Transcript of Israel, Hamas, and the Battle for Civilization – Douglas Murray

But I thought what you said was quite brilliant and important. And I think there are probably a few crucial points that were misunderstood. And so I’d like to do a bit of a post mortem on that, but I’m wondering what your experience of it was. How do you view it? How much of the aftermath have you seen? No doubt, even if you don’t read comments, you’re still getting some of the comments.

On Public Reactions and Media Response

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Somehow, because I don’t read comments, I don’t really follow very closely if I think I’ve done the right thing, which I try to do routinely, I don’t think I ever knowingly mean to do the wrong thing. But if I do something which I feel perfectly content with myself in that I can look myself in the mirror the next morning, I have no interest in seeing what people rampaging across the Internet have to say. Although there is a certain type of almost friend who can never resist sending you the nastiest response they’ve seen online, saying, “I disagree with this person.”

SAM HARRIS: I don’t think you’re nearly that fat or ugly.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: “I disagree with everyone else. I like you.” Despite some people doing that and thus giving me a glimpse into it, I really don’t bother. I have a book out. I’ve been doing a lot of traveling and speaking and so on, so I don’t really have time to absorb very much of the podcast meltdown that I gather has occurred.

SAM HARRIS: I saw your collision on Newsnight.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: After that, that was just a typical BBC thing. They got me into prerecord for 20 minutes. I attacked Newsnight there to get it down to seven minutes and then afterwards…

SAM HARRIS: Three people to attack me in your absence.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: I’m sort of used to that. I find it sort of normal that if I’m allowed to speak on the BBC, they must have 500 anti-Douglasites to defame me and much more. And that’s fine, I don’t care.

SAM HARRIS: That actually surprised me. I had thought the level of confusion they expressed there in the aftermath on Newsnight. I thought that the pendulum had swung back enough in the UK where that species of confusion wouldn’t be so prominent.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Not on the national broadcast. As I think I told them in one of the bits that they edited out, I said, “You’re just wildly out of date. Like, this is weird. This is having a conversation from 10 years ago and you just haven’t updated your software and shame. But that’s why nobody watches the program.”

The Rogan Intervention

SAM HARRIS: Okay, so we’re going to focus. So I want to know your experience of attempting that intervention. How did it strike you in the moment?

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Well, I like Joe and enormously admire what he’s done. He’s so good at talking about interesting things with guests easily and for a long time that a lot of other people think that it’s extremely easy and it just isn’t. He’s a master of it. But I had noticed that he had in recent years not really had anyone on who had my views about the Russia-Ukraine conflict or indeed about the Israel-Hamas conflict. And he had had some people on who I have had to become aware of very annoyingly like all of us, but who are just retreads of a school of pseudo-history which was seen off a long time ago and which I dislike.

And I suppose I just wanted to try to say to Joe as gently as possible that I thought that something was going very badly wrong here and that he was misleading his viewers and listeners about what the story is on each of these things. And that specifically that Ukraine actually does have a right to defend itself against Putin’s aggression. Israel has a right to defend itself against Hamas’ brutal invasion of Israel. And I believe—and just wait for this—I think Adolf Hitler was a really bad guy. I do.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: As Norm MacDonald said, maybe I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. I said it before it was cool to say it. I think Adolf Hitler was the bad guy of World War II. And I think Churchill was one of the people in history who saved civilization almost single-handed at one point in 1940. And so when I see people just throwing out this absolute rubbish about, for instance, what they try to do is they try to minimize the crimes of Hitler, they try to maximize the crimes of Churchill. This is what David Irving used to try before he was completely debunked as well.

And then what you do is you have this thing where you say that the Allies and the Nazis were on an equal footing in World War II, and then you go for your next move, which is actually the Allies were the baddies. I just can’t put up with that. I just, it’s intolerable to sit by and see this stuff going on. And so, yes, I tried to cite that. Of course, the whole thing was two against one, because although Joe has had people like comic Dave Smith, who, by the way, I’ve yet to hear being funny on anything.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: And maybe somebody else can point me to it. But he just spent 18 months criticizing Israel in the most ignorant terms. And I was annoyed that Joe had said, you know, you can only come on if you’re on with comic Dave Smith, whereas just a week before, comic Dave Smith was on, on his own, once again sounding off. And he didn’t seem to need a bodyguard or tag team double or anything like that. So okay, it’s two against one. That’s… I’ve had worse odds. But it makes it extremely difficult, undoubtedly, because if I’d had a sidekick, they could have mopped up some of my points.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, I mean, I think there are several reasons why it was almost an impossible task.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Well, as you just said, the only tasks worth doing are the impossible tasks.

