On October 7th, 2006, a terrorist attack on the Israeli capital, Tel Aviv, left seven people dead, including a young girl who was shot in the head by members of the terrorist group Hamas. The attack was a direct attack on Israel's capital, and the death toll could have been much higher if not for the actions of the Israeli military. On this episode of TALKING POINTS, Douglas Murray and Andrew Doyle talk about why this could have happened, and why it happened in the first place.
00:18:43.740I don't want to cite, I feel annoyed citing him because he's just so unimportant in some ways.
00:18:49.860But on the other hand, he is important because he writes to the Guardian and has some following online.
00:18:54.140He comes out of seeing the atrocity videos and sort of complains that there's not enough rape in it, basically.
00:18:58.320Uh, so it says, it says, I didn't actually see women being raped.
00:19:02.580I was like, sorry that the snuff video wasn't to your liking.
00:19:07.840Um, uh, but, but why would somebody like him do that?
00:19:12.940It's because he has a couple of options in his head, as I just mentioned.
00:19:18.720You know, you either sort of say, um, yeah, that's my side and that's what they do.
00:19:25.240Um, but we have to keep going or you have to say, why am I in bed with the death cult?
00:19:33.360And, uh, self-reflection isn't, isn't that common among people who've already thrown in their lot with people like that.
00:19:41.600Have 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?
00:22:45.520And this was, by the way, exactly what had happened 50 years earlier when Israel's enemies, neighbors, attacked, the Arabs attacked on Yom Kippur.
00:23:29.360Once they overwhelmed that base and they took uniforms from the base, once they killed the first policeman, they took uniforms from the policeman.
00:23:41.380And so there was an enormous confusion very early on.
00:23:45.920There 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.
00:24:03.360He 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.
00:24:25.240And 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.
00:24:43.080There's a young woman who was murdered with her boyfriend.
00:24:46.380They managed to escape the party, and her father described to me how they managed to escape.
00:24:55.240They 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.
00:25:08.580And the last conversation that this girl had with her father, she said, and the police have told us we should stop here.
00:25:15.760And the police were Hamaz, you know, so.
00:25:19.300Now, 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.
00:25:30.900There was enormous confusion among them.
00:25:35.660You know, we all know this from, like, comparatively minor terrorist atrocities.
00:25:41.300Something happens, and the misreporting that immediately comes out, you know, like, another tower's been hit, or another tower.
00:25:48.640In the middle of pandemonium, it's just, it's a mess.
00:25:55.340And people were driving into the middle of firefights, no idea what they were getting into.
00:26:02.560There was definitely a point at which, when it looked like the incursion might come all the way up the center of the country,
00:26:08.700I 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.
00:26:21.940And all the time also, trying to get troops up to the north to stop an attack there as well.
00:26:31.300I mean, it's, there was enormous failure by security and intelligence in Israel, and it's going to have to be learned from.
00:26:41.560I think everyone should learn from it.
00:26:42.580But, 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.
00:26:57.260But, 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.
00:27:09.840But, 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.
00:27:23.620And he drove south himself in his car, and with his handgun, he happened to have a revolver, and eight rounds of ammunition.
00:27:34.480And when he got south, because he started to realize, well, he realized how bad it was, because he had a friend down there.
00:27:41.360And 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.
00:27:54.080But he left a video message on his phone for his two young children, because he said, I knew I wouldn't survive the day.
00:28:03.260And I wanted it, when my phone was found in my body, I wanted my two young children to know that I loved them.
00:28:09.640There were a lot of people who did extraordinary things like that.
00:28:12.580But, yeah, there was just confusion, a wild, wild confusion.
00:28:18.900And there will be a lot of self-examination about that for a long time to come.
00:28:24.620Douglas, one of the things, obviously, in the book, you're not just talking about the Middle East.
00:28:29.880You're talking about the West and democracies.
00:28:33.040What do we all learn from what is going on, what has happened, what the reaction has been?
00:28:43.120What should we think about as a result of all of this?
00:28:48.820I'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?
00:28:59.440And 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.
00:29:38.800And 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.
00:30:05.600I mean, there are lessons about the response, which I think can definitely be learned.
00:30:11.780I 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?
00:30:29.460So that we can extrapolate out, potentially learn something from.
00:30:35.840And, 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.
00:30:55.460Which 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.
00:31:11.020And, 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.
00:31:22.040Why? Because we're still trying to work out that much more.
00:31:58.760But 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?
