comes with a kefir and a COVID-19 mask because the people of
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that ilk are simultaneously very hot for Intifada and terrified of the Delta variant. I think we can all agree.
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But so we've become so knowledgeable about left-wing antisemitism too. I think the one that is almost
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completely absent from an understanding in the West, and in a way it's like, well, why would
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most Westerners understand or need to understand it is Islamic antisemitism, which, as I say in the book,
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is its own fuel? It's its own fuel. There is a guy called Mehdi Hassan, who used to be in the media in
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in the UK. Oh, yes, I know who he is. He said something true about 10 years ago that I quote in the book.
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It was an unusual occasion. So I thought it was worth bookmarking. He described as a Muslim himself,
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he wrote in the New States that Islamic antisemitism is, quote, routine, rife, and commonplace.
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And he said every British Muslim reading this will know what I'm talking about. He said every dinner,
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there'll be somebody who starts talking about the Jews during 9-11 or, you know. And I believe him on
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that because that's my experience as well. I don't know any Muslim who doesn't acknowledge that Islam has
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a massive Jew hatred problem. And that doesn't mean that every Muslim has that. But my word,
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it's there in many, many Muslims in much of the Muslim world. And that's, again, because
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the Jews are the almost, I mean, not only having rejected Muhammad's teachings very early on,
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and not only by having a successful state in a region of states that are falling apart or just run by
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military junters or royal families and having some oil money and not much else. And not just that,
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but this central thing that it seems to be intolerable to much of the Muslim world,
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that the Jewish people should be able to fight to defend themselves and to win.
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It hurts their self-esteem at their core. And that, as I say in the book, among other things,
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when it comes to Islamic antisemitism, as with all other types, it tells us nothing about the Jews.
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It tells us only about the person who suffers from it. Everything that the Muslim world accuses Jews of
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is what they're guilty of themselves. And if people could realize this is just projection
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on a vast scale, it would become much more understandable to a wider number of people.
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I loved your explanation just a few minutes ago, where you said about sort of the attribution of
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personal failures, because I have actually developed that exact argument, but using sort of my psychological
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based knowledge. So let me reframe what you said using some of these psychological principles.
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So in psychology, we have something called the self-serving bias, whereby you attribute
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successes internally, right? I did well on the exam because I'm a smart guy and I studied hard.
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And you attribute failures externally, right? I did poorly on the exam because Professor Saad is an
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asshole Jew and he's not fair. And I'm Muslim, so that's probably why he gave me a bad grade.
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Now, that is already an indelible feature of the human mind, because it's an ego defensive strategy.
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I want to protect my ego. Good things are because of me, bad things are because of them. And exactly to
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your point, the Jew, to use Amy Chua's term, the Yale law professor, she talks about market-dominant
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minorities. Well, the Jew is the ultimate market-dominant minority, who exactly to your point,
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is minuscule in number, but outlandishly supersized in terms of their influence. Well,
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now you've got the perfect cocktail to blame the Jew for why I cheated on my wife, or my wife cheated
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on me, because the Jew is the pornographer. It's probably the Jew who put the, so that's the six
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degrees of freedom. Why do I have diabetes? It's not because I'm 400 pounds and I eat all this junk
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food. It's because the Jews are withholding the diabetes drug so that they can manipulate the stock
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prices of the diabetes pharmaceutical industry. So, and by the way, you said that you've seen it.
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I lived it every day as a guy growing up in Lebanon, and this is Lebanon tolerant, Paris of the Middle East,
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Lebanon. So I can't even begin to fathom what it's like in Lahore or in Yemen. And so again,
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let me ask, because I always like to extract some sort of optimism. Can we find a mind vaccine that
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eradicates Jew hatred from the heart of mankind, let alone Muslim people?
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No, I'm rather pessimistic about that, because as I say, it seems to me to be such a human perennial.
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Can you shoot down certain things? Yes, yes, absolutely. And I think you can warn
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decent people away from it. And you can alert the cleverer people not to fall into this self-destructive
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mind virus. You know, the people he mentioned earlier, but you know, the people who think that
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mass immigration to Europe is, is because of Jews. Like there's, there's, there's a woman I mentioned
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in The Strange Death of Europe, or Barbara something, I can't remember. It's a totally fringed figure,
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but she is Jewish. And she is on video somewhere saying that-
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I know exactly who you're talking about, because they always send it to me.
