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Language: en
These are not academic questions. We are
waging both economic and kinetic wars
right now as we violently renegotiate
the world order. How we decide to move
forward will affect generations to come.
And few people have thought more about
these issues than Douglas Murray. As a
war correspondent, best-selling author,
and lauded public intellectual, he's
been at the heart of many of these
crucial debates and can help paint a way
forward. And today, he's with us. So
without further ado, I bring you Douglas
Murray. How do we make sense of the fact
that we can't even agree on who the good
guys are and the bad
guys? Well, I I mean that's a perennial
problem. Of course, it's it's it's been
something that in any conflict, any any
political situation is is is normal. I
think that the there's been a change
since the age of social media, which
I've uh described before as being the
move from the era about
disagreeing um about our interpretation
of events to not agreeing on what just
happened. In other words, having a
different opinion is very 20th century.
In the 21st century, we have different
facts. And I think that that is one of
the things in our era which has proved
especially divisive. Um has all sorts of
uh positives uh greater access to
knowledge, greater access to a wider
range of opinion. These are all good
things. But I think that the uh
increasing inability to agree on what
just happened is one thing that is
massively dividing all of our societies.
Is there a world on the other side of
that or do we have to somehow someway
come to a shared understanding of facts
or this is just uh there is no way to
reach common ground? Well, I I I mean my
hope is that there is is a way we'll
never find common ground, but we can we
can we can agree on certain uh
principles perhaps or say what the
ground is that we're standing on uh and
whether it's desirable ground. I mean, I
think that the era we're in, I've
occasionally described as what I call
the second dark
age. That is, the first dark age was
characterized by an inability to access
knowledge or information. Uh, literally
people didn't even have access to or
knowledge of the one holy book. Um, in
our age, it's quite different. Our dark
age is characterized not by an inability
to access knowledge but by a surit of
knowledge, a surfitit of information
and stories, details and much more. So
that none of us can actually be on top
of everything, but there's an
expectation that you're meant to have
opinions about everything. Uh I've
characterized this as the um the oddity
that you you will have noticed as well
online of the people who were are
experts on tariffs this week were
experts on Ukrainian mineral deposits uh
last month and before that they were
experts on how to withdraw from
Afghanistan and also on uh pandemics.
Some of these things are so important
that we do have to have well we we have
certainly have the right to have but we
most sensible people would want to form
opinions about them but even that is
dictated increasingly by what is pushed
your way uh by the confirmation bias
that we're all have a tendency to
already hardwired into us but the
confirmation bias of the algorithms and
much more. Um, but I my hope is is that
we can push through this second dark age
as we did the first as a species and
that we will get a better knowledge.
Maybe it'll come in our lifetimes, maybe
afterwards. I hope in our lifetimes of
where we can actually agree on what just
happened and then get to the substance.
All right, talk me off a ledge. Um I
have so my whole thing in life is I'm
not interested in being right but I'm
deeply interested in identifying the
right answer. An answer that has high
predictive validity that if I think in
this way make these base assumptions
that I can both look backwards at
history and go yeah that all makes sense
based on what I believe and then ideally
that means that looking forward I'll
have some sense too much complexity to
get things perfectly right. Um but am
always trying to update my thinking. The
way that I think about this moment is uh
it's this profound renegotiation of
everything in a time where we don't
share facts and more importantly in a
time from where I'm sitting anyway where
we don't share morality. And so we're we
don't have an anchor by which we can
navigate through these things. And so
when I think about what happened in the
cold war against Russia when it was US v
Russia um they it was a cold war but
they were fighting over whose ideology
was better and there was an actual
winner like the USSR ran out of economic
steam and they were no longer able to
fight and if they wanted to have any
sort of allies whatsoever they had to
tear the wall down. they had to give up
their system. And you said when you were
talking that we pushed through the dark
ages. And when you said that, I thought,
oo, there there's a lot of uh lives lost
in that very simple statement. And so my
concern is that this moment is going to
be devastating in loss of life uh as the
whole world sort of gets thrown up in
the air. Whether it's the economic
warfare between America and China,
whether it's the hot wars that you've
been um reporting from on the lines of
Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Gaza.
Um, do you think that that is too dark
of a view and that we're going to be
able to find a way out of this without
fighting for supremacy of
ideology or do we have to fight?
Uh, we'll see. I mean I'm very fond of
quoting uh something that CS Lewis said
in a sermon in Oxford in 1939 when he
pointed out that although that the age
that his country my country of birth was
in was not in a propitious moment uh
nevertheless he said he said human life
was always lived on the edge of a
precipice that if you look back even
times that seemed relatively uh uh
peaceful like Europe Europe in the late
19th century when you look back at it
were also like our age like CS Lewis's
age were filled with alarms and panics
and crises and much more. The important
point he makes, which is one that I've
always tried to live by and which I uh
always say, particularly when I have the
opportunity to speak to university
students or anyone young, is to say what
CS Lewis went on to say, which is um
that if mankind had put off the search
for beauty, meaning, purpose until the
conditions were right, the search would
never have begun.