00:32:10.900If 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.
00:32:27.120And and there's a healthy response to it, an attitude towards it.
00:32:30.860And there's a probably an unhealthy set of unhealthy ones as well.
00:32:33.680But 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.
00:32:47.780Because, 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.
00:32:58.120You 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.
00:33:05.760So that age group in the UK, would you be willing to fight for your country?
00:33:10.340And, you know, you see these polls and I mean, they will have bewildering replies like, you know.
00:33:17.700The 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.
00:33:26.000By 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.
00:33:31.340I thought you were going to say 10 percent killing because they've got ADHD.
00:34:13.880And of course, there's this thing of like, actually, what do those polls mean?
00:34:18.380I mean, America hasn't had a land invasion, you know, it's a founding.
00:34:25.380I 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.
00:34:35.900And it's the same with young Brits and Western Europeans and so on.
00:34:40.280It gets a little different the further east you go in Europe now.
00:34:46.920There's a long-winded way to just say that the interesting thing is that the same doubts existed in Israel until the 7th.
00:34:55.600The young Israelis were fought very often by their elders, people who fought after the invasions by the Arabs in 67 and 73.
00:35:04.740There was this perception that the young Israelis were weak, were, just wanted to party in Tel Aviv.
00:35:17.000They just wanted to be on Instagram and TikTok and all these sort of things.
00:35:20.480And then that proved to be flat out wrong.
00:35:24.480And 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.
00:35:43.340This would sound bewildering to some people listening who have read totally false information about what these soldiers do.
00:35:59.440Their relatives and friends were murdered and raped and slaughtered.
00:36:02.340And 250 taken hostage by the terrorists.
00:36:11.220Which, if you extrapolate that number out to America in terms of population, would be 10,000 Americans being taken hostage in one day.
00:36:19.120So, this happened to their people, to their family, their friends, their nation, their country.
00:36:27.260And the reservists who were called up, the over-request of soldiers to return to service, 130% re-enlistment rates after the 7th.
00:36:39.720And 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.
00:36:52.560Just 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.
00:37:10.160And 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.
00:37:31.020And 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?
00:37:44.320You know, I mean, I've seen young female soldiers, you know, 19, 20, and remarkable young people.
00:37:52.420And 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?
00:38:12.060And they are ignoramuses, and you're a person, you're a real person and a hero.
00:38:17.600And I suppose that's sort of one of the questions in the book is, who do you want to admire?
00:38:49.560So, sorry, for all of our Colombian viewers.
00:38:53.440My Venezuelan mother would be disgusted with you, Douglas.
00:38:56.780But we'll get you back to the interview in a minute.
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00:40:41.620As 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.
00:40:55.980And 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.
00:41:08.600I 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.
00:41:19.700One thing is that you will reveal your true self.
00:41:25.400That'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.
00:41:39.300And as I say in the book, it shows us as human beings at our very best and at our very worst.
00:41:45.780And 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.
00:41:55.640You say, it was a test to people in Israel, but it was also a test to people outside Israel.
00:42:03.840And 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.
00:42:19.560And, 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.
00:42:33.720And, 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.
00:43:03.720Not 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.
00:43:18.160And 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?
00:43:35.420And 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.
00:43:43.760And 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.
00:44:05.420Uh, detriment, uh, detriment, I think.
00:44:08.660Um, but just, just consider what these people say they are opposing.
00:44:13.660They say that they're opposing a settler colonial state.
00:44:19.300They say that they are opposing genocide.
00:44:22.940They say they're opposing ethnic cleansing and they're opposing white supremacy.
00:44:29.100First 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.
00:44:39.380But, 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.
00:44:52.580Um, that is, they are accusing Israel of the sins that they have been told they're guilty of.
00:45:02.540You see, young people in the West, we're sitting in London.
00:45:07.680A 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.
00:45:16.340Nobody 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.
00:45:26.080The Magna Carta has very little to say about race relations.
00:46:08.780Now, 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.
00:46:17.860But 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.
00:46:36.100Because 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?
00:47:07.020I can overcome what I'm told I'm guilty of.
00:47:10.620I can overcome my inherited ethnic cleansing tendency by claiming that the Jewish state is doing it, even when it's not.
00:47:22.060And that's one of the things that's going on.
00:47:24.800And 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.
00:47:43.300And 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.
00:48:02.260I mean, how can these people, they know nothing, obviously.