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And, but it's like, she didn't run European post-war migration policy. She's just a person
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who happens to be Jewish, who happens to have an objectionable viewpoint. But the, the pretense that
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everybody who was actually in charge, whether it's Tony Blair, John Major, Gordon Brown, David Cameron,
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Boris Johnson in the UK, or endless number, Angela Merkel in Germany.
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These are the people who created post-war Europe. I mean, a much longer list, but these are some of
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the people who created Europe's post-war migration disaster. And you, you struggle to find a Jew among
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them. Oh, I got one. I got it. Clearly you're, you haven't mastered your six degrees of Jew
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game yet. George Soros is the acolyte of Karl Popper. Yes.
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And he promoted the notion of the open society. George Soros is the billionaire who serves as the
00:28:10.780
background puppeteer to all of the non-Jewish leaders that you mentioned. Aha, it is the Jewish fault.
00:28:17.500
Yes. I did actually go into that in Australia's death of Europe. I have a considerable distaste for
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George Soros's philanthropy. But it's, it's like, it's the lowest resolution type of thinking.
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And one of the reasons why I don't, and I explained in that book why I, why I came to the conclusions I
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did after many years of study of what was going on with post-war European migration. But the, the reason
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why I say that this, this is probably a perennial of the human heart is that it'll, these conspiracy
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claims will always be available to people lacking in curiosity and intelligence who wish to find
00:29:04.380
someone else to blame for their own failings. And, um, I don't think there's going to be a time when
00:29:10.700
we as a species get cleverer or, uh, more decent or less, uh, malleable by fools. Yeah.
00:29:19.740
Yeah, no, I hear you. Now you, I think we both have been two of the people who have been most
00:29:25.420
recurringly standing on top of the mountain, screaming and warning people. Do you feel,
00:29:31.660
nevermind when you and I last spoke in the last 15 years that you might've been involved in trying to,
00:29:39.180
you know, warn people about this? Do you feel that people are waking up and hence might engage in some
00:29:47.020
reasonable auto correction? Let's say my, as you mentioned immigration or, and here's where I'm
00:29:53.460
going to share my pessimism. I feel that no amount of evidence that the West sees is ever going to cause
00:30:01.020
them to auto correct. Please tell me I'm wrong, Douglas. I think it's country by country, you know,
00:30:06.460
Gad. I mean, America has a pretty impressive, uh, uh, auto correct system. American politics,
00:30:13.580
as we've seen in recent years has, uh, a much more adept capability to react to public dissatisfaction
00:30:22.300
with things. I mean, you know, the, the Southern border crisis happens in the U S Biden overseas,
00:30:30.300
a, a disastrously lax immigration policy where millions of illegal migrants head into the U S and
00:30:38.780
the U S votes in Donald Trump, who's saying on the campaign trail, this is something I'm going to fix.
00:30:45.740
And already he hasn't, he hasn't got everybody who's illegal out, but he's stopped crossings at
00:30:51.860
the Southern border to like one person or so in the last few weeks. Um, by contrast, some other
00:30:59.500
countries seem to be extremely bad at course correction. The country you're in Canada, it seems
00:31:05.580
that there is a capability or capacity. I hope this isn't the case, but just swap out a leader, uh,
00:31:12.480
of the left and continue to make the same mistakes and not ever concede to it. So who knows? I love
00:31:19.360
Canada. I've got some great Canadian friends. I'm not very positive about that. Pretty negative about
00:31:24.080
my own country of birth, uh, great Britain, because again, doesn't seem to matter whether
00:31:29.760
you vote conservative or labor, you still get the mass migration. The British public voted for
00:31:34.640
Brexit to lower immigration among other things. And a conservative government oversaw a record number
00:31:41.360
of net migration figures during their time. And now it's labor and nothing gets better. And they
00:31:47.360
can't even seem to stop boats of illegal migrants like landing every day. Uh, but there are some
00:31:54.240
success stories. Uh, there's one that I have kept an eye on, which is Denmark. Okay. It's only a country
00:32:02.160
of about 5 million people, but they had an early warning to some of the problems of, of bringing
00:32:08.320
extremists into your country, uh, with the cartoon crisis, which I can never quite believe we all had
00:32:16.720
to go through and still are. Um, and now a left-wing government in Denmark has actually
00:32:23.920
brought illegal, brought migration to a, you know, a sensible level and, uh, left-wing government is
00:32:32.400
actually doing the things that any sensible government would do. So it is some countries
00:32:37.920
can correct. It's just, it will be on a country by country basis. And it'll depend on, of course,
00:32:43.360
whether or not there are decent, good politicians who hold firm and do what's needed and it'll depend
00:32:49.520
or not. And it'll depend on whether publics have the wisdom for vote to vote for politicians who
00:32:56.240
don't just give them, uh, bromides, but actually solve the problems that the country needs to address.
