TRIGGERnometry - The Truth about October 7th - Douglas Murray

Episode Date: April 9, 2025

Douglas Murray is an author and journalist based in Britain. His latest publication "On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel, Hamas and the Future of the West" is now available to order - https://amzn.eu/d/drbnYTY | SPONSOR. We use Ground News to escape the echo chamber and stay fully informed. Go to https://ground.news/triggernometry to save 40% on the Ground News unlimited access Vantage plan. SPONSOR. Shopify! Sign up for a £1 per month trial at https://www.shopify.co.uk/trigger/ Follow Douglas on X: https://x.com/DouglasKMurray Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Substack! https://triggernometry.substack.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Shop Merch here - https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 Introduction 01:25 Why Did October 7th Happen? 07:35 Why Is Hamas Willing To Die For Its Ideology? 20:26 The IDF Response To October 7th 27:08 What Should The West Be Learning From This? 38:58 Anti-Semitism In Universities 46:49 Right-Wing Anti-Semitism Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

War reveals the essence of ourselves. Imagine what kind of a psychopath you have to be to gang up a girl and then shoot her in the head. Most people wouldn't be proud of that action. But Hamazar... Think about this. These guys are billionaires. And yet they're prepared to die, prepared to put their children at risk,

prepared to have their entire tribe destroyed, annihilated in retaliation for their actions. I mean, I put it to you, Douglas, they've got quite an ideology there. When they say we love death as much as you love life, they mean it. It's really that one of the things you can tell with, again, in this case, 100% accuracy, is that anti-Semitism is the sign of a society going rotten. Douglas Murray, you're back for the seventh time. Welcome back. It's a great pleasure of you with you. Has anyone done more than seven?

I don't think so. I don't think so. I'm very proud to be there. No, I'm certain no one's done more. No. Andrew Doyle may have done, may be touching the fourth or the fifth time, but that's it. You are a go-to guy, and you have a new book. I do. Democracies and death cults, Israel, Hamas, and the future of the West.

Yes. Let's get straight into. I mean, you talk a lot, of course, about the history of the Middle East, but actually, I want to ask a question that you cover in so much detail in a way that we haven't really talked about. Why did October 7th happen, Douglas? it'll probably take a full inquiry to finding out exactly what went wrong on the Israeli side that it was possible that Hamas could have come so far up inside the

center of Israel but I know and write about some of the reasons why first thing is by the way is not related to the defensive bit of it but the aggressive bit of it why did Hamas do it we know a lot of about that now. It was a plan of their bosses in Tehran that Hamas would come up through the south of the country, south of Israel, Hezbollah would come through the north and they would effectively strangle Israel from the middle. We know that now because of the documents and other things caught in Lebanon from Hezbollah. So that was a plan. Hamaz went off a little early, didn't feel that they could communicate with Hezbollah about the exact timing of the attack without it

being intercepted. So Hezbollah was slightly surprised. And although Hamas attacked on the 7th October, Hezbollah started firing missiles straight away by the 8th. Nevertheless, by that point, significant number of IDF soldiers had been sent up north and Hezbollah did not make an incursion on the ground from the north. Otherwise, what happened in the south of Israel on October 7th would have happened across the north as well. And it's possible that the armies could have, the terrorist army, could have met in the middle. That was the plan that Iran knew about, the Iranian revolutionary government, and the aim was to completely annihilate Israel. And Yaya Sinwa, who planned the seventh of Hamas, who had previously been in an Israeli prison, where he was found to have a brain tumor,

which he was diagnosed by a Jewish dentist who worked with him, saved his life. The Israelis then operated on the Cynois to save the brain tumor from killing him. And he was released in a prison exchange in 2011 for one of a thousand people released for the release of the Israeli hostage, Gilad Shalid. Sinwa, after he was released, said publicly many times what he wanted to do. He said in private to the doctor who saved his life. He said, now you, Israel, are strong, but one day you'll be weak, and then I'll attack. And he was true to his word.

And what's more in the years after he was released from prison when he went back to being one of the senior leaders of Hamas and then the leader in Gaza, he said repeatedly what he wanted to do. And he said, among other things, he said, we're going to go in and we're going to tear their hearts out from their bodies. and he was true to his word. And you say that he said this, and I'm sure it makes sense from his perspective, that I will attack when you're weak. Why was Israel weak? Well, that is definitely a sort of very, it's the big question for Israel and its defense.