00:48:05.580But the Iranian revolutionary government has spent recent years colonizing, having colonized Iran, colonizing Iraq, colonizing Yemen, colonizing Lebanon, colonizing Syria, colonizing Gaza.
00:48:22.240And the supreme leader of Iran writes a letter to students in America thanking them for their help in the anti-colonial struggle.
00:48:38.400And 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.
00:49:08.700Well, 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.
00:49:20.860Who talk endlessly about the evil Israel lobby and the way that it's ruined America.
00:49:26.820That's going to be the title of the episode, by the way.
00:49:50.340But, I mean, they sort of say, oh, you use the term anti-Semite too often.
00:49:56.940Well, it's because I see anti-Semitism too often.
00:49:59.600But, yes, it's one of the interesting things.
00:50:05.700I 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.
00:50:13.060But 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.
00:50:21.540It's like a set of viruses in the human condition, it's able to be a parasite on whatever it can find.
00:50:32.980And the virus of anti-Semitism can come from every direction.
00:50:43.940It 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.
00:51:09.460And of being very religious and being very secular.
00:51:19.260And it's one of the things that makes it such an interesting subject.
00:51:24.240But, yes, the fact that it can come from every political side seems to me to be obvious.
00:51:31.360Now, we knew that in the 20th century, the most lethal form of anti-Semitism came in the form of Nazi anti-Semitism.
00:51:40.360Of course, I mean, Stalin had his own anti-Semitism as well.
00:51:43.620And there was never a lack of left-wing or right-wing anti-Semitism.
00:51:50.700I had thought that there was a cordon sanitaire on the right about anti-Semitism, which, broadly speaking, still exists in Europe.
00:52:00.540I think it really does exist in Europe, actually.
00:52:02.600You 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.
00:52:21.120He can be anti-Semitic more easily than if Marine Le Pen, for instance, was to try this rubbish.
00:52:26.860But 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.
00:52:38.180And although I think that the cordon has held much more firmly on the right, it's definitely been breached in places.
00:52:49.600And it shows how deep the appeal of the Jewish scapegoat is.
00:53:21.140One 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.
00:53:36.320Anti-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.
00:53:57.320And 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.
00:54:14.040How this works with the right, I think it's a, again, it's a kind of mirror to their failings.
00:54:24.660It reflects what their fears are, what they lack.
00:54:33.540It provides the perfect thing to blame.
00:54:35.960I was completely persuaded when I read Girard some years ago, Violence and the Sacred, completely persuaded by the scapegoat theory of history.
00:56:29.280And, 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.
00:56:44.100But isn't it easier always to say there's a secret reason why it went wrong that's been withheld from you?
00:56:58.000Well, 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.
00:57:20.860It's reprehensible and it's crappy and it's low grain.
00:57:24.040I 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.
00:57:40.700And he produced a book called Golfing for Cats with a swastika on the cover.
00:57:49.220And it's like that with YouTube videos and so on.
00:57:52.360We 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.
00:58:32.420You 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.
00:58:42.780Well, 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.
00:59:02.400Now, I mean, again, lots of criticisms, but don't kill the golden goose.
00:59:06.000But 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?
00:59:20.000You would end up having to say, well, World War I and World War II.
00:59:24.020That's where all the confidence starts to drain out of Western society.
00:59:39.700And 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.
00:59:58.840And 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.
01:00:07.960You 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.
01:00:17.840And I think that's – I think that's what I'm seeing.
01:00:22.000So that's why Winston Churchill is the greatest villain of World War II now, according to some people.
01:00:30.220Tarka 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.
01:00:42.480The 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.
01:00:50.720You go, well, it's nice you were honest.
01:00:58.740But, 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.
01:01:03.820But, I mean, he is a sort of autodidact, self-taught, pretend historian.
01:01:08.220But 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.
01:01:16.300This 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.
01:01:27.120And, 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.
01:01:39.360What are the people doing that really doing?
01:01:41.060I mean, trying something out, looking for someone to blame, doing something edgy, and sometimes, again, doing something much more dangerous than that.
01:01:54.700I 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.
01:02:01.080And I also know what's happening with that, which is it's part of a process of deliberate demoralization.
01:02:07.180The left was saying, when it was attacking Churchill, we're going to take out your biggest hero.
01:02:12.540If you're a British person, you're going to take out your biggest hero.
01:02:15.740And the few fringe figures on the right who are trying to do that with Churchill seem to be doing it for the same reason.