00:33:03.360
Yeah. I, I worry though. So yes, of course the United States is in, is, is in better shape than
00:33:08.880
some of the certainly Western European countries. But as you probably know, Douglas, uh, you know,
00:33:15.280
Islamic leaders have for many, many years said that we are going to conquer the West in three
00:33:20.720
ways. Number one, through the womb of our women. And certainly they're doing that. And it certainly
00:33:26.720
doesn't help that most Western countries don't even meet the fertility rate of, you know, the
00:33:31.840
replacement rate of 2.17. Number two, we're going to conquer the West through hijra. Hijra is the Arabic
00:33:37.440
word for immigration. And number three, perhaps most importantly, we are going to conquer the West by
00:33:44.080
using your miserable freedoms against you. So now even in a place like the United States,
00:33:51.040
Dearborn now exists little issues in Minneapolis exists. So inshallah, wait enough time. Maybe it'll
00:33:59.200
take 500 years for the United States to become mammal. But once the patterns start, they're irreversible
00:34:06.880
unless you create a cataclysmic auto correction. Do you think that anyone has that? I mean,
00:34:12.880
I'm asking you to extrapolate into the future, but do you think some leader will come along that
00:34:17.360
Donald Trump is going to be done in a few years, but who will say Islam and the West are incompatible.
00:34:28.080
Well, there have already been political leaders who've said pretty much that, and some of them have
00:34:33.680
been very successful at the polls, although he, they couldn't form a coalition to agree on him being
00:34:39.840
the Prime Minister, Geert Wilders, who has said that and much more in the Netherlands, has got the
00:34:44.800
largest number of seats in the Dutch parliament.
00:34:48.560
And I think that it's perfect, it's perfectly possible that people will say that.
00:34:57.680
What are you going to do about it is the big unanswerable follow on question. What are you
00:35:03.280
going to do about it without losing your own sense of self and indeed morality? I mean, I can,
00:35:11.280
I can and have foreseen terrible, uh, responses to this. And it's always been my view that the longer
00:35:19.200
you leave it, the worse in the end it's going to be. But nobody, nobody addresses a problem early
00:35:27.200
in politics, if they can avoid it, they put it off for successors. And I was going to
00:35:32.800
another generation, forgive me for interrupting, uh, to our earlier point about there are some things
00:35:37.840
that are an inerrant part of the architecture of the human mind. I also think that most people are
00:35:44.800
only willing to face a problem when it, I mean, literally bites them in the, in the behind, right?
00:35:51.200
Well, look at the, look at the response of the British government after the Southport killings.
00:36:01.760
stabs three girls under the age of 10 at the Taylor Swift dance party.
00:36:13.520
Um, the, the media runs with, you know, angelic schoolboy from Wales.
00:36:19.040
And, and, and then like, and then the government covers up much of it as far as one can see and
00:36:28.720
doesn't allow information out that they already know. Very angry people come out onto the streets
00:36:34.960
of a very ordinary British city. You know, Southport is not London. It's, it's like, if this can happen
00:36:41.040
in Southport, it can happen anywhere. And the reaction of the authorities is let's get the general public.
00:36:46.880
Amazing. I, I, and I've just seen that, like, you have far too many times in different iterations.
00:36:55.920
And I, every time I just think, oh God, please don't do it. You're going to make it worse.
00:37:01.200
Yeah. I mean, I, I pick up and whenever I've seen, you know, either read something of yours
00:37:06.800
or seeing you on some show, I think we share a similarity in terms of our stupefied indignation,
00:37:15.120
if you'd like. Like we can't believe that people do this, right? And so this, maybe I didn't plan
00:37:22.960
Unified indignation. That should be the title of our joint memoir.