I'd say there's a set of reasons. One was definitely the perception there'd been in the year before the 7th, this intense internal turmoil in Israel about a question of judicial reform that almost nobody inside Israel understands and nobody outside understands. But there were demonstrations by left-wing Israelis every day, a week, against the government's proposed judicial reforms. This definitely meant that the police were overstretched in that period, and many people think that that made Israel look from Sinwa's point of view, from Hamas and Hasbalah's point of view, from Iran's point of view, made him look internally divided. And there's something in that. And an Israeli friend of mine

said to me a few weeks after the seventh in Jerusalem, and he said, you know, in some ways Hamas were stupid. If they left it another year, we'd have all killed each other. So there's some, there is a sort of lesson about internal turmoil, you know. And there's something almost biblical about that, you know, the Jews are all fighting among each other, and then an external enemy comes to annihilate them, and then suddenly they realize actually there are more important things. There were technical things that went wrong, which is going to take a while to work out. Their intelligence failures. There was what was called, what has been called the conception, which was wrong.

The conception, I think, among Israeli military and many politicians was that Hamas had got to that point that some terrorist groups get to where they don't mind just being corrupt and, you know, getting on with their lives. Every head of Hamas was a billionaire by October, 2023. This amount of Hainir, worth three or four billion living in Qatar and luxury penthouse apartments. His sons also lived in. There was a perception that maybe that Hamas leadership were like so many other people in history, like the Soviet leadership and others. At some point, you sort of don't really believe the ideology is as happy being corrupt and relatively rich. That was completely mistaken in the case of Hamas.

They really meant it, Sinwa and others. They really meant it. And so that's one thing. There were intelligence failures, definitely. Technological failures, certainly. And then a certain amount of luck for Hamas. It's said that they didn't know that the Nova Party was going on in Reim.

So when the paragliders landed on the morning at the trucks of Hezbollah, of Hamas or other terrorists came in, they were delighted to find hundreds and hundreds of unarmed young Israelis dancing. Francis, let me ask just one more question before you went. You said something that I think

is very, very important there about the leadership. And it's something that increasingly has to be explained to Westerners and they don't understand. Because our world is so obsessed with money and freedom and prosperity and all of this other stuff. Think about this. These guys are billionaires. Billionaires. The whole families are gold-plated AKs all over there, everything.

And yet they're prepared to die, prepared to put their children at risk, prepared to have their entire tribe. destroyed, annihilated in retaliation for their actions. I mean, I put it to you, Douglas, they've got quite an ideology there. Yeah, they have, definitely, and it should be taken seriously. What is that ideology? And why do they believe it in that way, and why are they willing to die for it? When they say we love death as much as you love life, they mean it.

I give an example in the book of the very sinister bit of footage, have of when one of the leaders of Hamas, who was in Qatar at the time, learned, effectively on camera that three of his sons had been killed in an Israeli Air Force drone strike inside Gaza. His sons were all Hamas leaders as well. But this particular leader, Hania, learns about it and there's not a tear. He immediately prays with gratitude for the fact that his sons have become martyrs. That's something it's hard for the Western mind to comprehend. So yes, they mean it.

They have an eschatological, millenarian worldview which has existed in various forms throughout history and it believes that the ultimate purpose of life is found in violent death taking your enemies with you and that seems inconceivable sitting in London

but it's not inconceivable to them it's eminently reasonable we talk about the things that are inconceivable while sitting in London. When I was reading your book, I was reminded of the sheer horrific brutality, which is inconceivable to the Western mind.

I think it's something that we need to talk about because I think people have forgotten exactly what happened in the events of that day. Well, if they've forgotten, it's because many of them didn't know in the first place. Very strange thing that happened with the 7th October, which was that by the 8th of October, not only were crowds in London and elsewhere already protesting against the Israelis before the Israelis

had done anything in retaliation. We know that the so-called pro-Palestinian marches in London applied for their demonstration permits on the 7th of October. On the 7th, as the massacre was going on, and then had their first protests against Israel as the massacre was going on. And that's a, remarkable thing itself but it meant it was one of the reasons why among other things the world's attention seemed almost immediately to turn not to what had happened what Hamas had done but to what Israel might do in response and there's lots of reasons for that but that's that's one of the sort of news stories that the world loves is not what has been done to the Jewish state but what will the Jewish state do in response and so that meant that a lot of the

just the stories I tell in the book aren't even known about. I mean, they're known about inside Israel, but outside. I mentioned the story of, at one point in the book, of a rather terrible piece of footage. I've seen a number of times of the family living in the South. Oldest boy was at the beach with his friends. Hamas came in from the water and he ran Grishelter with friends

and was killed live on camera because of course these people Hamas are very proud of what they do they wanted to record it so they recorded it and anyhow he was killed with his friends and then the terrorists made their way as it happened to the area his family lived

there were two young boys and their father were alone in the house and they went to the bomb shelter because the rockets had already fired and they went to the bomb shelter and Hamas terrorists made it to them and on the footage you see them go into their bomb shelter Hamas throw a grenade in after the two young boys and their dad and then you see the footage among other things from the living of the house the father had thrown himself on the grenade and one of his sons, I think ten or so had one of his eyes blown out, and the other one lost his hearing.