And I take great comfort in that that
although you always live in the middle
of the
whirlwind. Um know that that doesn't
mean you should be distracted from doing
what you should do. Um does this moment
feel different to you though? Like as
somebody who grew up in the 80s, this
moment feels distinctly different. It's
extremely hard to say because uh
everybody has the ability in the rear
view mirror. everything looks clear. Um
I'm very fond of a quote from the great
Czech writer Milan Kandera who said in a
book of his in the '9s testaments
betrayed he said um mankind walks
through life uh uh in a fog and we
stumble along and we create a path as we
walk it. That's not the interesting
thing. The interesting thing as Candera
said is that if you look back, you see
the man and you see the path, but you
don't see the fog.
Everything looks clear in hindsight. In
hindsight, people of our generation
might look back and view the 1980s as a
a time of in relative tranquility. But I
have no doubt in my reading of the era,
talking to people from the era, said it
felt very different from that at the
time. Everyone now expected that the
Soviet Empire would crumble, but in the
1980s, by no means everybody did. Same
thing with the 1990s. Some people look
at it and say, "Look what a Hian time it
was." Uh, the whole world was talking
about a single [ __ ] Um, but in
fact, the '9s were filled with their own
crises and alarms and uh and so on. So
yes, it it always feels different. It
always will feel like that. And um sure,
there are certain things that
characterize our own era and are
particularly concerning, but I don't
think that they're uniquely so. And I
don't think they're uh irreoverably so.
I certainly don't think we should be
demoralized in the face of that. I like
that take. Uh let me give you why I
think that um in my language there's
higher predictive validity to see this
moment as a different time. Certainly
from uh my lifetime. I'm sure this is
repeated in history a gazillion times.
But uh there was what I'll call moral
clarity in the 80s. America good, Russia
bad. It was really simple. And so we uh
I mean you're never going to get 100% of
anything, but it really felt like uh
everybody was prepared to fight for
America. We had the confidence of our
beliefs. We felt good about who we were,
about our country. And one of the things
that your book really does a phenomenal
job of is holding up um a morally
repugnant act and then following the
chain of but there are a whole lot of
people that don't think this is morally
repugnant. Now, it may just be that with
social media, you can see all the people
that thought the same thing back in the
day. You just couldn't see them. But
now, I'm being confronted with, whoa, I
I don't see what the nonre
relativistic moral ground is that I'm
meant to stand on. And that makes us
feel particularly strange because the
internal fighting inside of my own
country, uh, certainly the UK has got
its woes as well. And that makes and
obviously I'm I'm very familiar with
your uh work on the strange death of
Europe. And so it's like that feels like
the very thing that set the stage. And
so that book and this book to me feel
like there's some compendium nature to
them. And it's like failing to get that
common ground leads to the strange death
of Europe. I agree. I I'm I actually
moved to America some years ago, which
um you might take as being uh telling in
itself about my views of of the old
continent. I haven't given up on it
entirely. that one of the things that
has concerned me in recent years is that
what I charted uh in the the let's say
the demoralization among other things of
Europe in the last 80 years a
demoralization that starts from very
obvious reasons
um ends up with a sort of a healthy
societal
self-criticism turning into a very
unhealthy societal self-loathing and
eventually self-destruction.
uh this is a very complicated process
because as I as I've often said western
self-criticism the tradition of
self-criticism is one of the great uh
advantage points of the western uh
civilization. It's it's it's it's good
to adapt when you're doing something
that's wrong. You don't want to keep
doing something that's wrong either
technologically or morally or anything
else. uh that but there is a some liinal
moment when the self-criticism can be
pushed upon you by people who want you
to go further down that path because
they want you to do it for a reason. And
I believe that America has undergone
maybe resisting at the moment a bit more
but has undergone a period of similar
demoralization and self laceration to
the version that Europe has been through
in recent decades. And what I mean by
that really
is where American
selfcriticism turns into the self-hatred
which has been pushed on many young
Americans in particular where instead of
believing if there was a time when young
Americans brought up to believe that
America was uniquely good, they are very
often brought up now to believe that
America was uniquely bad. And if any
group abroad or other system of
governance uh may in the past have been
portrayed as innately inferior,
uh a generation is to a very great
extent being brought up to today to
believe that any other form of
government or system of values is
innately superior to ours. I think
that's where the problem comes for
America. I analyzed that quite a bit in
my last book, The War on the West, where
I was very interested in why America was
engaging in this not healthy
revisionism, but deeply unhealthy
self-destruction
uh whereby everything from the origins
of America onwards were being seen in
the most negative light. I regard that
as being a civilizational turning point
because I think it's perfectly natural
for any group of people wherever they're
born in the world to have a natural
predisposition to feeling that their way
of doing things is good and that it's an
unhealthy position for any society
uh let alone the world's foremost
democracy to get into the position of
thinking that anything they do in the
world or at home is uniquely bad. And
and that's where that's where I start
have started to worry in recent years
about America following Europe's path.