00:37:27.040
Exactly. I'm in, sign me up. So this leads me to a segue, which I asked you off air,
00:37:34.320
if we could discuss it, and you were gracious enough to say yes. When you appeared recently on
00:37:39.200
Joe Rogan, I think that came across. I mean, you were not happy and you were not going to have it.
00:37:44.880
And I listened. So I was driving with my family. I was giving a, I was delivering a lecture in,
00:37:50.720
in Ottawa, which is about a two hour drive from Montreal. And my entire family was with me and
00:37:56.320
your, that episode had dropped. So we listened to about the first 45 minutes where, I mean,
00:38:01.040
the main gist of your point is, you know, why do you bring these, these idiots who are
00:38:05.520
spouting all kinds of nonsense. And so I put out a clip and, and feel free to completely disagree
00:38:11.920
with me here. Although I, I suspect you, you might not. It was a very, very gentle, uh,
00:38:21.920
No, it was a, it was, it was me. So let me summarize what it was. I start off with
00:38:28.400
Douglas Murray's coming on my show. I'm a huge fan of his work. We probably agree on a hundred
00:38:32.480
percent on all points. I couldn't imagine a better ally.
00:38:35.360
I might have chosen a different stylistic choice and how I tackled Joe. I am appearing on his show.
00:38:44.400
I might not want to sort of, although your moral indignation is perfectly justified.
00:38:49.840
Just the stylistic choice is one where you might lose some people that you otherwise want on your
00:38:56.320
side because you made that. That was the entirety of my criticism of Douglas Murray. Otherwise,
00:39:02.480
a hundred percent on board with him. I think I got more hate from Jews because I dared to make that
00:39:11.120
criticism because their logic was Douglas Murray is a friend of the Jews. Your buddy, Joe Rogan,
00:39:18.240
is inviting all these assholes. You're a fraud, Gadsad. Number one, to, to dare to say something
00:39:25.440
negative of how Douglas comported himself. And number two, why aren't you publicly disassociating,
00:39:33.440
is disassociating yourself from Joe Rogan because he is the new Himmler? I thought that that was wrong.
00:39:40.320
Am I wrong in thinking that that was wrong, Douglas?
00:39:44.400
There's quite a lot in that, Gadsad. I didn't see your video.
00:39:51.200
Everybody always, I mean, it's like post-match analysis of any kind, like everybody
00:39:56.080
thinks they know how they would kick the winning ball. But in the end, it's you on the pitch and,
00:40:01.760
you know, it's as useful having people online saying, you know, I would have done it like this,
00:40:07.680
as it is, I imagine, for a Premier League footballer to be on the pitch and hearing people
00:40:12.480
from the stall, from the stands shouting, kick it. I was obviously trying to do several things there.
00:40:20.880
I thought that the fact that Joe would only have somebody with my views on if he had the protection of
00:40:27.840
his comic buddy was surprising. I thought that it was surprising, not least because just a week
00:40:37.600
before he'd given this guy, Dave, free reign again on his show. And that's obviously Joe's right,
00:40:47.360
he can have whoever he wants on his show. But it's strange that, you know, he doesn't have to have
00:40:51.440
somebody like that accompanied by a sort of babysitter and that I must have a debate with
00:40:59.920
the sort of two on one debate. I think that's, I thought that was, I mean, I've been in plenty of
00:41:05.040
skewed environments where, you know, the whole thing is tilted deliberately against the position
00:41:10.720
that I take. But, you know, you have to do what you think is right. And I thought that I had to say,
00:41:16.960
I think it was incumbent that somebody did say to Joe, I mean, well, first of all, to debate this
00:41:23.440
comedian who's now appointed himself a Middle East expert. Well, that's its own story, I suppose.