They're staggering around the main room of their house, unable to comprehend what's happened, obviously. One of them can hardly see, the other one can hardly hear. And the younger ones are saying, he can't be dead, he can't be dead. The old one is saying, what do you mean? Did you see him? And the terrorists who killed their father walks into the room and starts arguing with the children and takes a... opens a fridge and takes a Coca-Cola from the fridge and starts drinking.

And I was actually... I saw a person who did that in the maximum security prison in Israel a year after the 7th. But the gratuitous... savagery is very hard to explain, very hard to comprehend. It seems when I was reading the book that these are people who not only see this as their cause, but also take a gratuitous delight in the viciousness and the callousness. It's not just, it's a terrorist putting a bomb in a building.

it's someone who takes a perverse delight in what they're doing. Yeah, well, I mean, imagine that, imagine what kind of a psychopath you have to be to stumble, stumble, drive into the dance party in Rehame, outside Reim, and, you know, a gang rape a girl and then shoot her in the head. most people wouldn't be proud of that action, but Hamazah, their terrorists are, it's very strange speaking about it in a way

because all the time I have in my head this knowledge that there is this type of modern Holocaust denial of people who think that things I've seen didn't happen. And I knew that would happen pretty soon after the seventh. But, I mean, you know, the accounts, which even the Guardian has published, the accounts of the rape of women as well as men, that morning. Even the Guardian's published that, but still many of the Guardian's readers and others believe that this is fake news. The people who said believe all women in recent years didn't believe the women,

all the people who saw the women. being raped on the 7. And so, as I say, even when recounting some of the atrocities, I know that there is this pond life subsection of the world out there that wants this not to be true. And I think, by the way, there's a very interesting reason for that, which is what always happens if you support any cause, which is you have to try to comprehend it in its entirety. and if you were on the side of the cause that as it were thinks that Hamas is a legitimate expression of Palestinian self-determination and the desire for a peaceful two-state solution, if you believe that is what they are, then when you see what they do, what they did, you have a couple of choices in front of you. You can either say, I see what they have done, or you can say, I refuse to see what they've done. And the attraction of saying, I refuse to see what they've done is that you can continue your previous perception.

If you understand, see, acknowledge what they've done, you have very few options in front of you. I mean, one is that you realize you might be on the bad side. Another would be to say, yeah, okay, my side raped and murdered and killed in cold blood, but it's still a good cause. And that latter is something which if people were being honest, more people would say. But they don't have a courage to say. Let me give an example of an unimportant, absolutely uninformed twerk. but our fellow countryman knowing Jones.

He goes on, he actually saw a bit of the edited atrocity videos that were shown to some journalists. And he came out of that. I don't want to cite, I feel annoyed citing him because he's just so unimportant in some ways. But on the other hand, he is important because he writes to The Guardian and has some following online. He comes out of seeing the atrocity videos

and sort of complains that there's not enough rape in it, basically. So it says, I didn't actually see women being raped. I was like, sorry that the snuff video wasn't to your liking. But why would somebody like him do that? It's because he has a couple of options in his head, as I just mentioned. You know, you either sort of say, yeah, that's my side and that's what they do, but we have to keep going. you have to say, why am I in bed with a death cult? And self-reflection isn't that common among people

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Consult with a tax attorney or financial professional before making an investment decision. There's one aspect of October the 7th that I've found baffling, if I'm being honest, which is the response of the IDF. I think you quoted the time in your book. It took them 14 hours. Correct me if I'm wrong. No, it took parts of the army a long time. Not all the army.

But sorry, go on. But why was that? Because with something, an event as awful as that, that decimated young people, why did it take parts of them so long? It's a very good question. And I have some of the answers. From all the first-hand testimony I collected, I think that there's a number of things that happened.

One was wild confusion. Well, let me do it before that. It was a religious holiday. Simcat Torah was being celebrated, a Jewish religious festival. It was Shabbat. A lot of people are off their phones. Religious Jews were off their phones. This was, by the way, exactly what had happened, 50 years.

earlier when Israel's enemies, neighbors attacked, the Arabs attacked in Yon Yom Kippat. Same thing, 50 years later. It's very interesting. Maybe you could say that's exactly the memory span of people, 50 years, you know. But there were a lot of clever things Hamas did. One was having people come in in uniforms, some of them did, in uniforms that approximated the uniform of soldiers, IDF soldiers. soldiers. Another was that as soon as they overwhelmed the, there was a military base of young women.