Yeah. So reading the most recent book on
democracies and death cults, um you're
really confronted with a stark reality
of you don't mean this metaphorically.
So, if if you don't mind, walk us
through what is a death cult uh and why
in the book because the book is largely
I don't know if you'll like this uh
encapsulation, but it seems so true to
me. It's largely a um looking at October
7th and what happened in Israel with the
Hamas attack through that lens. And so,
it is this unrelenting
um recantation of all the things that
happened. And it was stark reading it.
like I've obviously been paying
attention to it, but whoa, like when you
hear it one after another, like
following that timeline, it's is pretty
grave. And so I walked away, and I don't
know if you wanted me to, but I walked
away feeling um coming to the conclusion
that solving this problem is going to
require a total victory on one side or
the other. And we'll we'll get into that
because I have beliefs that I think uh
YouTube at large takes deep exception
with. And so we'll see if if you can
beat it out of me or if we uh rile each
other up. I don't I don't know how
that'll play out. But um one, does that
feel like a fair read of the book? And
then two, what is a death cult? Very, uh
succinctly.
Uh firstly, uh I don't mean the book to
be unrelenting. Uh I think I tried to
relent a bit at various points. I
certainly try to finish by the end on a
somewhat positive note, which I feel
it's not faked by any means.
on democracies and death cults starts
with the morning of October the 7th
because for me um several things
happened that I thought were enormously
telling and that's why I spent most of
the last year and a half in uh the the
area covering the war uh in Israel,
Gaza, Lebanon, elsewhere. I've also been
in uh Ukraine and so on.
It's largely about the Israel Gaza war
because uh when the news started to come
out from Israel on the 7th uh having
reported from there and been there many
times I was first of all of course
horrified by the the things that were
coming out I secondly knew that um this
story of what had happened the murder of
1200 civilians kidnapping of 250
civilians from Israel by Hamas was going
to be um passed over quite swiftly
because the world media for various
reasons uh tends to like to talk about
Israeli retaliation more than they do
the thing that's caused Israel to
retaliate. But I uh I I was aware from
24 hours after the massacre. Firstly,
that I needed to go to Israel to get
firsthand what had happened, but
secondly, I became aware that there was
going to be something going very badly
wrong here at home in America and in
other Western countries. And I knew that
because I had a glimpse of it in Times
Square on October the 8th when the
massacre was still going on. And I went
down to Times Square because there was a
protest, a pro- Hamas protest, an
anti-Israel protest that was glorifying
the massacres.
And I thought, "Okay, get ready. This is
going to get a heck of a lot worse
because this is before any Israeli
reaction to the atrocities had even
started."
You ask what a death cult is. I I mean
in a way I I put the the title on
democracies and death cults. I put it in
clear um antithesis because I believe
they are uh absolute opposites. We've
seen many death cults in history. What
unites them is they do not share what
many people in America and the rest of
the west assume is the
natural predisposition of mankind. Ask
your average college student, you know,
do people in the world feel roughly the
same everywhere and want the same
things? And they'll say, yes, of course.
Everyone in the world basically wants
the same thing. And my inclination,
having traveled very widely in the
world, is to say, whoa, hang on
there. Many people want different
things. And the more you travel in the
world, the more you realize that. But
the thing that I write about here is is
something which many people most people
in in the world of peace simply cannot
comprehend. And that is that there are
some people who literally not only do
not value life but literally worship
death.
We have seen this many times before in
history. In the 1930s in Spain, a great
Spanish philosopher of the era, Miguel
Dunamuno, who wrote the book The Tragic
Sense of Life, gave a lecture at his
university in which the Francoist, the
fascist students, who he was trying to
pull back from the
brink, resist his attempt to um civilize
them and end up chanting Viva
Lamuete, long live death. And Unimuno
leaves and dies shortly afterwards. An
extremely disappointed and disillusioned
man as he says this necrilic chant long
live death. Well, Hamz like Hezbollah
uh is a similar death cult. Its leaders,
its members literally have spent decades
saying we worship death. We love death.
They say we love death more than you
love life. The now late leader of
Hezbollah and Azarella said for years
the great weakness of the west is that
they love life whereas we do not. We
love
death. And the fact that that exists is
an extremely troubling and difficult
fact. And it's a particularly troubling
and difficult fact for Israel because it
happens to have neighbors who have this
view. Really fast. Is that
definitionally born of Islam? Uh or is
this just a an algorithm that can be
tripped inside of the human mind? Uh as
I hope I show by giving the example of
1930s Spain, it is something that can be
uh um created for many many different
backgrounds, many d directions. It can
come from the left, it can come from the
political right. It can come from uh the
poor, the rich, uh uh the advantaged,
the disadvantaged. It can come from
absolutely anywhere. But in the case of
the death cults that Israel faces, Hamas
and Hezbollah and their backers in the
Iranian revolutionary government in
Iran, it obviously has its origins in a
very violent, the most violent and most
appalling version of the Islamic faith
uh which is the jihadist death cult.