00:41:33.760
But I thought that somebody had to say to Joe that he's doing something different here. He's doing
00:41:43.280
something different. It's not just asking questions at some point, if you're inviting on
00:41:51.120
complete frauds, and hucksters, who are pretending to be knowledgeable about areas, and in fact, are
00:42:01.920
pumping unbelievable sewage into the minds of listeners. And I don't think that's it. Joe can do
00:42:10.880
what he wants, obviously, and will, just as you can or anyone else. But I can't not say that that is
00:42:18.880
what has been going on. Like, just because we have had a period in which gatekeeping has become
00:42:27.040
a problem, and people use it as a problem, does not mean you lift every sluice in the sewers of your
00:42:33.360
society, and let the shit just flow. And I'm afraid that's what I think is being done when people invite
00:42:42.720
on completely unfunny comedians to talk about serious things and mislead people, and then say,
00:42:52.720
oh, well, I'm just a comedian. And I think that's exactly what you're doing when you're inviting
00:42:57.360
his pseudo historians on, who then say I'm not a historian, but don't demur when somebody introduces
00:43:04.400
them as a historian, they just say they're not a historian, when they're caught out on not knowing
00:43:09.280
what they're talking about. And I had to say this, Gad, because somebody had to say this.
00:43:17.600
So many people owe their celebrity or whatever to going on Joe Rogan's podcast, or being invited to his
00:43:25.040
comedy stage. But I offered him a critique of what he's doing. And he can either, I suppose,
00:43:37.200
accept what I think was friendly criticism, or he can double down. And I would love it if he accepted
00:43:44.960
the friendly criticism, and actually invited on people who could clean up some of the slurry that
00:43:54.560
some of his previous guests have pumped around. And yeah, I mean, when you do these things,
00:44:02.080
everybody has a view. Do you think so? And again, people are going to accuse me of trying to be too
00:44:07.600
charitable to Joe because he's a friend and so on. But I'm really hypothesizing this with an open
00:44:14.480
spirit. I think that Joe is the type of guy who is very inquisitive, perhaps at times to a fault,
00:44:22.320
when he is being inquisitive about hearing positions by people that are perfectly idiotic
00:44:28.800
positions, to your point. But it comes from a mindset of, hey, let's talk about whether there
00:44:35.280
is evidence that Bigfoot exists. Let's talk about whether in New Mexico, they have aliens that have
00:44:41.120
landed. He has that slash curiosity, slash slightly conspiratorial mindset. So could it be that all of
00:44:50.000
these imbeciles that he's invited, you know, Churchill is really the evil guy, not Hitler,
00:44:56.480
Israel are the evil? Could it simply be coming from that reflex of, you know, I just invite anybody
00:45:02.400
who's got something interesting to say? Or are you suggesting, and again, I'm open to either positions
00:45:07.600
that you might espouse, or are you suggesting that Joe has a nefarious agenda in inviting these folks?
00:45:14.560
I don't know. I don't like to create windows into people's souls. But I would just say that
00:45:24.000
I think you can tell quite a significant amount from two things. One, if somebody went on Joe's
00:45:32.480
podcast and talked about MMA fighting, and turned out they had never been to a fight,
00:45:39.040
and they had actually got no understanding of the basic rules of MMA, Joe would notice,
00:45:49.120
and would not bring that person on again to talk about MMA. And I suspect his horse shit detector,
00:45:56.400
which is pretty acute normally, would would ring fairly early, and said person would be called out on
00:46:03.280
the podcast for not knowing what they're talking about. So if that is the case with MMA, or any other
00:46:11.200
thing that is one of Joe's passions, why not, when it comes to, for instance, the war in Ukraine,
00:46:20.240
or the war in Israel? Why not? Why not say, look, this is, if MMA is complicated,
00:46:29.120
this is a lot more complicated. And maybe to understand this complicated thing,
00:46:35.120
I should at least get a variety of people on, and not just rely on self styled comedians,
00:46:45.120
who are self taught, would be, you know, know alls about something. I think that is very telling.
00:46:56.320
I think that if you have somebody on who believes that Hitler is a bad guy in the 20th century,
00:47:01.600
sorry, that if you have somebody on who believes that Churchill is a bad guy in the 20th century,
00:47:09.120
maybe you should have someone on who knows about Winston Churchill, and believes that on balance,
00:47:16.480
Churchill, good thing. I mean, some of this gets very serious. It's not important what a couple of
00:47:26.080
comedians shit talk about each other about MMA, or probably about any number of other things.
00:47:34.240
It is when you are vastly misinforming your viewers. And the second thing I would say about that,
00:47:40.880
if I may, is there seems to be some kind of confusion about what is being what what is what's I mean,
00:47:47.520
I don't absorb this slurry, but I have friends who keep me vaguely informed about bits of it.