It wasn't really military base. It's an observation base in Nahalaz. Once they overwhelmed that base and they took uniforms from the base. Once they killed the first policeman, they took uniforms from the policeman. And so there was an enormous confusion very early on. 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

the sort of ambulance service and medic service that deals with car crashes or anything else in medical emergency he got his alert on his device and he happened to drive into the fire by motorway 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. And why are they shooting? They were Hamas dressed in the soldiers of this dead soldiers uniform. And they held him hostage as a human shield and then shot him at the knee. Fortunately, he survived. The amazing, brave man. So there was a lot of confusion.

There's a young woman who was murdered with her boyfriend. to escape the party and her father described to me how they managed to escape the party in a car and they went to one of the kibbutzs in for safety not realizing that this kibbutz's community was itself having a massacre going on inside and the last conversation that this girl had with her father she said and the police have told us that we should stop here and the police for Hamas, you know. So now, by the point that that started to come out, the army that were flooding South and the self-started is just people who I interview in the book and who just ran to the fight, there was enormous confusion among them. You know, we all know this

from like comparatively minor terrorist atrocities. Something happens and the misreporting that immediately comes out, you know, like another tower has been hit or another. there's another bomb there. In the middle of pandemonium, it's just, it's a mess. And people were driving into the middle of firefights and no idea what they were getting into. There was definitely a point at which, when it looked like the incursion might come all the way up the center of the country,

I think the army, well, they did lock off a part of the South, and trying to fight in these communities, but all the time trying to make sure that the incursion didn't come further up the country. And all the time also trying to get troops up to the north to stop an attack there as well. I mean, there was enormous failure by security and intelligence in Israel. And it's going to have to be learned from. I think everyone should learn from it. But yes, I mean, that's one of the things that happens.

And people who sow terror, so terror. And Hamas were very good at it that morning on their own terms. 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. But, you know, people who, there's a friend of mine, a 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 his south.

And he drove south himself in his car and with his handgun, he hadn't had a revolver, and eight rounds of ammunition. And when he got south, because he started to realize, well, he realized how about it, because he had a friend down there 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 but he he left a video message on his phone for his two young children because he said i knew i wouldn't survive the day and i wanted it from my phone when my phone was found at my body i wanted my two young children to know that i loved them There were a lot of people who did extraordinary things like that.

But, yeah, there was just confusion, a wild, wild confusion. And there will be a lot of self-examination about that for a long time to come. Douglas, one of the things, obviously, in the book, you're not just talking about the Middle East. You're talking about the West and democracies. What do we all learn from what is going on, what has happened, what the reaction has been. What should, what, what, what are we missing?

What should we think about as a result of all of this? I'm always loath to, to, it's, back up moments, but, you know, sometimes people say about the Holocaust, you know, what lessons do we learn from the Holocaust? And there's this terrible presumption in that, which is the Holocaust happened in order to educate us better about something, you know?

to morally improve us. That's not what I mean. No, no, no, I know. I'm just saying that I'm instinctively, as a result, sort of wary of like, what are the lessons? My point is this. You are talking about the West, right? And Israel, you might say,

is an outpost of Western civilization in the Middle East, but it's not the entire West. No. And it seems to me that people who are battling these evil terrorists, which is what they are, have something to, teach us. And you've written about the generation of young people in Israel and how it contrast

with us here in Europe and in America to a lesser extent. That's what I'm asking about. No, no, no, you're quite right. I'm just sort of sensitive. Don't put me in a bucket with Owen Jones. I don't belong there. Absolutely. God forbid. No, I mean, I only say because, yes, there is just always a tendency to do what I was just resisting, you know. But you're right. I mean, there are, there are lessons about the response which i think can definitely be learned um i mean part part of the purpose of this book is not just to give my first hand accounts of the war and and testimony and so on but to say yeah to basically ask what is what is there in this so that we can extrapolate out potentially learn something from and uh

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 that we, if I can say so, probably all to some degree have, 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. 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. Why? Because we're still trying to work out that much more. And it's been much closer to home. And if you want to stir people up in a good way, you will talk about the great

generation and that's absolutely right. It's always been interesting to me that accepted inevitable part of the background of the society that we live in. We 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 and this is absolutely right. But as this receives into history, as the Second World War receives into history, there is this ever sort of present question. which is what would we do 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.

