TRIGGERnometry - The Truth about October 7th - Douglas Murray

00:00:00.840 War reveals the essence of ourselves. 0.96

00:00:03.880 Imagine what kind of a psychopath you have to be 1.00

00:00:07.660 to gang-r*** a girl and then shoot her in the head. 1.00

00:00:12.660 Most people wouldn't be proud of that action, 1.00

00:00:15.760 but Hamazar.

00:00:18.240 Think about this, these guys are billionaires,

00:00:20.220 and yet they're prepared to die,

00:00:21.960 prepared to put their children at risk,

00:00:23.600 prepared to have their entire tribe destroyed,

00:00:26.860 annihilated in retaliation for their actions.

00:00:29.100 I mean, I put it to you, Douglas,

00:00:30.940 they've got quite an ideology there.

00:00:32.600 When they say we love death as much as you love life,

00:00:35.420 they mean it.

00:00:36.640 It's really one of the things you can tell with, again,

00:00:39.200 in this case, 100% accuracy,

00:00:41.480 is that anti-Semitism is the sign of a society going rotten.

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00:01:36.340 Douglas Murray, you're back for the seventh time.

00:01:39.120 Welcome back.

00:01:40.040 It's a great pleasure to be with you.

00:01:41.060 Has anyone done more than seven?

00:01:42.560 I don't think so.

00:01:43.960 I don't think so.

00:01:44.900 I'm very proud to be with you.

00:01:45.980 No, I'm certain no one's done more than seven.

00:01:47.800 No.

00:01:48.460 Andrew Doyle may be touching the fourth or the fifth time,

00:01:51.860 but that's it.

00:01:52.420 You are a go-to guy, and you have a new book.

00:01:56.120 I do.

00:01:56.980 Democracies and Death Cults, Israel, Hamas, and the Future of the West. 0.96

00:02:00.640 Yes.

00:02:02.360 Let's get straight into it.

00:02:03.500 I mean, you talk a lot, of course, about the history of the Middle East,

00:02:05.480 but actually I want to ask a question that you cover in so much detail

00:02:09.120 in a way that we haven't really talked about.

00:02:11.240 Why did October 7th happen, Douglas?

00:02:16.180 It'll probably take a full inquiry to find out exactly

00:02:19.860 what went wrong on the Israeli side.

00:02:22.980 That it was possible that Hamas could have come so far up inside the center of Israel.

00:02:29.440 But I know and write about some of the reasons why.

00:02:33.520 First thing is, by the way, is not related to the defensive bit of it,

00:02:37.380 but the aggressive bit of it.

00:02:39.520 Why did Hamas do it? 0.74

00:02:41.060 We know a lot about that now.

00:02:45.340 It was a plan of their bosses in Tehran that Hamas would come up through the south of the country, 0.75

00:02:55.620 south of Israel.

00:02:56.280 Hezbollah would come through the north, and they would effectively strangle Israel from the middle. 0.99

00:03:01.760 We know that now because of the documents and other things caught in Lebanon from Hezbollah. 0.77

00:03:08.120 So that was a plan.

00:03:09.740 Hamas went off a little early, didn't feel that they could communicate with Hezbollah

00:03:16.620 about the exact timing of the attack without it being intercepted.

00:03:20.060 So Hezbollah was slightly surprised.

00:03:23.100 And although Hamas attacked on the 7th of October, Hezbollah started firing missiles straight away

00:03:28.100 by the 8th.

00:03:29.840 Nevertheless, by that point, a significant number of IDF soldiers had been sent up north,

00:03:34.440 and Hezbollah did not make an incursion on the ground from the north.

00:03:37.660 Otherwise, what happened in the south of Israel on October 7th would have happened across the north as well,

00:03:42.020 and it's possible that the terrorist armies could have met in the middle.

00:03:45.880 That was the plan that Iran knew about, the Iranian revolutionary government,

00:03:50.960 and the aim was to completely annihilate Israel.

00:03:55.720 And Yahya Sinwar, who planned the 7th of Hamas, who had previously been in an Israeli prison

00:04:06.540 where he was found to have a brain tumor, which he was diagnosed by a Jewish dentist who worked with him,

00:04:15.840 saved his life.

00:04:18.000 The Israelis then operated on Sinwar to save the brain tumor from killing him,

00:04:22.880 and he was released in a prison exchange in 2011 for one of 1,000 people released

00:04:28.860 for the release of the Israeli hostage, Gilad Shalit.

00:04:33.540 Sinwar, after he was released, said publicly many times what he wanted to do.

00:04:39.600 He said in private to the doctor who saved his life, he said,

00:04:43.540 Now you, Israel, are strong, but one day you'll be weak, and then I'll attack. 1.00

00:04:50.500 And he was true to his word.

00:04:53.160 And what's more, in the years after he was released from prison,

00:04:56.720 when he went back to being one of the senior leaders of Hamas and then the leader in Gaza,

00:05:02.120 he said repeatedly what he wanted to do, and he said, among other things,

00:05:05.520 he said, we're going to go in and we're going to tear their hearts out from their bodies.

00:05:09.660 And he was true to his word.

00:05:11.860 And you say that he said this, and I'm sure it makes sense from his perspective,

00:05:17.220 that I will attack when you're weak.

00:05:18.720 Why was Israel weak?

00:05:23.140 Well, that is definitely a sort of very, it's one of the big questions for Israel and its defense.

00:05:30.080 I'd say there's a set of reasons.

00:05:33.760 One was definitely the perception there'd been in the year before the 7th,

00:05:38.500 there'd been this intense internal turmoil in Israel about a question of judicial reform

00:05:44.480 that almost nobody inside Israel understands and nobody outside understands.

00:05:49.360 But there were demonstrations by left-wing Israelis every day, every week,

00:05:54.580 against the government's proposed judicial reforms.

00:05:58.360 This definitely meant that the police were overstretched in that period.

00:06:02.420 And many people think that that made Israel look, from Sinwar's point of view,

00:06:08.520 from Hamas and Hezbollah's point of view, and from Iran's point of view,

00:06:11.460 made them look internally divided.

00:06:13.840 And there's something in that.

00:06:14.800 And an Israeli friend of mine said to me a few weeks after the 7th in Jerusalem, 1.00

00:06:19.280 and he said, you know, in some ways Hamas were stupid. 0.99

00:06:23.960 If they left it another year, we'd have all killed each other. 0.99

00:06:26.500 So there is a sort of lesson about internal turmoil, you know.

00:06:32.360 And there's something almost biblical about that, you know.

00:06:35.060 The Jews are all fighting among each other, 1.00

00:06:36.700 and then an external enemy comes to annihilate them,

00:06:39.560 and then suddenly they realize, actually, there are more important things.

00:06:43.820 There were technical things that went wrong,

00:06:46.220 which is going to take a while to work out.

00:06:49.460 There were intelligence failures.

00:06:51.360 There was what was called, what has been called the conception,

00:06:55.280 which was wrong.

00:06:55.920 The conception, I think, among Israeli military and many politicians

00:06:59.640 was that Hamas had got to that point that some terrorist groups get to

00:07:04.280 where they don't mind just being corrupt and, you know, getting on with their lives.

00:07:11.520 Every head of Hamas was a billionaire by October 2023.

00:07:16.380 Ismail Hanir, worth, I mean, three or four billion,

00:07:20.900 living in Qatar and luxury penthouse apartments his sons also lived in.

00:07:25.020 And there was a perception that maybe Hamas' leadership were like so many other people in history,

00:07:30.400 like the Soviet leadership and others.

00:07:31.780 At some point, you know, you sort of don't really believe the ideology is as happy being corrupt

00:07:36.200 and relatively rich.

00:07:37.620 That was completely mistaken in the case of Hamas.