That's yes believes in martyrdom. the
the highest value in life is to die in
the cause
and indeed to take other people with you
to kill and to die in the name of the
cause. Some people may think I'm
exaggerating this. I'm not at all. I
mean I give example in the book of the
Hamaz leader Ishmael Haneir who was
living in a luxury apartment in in
Qatar. Um he gets the news that his
three sons who are also Hamas leaders
have been killed in an air strike in
Gaza. And he's absolutely joyful that
they have
been. Much of the western mind cannot
comprehend how any father could be
joyful that his sons have all died. But
he is because he believes that they have
died in this cause.
And uh I believe that this is very very
hard for the western mind to
comprehend. The people in the south of
Israel who stared this in the face
literally on October the 7th, they know
what this is now. I don't think many
other people in in the rest of the West
in Western Europe or America, North
America do understand. But there is this
follow-on question which I spend much of
the book meditating on which is why are
there so many people in our own midsts
who want to excuse or to uh promote or
to uh even
admire the death cults. And I think this
is a very very important question for us
to ask because we should have some
ability as we were saying earlier to
have the zones of agreement and the
zones of agreement should
include not supporting the deliberate
rape of women. Not Yeah. One one would
hope. All right. I have a read on this.
I'll be very curious to get your I'm
sure far more thoughtful take. But uh as
a student of history, I look at that and
I recognize in what's going on in Israel
and Gaza the revolutionary mindset and
the framers of the constitution here in
the US understood very clearly the
reason that what happened in France or
any time that you have a revolution it
tends to lead to tyranny is because once
you click over that algorithm once it
turns on in the human mind everything
becomes about revolution. It is a
revolutionary frame of reference in
which you can tear anything down. Uh no
one prizes stability. It's fighting for
the sake of that idea, whatever that
idea is. And once you have this thing is
worth dying for to actually manifest
that in the world, you've got to share
that idea. You've got to get that idea
to take shape in the minds of everybody
around you. And once you create that, or
I should say once that momentum gets
going, it is extremely hard to stop. And
so hearing Alexander Hamilton and George
Washington both talk about like, hey,
we've got to get these guys to chill
because otherwise we're going to go from
overthrowing the British government to a
civil war that just tears us apart.
We've got to get people outside of that
mindset. And so if I always look at
humans as a super organism and there's
just so many patterns that we don't feel
as individuals, we always just feel like
we see the world the way that it
actually is. All these other idiots,
they're caught up in something. But if
you instead go, "Oh, this is this is a
thing inside the human mind that has a
justification, which is we um I have a
thesis that humans as a superorganism
abore uh plateaus." And so we have
something in us that runs that says,
"Oh, we're getting mired in something.
We're getting stuck. We're being
oppressed." Whatever. Boom. That
algorithm kicks in. The first person
realizes they would rather die than sit
still. We get thrilled by that. I mean,
there are plenty of people in history
where we're like, yo, they died for the
cause. It's incredible. You talk about
some people in your book that were like,
we we revere them for their willingness
to go try to save lives and to be
willing to give over their life. We'll
be back with the show in just a moment.
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advertisement. And now, let's get back
to the show. For Israel, this is a
dangerous moment where now they run the
risk of becoming the death cult who's
like, "Well, we now have our thing that
we're willing to fight to the death
for." Do you see that risk? There's
always risks. Um, and as I say, from
every direction. Um, I believe, however,
there is every difference in the world
morally and strategically
uh to fight uh for death and to fight
for life.
I believe there's all the difference in
the
world of um carrying out an
unprovoked unnecessary attack on
peaceful people in their homes on a
Saturday
morning and for instance going in to
Hamas
stronghold and trying to either kill the
leaders of Hamas or get the hostages
back. Uh I believe that although
uh some people claim that there is no
difference between these two things
because if death is the result it's it
all comes out in the wash. I disagree
with that. I think that uh somebody who
goes into a firefight to save lives as I
give examples of in the book many and I
could have given many many more. Going
into a a place of conflict to save lives
is the exact opposite of going into a
conflict with the express desire to take
as much human life as
possible. And Hamas's aim everywhere
always like Hezbollah is to take as much
human life as possible. And even and
this is one of the added perversions
even to to make your enemy take as many
lives on your own side as possible. I
believe that's a very very different
thing. Uh these two things stand as
opposites and uh I'm very happy to to
argue through why uh uh
that exists that difference. I think
that would be helpful because one thing
I want to know is what do you anchor
your morality on? And the bad news for
this conversation is I share your anchor
or at least as I interpret you. Um, but
some people clearly they need they need
an anchor and it seems like they're
anchoring off of uh weak, good, strong,
bad. Very simplistic but it's an anchor
and it's giving a lot of fervor to the
people in the west. Um, what what do you
anchor the what is to you and I obvious
that if you're fighting for life that's
very different than if you're fighting
for death.