01:02:23.700Because they're saying, your country's no good at the moment, and we're going to take out your biggest hero.
01:02:31.000And then you'll realize you're wrong, something like this.
01:02:34.800All 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.
01:02:53.420I 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.
01:03:09.740A Lincoln scholar said, you know, Abraham Lincoln didn't solve every problem, but he did solve a big problem of his time.
01:03:23.920Churchill 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.
01:03:35.720And 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.
01:03:47.880And you have a very interesting quote in it from Mehdi Hassan.
01:03:59.060Mehdi 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.
01:04:07.820There 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.
01:04:18.160And interviewed on Pakistani television, after being released from prison, said that the reason why he'd gone to prison was as a Jew.
01:04:32.740Now, you and I might ask, were the Jews making you text?
01:04:37.320Did the Jews push the Polish gentleman in front of your car as he would text driving?
01:04:42.300We have no explanation for this from Lord Ahmed.
01:04:47.160But the fact he did that, made that claim, and when it came public in Britain, it caught a certain amount of attention.
01:04:53.160Mehdi Hassan wrote a column in the New Statesman at the time saying something true, as I say.
01:05:28.000And 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,
01:05:37.340and the rife anti-Semitism that exists in Muslim communities in the West.
01:05:43.780And I think it's a major, major problem.
01:05:46.220And I think that many Jews don't want to face up to that.
01:05:49.700Many non-Jews don't want to face up to that.
01:05:53.260Hardly any Muslims want to face up to that.
01:05:55.220And even old media never repeated that point.
01:06:03.660And 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
01:06:20.320have been led by Muslims, that the political attacks on Israel have been led by Muslims in the rest of the West,
01:06:28.900is because whether it's the former First Minister of Scotland or Muslim Minister in Australia,
01:06:37.220they cannot bear the Jews defending themselves.
01:06:41.760They cannot bear it because of this issue of the self-esteem of Islam, the self-esteem of Muslims.
01:06:48.840It's just, you just, just, just notice it.
01:06:51.460Just, just, for God's sake, let's be honest about it.
01:06:56.060A million Uyghur Muslims are put into camps in China.
01:07:00.460And has the center of London been ground to a halt week after week by Muslims and others about this?
01:07:44.500And one of the explanations that I mention in the book is that's because of the core of Islam.
01:07:50.140And let's just face up to it, for God's sake.
01:07:53.020The core of Islam is the belief that Islam is the final revelation from God.
01:07:56.440And if you believe you've got the final revelation from God, then things should be going well for you.
01:08:05.600You know, things should be going well.
01:08:08.380At the very least, they should be going better than the guys who rejected the revelation from God.
01:08:14.100And 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.
01:08:34.840This is like the biggest hit, not just at the core of your self-esteem.
01:08:41.140This is a hit at the core of your religion.
01:08:43.600Why didn't our revelation bring loads of great stuff with it?
01:08:49.860Well, that's a painful question for Muslims to ask themselves.
01:08:55.360But, I mean, I refuse to not identify it.
01:09:02.240You 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.
01:09:23.680And you have a particular theory for this, which I find quite interesting.
01:09:28.420In the book, you told about the meeting, I think it was in the late 1930s, early 1940s, between the Grand Mufti and Adolf Hitler.
01:09:38.520Well, 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.
01:09:57.740After the end of World War II, the Nazi leaders in Europe were either hanged or slid away to South America like rats.
01:10:12.380And that's why I say, I mean, on the right and broadly speaking, on the left.
01:10:20.060After that, there was a recognition, that's bad.
01:10:27.020But 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.
01:10:44.240And he returns home, he returns back to Cairo, 1946, 1947, and is a hero.
01:10:53.680And I say in the book, I say, this is something people should know more about.
01:10:58.300That is one of the reasons why the bacillus, the virus of anti-Semitism, comes back to the Muslim world, a victor.
01:11:13.900And if this was any other part of society, we would say, right, left, Christian, whatever.
01:11:22.520But the fact that Muslim anti-Semitism is not being confronted is, to my mind, a great problem.
01:11:27.540And some people watching might think, well, why is it such a big problem?
01:11:30.380Why is it, you know, I'm not Jewish or, you know, whatever.
01:11:34.620It's really one of the things you can tell with, again, in this case, 100% accuracy,
01:11:39.580is that anti-Semitism is the sign of a society going rotten.
01:11:47.760It is one of the things you do when everything else is going wrong.