00:07:39.960 They really meant it, Sinwar and others, they really meant it.

00:07:45.740 And so that's one thing.

00:07:47.640 There were intelligence failures, definitely.

00:07:50.820 Technological failures, certainly.

00:07:52.380 And then a certain amount of luck for Hamas. 0.94

00:07:59.040 It's said that they didn't know that the Nova Party was going on in Re'im.

00:08:05.060 So when the paragliders landed on the morning and the trucks of Hezbollah, 0.90

00:08:09.020 of Hamas or other terrorists came in,

00:08:11.520 they were delighted to find hundreds and hundreds of unarmed young Israelis dancing.

00:08:21.000 Francis, let me ask just one more question before you weigh in.

00:08:26.500 You said something that I think is very, very important there about the leadership.

00:08:32.080 And it's something that increasingly has to be explained to Westerners

00:08:37.540 and they don't understand.

00:08:39.580 Because our world is so obsessed with money and freedom and prosperity

00:08:43.820 and all of this other stuff.

00:08:46.160 Think about this.

00:08:47.020 These guys are billionaires.

00:08:49.520 Billionaires.

00:08:50.240 Their whole families are, they've got gold-plated AKs all over there, everything.

00:08:56.460 And yet they're prepared to die, prepared to put their children at risk,

00:08:59.800 prepared to have their entire tribe destroyed, annihilated,

00:09:04.640 in retaliation for their actions.

00:09:08.340 I mean, I put it to you, Douglas, they've got quite an ideology there.

00:09:11.940 Yeah, they have, definitely.

00:09:13.760 And it should be taken seriously.

00:09:17.860 What is that ideology?

00:09:19.160 And why do they believe it in that way?

00:09:21.080 And why are they willing to die for it?

00:09:23.180 When they say we love death as much as you love life, they mean it.

00:09:26.580 I give an example in the book of the very sinister bit of footage we have

00:09:32.980 of when one of the leaders of Hamas, who was in Qatar at the time,

00:09:39.740 learned effectively on camera that three of his sons

00:09:44.720 had been killed in an Israeli Air Force drone strike inside Gaza.

00:09:51.240 His sons were all Hamas' leaders as well.

00:09:56.580 But this particular leader, Haniyeh, learns about it, and there's not a tear.

00:10:06.600 He immediately prays with gratitude for the fact that his sons have become martyrs.

00:10:14.240 That's something that's hard for the Western mind to comprehend.

00:10:22.600 So, yes, they mean it.

00:10:26.420 They have an eschatological, millenarian worldview,

00:10:33.340 which has existed in various forms throughout history.

00:10:36.780 And it believes that the ultimate purpose of life is found in violent death,

00:10:43.140 taking your enemies with you.

00:10:45.280 And that seems inconceivable sitting in London.

00:10:49.780 But it's not inconceivable to them.

00:10:51.580 It's eminently reasonable.

00:10:54.440 We talk about the things that are inconceivable while sitting in London.

00:10:58.840 When I was reading your book, I was reminded of the sheer horrific brutality,

00:11:04.060 which is inconceivable to the Western mind.

00:11:07.000 I think it's something that we need to talk about,

00:11:09.160 because I think people have forgotten exactly what happened in the events of that day.

00:11:15.220 Well, if they've forgotten, it's because many of them didn't know in the first place.

00:11:19.760 Yes.

00:11:21.740 Very strange thing that happened with the 7th of October,

00:11:24.280 which was that by the 8th of October, not only were crowds in London and elsewhere

00:11:29.760 already protesting against the Israelis before the Israelis had done anything in retaliation.

00:11:35.360 We know that the so-called pro-Palestinian marches in London

00:11:38.880 applied for their demonstration permits on the 7th of October.

00:11:44.120 On the 7th, as the massacre was going on.

00:11:47.440 And then had their first protests against Israel as the massacre was going on.

00:11:51.880 And that's a pretty remarkable thing in itself.

00:11:57.660 But it meant, it was one of the reasons why, among other things,

00:12:00.760 the world's attention seemed almost immediately to turn not to what had happened,

00:12:05.860 what Hamas had done, but to what Israel might do in response.

00:12:10.580 And there's lots of reasons for that.

00:12:12.040 But that's one of the sort of news stories that the world loves,

00:12:16.220 is not what has been done to the Jewish state, but what will the Jewish state do in response.

00:12:24.220 And so that meant that a lot of just the stories I tell in the book aren't even known about.

00:12:31.800 I mean, they're known about inside Israel, but outside.

00:12:34.340 I mean, I mentioned the story of, at one point in the book,

00:12:39.700 a rather terrible piece of footage I've seen a number of times,

00:12:44.400 of the family living in the South.

00:12:51.340 Oldest boy was at the beach with his friends.

00:12:56.120 Hamas came in from the water,

00:12:58.340 and he ran to a shelter with friends and was killed live on camera.

00:13:04.420 Because, of course, these people, Hamas are very proud of what they do. 0.89

00:13:08.500 You know, they wanted to record it.

00:13:10.520 So they recorded it, and anyhow, so he was killed with his friends.

00:13:14.480 And then the terrorists made their way, as it happened, to the area his family lived.

00:13:19.380 There were two young boys, and their father were alone in the house,

00:13:24.360 and they went to the bomb shelter, because the rockets had already fired.

00:13:26.920 And they went to the bomb shelter, and Hamas terrorists made it to them.

00:13:31.660 And on the footage, you see them go into the bomb shelter.

00:13:37.060 Hamas throw a grenade in after the two young boys and their dad.

00:13:42.720 And then you see the footage, among other things, from the living of the house.

00:13:48.260 The father had thrown himself on the grenade.

00:13:50.680 And one of his sons, I think 10 or so, had one of his eyes blown out.

00:13:58.740 And the other one lost his hearing.

00:14:00.780 And they're staggering around the main room of their house,

00:14:04.840 unable to comprehend what's happened, obviously.

00:14:07.480 One of them can hardly see.

00:14:08.540 The other one can hardly hear.

00:14:09.600 And the younger ones deny it, saying, he can't be dead, he can't be dead.

00:14:15.660 The older one's saying, what do you mean?

00:14:16.920 Did you see him?

00:14:19.740 And the terrorists who killed their father walks into the room

00:14:23.060 and starts arguing with the children

00:14:26.360 and takes a, opens a fridge and takes a Coca-Cola from the fridge and starts drinking.

00:14:36.520 And I was actually, I saw a person who did that

00:14:41.500 in the maximum security prison in Israel a year after the 7th.

00:14:45.880 But the gratuitous savagery is very hard to explain, very hard to comprehend.

00:14:58.480 It seems, when I was reading the book, that these are people who not only see this as their cause,

00:15:05.460 but also take a gratuitous delight in the viciousness and the callousness.

00:15:11.760 It's not just a terrorist putting a bomb in a building.

00:15:18.200 It's someone who takes a perverse delight in what they're doing. 0.95

00:15:22.720 Yeah, well, I mean, imagine that, imagine what kind of a psychopath you have to be

00:15:31.000 to stumble, stumble, drive into the dance party in Reim, outside Reim. 1.00

00:15:40.800 And, you know, gang rape a girl and then shoot her in the head. 0.99

00:15:50.360 Most people wouldn't be proud of that action. 1.00

00:15:53.480 But Hamas are, their terrorists are.

00:15:56.980 It's very strange speaking about it in a way, because all the time I have in my head this knowledge

00:16:09.060 that there is this type of modern Holocaust denial of people who think that things I've seen didn't happen.

00:16:15.060 And I knew that would happen pretty soon after the 7th.

00:16:20.980 But, I mean, you know, the accounts, which even The Guardian has published,

00:16:27.580 the accounts of the rape of women as well as men that morning.