And there's a healthy response to it and asked you towards it and there's probably an unhealthy, there's a set of unhealthy ones as well. But one of the things that is one of the things that is a question is a question. that really has inspired me in the last year and a half has been that for Israel, that question has been answered 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 all comment on, 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 1 and 2, that age.

group in the UK, would you be willing to fight for your country? And you know, you see these polls and I mean, they all have bewildering replies like, you know, like what was a recent one? The vast majority of people in Britain, young people said they wouldn't fight for their country, even in an existential conflict. By the way, there was one recently that said, I think 10% of young people said that they couldn't because they were looking after someone. I thought you were going to say 10% couldn't because they've got ADHD? Can you imagine? No, I'd like to fight for my country's survival.

I'd like to shoot the German, but look. But I am looking after my nan. Because your man is going to be fine once the evil hoards of the society. Anyway, I mean, it's all sort of bewildering stuff like this has come up in recent years. When the war in Ukraine started, when the Russian invasion, there was poles of American people of fighting age. you know, also found, you know, wouldn't be willing to fight for their country, would flee. And, I mean, it's all bewilding. And, of course, there's this thing of, like, actually, what do those polls mean?

America hasn't had a land invasion, you know, it's a founding. 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. And it's the same with young Brits and Western Europeans and so on. It gets a little different the further east you go in Europe now. But all that stuff is inconceivable. There's a long-winded way to just say that the interesting thing is that the same doubts existed in Israel until the seventh. The young Israelis were thought very often by their elders, people who fought after the invasions by the Arabs in 67 and 73. there was this perception that the young Israelis were weak, were just wanted a party in Tel Aviv.

They just wanted to be on Instagram and TikTok and all these sort of things. And then that proved me flat out wrong. 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. This would sound bewildering to some people listening who have read totally false information

about what these soldiers do. But their homeland was attacked, their families were attacked, the relatives and friends were murdered and raped and slaughtered. and 250 taken hostage by the terrorists, which if you extrapolate that number out to America in terms of population, would be 10,000 Americans being taken hostage in one day.

So this happened to their people, to their family, their friends, their nation, their country, and the reservists who were called up, the over request of soldiers to return to services, there's 130% re-enlistment rates after the seventh. People I record in the book flying back from around the world, from holiday or anything like just getting on the first plane, getting back and, you know, being in uniform within 48 hours.

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. 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 metal at the moment of truth, trial. 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, you know? I mean, I've seen young female soldiers, you know, 19, 20 and remarkable young people. And I thought, do you know that your contemporaries in New York are busily eating Oreo cookies in a tent in the middle of some godforsaken campus of being educated into idiocy and they are ignoramus and you're a person you're a real person and a hero and i suppose there's a sort of one of the questions in the book is like where do you who do you want to admire who do you want to turn to the person who wants to cosplay being ahamas in uh columbia or a young man of 19 who manages to kill Sinai. Columbia the University, we should say.

Douglas has nothing, no problem with Colombia. Oh, Colombia, the country is much more civilised in a wonderful place than Colombia, the university. For all our Colombian viewers, my Venezuelan viewers. My Venezuela mother would be disgusted with you, Douglas. But we'll get you back to the interview in a minute. But first, That, my friends, is the sound of another sale on Shopify,

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Because it is the job of the previous generation to educate the young generation. And you talk about some of these professors in your books. book and how, let's be honest, let's call it what it is, virulent, rabid, anti-Semitism, the moment these atrocities happen. Yes. No, you're quite right. 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, what happens when you're tested. One thing is that you will reveal your true self. That's one of the things that's interesting about war.

is that war reveals in some way. It's a terrible thing, but it's war reveals the essence of ourselves in some way. And as I say in the book, it shows us as human beings at our very best and at our very worst. And it's the same in does that moment of test, the moment of a sort of historic test, like the attack on Jewish State on 7th October, 2023, you say it was a test. to people in Israel, but it was also a test to people outside Israel. 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. 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. And by the way, there's another one there which is 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 learns what he describes as the rich history of protests. and says, you know, when I heard about the rich history of protest on my campus, I thought, you know, when things kick off again, I want to be in the center of it. 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 be in the center of the protest at your time. And then, of course, what's interesting is when this happens, find yourself 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? And here's one of the things that I've found very, very interesting in the writing of the book and as I've been thinking about this as I was writing, is I was writing,

is just think about what the, anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian, they tend to say, but they've now melded Hamas and Palestinian caused together to their great detriment, I think. But just consider what these people say they are opposing. They say that they're opposing a settler colonial state. They say that they are opposing genocide. They say they're opposing ethnic cleansing and they're opposing white supremacy. That's all the white supremacy one, of course.

They've obviously never walked down a street in Tel Aviv if they think that Israel as a white supremacist society. But we'll put that to the side for a moment. But all these things that they've been accusing Israel on, I believe are massive forms of projection, what a psychologist would call projection. that is they are accusing Israel of the sins that they have been told they're guilty of. You see, young people in the West, we're sitting in London. A recent poll showed that it's only among the youngest cohort in Britain who agree with a statement that the foundations of Britain are fundamentally racist.