On Expertise and Confusion

SAM HARRIS: That’s right, yeah. I mean, I’d like to try to track through what I think is kind of the center of their confusion because I think there’s something that’s genuinely hard to parse here around the role of expertise and what it is, how we recognize it when we honor it, how you avoid arguing from authority, et cetera. I think that some of that stuff is genuinely confusing and they were mightily confused by it and quite content to be and felt that you were simply arguing from authority and urging upon them some kind of mere credentialism.

And it was clear to me you weren’t doing that. And this relates obviously to both the topics you were touching, the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza. We’ll focus on Gaza because I want to track through your argument in your book. But one thing I would just point out is that the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza are connected in at least two senses. One, it’s clear which side of those conflicts you should be on if you want to be defending the west and open societies and liberal democracies against their enemies. And secondly, Vladimir Putin is on the wrong side of both of these conflicts and Joe and Dave couldn’t seem to untangle that.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: By the way, there’s an additional problem there, which is that I’m supportive of both countries’ rights to self-defense and unfortunately because of the degradation of the age and the decision to make politics almost entirely a team sport. On the American right, there’s almost certainly on the mainstream, Congress, Senate and so on, there’s mainstream support for the Israelis in their war against Hamas. There’s increasingly contempt for the right of the Ukrainians to defend themselves against Putin. And the opposite exists on the left. So the left increasingly believes that Israel does not have the right to defend itself, but Ukraine does. So I suppose I find myself, in the words of Richard Strauss’s librettist in Capriccio, I find myself burning between two fires.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, well, I’m going to try to push you into the rightward fire a little bit because I think you have a problem there. Honestly, I think you have unfortunate company that it’s just a matter of time before it becomes too uncomfortable to not notice the differences of opinion. And Ukraine is obviously a very sore point, but I think it also is worth worrying about the level of anti-Semitism on the right.

Oh yeah, and much of the confusion you saw from—had you read the comments, you would have seen a tsunami of confusion coming from Joe’s audience. And much of that audience is not the—I would say most, maybe 90% of it is kind of rightward leaning, if not fully in Trumpistan. It’s definitely not the AOC supporting leftward confusion.

But let’s talk about expertise. So I’m actually, I have some notes here because I find this is all very clear in my mind, but I find that whenever I talk about this, I fail to track it through systematically enough for people to have their doubts removed. So the first point I think we need to make is that everyone acknowledges, whether they want to or not, everyone acknowledges the reality of expertise and its importance.

And this is a point I think you’ve made before, and I’ve made it as well in response to the aftermath of your podcast with Joe, that if you put someone in front of Joe who wants to talk about MMA as though they were an expert, as though they knew something and they knew next to nothing, very, very quickly, Joe would recognize the problem there and begin to turn down the screws, and it would be excruciating. There’s no way you can pretend to know about MMA sitting in front of Joe Rogan when in fact you don’t. Everyone, when they got on an airplane, wants their pilot to be a real pilot, not just one who’s larping as a pilot or who’s self-taught in a simulator they have at home. Unless they don’t want to land a plane. Right. In which case, unless they’re jihadist. But let’s leave that aside.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: If you go in for brain surgery and just before you’re wheeled into the operating theater, comic Dave Smith appears and says, “I’m doing the task.”

SAM HARRIS: I’m not an expert, but I never…

DOUGLAS MURRAY: “I never claim to be an expert, but I am carrying out the operation.”

The Importance of Expertise and Consensus

SAM HARRIS: Yes. Yeah, I’ve got a free four hours. It’ll be inside your head. Okay. So there is just simply indisputable that in any domain that matters and certainly in any domain that purports to be in touch with reality, any side of it, whether it’s journalism, history, science, or just how to get things done, you know, just physically, whether you’re a plumber or not a plumber. The difference between knowing something or knowing nearly everything and knowing nothing is extraordinary. And it matters insofar as the topic matters.

In that context, you can see that a consensus among experts is rather often meaningful. So if you have the lone person who’s going against the consensus, if 99% of the specialists in a field believe X and you’ve got somebody believing Y, maybe somebody who is himself an expert. He has the right credentials. But certainly in the case of someone who isn’t an expert and doesn’t have the right credentials, it is more often than not the case that you’re not in the presence of a lone genius who’s just figured everything out on his own. You’re very likely in the presence of somebody who’s mistaken or a crank or otherwise has some incentive that is going undetected and they’re going against the mainstream for bad reasons. Now, that’s not to say there’s no such thing as there being a lone genius who does overturn.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Sometimes it’s got to. There.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, yeah, so. But if you had to walk into a casino and bet on prevailing opinion in any field, you would be right to bet on what 99% of oncologists think about this cancer, rather than your uncle who just has strong opinions about cancer. Right. And that’s just a probabilistic bet we all place every day whenever we’re granting credence to knowledge claims. And we’re always tending to go with the mainstream consensus of specialists. And that’s because expertise really is a thing and probability really is a thing.