00:16:33.940 Even The Guardian's published that.

00:16:36.560 But still, many of The Guardian's readers and others believe that this is fake news.

00:16:40.740 The people who said believe all women in recent years didn't believe the women.

00:16:45.160 All the people who saw the women being raped on the 7th.

00:16:47.120 And so, as I say, even when recounting some of the atrocities,

00:16:51.940 I know that there is this pond life subsection of the world out there that wants this not to be true.

00:16:59.040 And I think, by the way, there's a very interesting reason for that,

00:17:01.340 which is what always happens if you support any cause,

00:17:07.380 which is you have to try to comprehend it in its entirety.

00:17:10.840 And if you were on the side of the cause that, as it were,

00:17:14.380 thinks that Hamas is a legitimate expression of Palestinian self-determination

00:17:20.180 and the desire for a peaceful two-state solution,

00:17:23.300 if you believe that is what they are,

00:17:27.240 then when you see what they do, what they did,

00:17:31.340 you have a couple of choices in front of you.

00:17:33.960 You can either say,

00:17:36.080 I see what they have done,

00:17:40.020 or you can say, I refuse to see what they've done.

00:17:43.300 And the attraction of saying, I refuse to see what they've done,

00:17:46.000 is that you can continue your previous perception.

00:17:51.420 If you understand, see, acknowledge what they've done,

00:17:58.520 you have very few options in front of you.

00:18:01.000 I mean, one is that you realize you might be on the bad side.

00:18:06.620 Another would be to say, yeah, okay, 0.99

00:18:08.840 my side raped and murdered and killed in cold blood, 0.96

00:18:13.000 but it's still a good cause.

00:18:14.840 And that latter is something which, if people were being honest, more people would say.

00:18:22.680 But they don't have the courage to say it.

00:18:24.220 Let me give you an example of an unimportant, absolutely uninformed twerk,

00:18:30.220 but our fellow countryman Owen Jones.

00:18:32.400 He goes on, he actually saw a bit of the edited atrocity videos that were shown to some journalists.

00:18:39.260 Um, and, uh, he, he came out of that.

00:18:43.740 I don't want to cite, I feel annoyed citing him because he's just so unimportant in some ways.

00:18:49.860 But on the other hand, he is important because he writes to the Guardian and has some following online.

00:18:54.140 He comes out of seeing the atrocity videos and sort of complains that there's not enough rape in it, basically.

00:18:58.320 Uh, so it says, it says, I didn't actually see women being raped.

00:19:02.580 I was like, sorry that the snuff video wasn't to your liking.

00:19:07.840 Um, uh, but, but why would somebody like him do that?

00:19:12.940 It's because he has a couple of options in his head, as I just mentioned.

00:19:18.720 You know, you either sort of say, um, yeah, that's my side and that's what they do.

00:19:25.240 Um, but we have to keep going or you have to say, why am I in bed with the death cult?

00:19:33.360 And, uh, self-reflection isn't, isn't that common among people who've already thrown in their lot with people like that.

00:19:41.600 Have you ever read a headline or watched a clip and immediately made up your mind about a story only to later find out there was more to it?

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00:21:41.940 There's one aspect of October the 7th that I found baffling, if I'm being honest, which is the response of the IDF.

00:21:50.280 I think you quoted the time in your book.

00:21:53.180 It took them 14 hours.

00:21:55.540 Correct me if I'm wrong.

00:21:56.480 No, it took parts of the army a long time, not all the army.

00:22:03.560 But, sorry, go on.

00:22:04.300 But why was that?

00:22:05.760 Because with something, an event as awful as that, that decimated young people, why did it take parts of them so long?

00:22:16.520 It's a very good question, and I have some of the answers.

00:22:20.560 From all the first-hand testimony I collected, I think that there's a number of things that happened.

00:22:26.640 One was wild confusion.

00:22:30.540 Well, let me do it before that.

00:22:32.180 It was a religious holiday.

00:22:33.900 Simchat Torah was being celebrated, a Jewish religious festival.

00:22:38.300 It was Shabbat.

00:22:39.740 A lot of people were off their phones.

00:22:43.600 Religious Jews were off their phones. 1.00

00:22:45.520 And this was, by the way, exactly what had happened 50 years earlier when Israel's enemies, neighbors, attacked, the Arabs attacked on Yom Kippur.

00:22:56.420 Same thing, 50 years later.

00:22:57.900 It's very interesting.

00:23:00.100 Maybe you could say that's exactly the memory span of people, 50 years.

00:23:05.600 But there were a lot of clever things Hamas did. 0.99

00:23:08.820 One was having people come in in uniforms, some of them did, in uniforms that approximated the uniform of soldiers, IDF soldiers.

00:23:19.480 Another was that as soon as they overwhelmed the military, there was a military base of young women. 1.00

00:23:26.560 It wasn't really military base.

00:23:27.700 It was an observation base, Nahal Oz. 0.66

00:23:29.360 Once they overwhelmed that base and they took uniforms from the base, once they killed the first policeman, they took uniforms from the policeman.

00:23:41.380 And so there was an enormous confusion very early on.

00:23:45.920 There was a Muslim doctor and Muslim Arab Israeli doctor who I interviewed who described how he's a first responder in a group called Hatsala, which is a sort of first responder, a sort of ambulance service and medic service that deals with car crashes or anything else, medical emergency.

00:24:03.360 He got his alert on his device, and he happened to drive into the firefighter, but he told me that he, his name's Tariq, and he said that he saw these dead bodies in a car, stopped, and then saw these IDF soldiers, and they started shooting at him.

00:24:25.240 And he thought, why are they shooting, they were Hamaz dressed in the soldiers, this dead soldier's uniform, and they held him hostage as a human shield and then shot him in the knee. 0.89

00:24:36.920 Fortunately, he survived.

00:24:38.460 Amazing, brave man.

00:24:40.460 But, so there was a lot of confusion.

00:24:43.080 There's a young woman who was murdered with her boyfriend.

00:24:46.380 They managed to escape the party, and her father described to me how they managed to escape.

00:24:55.240 They escaped the party in a car, and they went to one of the kibbutzim for safety, not realizing that this kibbutz's community was itself having a massacre going on inside.

00:25:08.580 And the last conversation that this girl had with her father, she said, and the police have told us we should stop here.

00:25:15.760 And the police were Hamaz, you know, so. 0.85

00:25:19.300 Now, by the point that that started to come out, the army that were flooding south, and the self-start is just people who I interview in the book, who just ran to the fight.

00:25:30.900 There was enormous confusion among them.

00:25:35.660 You know, we all know this from, like, comparatively minor terrorist atrocities.

00:25:41.300 Something happens, and the misreporting that immediately comes out, you know, like, another tower's been hit, or another tower.

00:25:47.640 There's another bomb there.

00:25:48.640 In the middle of pandemonium, it's just, it's a mess.

00:25:55.340 And people were driving into the middle of firefights, no idea what they were getting into.

00:26:02.560 There was definitely a point at which, when it looked like the incursion might come all the way up the center of the country,

00:26:08.700 I think the army, well, they did lock off a part of the south, trying to fight in these communities, but all the time trying to make sure that the incursion didn't come further up the country.

00:26:21.940 And all the time also, trying to get troops up to the north to stop an attack there as well.

00:26:31.300 I mean, it's, there was enormous failure by security and intelligence in Israel, and it's going to have to be learned from.

00:26:41.560 I think everyone should learn from it.

00:26:42.580 But, yes, I mean, that's one of the things that happens when people who sow terror sow terror, and Hamas were very good at it that morning on their own terms. 0.95

00:26:57.260 But, I mean, there's a number of amazing, heroic people I cite in the book, first-hand evidence, sometimes from people whose lives they saved, sometimes from people who managed to survive.