Nobody in the older age groups agrees with them. 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. The Magna Carta has very little to say about race relations. Very, very little to say. You know, a very important part of our history was the Reformation. What did that have to do with racism? Anti-Italianism, 400 years in advance of Italy's creation.

But that's the... There's a generation that's been told they are guilty of these things. They are from a country that is racist. They are from a country that was a colonizer, a country that committed genocide, all of these things. Now, what are you, and it's tight in this book, my last book, The War on the West, because in that book, I was looking at these things that it were being taught. 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, you think your society

is genocidist, you think your society ethnically cleanses, what are you to do about it? In the war in the West, it's not clear. There's no way out, because what can you, even if you believe that these are the case, what could you do about something that happened in 1619 if you're born in 2002? Nothing. Nothing you can do. The past is past. It's nothing you can do. No one to make amends to. Nobody, nothing to atone for. Ah, but if you find a scapegoat who you can accuse of being guilty of all of these things, that's your way out. That's your way out. I can overcome what I'm told I'm guilty of. I can overcome my inherited ethnic cleansing tendency by claiming that the Jewish state is doing it,

even when it's not. And that's one of the things that's going on. 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 where you can, of the anti-Israel protesters in the West saying that, for instance, they dislike colonialism and accusing Israel of colonialism, which is not guilty of, but accusing Israel of colonialism, being supported by and supporting the Revolutionary Islamic Government in Tehran, which is the most colonialist power of our era in the region. How can these people, they know nothing, obviously. But the Iranian Revolutionary Government has spent recent years colonizing, having colonized Iran,

colonizing Iraq, colonizing Yemen, colonizing Lebanon, colonizing Syria, colonizing Gaza. And the supreme leader of Iran writes a letter to students in America, thanking them for their help in the anti-colonial struggle. Might you be on the wrong side, guys? Might you be? Douglas, everything is true. 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.

The stronger the oppressors. And therefore Israel is bad because Israel is strong. Right. Right. 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 to universities. I think the thing that has shocked me the most is what's been happening on the right in relation to this issue. And I wonder if you have any thoughts about it. What are you thinking of?

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 influences and commentators and journalists who engage in many of the same tropes. who talk endlessly about the evil Israel lobby and the way that it's ruined America. That's going to be the title of the episode, by the way. The Israel is really good. I don't think we can pretend that's not there. That's true. And that also requires some explanation, I think.

By the way, I mean, not all of this is caused by anti-Semitism, but anti-Semitism is a huge part of it. And people are so resistant to that. But, I mean, they're supposed to say, oh, you use the term anti-Semite too often. Well, it's because I see anti-Semitism too often. But, yes, it's one of the interesting things. 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. 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. It is like a set of viruses in the human condition, it's able to be a parasite on whatever it can find. And the virus of anti-Semitism can come from every direction. And it can come from the right, it can come from the left. It can come from, I mean, I say at one point using the great, too little red 20th century writer Gregor von Rett's story, 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 and of being very religious and being very secular. There's a set of things. White and non-white as well. White and non-white, absolutely. and it's one of the things that makes it such an interesting subject. But yes, the fact that it can come from every political side seems to me to be obvious. Now, we knew that in the 20th century,

the most lethal form of anti-Semitism came in the form of Nazi anti-Semitism. Of course, I mean, Stalin had his own anti-Semitism as well. And there was never a lack of left-wing or right-wing, anti-Semitism. I had thought that there was a cordon sanitaire on the right about anti-Semitism, which broadly speaking still exists in Europe. I think it really does exist in Europe, actually. 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. Much easier if you're left. like Melanchon in France far left he can be anti-Semitic more easily than if Marine Le Pen for instance was to try this this rubbish 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 and although I think that the cordon has held much more firmly on the right it's definitely been breached

in places. And it shows how deep the appeal of the Jewish scapegoat is. Why is that, Douglas? Why is that trouble? Why is that? Because the Jews aren't the only Jews in the world.

You know this very well. These groups that are middlemen, minorities, as Thomas Somm calls them, they have been persecuted all over the place. It's the Indians in Africa. It's the Chinese who live outside of China, et cetera. Why are people tempted to go for this? Why is this such a thing?

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. 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. 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 Egyptian. how this works with the right I think it's a again it's a kind of mirror to their failings and it reflects what their fears are what they lack it provides the perfect thing to blame

I was completely persuaded when I read Girard some years ago Violence and Sacred completely persuaded by the scapegoat theory of history. It's so redolent. And I think the specific bit of what you're asking, I think,

can be answered in this way. I think there is now a reward for playing with the darkest stuff again. And I think that's how I said. I've said this in the past in relation to the left and of As I say, every political side has the ability to go into disaster. We all know that. We should know that. I believe that the left has played with the dangerous stuff very glibly for a long time.