Well, one thing is that I'm uh unashamed
to say that I'm on the side of my own
civilization. Um, I'm I I'm on my own
side as it were. I I want uh my own uh
societal side to win out against uh when
it's challenged in a fight. I want it to
win against other visions of how to
organize human life. I'm on the side of
the democracies winning against
communism, but that's a fight from
previous generation. I'm obviously on
the side of the democracies that fought
against and destroyed Nazi fascism.
I believe that in a conflict between
your your friends, your allies
um against people who are not just their
enemies but yours as well. It isn't that
hard to know which side to be on. That
doesn't mean of course you shouldn't be
or can't be critical of your side's
actions and certainly when your side
does something which is wrong that
should of course uh uh uh be criticized.
But I think that one of the things that
has caused a lot of uh disputation in
the last 18 months since this war's been
going
on is that first of all I mean many
people do not actually understand
anything about the nature of war. I have
yet to hear from any of my
critics any scenario in which they know
how you would rescue 250 people from a
densely packed area in which they're
being hidden underground by a group that
uses its own civilians as human shields
and uses its tunnel networks to store
its weaponry. that literally as a leader
of Hamas said the other month when he
was interviewed on Arabia, the
interviewer said to him in Arabic, why
uh why don't you allow the Gazan
civilians to shelter for many bombings
uh from the air? Why don't you allow the
shelter in the extensive tunnel network
which you spent 18 years building in the
Gaza? This Hamaz leader said, "But the
the tunnels are not for the citizens of
Gaza. They're for our fighters and for
our rockets." Um, I have yet to hear a a
decent explanation from anyone, a
military historian or an amateur or
interested observer or anyone else. I've
yet to hear anyone say how they in a
situation like this would retrieve the
hostages and destroy the leadership of
the terrorist death cult that abducted
them and killed 1,200 of their fellow
countrymen. And just to put it in some
perspective, uh I know your audience
will be able to understand this, but I
know some audiences who haven't been
able to understand the idea of
extrapolation out from population size.
Uh Israel is a is a country of only 9
million people and obviously uh the
United States is many times that uh size
population wise. But if you look if you
uh do the uh extrapolation of numbers
out uh what Israel suffered on the 7th
of October is the equivalent of about
44,000 Americans being murdered on one
day on the American homeland soil and
about 10,000 Americans being abducted
from their homes and held in a
neighboring country. Nobody can persuade
me that if 10,000 Americans were being
held
hostage and 44,000 have been massacred
and raped much more. Nobody can persuade
me that America wouldn't want to have a
strategy to reverse that, to address it,
to stop it from ever happening again.
And if you do agree with that, what is
your plan for retrieving the hostages
and for killing the leaders who did this
or bringing them to justice?
The bad news is their reasoning. They're
they're going to have a [ __ ] answer.
They'll give you one. They're going to
say that's bad. You go in softer. You
negotiate. You blah blah blah. All the
things that will never be able to run
the counterfactual. But I think that
there is a moment earlier in what you
were saying that you actually schism
away from the people that you're trying
to get that answer from. And I think I I
am very much mind readading and so
you're closer to the problem. By all
means, um, correct me if you see
something wrong, but this is my mental
map. uh that they would say uh that's
the price you pay. You are a colonial
power. You have uh been occupying
people. This is an act of resistance.
And yeah, you don't have the right full
stop to come in and have a
disproportionate response. So I don't
know what you want me to say. You don't
get to. You need to negotiate. You need
to find a way to free these hostages.
That's nonmilitary. Like that's crazy.
Well, um, yes, Israel is accused of
every single sin that the rest of the
West is accused of. It's accused of
colonialism just as America is accused
of colonialism, just as Britain is
accused of colonialism. By the way, in
the case of Britain, it's a valid
accusation. I have to concede. Um, but
uh um not for some centuries, I should
stress. Um, in the case of Israel, it's
also accused of u genocide and and much
more which it's not guilty of and which
I lay out why that's obviously a slur in
the book. But America is accused of the
same
things. So just just run with me for a
moment on this. If America is uh being
accused of all the same things that
Israel has been accused of, in what
world would we say that the murder of
thousands of Americans on American soil
and the abducting of many thousands more
is a reasonable response to historical
injustices carried out by Americans who
are long
dead. Um, you don't even have to do that
with this country. You could do it with
any even rival country or even a
challenger country or even a country
whose leadership professes itself to be
an enemy of the United States like the
revolutionary Islamic government in
Iran. The revolutionary Islamic
government in Iran that backs Hamz,
Hezbollah, the Houthis and others who
are waging war on Israel and others.