00:27:09.840 But, you know, people who, there's a friend of mine, Nimrod, who went south on the 7th, he defied an order from his commander to return to base as a reservist, says to his commander, we need it south.

00:27:23.620 And he drove south himself in his car, and with his handgun, he happened to have a revolver, and eight rounds of ammunition.

00:27:34.480 And when he got south, because he started to realize, well, he realized how bad it was, because he had a friend down there.

00:27:41.360 And he describes to me how, when he gets into the middle of the firefight and runs out of ammunition, and he ends up managing to grab a gun off a dead Hamas terrorist.

00:27:54.080 But he left a video message on his phone for his two young children, because he said, I knew I wouldn't survive the day.

00:28:03.260 And I wanted it, when my phone was found in my body, I wanted my two young children to know that I loved them.

00:28:09.640 There were a lot of people who did extraordinary things like that.

00:28:12.580 But, yeah, there was just confusion, a wild, wild confusion.

00:28:18.900 And there will be a lot of self-examination about that for a long time to come.

00:28:24.620 Douglas, one of the things, obviously, in the book, you're not just talking about the Middle East.

00:28:29.880 You're talking about the West and democracies.

00:28:33.040 What do we all learn from what is going on, what has happened, what the reaction has been?

00:28:40.500 What should, what are we missing?

00:28:43.120 What should we think about as a result of all of this?

00:28:48.820 I'm always loathe to, back up moments, but, you know, sometimes people say about the Holocaust, you know, what lessons do we learn from the Holocaust?

00:28:59.440 And there's this terrible presumption in that, which is the Holocaust happened in order to educate us better about something, you know, like morally improve us.

00:29:10.300 That's not what I mean.

00:29:10.980 No, no, no.

00:29:11.420 I'm just saying that I'm instinctively, as a result, sort of wary of, like, what are the lessons?

00:29:17.380 My point is this.

00:29:18.500 You make, you are talking about the West, right?

00:29:22.840 And Israel, you might say, is an outpost of Western civilization in the Middle East, but it's not the entire West. 0.76

00:29:28.360 No.

00:29:28.480 And it seems to me that people who are battling these evil terrorists, which is what they are, have something to teach us.

00:29:38.300 Yeah, no, look.

00:29:38.800 And you've written about the generation of young people in Israel and how it contrasts with us here in Europe and in America to a lesser extent.

00:29:46.620 That's what I'm asking.

00:29:47.500 Yeah, no, no, no.

00:29:47.980 You're quite right.

00:29:48.500 I'm just sort of sensitive.

00:29:50.020 Don't put me in a bucket with Owen Jones.

00:29:51.680 I don't belong there.

00:29:54.320 Absolutely not.

00:29:55.140 God forbid.

00:29:55.560 No, I mean, I only say, because, yes, there is just always a tendency to do what I was just resisting, you know.

00:30:03.120 But you're right.

00:30:05.600 I mean, there are lessons about the response, which I think can definitely be learned.

00:30:11.780 I mean, part of the purpose of this book is not just to give my firsthand accounts of the war and testimony and so on, but to say, yeah, to basically ask, what is there in this?

00:30:29.460 So that we can extrapolate out, potentially learn something from.

00:30:35.840 And, you know, the really strong feeling I have had for the last year and a half is that there's this very moving thing, which I believe, I believe that we, if I can say so, probably all to some degree have, which.

00:30:55.460 Which I think everybody in America, Britain, the West broadly has, which is that we've all been brought up in the embers of the last bits of exhaust from exhaustion from World War II.

00:31:11.020 And, you know, as everybody knows in the publishing industry, you know, if you publish a book on Pol Pot, it's not as popular as if you publish a book about Hitler.

00:31:22.040 Why? Because we're still trying to work out that much more.

00:31:27.460 And it's been much closer to home.

00:31:30.100 And if you want to stir people up in a good way, you will talk about the greatest generation.

00:31:38.860 And that's absolutely right.

00:31:40.660 This is it's always been interesting to me that accepted, inevitable part of the background of the society that we live in.

00:31:48.440 You know, we are surrounded by the memorials to the dead and the fallen and the memorials to the heroes and we grow up on stories of them.

00:31:56.400 And this is that's absolutely right.

00:31:58.760 But as this recedes into history, as the Second World War recedes into history, there is this ever sort of present question, which is what would we do?

00:32:10.900 If if if that was to happen to us in our generation and I've always found it an interesting question because it sort of haunts people and it should and it makes us feel inadequate and it should.

00:32:27.120 And and there's a healthy response to it, an attitude towards it.

00:32:30.860 And there's a probably an unhealthy set of unhealthy ones as well.

00:32:33.680 But but what one of the things that really has inspired me in in the last year and a half has been that that for Israel, that question has been answered.

00:32:47.780 Because, you see, all of the things we say about the young generation in Britain or America, you know, you do all these polls and we will comment on that.

00:32:58.120 You see these polls that come out saying, you know, if you're British and you're 18 to 40, which is, you know, the age group that fought in World Wars one and two.

00:33:05.760 So that age group in the UK, would you be willing to fight for your country?

00:33:10.340 And, you know, you see these polls and I mean, they will have bewildering replies like, you know.

00:33:16.380 What was a recent one?

00:33:17.700 The fact that the vast vast majority of people in Britain, young people said they wouldn't fight for their country, even in an existential conflict.

00:33:26.000 By the way, there was one recently that said I think 10 percent of young people said that they couldn't because they were looking after someone.

00:33:31.340 I thought you were going to say 10 percent killing because they've got ADHD.

00:33:37.080 No.

00:33:38.360 Can you imagine?

00:33:39.420 Like, no, I'd like to fight for my country's survival. 1.00

00:33:43.880 I'd like to shoot the German, but look. 1.00

00:33:45.900 But I am looking after my nan. 0.99

00:33:48.420 Yeah.

00:33:49.600 Because your nan is going to be fine once the evil thorns are in our society. 1.00

00:33:54.700 Anyway, I mean, there's also bewildering stuff like this has come up in recent years.

00:33:58.660 When the war in Ukraine started, when the Russian invasion, there was polls of American people of fighting age, you know,

00:34:06.960 wouldn't be willing to fight for their country, would flee.

00:34:10.860 And I mean, it's all bewildering.

00:34:13.880 And of course, there's this thing of like, actually, what do those polls mean?

00:34:18.380 I mean, America hasn't had a land invasion, you know, it's a founding.

00:34:25.380 I mean, it's, you know, it's inconceivable to an average American that, you know, the Vladimir Putin's army would land in California and start fighting, you know.

00:34:35.900 And it's the same with young Brits and Western Europeans and so on.

00:34:40.280 It gets a little different the further east you go in Europe now.

00:34:43.440 But all that stuff is inconceivable.

00:34:46.920 There's a long-winded way to just say that the interesting thing is that the same doubts existed in Israel until the 7th.

00:34:55.600 The young Israelis were fought very often by their elders, people who fought after the invasions by the Arabs in 67 and 73.

00:35:04.740 There was this perception that the young Israelis were weak, were, just wanted to party in Tel Aviv.

00:35:17.000 They just wanted to be on Instagram and TikTok and all these sort of things.

00:35:20.480 And then that proved to be flat out wrong.

00:35:24.480 And in the last year and a bit, when I've been embedded with the IDF in Gaza and Lebanon and elsewhere, I've been just enormously inspired by them.

00:35:43.340 This would sound bewildering to some people listening who have read totally false information about what these soldiers do.

00:35:53.980 But their homeland was attacked.

00:35:58.000 Their families were attacked.

00:35:59.440 Their relatives and friends were murdered and raped and slaughtered.

00:36:02.340 And 250 taken hostage by the terrorists.