Let's do the obvious, like wearing a shake of a t-shirt. Most obvious example. There's sort of a slight joy in the dangerous. dangerous stuff. Now, is it ignorant? Yeah, of course it's ignorance. Is it also sometimes a deliberate provocation? Yes. Is it sometimes trolling? Yes. Is it sometimes actually something that would reveal murderous desires? Yes. Yes. But now you see there is an ecosystem of people who would like to do that on the right. the most charitable interpretation would be, again, to say they don't know what they're dealing with. They just can't know what they're dealing with. And the less charitable interpretation is of some, yeah, they do.

They do. 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. But isn't it easier always to say, there's a secret reason why it went wrong that's been withheld from you? 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. That's a great title. It is, Jack. But it'll do better than... Yes, it's why we don't do that. Right. Because it's reprehensible.

It's reprehensible and it's crappy and it's low-grain. It's, you know, there was an English humorist in the last century who discovered that the three best-selling things were, the best-selling subject, the things that guaranteed your best-seller were if you wrote about Hitler or if you wrote about golf, or you wrote about cats, and he produced a book called Golfing for Cats with a swastika on the cover. And it's like that with YouTube videos and so. 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. Yeah, right. But I'm going to tell you anyway. And that's a place some people in the ecosystem are in. I think it's reprehensible. I think you should be pushed back against. But it's the reminder of the nature of certain intellectual viruses. Douglas, just one very quick thing.

You said something I just want you to clarify, because it's interesting to me. You said that people on the right fear certain things. What do you mean exactly? Which bit? 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 or the Jews have.

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 sit. Now, again, lots of criticisms, but don't kill the Golden Goose, you know what I mean. 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, you would end up having to say, well, World War I and World War II. That's where all the confidence starts to drain out of Western society. Why? Two World War is pretty good reasons.

You might be tempted to say, well, how could we reset to before that? or what went wrong that led to that? 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 it must be nice to minorities, for instance. 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 visit.

Before you know it, it's one of the interesting things. 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. And I think that's what I'm seeing. So that's why Winston Churchill is the greatest villain of World War II now, according to some people. Well, that's a very interesting one.

Taka had this lunatic pseudo-historian on, who I was very interested to see when my friend Andrew Roberts, the historian, was invited to debate this pseudo-historian. The pseudo-historian said, I couldn't debate Andrew Roberts because I've got all these books and learned from his books, but I'm not able to disagree with him. Well, it's nice you were honest.

Nice, you were honest. But, I mean, that guy, that guy, I mean, no one's ever heard him before, no one will hear of him again, I assume. I mean, he is a sort of daughter-didact, self-taught, pretend his story. 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.

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. And, I mean, once you end up in the position of, of, I wrote about, 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. What are the people doing that really doing? I mean, trying something out, looking for someone to blame, doing something edgy, and sometimes, again, doing something much more dangerous than that.

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. And I also know what's happening with that, which is part of a problem. process of deliberate demoralization. That's what the left was doing. The left was saying when it was attacking Churchill, we're going to take out your biggest hero. If you're a British person, you're going to take out your biggest hero. And the few fringe figures on the right who are trying to do that with Churchill seemed to be doing it for the same reason, because they're saying, your country's no good at the moment, and we're going to take out your biggest hero. And then you'll realize you're wrong.

something like this. 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. I was in Georgia, America recently, and was talking with somebody about this,

an academic. And he had a lovely insight. I'm going to steal in future. It's about Abraham Lincoln. A Lincoln scholar said, you know, Abraham Lincoln didn't solve every problem, but he did solve a big problem of his time. And it's the same with Churchill.

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. And it's interesting when we're talking about anti-Semitism, there's one type of anti-Semitism that you touch on the book, which is anti-Semitism within Islam. And you have a very interesting quote in it from Medi Hassan.

Oh, yes. You're a great hero. Yeah. Dear, dear friend. One of my closest enemies. And yes, that's right. Medi Hassan accidentally some years ago said something true. And I quote it in the book.

which he read an article for New States from in, I think, 2013 or so. I was a labor 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, and interviewed on Pakistani television after being released from prison, said that the reason why he'd gone to prison was as a Jews. Now, you and I might have. ask, were the Jews making you text? Did the Jews push the Polish gentleman in front of your car, as you would text driving? We have no explanation for this from Lord Ahmed. But the fact he did that

made that claim, and when it came public in Britain, it caught a certain amount of attention. Mady Hassan wrote a column in the New Sexman at the time saying something true, as I say, must have been wrung out of him. He said, every Muslim reading this one, know what I'm talking about when I say that it's our dirty little secret. He said, he said the anti-Semitism in the Muslim community in Britain, he said, is, quote, rife and commonplace. Rife and commonplace. He said, every Muslim reading this will know what I mean.