Um they uh they have had Iran uh in uh
captivity that regime since
1979 and belleaguered and and much
oppressed one of the great civilizations
I think in the world the Persian uh
people.
Um, if however a group was to
uh go into Iran, select peaceful people
going about their lives, burn them alive
in their homes, kidnap other Iranians
and so on.
I could make uh uh the the argument that
and I will will make it quickly now that
Iran the Iranian revolutionary
government today is literally a
colonialist power. It is the most
colonialist power in the region perhaps
in the world. In my own lifetime it
obviously colonized Iran. The Ayatollah
went on to colonize Iraq after the
vacuum left by America. It colonized
Syria. It colonized and helped to
destroy the formerly gray country of
Lebanon and it has colonized Yemen. So
Iran in our own day is literally guilty
of the greatest amount of colonialism of
anyone in the era. And yet, if on a
Saturday morning any group went in and
started randomly slaughtering and raping
Iranian women because of this
colonialism and said, "Well, you're
guilty by dent of being
Iranian." I would like to think that
everybody in my friendship circle and
anyone I wanted to know would say, "It
doesn't matter. That's still wrong.
Um, why has that ability to make a
judicious
judgment
seemed to evade so many people in the
West? Why does so many people in elite
institutions
from UCLA to and Berkeley to Colombia
and much more? Why do they find it so
hard to believe all
women or not victim
blame? Why do they want to make excuses
for the most
violent anti-semitic but also
anti-western terrorist groups of our
time? It suggests a profound breakdown
in our ability to be
judicious for sure. And it's one that
should trouble us all.
Do you have an answer for that? Like
what what algorithm are they running
that makes that so it's it's conflict
free in their mind? Like watching uh
even I mean this is obviously much
lighter than some of the things you just
painted, but watching Claudine Gay um
try to tap dance, use legal language
around the genocide. Yeah, genocide. It
does create a problem. I'm just going to
say it. Uh she just wasn't going to
bring herself to do that. Um, but I
think, and look, I'm often accused of
mind readading, and I will admit I try
to mind readad as much as possible. Uh,
I feel like I have a high predictive
validity take on what she is doing. Um,
do you have a sense of the narrative
that she tells herself or whatever that
governs her morality? Yeah, absolutely.
Um, when those three university uh
presidents sat before that congressional
committee,
uh, I knew that they were reading out
uh, statements that they had been given
by the university's legal team, uh, they
wanted to make sure they weren't opened
up to class action lawsuits and much
more. And since many Jewish students on
their campuses and others have been
racially attacked in the last 18 months,
just two days ago at Princeton
University, Jewish students had chance
of of being told to go back to their own
homelands, which is interesting, of
course, because it seems that Jews can
never do anything, right? If they're in
the Middle East, they should go back to
Poland. If they're in Poland, they
should go to Avitz. if they're in
America, they should go back to
somewhere. It's a a very dark thing that
but
the universities where that's happened
on have happened across the country, by
the way, would not be agreed on from
anywhere else. It would not be agreed on
from any other direction. If if um black
students on an American campus had
right-wing maniacs screaming at them to
go back to Africa, I would like to think
not only that those students or the
people doing it wouldn't get away with
it, but all of us would join in a
condemnation of that. We would all join
in the condemnation of that. We wouldn't
say what if or but you have to
understand the context or anything else.
But with Jewish students, it's
different. It's for some reason well for
various reasons I outlined in the book
is that it's a it's been made into a
different case but but the interesting
thing with Claudine Gay and the other
university heads was that they were
reading out lawyerlike statements
clearly to protect their own
backsides and of course that didn't work
but when it happened I phoned a friend
of mine who was teaching at one of these
universities and I said to him what they
were reading sounded to me like legal
ease and he said, "Really, it sounded to
me like chat GPT." And so, as I say in
the book, we tried an interesting
experiment, which was to type the
questions that Representative Stefanic
and others put to them. Is it legitimate
to call for genocide? Is it right? And
so on. And um we put that into chat GPT.
And Chat GPT was very clear. Um it said
genocide is recognized as being wrong in
all known moral systems.
And as I say in the book, it just goes
to show that sometimes chat GPT can be
more moral than the president of
Harvard. Um the point is is that uh
these uh university heads and others are
basically trying to cover their own
backsides against legal challenge and so
on. But what they do in the process of
it is to nod through the utterly
reprehensible.
uh and I understand I think the uh place
they're coming from and I understand I
think the place that the people that the
the the students who are actually doing
the aggressing are coming from. I think
the students and others who are doing
the aggressive actions and the
intimidation and the thug much
more are under the belief that Israel is
actually doing the things they're
accusing Israel of. They believe
themselves to be anti-colonialists and
they believe that Israel is a
colonialist power. They believe they are
anti-racists and they believe that the
world's one Jewish state is a racist
power. They believe that they are
anti-Nazi and they believe that Israel
is a Nazi
country. So some of them are simply
wicked, simply side with the death cult,
simply proame and profoundly
anti-western in every way. stated and
otherwise. By the way, the Columbia
students group who've got quite a lot of
attention in the last year in their
objectives they state that one of the
things they want is the quote complete
destruction of Western civilization.