00:36:11.220 Which, if you extrapolate that number out to America in terms of population, would be 10,000 Americans being taken hostage in one day.

00:36:19.120 So, this happened to their people, to their family, their friends, their nation, their country.

00:36:27.260 And the reservists who were called up, the over-request of soldiers to return to service, 130% re-enlistment rates after the 7th.

00:36:39.720 And people I record in the book flying back from around the world, from holiday or anything like that, just getting on the first plane, getting back and, you know, being in uniform within 48 hours.

00:36:52.560 Just story after story of young men and women who just rushed to the front and spent, in some of their cases, the next year fighting and in really terrible circumstances, but with amazing results.

00:37:10.160 And I think, I mean, for me, it's been unbelievably inspiring to see them at work because this is a demonstration that even a generation that is thought to be weak can show its mettle at the moment of trial.

00:37:31.020 And I think, you know, when I look at the people in the West, and obviously this is one of the things that the book is about, is when I look at the people in the West of their age, what the hell are you doing?

00:37:44.320 You know, I mean, I've seen young female soldiers, you know, 19, 20, and remarkable young people. 0.98

00:37:52.420 And I sort of think, do you know that your contemporaries in New York are busily eating Oreo cookies in a tent in the middle of some God-forsaken campus and being educated into idiocy? 0.99

00:38:12.060 And they are ignoramuses, and you're a person, you're a real person and a hero. 0.97

00:38:17.600 And I suppose that's sort of one of the questions in the book is, who do you want to admire? 0.76

00:38:23.760 Who do you want to turn to?

00:38:25.380 The person who wants to cosplay being Hamas in Colombia? 0.97

00:38:32.980 Or a young man of 19 who manages to kill Senua?

00:38:40.180 Colombia, the university, we should say.

00:38:42.040 Douglas has nothing, no problem with Colombia.

00:38:43.880 Oh, Colombia, the country is much more civilized and a wonderful place.

00:38:47.600 And Colombia, the university.

00:38:49.560 So, sorry, for all of our Colombian viewers.

00:38:53.440 My Venezuelan mother would be disgusted with you, Douglas.

00:38:56.780 But we'll get you back to the interview in a minute.

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00:40:11.280 And now, back to the interview.

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00:40:41.620 As well, we talk about young people, but older people need to take responsibility, because it is the job of the previous generation to educate the young generation.

00:40:55.980 And you talk about some of these professors in your book, and how, let's be honest, let's call it what it is, virulent, rabid anti-Semitism, the moment these atrocities happen.

00:41:07.260 Yes.

00:41:07.860 No, you're quite right.

00:41:08.600 I mean, this is one of the things that I find startling about it, which, again, it comes back to this thing of what happens at the moment of trial.

00:41:16.680 What happens when you test it?

00:41:19.700 One thing is that you will reveal your true self.

00:41:25.400 That's one of the things that's interesting about war, is that war reveals, in some way, it's a terrible thing, but war reveals the essence of ourselves in some way.

00:41:39.300 And as I say in the book, it shows us as human beings at our very best and at our very worst.

00:41:45.780 And it's the same in that moment of test, the moment of a sort of historic test, like the attack on Jewish state on the 7th of October, 2023.

00:41:55.640 You say, it was a test to people in Israel, but it was also a test to people outside Israel.

00:42:03.840 And there were people educated by those older than them who failed the test and joined the death cult because they had been told that was the right side.

00:42:19.560 And, yes, I mean, I give horrifying examples in the book of professors at American universities who were praising the massacres as they were going on, talked about how energized they were by the massacres.

00:42:33.720 And, and, and by the way, there's another one there, which is this, this question of, I mean, something I go into, but I quote a student who describes how, after getting to his university in America, he, he learns what he describes as the rich history of protests and says, you know, when I heard about the rich history of protests on my campus, I thought, you know, when things kick off again, I want to be in the center of it.

00:43:03.720 Not exactly what some of us thought the university was meant to be for, you know, some of us thought you meant to go to university to learn something, make friends in the pub and much more, but no, it was to, to be in the center of the protests of your time.

00:43:18.160 And then, of course, what's interesting is when this happens, you find yourself in this time of trial, not a real trial, just outside of Israel somewhere, but, and you think you have to be at the center of the movement that is doing what?

00:43:35.420 And here's, and here's, here's one of the things that I've found very, very interesting in the, in, in, in, in the writing of the book.

00:43:43.760 And as I've been thinking about this as I was writing is just think about what these, um, anti-Israel pro-Palestinian, they tend to say, but they've, they've now melded Amazon, Palestinian cause together to their great.

00:44:05.420 Uh, detriment, uh, detriment, I think.

00:44:08.660 Um, but just, just consider what these people say they are opposing.

00:44:13.660 They say that they're opposing a settler colonial state.

00:44:19.300 They say that they are opposing genocide.

00:44:22.940 They say they're opposing ethnic cleansing and they're opposing white supremacy.

00:44:29.100 First of all, the white supremacy one, of course, I mean, they've obviously never walked down the street in Tel Aviv if they think that Israel is a white supremacist society, but put that aside for, for a moment.

00:44:39.380 But, but, all these things that they've been accusing Israel of, I believe are massive forms of projection, what a, what a psychologist would call projection.

00:44:52.580 Um, that is, they are accusing Israel of the sins that they have been told they're guilty of.

00:45:02.540 You see, young people in the West, we're sitting in London.

00:45:07.680 A recent poll showed that it's only among the youngest cohort in Britain who agree with the statement that the foundations of Britain are fundamentally racist.

00:45:16.340 Nobody in the older age groups agrees with that, because in the older age groups, they're wise enough to know that, for instance, one of the foundations of modern Britain is the Magna Carta.

00:45:26.080 The Magna Carta has very little to say about race relations.

00:45:31.100 Very, very little to say.

00:45:34.540 Um, you know, what a very important part of our history was the Reformation.

00:45:40.380 What did that have to do with racism?

00:45:44.820 Anti-Italianism?

00:45:46.500 400 years in advance of Italy's creation?

00:45:48.680 I mean, but that's the, there's a generation that's been told they are guilty of these things.

00:45:57.300 They are from a country that is racist.

00:45:59.040 They are from a country that was, was a colonizer. 0.81

00:46:02.640 Uh, a country that committed genocide.

00:46:06.780 All of these things.

00:46:08.780 Now, what are you, this, and it ties in this book, my last book, The War on the West, because in that book, I was looking at these, these things that were being taught.

00:46:17.860 But I think after October the 7th, you see in the rest of the West outside Israel, the fruits of that teaching, which is, you think your society is racist.

00:46:26.920 You think your society is genocidist.

00:46:29.100 You think your society ethnically cleanses.

00:46:31.280 What are you to do about it?

00:46:33.300 In the war on the West, I was like, it's not clear.

00:46:35.100 There's no way out.

00:46:36.100 Because what can you, even if you believe that these were the case, what can you do about something that happened in 1619 if you're born in 2002?

00:46:43.960 Nothing.

00:46:44.560 Nothing you can do.

00:46:45.920 The past is past.

00:46:47.780 There's nothing you can do.

00:46:48.920 No one to make amends to.

00:46:50.120 Nobody, nothing to atone for.

00:46:51.780 Ah.

00:46:52.120 Ah, but if you find a scapegoat who you can accuse of being guilty of, all of these things, that's your way out.

00:47:05.720 That's your way out.

00:47:07.020 I can overcome what I'm told I'm guilty of.

00:47:10.620 I can overcome my inherited ethnic cleansing tendency by claiming that the Jewish state is doing it, even when it's not. 0.76

00:47:22.060 And that's one of the things that's going on.

00:47:24.800 And one other quick thing on that, which is we have to make mention of the hilarity, the dark hilarity, you've got to get your laughs while you can, of the anti-Israel protesters in the West saying that, for instance, they dislike colonialism.