00:47:53.120
There seems to be some kind of confusion online about my appeal to credentials or credentialism or
00:48:01.280
expertise. And it's worth clearing that up. Because I said repeatedly during that podcast during that
00:48:09.200
three hours talking with these two or having to debate these two, I said repeatedly, anyone can say
00:48:17.360
whatever they want. I'm not trying to stop anyone speaking good lord, as if I could think I could shut
00:48:25.040
up a bunch of comedians in Austin, Texas. But what I did say was that again, just because experts have
00:48:34.400
got things wrong, many times does not mean that expertise does not exist. And that obviously is very
00:48:41.760
clear where it exists, or it should be relatively clear in, for instance, STEM. We all recognize it
00:48:47.760
exists in medicine. If you, Gad, were being wheeled into the operating theater to have heart surgery and
00:48:54.400
comic Dave Smith pop on doing the surgery today, is that all right with you, Gad? I think you'd say,
00:49:04.240
actually, I'm not sure that you're reading of a few Wikipedia articles. And what you've heard from
00:49:10.080
doctors is going to get us through? Okay, those are those are clear ones. Those ones are clear ones.
00:49:17.600
But when it comes to journalistic standards, I notice that something else is happening.
00:49:24.880
Joe could have acknowledged in the aftermath of that, that a person like me, who has put in the work,
00:49:35.600
who has done the field work, done the ground work, and written a book, which I don't think Joe has
00:49:40.720
yet had the courtesy to read, but which shows in considerable detail, I'd say,
00:49:50.800
what is a first-hand account of a conflict. I think that there should be a basic realization that
00:49:59.200
in journalism, it is a norm to actually go to a place and report. And that is seen as being a good
00:50:08.640
thing. It isn't to be laughed about or derided. And it isn't to be seen as being on the same level
00:50:16.560
as somebody who has taught themselves by reading Wikipedia and anything that confirms their own
00:50:22.720
biases. And I am frankly, when you come to the question of, is this good faith or not, which is
00:50:30.240
effectively what you're asking is, I would say yes, right up until the moment that Joe and any of his
00:50:38.240
friends and circle think that basic standards of journalism, like actually being in the place you're
00:50:48.560
writing about, is to be derided. And amateur hour conspiracy theory junk is to be lauded.
00:50:59.280
That would be the time when it would fall apart. The media has plenty of problems.
00:51:03.920
It has got plenty of things wrong. But there are basic standards in journalism that you are meant,
00:51:11.120
that people are meant to abide by. And I, at any rate, don't think that they're laughable. I don't think
00:51:16.880
it's ridiculous. And I think that Joe and his circle of friends will reveal a lot about themselves and
00:51:23.440
their intent as on whether or not they find, for instance, a firsthand account of a war like on
00:51:33.760
democracies and death cults to be something they contend with, or whether they pat themselves or their
00:51:41.600
mates on the back, uh, hilariously, uh, for not knowing anything.
00:51:46.880
Well, I hope that you two, I don't know if the bridges have been burned, but your voice is...
00:51:52.160
Not on my end. I, I, I never close the door entirely.
00:51:55.120
And well, that's, that's good to hear. So I was going to ask you, you haven't reached out to him or,
00:51:59.840
or vice versa, not to turn this into a gossip session, but because I, I think that I, I did notice
00:52:05.360
there was a clip that came out, uh, I think a couple of days ago where I think you're referring
00:52:09.920
to it, where I guess he was with a comedian where they're sort of making fun of you didn't go there
00:52:16.080
kind of routine. Uh, that can of course come across as a personal slight, or again, not to be
00:52:22.880
charitable. I know that he spent about 20 minutes with Bill Burr a few years ago, making fun of my
00:52:28.640
name and all kinds of stuff. It could just be good old fashioned comedian ribbing. And the reason why I'm
00:52:33.920
trying to take a charitable, you know, processing of the situation is because I know that Joe does
00:52:40.800
unbelievable stuff and he brings on unbelievable people such as yourself. And to now have that
00:52:46.560
opportunity broken, everybody would lose because we need to have your voice there. By the way,
00:52:51.840
it's for the same reason that I told people, well, I went on Joe's show and defended Israel.
00:52:58.960
Should I disassociate from Joe? How would that benefit the battle of ideas?
00:53:05.840
I agree. I have, I, uh, have no beef with Joe, but I would like to know that he has actually taken
00:53:14.080
what I write in this book seriously. Like I'm not pissing around. I don't think this is funny.