Every dinner table, there'll be something about the Jews not being in the Twin Towers on 9-11. There'll be something about the Jews killing Princess Diana and so on and so forth. I believe him. And I believe that, and I know because I've traveled enough of the Muslim world to see the the rife anti-Semitism that exists in Muslim countries, and the rife anti-Semitism that exists in Muslim communities in the West. And I think it's a major, major problem. And I think that many Jews don't want to face up to that.

Many non-Jews don't want to face up to that. Hardly any Muslims want to face up to that. And even old media never repeated that point. but it's manifestly true 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 October onwards in the West have been led by Muslims

that the political attacks on Israel have been led by Muslims in the rest of the West is because whether it's the former First Minister of Scotland or Muslim Minister in Australia, they cannot bear the Jews defending themselves. They cannot bear it because of this issue of the self-esteem of Islam, the self-esteem of Muslims. You just notice it.

Just for God's sake, let's be honest about it. A million Uyghur Muslims have put into camps in China And has the center of London been ground to a halt week after week by Muslims and others about this? No, no, no, no. More Muslims were killed in the Syrian Civil War since 2011. More Muslims were killed every year of the last decade in Assad's civil war than have been killed in the wake of the invasion of Israel on the 7th. just every six months or so it has been saying just in Syria look at Yemen or they don't care about any of that they care when the Jews defend themselves why

because they can't bear it it hurts their self-esteem and one of the explanations I mentioned the book is that's because of the core of Islam and just let's just face up to it for God's sake core of Islam is a belief that Islam is a final revelation from God and if you believe you've got the final revelation from God, then things should be going well for you. You know, things should be going well. And at the very least, they should be going better than the guys who rejected the revelation from God. 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. This is like the biggest hit, not just at the core of your self-esteem, this is a hit at the core of your religion. Why didn't our revelation bring loads of great stuff with it? Well, that's a painful question for Muslims to ask themselves. But, I mean, I refuse to not identify it, and it's so darn obvious, so darn obvious.

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. And you have a particular theory for this, which I find quite interesting in the book. You told about the meeting. I think it was in late 1930s, early 1940s,

between the Grand Mufti and Adolf Hitler. 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. after the end of World War II, the Nazi leaders in Europe were either hanged or slid away to South America like rats. And that's why I say, I mean, on the right and broadly speaking on the left, after that there was a recognition that's bad.

Don't do that again. but the Grand Mufti who raised his own SS division goes to Adolf Hitler to volunteer his help to get an SS division in land of Israel to get the Jews out of the region he returns home

he returns back to Cairo 946, 947 and is a hero and I say in the book I said this is something people should know more about. That is one of the reasons why the basilis, the virus of anti-Semitism comes back to the Muslim world, a victor.

And if this was any other part of society, we would say, right, left, Christian, whatever. But the fact that Muslim anti-Semitism has not been confronted, It's to my mind a great problem. Some people watching might think, well, why is it such a big problem? Why is, you know, I'm not Jewish or, you know, whatever.

It's really that one of the things you can tell with, again, in this case, 100% accuracy is that anti-Semitism is the sign of a society going rotten. It is one of the things you do when everything else is going wrong. So it's not about Jews. and Muslims, it's not about Jews and non-Jews. It's about the fact that if you understand that there are certain things that our species falls into, traps, you know, we're not any more evolved than we were thousands or tens of thousands of years ago.

There are just traps we fall into. This is one of the big traps, and if your society falls into it, it goes off the cliff. if it tolerates it. And I suppose that's one of the many reasons I care why I've devoted so much time to this and so much energy and seem too much too up close for my liking, but this is why it matters. Douglas has been an absolutely brilliant interview.

We could carry on the conversation. In fact, we're going to do that over on our substack where our supporters get to ask their questions for you. But the final question is always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? You've answered this question so many times. I'm not answering it this time.

I'm not answering it. I've been surprised by that question every time. Why do I always forget you do that? Why haven't I, by now, after all of these years, come up with some brilliant zinger of a rejoinder? You can talk about the trans issue if you want. Oh, one of the great joys is that I no longer feel any need to talk about the trans thing. Everyone else is talking about it. Fantastic.

Head on over to substackles either. Can you please shed a light on the claims that Israel holds many people in prisons, detained without putting them on trial or even formally accusing them of a crime. Hmm. Many of them are supposed to be underage.