00:47:43.300 And accusing Israel of colonialism, which is not guilty of, but accusing Israel of colonialism whilst being supported by and supporting the revolutionary Islamic government in Tehran, which is the most colonialist power of our era in the region.

00:48:02.260 I mean, how can these people, they know nothing, obviously.

00:48:05.580 But the Iranian revolutionary government has spent recent years colonizing, having colonized Iran, colonizing Iraq, colonizing Yemen, colonizing Lebanon, colonizing Syria, colonizing Gaza.

00:48:22.240 And the supreme leader of Iran writes a letter to students in America thanking them for their help in the anti-colonial struggle.

00:48:31.440 Might you be on the wrong side, guys?

00:48:34.340 Might you be?

00:48:35.880 Douglas, everything you say is true.

00:48:38.400 And I think with Israel in particular, it's perhaps even simpler than what you said, which is the idea is that the West is bad because it is strong. 0.96

00:48:46.920 The stronger the oppressors.

00:48:48.320 Yes.

00:48:48.660 And therefore Israel is bad because Israel is strong. 1.00

00:48:50.920 Right.

00:48:51.220 Right.

00:48:52.080 But what I have to ask you about, it's right, but also easy for us to mock left-wing professors and left-wing students at universities.

00:48:59.880 I think the thing that has shocked me the most is what's been happening on the right.

00:49:04.380 In relation to this issue.

00:49:06.660 And I wonder if you have any thoughts on that.

00:49:07.760 What are you thinking of?

00:49:08.700 Well, I'm thinking of the fact that there are millions and millions of views now to be garnered online by very popular right-wing influencers and commentators and journalists who engage in many of the same tropes.

00:49:20.860 Who talk endlessly about the evil Israel lobby and the way that it's ruined America.

00:49:26.820 That's going to be the title of the episode, by the way.

00:49:28.600 The Israel lobby.

00:49:29.460 The Israel lobby.

00:49:29.760 Jolly good.

00:49:30.360 I don't think we can pretend that's not there.

00:49:34.560 That's true.

00:49:35.160 I mean...

00:49:36.320 And that also requires some explanation, don't you think?

00:49:39.040 By the way, I mean, not all of this is caused by anti-Semitism, but anti-Semitism is a huge part of it. 0.96

00:49:46.840 And people are so resistant to that.

00:49:50.340 But, I mean, they sort of say, oh, you use the term anti-Semite too often.

00:49:56.940 Well, it's because I see anti-Semitism too often.

00:49:59.600 But, yes, it's one of the interesting things.

00:50:05.700 I mean, there's a chapter in the book on this phenomena, which it's hard to say anything original on, but I sort of try.

00:50:13.060 But one of the interesting things about anti-Semitism is we know that it's, as my late friend Rabbi Jonathan Sachs used to say, it's a shape-shifting virus. 0.74

00:50:21.540 It's like a set of viruses in the human condition, it's able to be a parasite on whatever it can find.

00:50:32.980 And the virus of anti-Semitism can come from every direction.

00:50:41.460 And it can come from the right.

00:50:42.960 It can come from the left.

00:50:43.940 It can come from, I mean, I say at one point, using the great Too Little Red 20th century writer, Gregor von Retzori, you can, you know, it's a curse of the Jews that they can be accused of being poor and being rich simultaneously and being impossible to assimilate and also assimilating too much. 0.93

00:51:09.460 And of being very religious and being very secular.

00:51:13.380 There's just a set of things.

00:51:14.680 White and non-white as well. 0.86

00:51:16.060 White and non-white, absolutely. 0.99

00:51:19.260 And it's one of the things that makes it such an interesting subject.

00:51:24.240 But, yes, the fact that it can come from every political side seems to me to be obvious.

00:51:31.360 Now, we knew that in the 20th century, the most lethal form of anti-Semitism came in the form of Nazi anti-Semitism.

00:51:40.360 Of course, I mean, Stalin had his own anti-Semitism as well.

00:51:43.620 And there was never a lack of left-wing or right-wing anti-Semitism.

00:51:50.700 I had thought that there was a cordon sanitaire on the right about anti-Semitism, which, broadly speaking, still exists in Europe.

00:52:00.540 I think it really does exist in Europe, actually. 0.96

00:52:02.600 You know, if you're a right-wing political party in Europe, on the continent of Europe, you know it's just deadly for you to do this crap because it's like we see you. 0.82

00:52:16.300 Much easier if you're left-wing, like Mélenchon in France, far left. 0.99

00:52:21.120 He can be anti-Semitic more easily than if Marine Le Pen, for instance, was to try this rubbish.

00:52:26.860 But I'm circling around your question because, yes, I had thought that there was a cordon sanitaire on the right about this and that it was the left where it was just running rampant.

00:52:38.180 And although I think that the cordon has held much more firmly on the right, it's definitely been breached in places.

00:52:49.600 And it shows how deep the appeal of the Jewish scapegoat is. 0.75

00:52:57.320 Why is that, Douglas?

00:52:59.940 Why is that trope?

00:53:01.400 Why is that?

00:53:02.280 Because the Jews aren't the only Jews in the world.

00:53:03.920 You know this very well.

00:53:05.240 These groups that are middlemen minorities, as Thomas Sowell calls them, they have been persecuted all over the place.

00:53:11.160 It's the Indians in Africa. 1.00

00:53:12.880 It's the Chinese who live outside of China, etc.

00:53:16.320 Why are people tempted to go for this?

00:53:20.100 Why is this such a thing?

00:53:21.140 One of my great heroes, Vasily Grossman, says at one point, I quote him in the book, he said that anti-Semitism, the Jews hold up a mirror to your own failings.

00:53:36.320 Anti-Semitism reveals a mirror of your own failings so that, I mean, for instance, you know, you see in the Muslim world this anti-Semitism because, you know, there's no lack of Muslim countries, but there are a lack of successful Muslim countries.

00:53:57.320 And there's this tiny Jewish state of eight or nine million people doing so much better than his neighbors that holds up a mirror to your failings if you're a Jordanian or an Egyptian. 0.87

00:54:14.040 How this works with the right, I think it's a, again, it's a kind of mirror to their failings.

00:54:24.660 It reflects what their fears are, what they lack.

00:54:33.540 It provides the perfect thing to blame.

00:54:35.960 I was completely persuaded when I read Girard some years ago, Violence and the Sacred, completely persuaded by the scapegoat theory of history. 0.69

00:54:44.960 It's so redolent.

00:54:48.100 And I think the specific bit of what you're asking, I think, can be answered in this way.

00:54:57.180 I think there is now a reward for playing with the darkest stuff again.

00:55:07.240 And I think that's how I said, I've said this in the past in relation to the left.

00:55:12.100 The left, and as I say, every political side has the ability to go into disaster.

00:55:18.440 We all know that.

00:55:19.580 We should know that.

00:55:21.820 I believe that the left has played with the dangerous stuff very glibly for a long time.

00:55:32.020 Let's do the obvious, like wearing a Sheikha Vara t-shirt.

00:55:37.420 Okay.

00:55:37.900 Most obvious example.

00:55:38.860 There's sort of a slight joy in the dangerous stuff.

00:55:45.360 Now, is it ignorance?

00:55:46.500 Yeah, of course it's ignorance.

00:55:47.820 Is it also sometimes a deliberate provocation?

00:55:50.480 Yes.

00:55:50.920 Is it sometimes trolling?

00:55:52.360 Yes.

00:55:53.000 Is it sometimes actually something that would reveal murderous desires?

00:55:59.720 Yes.

00:56:00.600 Yes.

00:56:01.000 But now you see there is an ecosystem of people who would like to do that on the right.