00:53:21.360
I don't think that the world is a studio in Texas and we just riff endlessly and things don't have much
00:53:31.520
meaning. Um, I don't think it's a game. I don't think it's something to be litigated by
00:53:43.600
comedians, much as I love and have many comedian friends. I don't think they are able to solve
00:53:51.840
many problems in the world. I think they can have a good time, but I don't think that the war I'm
00:53:57.280
describing and have seen close up is about their amusement factor or their tolerance for
00:54:02.400
bullshit or their desire to, um, uh, spark debate about weird things they haven't really looked into
00:54:12.720
or just, just, just, just riff. It's like, I don't think the world's as funny as all that.
00:54:20.400
I don't think it's as, as meaningless and as nihilistic as all that. I think there are things
00:54:26.720
that very much matter. And if they matter, then you put in the work. And if you don't want to put in the
00:54:33.840
work yourself, you would least listen to people who have, and if your job is to host and if your job is
00:54:42.320
to spark debate and so on, then get other voices on and don't have a babysitter. Like have people who
00:54:53.680
know about Hamas and the Islamic revolutionary government and Hezbollah and what they've done
00:55:01.280
and have people talking about the actual war from different perspectives. It's not like there's any
00:55:07.200
lack of, of, of amazing experts and, and, and firsthand accounts or survivors or amazing people
00:55:14.880
who've, or soldiers or anyone else who could correct all of this slurry of misinformation.
00:55:22.080
There are thousands of people. I could point Joe and others to myself who could counter the one-sided
00:55:30.160
rhetoric and who ought to be on and heard young women, young men of every imaginable background
00:55:38.400
and heroic people, actual heroes, not ringside heroes. And, and until such a time as I see that the part of
00:55:50.800
the orbit of the orbit of that actually listening to the variety of voices they ought to listen to and not
00:55:59.040
just occasionally having somebody like me on babysat in a two-on-one, uh, uh, um, contest. Uh, I'm, um,
00:56:09.760
my mind is, uh, not yet made up. Fair enough. Uh, stay on the line. We're going to wrap up with the last
00:56:16.560
question, but I want people to remember to go pick up this beauty right here. It's already at number
00:56:21.760
one, but let's keep it at number one for a longer period. Are there any projects that you're currently
00:56:27.200
working on that you would like to take this opportunity, notwithstanding that you're now
00:56:31.680
promoting this book that we might expect from Douglas Murray to come down the pipeline?
00:56:36.880
You know, very well, that's a state secret. I couldn't possibly, I couldn't possibly let you
00:56:43.760
in on such high, uh, high grade Intel. No, I'm, um, I'm focusing on, on, on this book. This has been a real,
00:56:50.720
um, uh, uh, uh, labor to, to do this book. I, I wrote it, uh, was from notebooks in Israel,
00:57:02.320
in Lebanon, in Gaza, firsthand reporting and accounting and a lot of testimony, um, for me
00:57:10.960
and others. And really, um, as a friend was saying to me yesterday, uh, it's really also a meditation
00:57:20.640
on the nature of evil, because I believe that the nature of the evil that Hamas perpetrated on the
00:57:27.280
seventh has made me and should make others to think about that. We've lost the theological terms
00:57:35.440
in which we can talk about it perhaps, but it's, uh, yes, in other, in, in other, in other ways,
00:57:43.040
it's also a book about evil. It's not just about war and peace, which is enough, but about good and
00:57:49.600
evil and about heroism and human decency and kindness in the face of unimaginable odds. So
00:57:57.280
it's, it's been, um, it's been my honor to write it and to spend the last 18 months with remarkable
00:58:04.160
people who've inspired it. Well, thank you for writing it and please promise that it won't be
00:58:09.520
another nine years before you return on the show. I will be, by the way, in London, uh, first week of
00:58:16.800
June. I'll be speaking at an event in London and then at another event at University of Buckingham.
00:58:22.320
I hope that we'll have a chance to meet in person for the first time. I'd love that.
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I saw it to meet you in Canada the other month, but we will find a city to be in together at some
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point, Gad. I can't wait. Stay on the line so we can say goodbye offline. Thank you so much for
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coming on and thank you for your courage. Cheers. Thank you.