The Erosion of Trust in Institutions

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Well, I agree with, however, as you probably know, a significant caveat, which is that, as I’ve said for a long time, one of the things that Covid did was it stripped us of the consensus that the scientists were the last sort of cathedral of knowledge that you really did listen to. I said long time ago about this that, you know, once “trust the science” wasn’t respected anymore for some good reasons, we were completely stripped of anything in our society that we could trust. If you said trust the media, although there’s great things in the media, but if you said trust the media, increasingly people would laugh because the media, much of the media, would let itself down in the realm of facts and unacknowledged biases. If you said trust the politicians, that’s.

SAM HARRIS: Been a laugh line for quite some time.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: You know, I think generally that all. Every time there’s a poll of public opinions about who they trust more, I think journalists are somewhere beneath hookers and politicians beneath us. But the breakdown of the science trust was devastating. And I think that the breakdown of belief in almost everything in the state, everything. Every arm of government, every. And the attributing of, you know, the most appalling actions to parts of the security state, for instance, having somebody like RFK Jr saying that the evidence that the CIA killed his uncle was overwhelming.

SAM HARRIS: Right, right.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Well, that means that the CIA can kill presidents, which means that you’re in a country with a completely rogue intelligence service and just all of this added onto. But the COVID thing was the last cathedral to fall. It made science fall, it seems to me.

SAM HARRIS: But I would argue, and this was tacit in some of the things you were saying, whether it was just the fact that you were there saying it, I would argue Joe has more than his fair share of responsibility for that. Alternative media in general, but big podcasts in general. But Joe above all, given his taste for conspiracy thinking and given the lessons he has drawn from COVID.

I mean, so I share your concern about the failure of institutions and obviously the woke ideological capture of so many mainstream institutions. Distorted scientific communication. It’s certainly distorted journalism and it has predictably and to a degree that’s intolerable, destroyed trust in those institutions. But the remedy for all of that is not mere contrarian, anti-establishment, no-nothing-ism. Or much less a disavowal of expertise. It’s real expertise, real science, real journalism being aimed at the correct targets, shorn of the dumb ideology that distorted that conversation in the first place.

Protecting Knowledge and Expertise

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Yes. And by the way, there’s a sort of delineation that’s important to make as well, which is I think that part of the confusion that I’ve been told has been occurring is of course, that I think that there are probably realms in our society, STEM, which is just easier to shore up. If you just make sure that STEM subjects are as protected as possible from wild ideological outside influence. Sort of feels easier.

SAM HARRIS: Although even you had some. I think it was the Smithsonian Institute was declared that math was white supremacist. You know, the notion of objectivity.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: I charted this in having a right answer. Absolutely. Don’t think that it’ll stop at STEM, but STEM, it seems to me, is more. It could be more disciplined in order to just push that out. It’s easier to see how that happened. How do you do that in the humanities, including in the study of history? It’s somewhat harder. And I think that is the case.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, that’s true.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: And I think that is somewhere where, let alone with journalism and current events, I think that there is probably a harder way for people to pass what expertise would look like. But as I said in my column in the New York Post today, although journalism has been significantly deracinated of late, we do still have Rules. I mean, one rule, for instance, is that if you are writing from a country, you are in the country, right? You’re not allowed, you don’t have a.

SAM HARRIS: VPN that’s sending you through.

The Value of Firsthand Experience

DOUGLAS MURRAY: You’re not allowed to sit in West Palm beach pretending to be on the front lines of the Ukraine conflict. And a friend of mine who I do listen to said to me after that podcast, maybe you were too annoyed with the lack of any credentials of comic Dave Smith and were just angry that, you know, you needed, and you needed to show that you were right and he was wrong. And I thought, and I said, well, of course that. But I said that the real thing is just that simply on a journalistic level, if you haven’t spent your time on the ground somewhere, your ability to write about it or the likelihood that your readers will read about it is very significantly diminished.

And I can’t say that I don’t resent rather spending so much of my life on the ground in places going through things that my readers know I go through, but I don’t go on about only to be told that my witness, my testimony, my evidence is to be compared with somebody who has never gone further than Wikipedia in their sourcing or “I did the research about the region.” It seems rather galling to me.