00:56:10.280 The most charitable interpretation would be, again, to say they don't know what they're dealing with.

00:56:17.420 They just can't know what they're dealing with.

00:56:19.800 And the less charitable interpretation is of some, yeah, they do.

00:56:28.720 They do.

00:56:29.280 And, again, I mean, maybe some of it is this tendency to want to find out what has got, I mean, there's plenty of criticisms we all, we could spend all day doing about our societies.

00:56:44.100 But isn't it easier always to say there's a secret reason why it went wrong that's been withheld from you?

00:56:58.000 Well, you know, you know, as I do, if you title this video something like, I'm going to pay for telling you this truth, but I'm going to anyway.

00:57:10.780 That's a great title.

00:57:11.900 It is.

00:57:12.480 Jack.

00:57:13.780 But it'll do better than...

00:57:16.720 Yeah.

00:57:17.200 That's why we don't do that.

00:57:18.220 Right.

00:57:18.940 Because it's reprehensible. 0.95

00:57:20.860 It's reprehensible and it's crappy and it's low grain. 0.52

00:57:24.040 I mean, it's, you know, there was an English humorist in the last century who discovered that the three best-selling things, the best-selling subject, the things that guaranteed you a bestseller were if you wrote about Hitler or if you wrote about golf or you wrote about cats.

00:57:40.700 And he produced a book called Golfing for Cats with a swastika on the cover.

00:57:49.220 And it's like that with YouTube videos and so on.

00:57:52.360 We know that there is a way of saying, like, I've got this dangerous truth and I'm not meant to tell you about it and I'm going to pay for it.

00:58:01.100 Yeah, right.

00:58:01.820 Yeah.

00:58:02.140 But I'm going to tell you anyway.

00:58:04.840 And that's a place some people in the ecosystem are in.

00:58:08.620 I think it's reprehensible.

00:58:10.360 I think it should be pushed back against.

00:58:13.400 But it's the reminder of the nature of certain intellectual viruses.

00:58:20.520 Douglas, just one very quick thing.

00:58:22.020 You said something I just want you to clarify because it's interesting to me.

00:58:25.700 You said that people on the right fear certain things.

00:58:29.540 And can you – what do you mean exactly?

00:58:31.820 Which bit?

00:58:32.420 You were talking about the fact that the reason for right-wing anti-Semitism, such as it is, is because there's a fear and a feeling of lacking something that perhaps Israel and the Jews have.

00:58:42.780 Well, some of it is – I mean, you can definitely see in a sort of bit of the ecosystem on the right at the moment a desire, for instance, to explain why Western society has gone wrong in the way they see it.

00:59:02.400 Now, I mean, again, lots of criticisms, but don't kill the golden goose.

00:59:06.000 But if you were to try – if you were young and you were fairly ignorant and you were to say, what is the catastrophe of Western civilization that led to where we are?

00:59:20.000 You would end up having to say, well, World War I and World War II.

00:59:24.020 That's where all the confidence starts to drain out of Western society.

00:59:27.600 Why?

00:59:28.660 Two World Wars.

00:59:29.700 Pretty good reasons.

00:59:30.360 You might be tempted to say, well, how could we reset to before that?

00:59:36.240 Or what went wrong that led to that?

00:59:39.700 And if you're offered one very obvious set of conclusions, let alone a set of conclusions which have been usurped by your political opponents, I don't know, for instance, like, you know, the lesson of the Holocaust is we must be nice to minorities, for instance.

00:59:58.840 And you sort of saw this sort of thing all around, and you were a bit more edgy, and you were sort of trying to – before you know it, it's one of the interesting things.

01:00:07.960 You think you're going to before that, and what you're cursed to do is not to discover something in you, but to go around on the wheel again.

01:00:17.840 And I think that's – I think that's what I'm seeing.

01:00:22.000 So that's why Winston Churchill is the greatest villain of World War II now, according to some people.

01:00:27.260 Well, that's a very interesting one.

01:00:30.220 Tarka had this lunatic pseudo-historian on who I was very interested to see when my friend Andrew Roberts, historian, was invited to debate this pseudo-historian.

01:00:42.480 The pseudo-historian said, I couldn't debate Andrew Roberts because I've got all his books and learned from his books, but I'm not able to disagree with him.

01:00:50.720 You go, well, it's nice you were honest.

01:00:56.060 Nice you were honest.

01:00:58.740 But, I mean, people like that guy, I mean, no one's ever heard of him before, no one will hear of him again, I assume.

01:01:03.820 But, I mean, he is a sort of autodidact, self-taught, pretend historian.

01:01:08.220 But people like that, that's what I mean by this sort of slight – I don't think one can overstate it, nor should one underestimate it.

01:01:16.300 This slight ecosystem of let's find out where it went wrong and come up with, like, an original view that isn't the one that's been pushed on us.

01:01:27.120 And, I mean, once you end up in the position of – I wrote about in the war on the West, the war on Churchill from the left, and now we have a sort of war on Churchill from the right.

01:01:39.360 What are the people doing that really doing?

01:01:41.060 I mean, trying something out, looking for someone to blame, doing something edgy, and sometimes, again, doing something much more dangerous than that.

01:01:54.700 I care about that because I care about the misrepresentation of our history, whether it comes from the left or whether it comes from the right.

01:02:01.080 And I also know what's happening with that, which is it's part of a process of deliberate demoralization.

01:02:06.240 That's what the left was doing.

01:02:07.180 The left was saying, when it was attacking Churchill, we're going to take out your biggest hero.

01:02:12.540 If you're a British person, you're going to take out your biggest hero. 1.00

01:02:15.740 And the few fringe figures on the right who are trying to do that with Churchill seem to be doing it for the same reason.

01:02:23.700 Because they're saying, your country's no good at the moment, and we're going to take out your biggest hero.

01:02:31.000 And then you'll realize you're wrong, something like this.

01:02:34.800 All I would say to those people is they seem to be blaming Churchill for everything that's gone wrong, anything that's gone wrong, in the decade since his death.

01:02:53.420 I was in Georgia, America, recently, and was talking with somebody about this, an academic, and I had a lovely insight I'm going to steal in the future, which is about Abraham Lincoln.

01:03:09.740 A Lincoln scholar said, you know, Abraham Lincoln didn't solve every problem, but he did solve a big problem of his time.

01:03:20.360 And it's the same with Churchill.

01:03:23.920 Churchill didn't solve every problem that we have in the West in 2025, but he did solve the big problem of his time, and that should count for something.

01:03:35.720 And it's interesting, when we're talking about anti-Semitism, there's one type of anti-Semitism that you touch on in the book, which is anti-Semitism within Islam.

01:03:47.880 And you have a very interesting quote in it from Mehdi Hassan.

01:03:51.900 Oh, yes.

01:03:52.560 You're a great hero.

01:03:53.340 Yeah.

01:03:53.900 Dear, dear friend.

01:03:55.540 One of my closest enemies.

01:03:56.620 And, yes, that's right.

01:03:59.060 Mehdi Hassan accidentally, some years ago, said something true, and I quote it in the book, which he wrote an article for the New States from, I think, 2013 or so.

01:04:07.820 There was a Labour peer called Lord Ahmed who was texting whilst he was driving on the motorway, and he ran over and killed a Polish gentleman and went to prison for it.

01:04:18.160 And interviewed on Pakistani television, after being released from prison, said that the reason why he'd gone to prison was as a Jew.

01:04:32.740 Now, you and I might ask, were the Jews making you text? 1.00

01:04:37.320 Did the Jews push the Polish gentleman in front of your car as he would text driving? 0.99

01:04:42.300 We have no explanation for this from Lord Ahmed.

01:04:47.160 But the fact he did that, made that claim, and when it came public in Britain, it caught a certain amount of attention.