Fun. Complete destruction of Western
civilization. Interesting. Interesting.
At least they say it. At least they're
open about it. Yeah. So, some of them
they simply want to turn over the whole
darn table. They are the people that the
founding fathers and others recognized
in their time and others have recognized
throughout history. There are some
people who just want to wade through
blood, other people's blood or their
own, and they think the spilling of
blood gets you somewhere. It's a very
dark and ugly uh um aspect of some human
minds. But others of those people who
agree with them are simply massively
massively lied to. They actually believe
the things that they're chanting. They
actually believe that if
you make the Jews
leave their historic homeland and clear
them out from quote the river to the
sea, from the Jordan River to the
Mediterranean, something great will
happen.
Now they're never quite clear what and I
think
uh to some extent we're in the realm
here not of geopolitics or of the ethics
of war but in the realm of magic.
A lot of people seem to
Well, most of my adult lifetime I've
heard from politicians of the left and
the right, conservative, Republican,
Democrat, Labor, I've heard the claim
that uh if the Palestinians have another
state, and I say another state because
my view they already have two, or they
had another chance most recently with
Gaza,
um if they had another Palestinian
state, the region would all be Okay, it
would be good. In fact, the argument is
that it's the key. If you solve the
Israeli Palestinian dispute, it's the
key that unlocks every other problem in
the region. I always thought that was
rubbish. I always knew it was rubbish
because in my observation, even if there
was another Palestinian state, it
doesn't mean that the economy of the
Yemen is going to
blossom. Even if there was another
Palestinian state, it doesn't mean that
women in Iran are going to be given
equal rights. And even if the
Palestinians were given another stage,
it's not like the gay bars would open up
in Riad. Um it's it's obviously uh
nonsense. But the idea is now beyond the
region because the uh intersectionalists
and others believe that all oppression
is interlocked and to unlock one
oppression is to start to unlock the
others.
Some of these people actually seem to
believe that um if you address the issue
of Palestinian statethood once and for
all
um you also
address women's rights, trans rights,
gay rights, uh economic injustice,
historical injustice, colonization and
so on. It's magical thinking uh of a
very familiar kind. If we just solve
this one problem, the age of Aquarius
will come. Do you think there is one
umbrella problem that if you solve that
gets moving in the right direction or
No. No, I think it's fantasy thinking
and uh um and is one of the things that
can cause fanaticism, of course, because
if there was one thing that would if
addressed, solve all the world's
problems, what wouldn't you do to get
that one thing sorted?
All right. By way of over uh simplifying
this, ridiculously so, um I do want to
reveal my thinking on this, which is I
the closest thing that there is, I
think, to solving this problem long term
is you have to get everybody in the
region to focus on uh making my child's
life better in this life here on Earth
uh better than mine and that their kids
have an opportunity to make their lives
better than their parents. Uh and so
when I look at this again knowing this
is oversimplified but believe that this
is the thing that you can begin sort of
pulling things apart until you don't
have the revolutionary spirit and until
people go I want my kids life to be good
here on earth uh I I don't see a way out
of this but if you do solve that now you
at least have a northstar that forces
you to ask okay what has done that
around the world uh and you end up even
if you want to go to just the Chinese
system where it's still authoritarian
fine but it's
Okay, we're going to turn um the
economic engine on and off as we see
fit, but like we get that that's how you
get people out of poverty. You give them
this goaloriented mindset and and now
things begin to work. That feels like
again recognizing it is oversimplified,
but nonetheless is true. If they were
running that algorithm, then you at
least begin the very long slow process
that has led the Western world over time
to correct the wrongs.
Uh I agree and I think it's unlikely. Um
but yes
uh any system of uh thought that any
system of morality
that seeks the improvement of I'm trying
to keep away from any theological or
political language but seeks the
improvement of the lot of the next
generation.
um would not indulge in what Hamas and
others indulge in. Um I I think this is
the same with I I think that is one of
the reasons why you can identify
totalitarian mindsets and death cult
mindsets is that they they simply
have demands which are so unreasonable
in the pre in the present but are also
highly undesirable in the long term.
um they uh believe in our view or
nothing. They believe in death or
nothing. And I say repeatedly and I say
in the book that you know and by the way
this is I'm not the first person to say
this. Many other people, golden among
them have said this. But the moment at
which there could be peace between the
Israelis and the Palestinians would be
the moment when the Palestinians realize
that for their children to lead better
lives, they should put their um energies
into creating a state for their children
rather than trying to kill the children
of the state next door. Um, if they put
if they had put their energies into
building a state in Gaza rather than
trying to destroy the state next door,
the history of the last 19 years would
be very different. When you debate
people at that moment, what what is
their answer? Is it the open air prison,
apartheid, uh where do they go? Because
that seems so self-evident. Yeah, they
do they do all those things. They throw
uh lie after lie and misunderstanding
upon misunderstanding.