SAM HARRIS: Well, this was a genuinely confusing point because. So then I’m bending over backwards to be charitable to Dave Smith, who I notice rarely makes the effort in my direction or yours. When you were saying to him, you were basically shaming him for pretending to know what was going on in Gaza without ever having been there. And it was quite natural for you to do that because the point you were making really would have been resolved had he been there.

Because what became clear in the conversation was he was reading into certain phrases like “blockade” or “concentration camp” or “open air prison,” a notion that life was such pre-war in Gaza as to be completely intolerable. And you said, were you ever there? Did you ever see what life in Gaza was like a few years ago? And no, he’s never been to the region. And so it was relevant to make that point.

But on his side he wanted to argue, and generically I agree with this, that you need not in order to judge the ethics of a war, right. Provided you are actually in touch with the facts about it and you’re reading good sources and you know what is actually happening. You can judge the ethics and you can know who is on the moral high ground without ever having been to either of the respective countries. Right? Like you can, I mean, you could obviously judge. We could be talking about a war that happened 100 years ago and, you know, and be scholars of that conflict. And the burden is not upon either of us to have been to the region.

The Problem with Rhetorical Shape-Shifting

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Well, that was a rather lame point that comic Dave Smith tried to make, which is he said, I haven’t been to Nazi Germany either, but can I not have views about that? As I pointed out, he does have.

SAM HARRIS: Views about that, though.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Yeah, he does certainly does have views about that. But I said, yeah, but you can’t time travel, but you can travel. And this is, to me quite an important point, which is that if the reason why it matters in the now is that if you were litigating a foreign conflict or a domestic conflict that happened 100 years ago, much if not all of the dust would have settled. You’d be able to get a rounded view of what was happening, what had gone on, and be able to reflect on it.

When it’s something that is happening now, the dust is not settled by any means literal or metaphorical, and the consensus view has not emerged. And much if not most of the reporting and more that comes out of the region is wildly off. So I don’t think it is possible actually to simply rely on some published sources. No, no, I don’t think that at all. And I think it would. It is the duty of somebody commenting on such a thing to go and see it firsthand. And that is a journalistic standard.

But there we get into the follow on problem, which is the shapeshifter thing. And I’m not talking about the language in which the far right talks about the Jews. The shapeshifter thing, which I was also trying to fight in that conversation, is the “I never said I was a historian.”

SAM HARRIS: Yeah. I just spent five hours on television this week declaiming about the topic.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: I merely. When people introduce me as a historian, I don’t demur from the introduction. And if somebody introduces me as the world’s greatest living historian, I don’t.

SAM HARRIS: Now you’re talking about Daryl Cooper. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: But if you were to have, at the beginning of this podcast, introduced me as the world’s leading engineer of suspension bridges, Douglas Murray, I think I might have gone, I don’t know. But if I started to speak as if I was that at some point you are pretending to be that. If you keep being introduced to historian, but then you have the move of saying, I never said I was a historian.

If you keep saying I’m a comedian, but I’m not. I’m a commentator on a particularly febrile foreign conflict. And then you say, but you don’t know about this, and go, well, I’m just a comedian. And you play these endless games of assertion of knowledge followed by if you get caught, “Okay, I don’t know about this.” This is a very, very annoying rhetorical trick that some of us have observed because it means you can never be pinned down because you’re always shifting your presentation of who you are.

It was one of the things that always made me most irritated about Russell Brand, who I’ve never wanted to debate with or discuss with because I always saw him doing this. That he would indeed, 20 years ago, go on the BBC, announce the need for revolution and explain how we need to completely change the system of global finance. He would get shown a chart and he would say, “I ain’t got time for no chart. I’m no comedian.” This is a very annoying move. Jon Stewart used to do it as well.

SAM HARRIS: Well, it’s tennis without the net. And you find you can hit the ball rather hard when there’s no net, right?

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Yeah. And sometimes your rackets are made of jelly. I mean, it’s sort of just endlessly absurd. What are they doing in this thing? Why the constant shifting? It’s for people to work out what’s going on there.

The Problem with Platforming Non-Experts

SAM HARRIS: But the problem is that you’re in front of an audience and Joe has cultivated this audience and perhaps been in turn changed by this audience that is anchored to some very strong, if unacknowledged, claims about the nature of knowledge and authority and also certain moral principles. I mean, so for instance, I saw at least two heuristics running in the background of that conversation. One is sunlight is the best disinfectant. And for sunlight, I mean, let’s just turn on the microphones and talk at length, right?