01:04:53.160 Mehdi Hassan wrote a column in the New Statesman at the time saying something true, as I say.

01:04:57.760 It must have been wrung out of him.

01:05:00.180 He said, every Muslim reading this will know what I'm talking about when I say that it's our dirty little secret.

01:05:06.720 He said, the anti-Semitism in the Muslim community in Britain, he said, is, quote, rife and commonplace.

01:05:12.300 Rife and commonplace.

01:05:14.340 He said, every Muslim reading this will know what I mean.

01:05:17.520 Every dinner table, there'll be something about the Jews not being in the Twin Towers on 9-11.

01:05:22.040 There'll be something about the Jews killing Princess Diana, and so on and so forth.

01:05:26.500 I believe him.

01:05:28.000 And I believe that, and I know because I've traveled enough of the Muslim world to see the rife anti-Semitism that exists in Muslim countries,

01:05:37.340 and the rife anti-Semitism that exists in Muslim communities in the West.

01:05:43.780 And I think it's a major, major problem.

01:05:46.220 And I think that many Jews don't want to face up to that.

01:05:49.700 Many non-Jews don't want to face up to that.

01:05:53.260 Hardly any Muslims want to face up to that. 1.00

01:05:55.220 And even old media never repeated that point.

01:06:01.600 But it's manifestly true.

01:06:03.660 And it goes back to that thing of where anti-Semitism can come from, that the reason why the protests against Israel from the 7th of October onwards in the West

01:06:20.320 have been led by Muslims, that the political attacks on Israel have been led by Muslims in the rest of the West,

01:06:28.900 is because whether it's the former First Minister of Scotland or Muslim Minister in Australia,

01:06:37.220 they cannot bear the Jews defending themselves. 1.00

01:06:41.760 They cannot bear it because of this issue of the self-esteem of Islam, the self-esteem of Muslims. 1.00

01:06:48.840 It's just, you just, just, just notice it.

01:06:51.460 Just, just, for God's sake, let's be honest about it.

01:06:56.060 A million Uyghur Muslims are put into camps in China.

01:07:00.460 And has the center of London been ground to a halt week after week by Muslims and others about this? 1.00

01:07:08.380 No, no, no, no.

01:07:11.020 More Muslims were killed in the Syrian civil war since 2011.

01:07:15.860 More Muslims were killed every year.

01:07:18.840 More Muslims of the last decade in Assad's civil war than have been killed in the wake of the invasion of Israel on the 7th.

01:07:29.940 Just every six months or so, it has been the same.

01:07:32.700 Just in Syria.

01:07:34.320 Look at Yemen. 0.92

01:07:35.180 They don't care about any of that.

01:07:38.380 They care when the Jews defend themselves. 0.96

01:07:41.000 Why?

01:07:41.460 Because they can't bear it.

01:07:42.720 It hurts their self-esteem.

01:07:44.500 And one of the explanations that I mention in the book is that's because of the core of Islam.

01:07:50.140 And let's just face up to it, for God's sake.

01:07:53.020 The core of Islam is the belief that Islam is the final revelation from God.

01:07:56.440 And if you believe you've got the final revelation from God, then things should be going well for you.

01:08:05.600 You know, things should be going well.

01:08:08.380 At the very least, they should be going better than the guys who rejected the revelation from God.

01:08:14.100 And then when the guys, among the first people to reject Muhammad's so-called revelation, among the first people who say, no, we're not accepting that, are still around and have a state that's doing well in a region that has very little going well.

01:08:34.840 This is like the biggest hit, not just at the core of your self-esteem.

01:08:41.140 This is a hit at the core of your religion. 0.89

01:08:43.600 Why didn't our revelation bring loads of great stuff with it?

01:08:49.860 Well, that's a painful question for Muslims to ask themselves.

01:08:55.360 But, I mean, I refuse to not identify it.

01:08:59.480 And it's so darn obvious.

01:09:01.460 So darn obvious.

01:09:02.240 You can predict with almost disappointingly 99% accuracy that even the child of Muslim immigrants into the West will be triggered by Israel to a multitude of times more than anything else that happens. 0.92

01:09:23.680 And you have a particular theory for this, which I find quite interesting.

01:09:28.420 In the book, you told about the meeting, I think it was in the late 1930s, early 1940s, between the Grand Mufti and Adolf Hitler.

01:09:38.520 Well, it's a matter of historical record that the Muslim world is the only part of the world where, after World War II, a leader who participated in the Holocaust returned to his home a hero.

01:09:57.740 After the end of World War II, the Nazi leaders in Europe were either hanged or slid away to South America like rats.

01:10:12.380 And that's why I say, I mean, on the right and broadly speaking, on the left.

01:10:20.060 After that, there was a recognition, that's bad.

01:10:25.880 Don't do that again.

01:10:27.020 But the Grand Mufti, who raised his own SS division, goes to Adolf Hitler to volunteer his help to get an SS division in the land of Israel to get the Jews out of the region.

01:10:44.240 And he returns home, he returns back to Cairo, 1946, 1947, and is a hero.

01:10:53.680 And I say in the book, I say, this is something people should know more about.

01:10:58.300 That is one of the reasons why the bacillus, the virus of anti-Semitism, comes back to the Muslim world, a victor. 1.00

01:11:13.900 And if this was any other part of society, we would say, right, left, Christian, whatever.

01:11:22.520 But the fact that Muslim anti-Semitism is not being confronted is, to my mind, a great problem.

01:11:27.540 And some people watching might think, well, why is it such a big problem?

01:11:30.380 Why is it, you know, I'm not Jewish or, you know, whatever.

01:11:34.620 It's really one of the things you can tell with, again, in this case, 100% accuracy,

01:11:39.580 is that anti-Semitism is the sign of a society going rotten.

01:11:47.760 It is one of the things you do when everything else is going wrong.

01:11:53.560 So it's not about Jews and Muslims.

01:11:57.160 It's not about Jews and non-Jews.

01:12:00.080 It's about the fact that if you understand that there are certain things that our species falls into, traps,

01:12:08.520 you know, we're not any more evolved than we were thousands or tens of thousands of years ago.

01:12:14.400 They're just traps we fall into.

01:12:16.080 This is one of the big traps.

01:12:19.760 And if your society falls into it, it goes off the cliff if it tolerates it.

01:12:29.200 And I suppose that's one of the many reasons I care why I've diverted so much time to this

01:12:34.320 and so much energy and seen too much, too up close for my liking.

01:12:39.340 But this is why it matters.

01:12:44.020 Douglas, it's been an absolutely brilliant interview.

01:12:46.660 We could carry on the conversation.

01:12:47.960 In fact, we're going to do that over on our Substack, where our supporters get to ask their questions for you.

01:12:52.620 But the final question is always the same.

01:12:54.320 What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?

01:12:57.020 You've answered this question so many times.

01:12:58.880 I'm not answering it this time.

01:13:00.240 I'm not answering it.

01:13:01.320 I've been surprised by that question every time.

01:13:05.600 Why do I always forget you do that?

01:13:07.320 Why haven't I by now, after all of these years, come up with some brilliant zinger of rejoinder?

01:13:12.120 You can talk about the trans issue if you want.

01:13:14.800 Oh, one of the great joys is that I no longer feel any need to talk about the trans thing. 0.97

01:13:19.320 Everyone else is talking about it.

01:13:20.760 Fantastic.

01:13:21.520 Head on over to Substack.

01:13:22.520 We'll see you there.

01:13:24.800 Can you please shed a light on the claims that Israel holds many people in prisons,

01:13:29.080 detained without putting them on trial, or even formally accusing them of a crime?

01:13:32.920 Many of them are supposed to be underage.

TRIGGERnometry - April 09, 2025

The Truth about October 7th - Douglas Murray

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