But um I mean there are plenty of
Palestinians, Arabs and others who have
identified exactly the same problem in
their own
society that the you know the onus on
Palestinian
leaders to actually
accept their Jewish
neighbors.
Um that that's not where they feel
they're they that's not where they go. I
mean Yas Arafat
famously terrorist though he was I mean
he he had the opportunity again and
again Bill Clinton said this recently
again had the opportunity at Camp David
25 years ago now to get 99% of what he
had asked for all his life and he walked
away not actually because he wanted that
one extra percent but because he knew
that if he made an agreement he was
he'd be over. The um his own people
would reject it.
And this is this is a very deep problem
and I think that it's one worth staring
in the face. I'd love to see it solved.
Uh I'd love to see I'd love to uh be
able to dream the same dream that many
of the people in the kabuts, the
communities in the south and indeed the
young people at the Nova party dancing
in the early hours of the morning. I'd
love to be able to dream the same dream
that they dreamed that uh they always
dreamed of living in peace with their
neighbors. Many of them work, but they
didn't get it. We'll get back to the
show in a moment, but first, let's talk
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Now, let's get back to the show.
given how much you're steered by moral
clarity. Uh when you look at this
moment, what's the calculus that you
run? Because um at the end of the day,
when you look back all through human
history, you the only way that you're
going to get peace is if you win a
decisive military victory. Now, that
doesn't stop you from having
insurgencies. That is for sure. Uh but
that's just how these things have been
settled all throughout human history.
you just break the will of the other
side to fight. And when I look at what's
going on in Israel, Gaza, I think a lot
about America. And so for people that
don't know their own American history,
and I'll give it to you in the world's
tiniest nutshell, uh we run up on a
country that already has people on it,
um we through disease and warfare, um
knock out the first group and then we
get to uh basically Mexico, but it's in
the form of California, etc. and uh
President Pulk is like, "Yep, I want
that, too." And uh has his run of four
years and literally um displaces them
and his own generals were like, "This is
a stain on America that we'll never be
able to wash off, but hey, don't worry.
People have very short-term memories.
We've washed it off." And now we have a
country, and the crazy thing is when I
say that, I'm like, "That's so icky."
And yet if um if China rolled up on the
California coast where I live, I would
fight. So I'm like, okay. And I would
fight and I would be screaming from the
rooftops, decisive military victory. So
when I look at Israel, I'm familiar
enough, obviously people could drag me
into the weeds and be like, I don't
know. But uh I'm familiar enough with
the history to know that there's a very
similar roll out that's like, "Hey, if
we can get enough people here to this
area for reasons that obviously make all
the sense in the world post World War
II, like we've got to go somewhere."
They go, and at first it's like, "Well,
now we can be economically powerful. We
can start being politically powerful."
And you just get to the point where
you've got enough people that you're the
dominant culture at that point. And then
from that, you end up building the
state. And honestly, man, when I look at
the UK, I'm like, guess what playbook is
being run on you guys? It's that
playbook. You've got a bunch of Muslim
people coming in. They're not
assimilating. And on a long enough
timeline, like that just seems that's a
question of demographics. Who's having
more babies? Uh, and then what are they
teaching their children? If they teach
our children English values, great. If
they don't, then whatever they teach
them, if they become the dominant
culture, then that's what that nation
becomes. And so, man, I hate to have
this super detached thing because these
are human lives and I I don't want to
diminish any of that, but when I look at
this, the the thinking of, okay, we've
got two issues. We've got real people
are dying because bombs are going off,
guns are being fired, and then we have
the ideological battle of but we also
want to win international support. We
don't want to end up getting isolated.
That's going to matter. Um, so if you're
advising Israel, how do you do that on
one two step of, okay, there are going
to be people that feel some kind of way
about the formation of the state always
and forever, just as people feel some
kind of way about the way that America
started. Um, but you're here. So now
that you're
here, do they not need to pursue total
military victory, full stop, period, end
of story, regardless of what the
international pressures are?
um not totally regardless but um they
need to do as any country does what they
what is best in the security and safety
of their own people and always with that
remembrance I mean you mentioned people
coming from Europe to Israel but only
onethird of uh Israelis are of European
ancestry and descent most are entirely
indigenous to the region um it's always
interesting to hear people talking about
indigenous peoples. They they don't talk
about indigenous peoples in Britain. You
notice by the way. Um but even just to
really make this difficult and I hear
you and that we we should come back to
that. But to stare at the hardest parts
of this, if Mexicans and literally I'm
looking at Mexicans right now. If they
came to California, not not came to
they've been here forever from an
ancestral standpoint. If they were like,
"Okay, we are not interested in
assimilation anymore. We want to bring
our family over. We want