There can be nothing intrinsically wrong and only goodness in sitting across the table from someone like Darrell Cooper, who is an amateur, self-taught historian, talented podcaster, who has, as you pointed out, an appetite for contrarian taboo history of the David Irving flavor about the Holocaust. Nothing wrong with Joe just sitting with him for four hours and midwifing a conversation from him, which at no point entails Joe pulling him up short on any of the points he’s making. He’s simply receiving this person’s expertise. Even while if you pushed and said, but are you really a historian? He would say, no, no, I’m just a podcaster, I’m a fan of history, but the assumption is, and again, it’s the assumption from Joe’s audience is that there can be nothing wrong with this. If you’re talking for hours, people are going to recognize what is true. You’re trusting your audience to know what is true. And it is just an obvious fact that you cannot trust Joe or his audience to know when an already debunked David Irving talking point is being recycled in front of him, unless he’s done the homework to know what he’s actually in dialogue with.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Well, if I can say so. There are also two other things going on there. One is, I suspect that what you describe as sort of viewer aggravation with appeals to expertise, or indeed defense of expertise, feels like a personal assault on a large number of listeners because they feel like they’re doing that and they like to do that.

SAM HARRIS: It’s elitism.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Yeah, but they’d like to do that. They’re kind of doing that by listening to long form podcasting and developing views. Again, they are welcome to do that. I’m all for that. But the point that I keep trying to bring across is that you can still hold on to the principle of truth, of standards and much more.

The second thing is, I think there is a very obvious algorithmic excuse for this, which is that if you do a podcast in which you say Adolf Hitler was bad, definitely the bad guy of World War II, and Churchill was a hero, the algorithm doesn’t favor you. Whereas if you say, “Aha, I’ve got this fantastic new view: Hitler was trying not to be at all anti-Semitic in the 1930s. He was keeping the whole stuff down. And then he just sort of, you know, but they had his reasons to dislike the Jews. And I’m going to get into those in the next podcast.” And that’s sort of…

SAM HARRIS: You forgot the part. There was no intention to kill the Jews. They just found that they couldn’t feed them once they rounded them all up. So it was more compassionate to put…

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Them to death, stuff like that.

SAM HARRIS: Might it not be more compassionate to… to euthanize them?

The Dangers of Historical Revisionism

DOUGLAS MURRAY: And that unfortunately, that’s what certain people are doing and pushing. And I was genuinely, I mean, I said at the end, I said to Dave, he says he has a Jewish grandfather. So he, I think he probably wouldn’t be regarded as Jewish in a very Orthodox way, but he’d certainly be caught by the Nuremberg Laws and Hamas would certainly regard him as full blown, fully Jewish. The complete catastrophe. As Tom Stoppard memorably, incredibly describes it.

But people like him who are doing this, I just warned him, I said, you must know. Because he said something like, you know, there’s this sort of fertile ground at one. I said, “You’re doing the watering of it, you’re watering this, you’re bringing it up, you’re conspicuously engaged in the process of trying to grow an extremely poisonous tree and it’s going to get you and then all of us.” By which I mean of course you encourage the most ugly, debunked, destructive bigotries of human history. And they are always ones which once they flourish and once they grow, burn everyone.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, so the crucial point is that you were not saying that David Smith, that Dave Smith couldn’t possibly be right because he’s a non-expert. No, you’re saying that he’s a non-expert and it shows because he’s making obvious errors. And so it is with Darrell Cooper, and so it is with any of these people that are getting platformed right. And so it’s just, it’s not. The consequence of being a non-expert in this case is that these guys are trafficking in recognizable distortions of fact and coming to the wrong moral conclusions as a result.

And then a very easy way to summarize that problem is, listen, you’re talking to people who are non-experts. Why not talk to the experts? That’s not to deny the fact that people are entitled to their own opinions, that sometimes someone can be self-taught and actually make a valid contribution to knowledge and to flip it around. It’s also the case that arguments from authority are illegitimate and nothing is true simply because a consensus of Nobel laureates says it is. It’s just that a consensus of Nobel laureates is often a very good guide to the best state of the evidence. Right. I mean, that’s shorthand for finding the best evidence and the best arguments.

The Problem with “Anti-Gatekeeping”

DOUGLAS MURRAY: By the way, I just would say one other thing, which is that what I think a lot of people aren’t aware of. But you know, I do believe that when something becomes very fetid on your, what is roughly your political side, you should call it out, identify it. It’s very difficult to do this of course at the moment because there is a movement on the right in America and elsewhere which says that anything that is gatekeeping is demonstrably bad. And therefore let’s lift all of the sluices, all of the sewer sluices and let all the shit run.

And I think it’s worth identifying one other thing which I don’t know, you’re probably aware of, but a lot of people aren’t, which is that there has always been a reason why a type of American right wing figure will play with this stuff, and it’s slightly different. The reason why you get the same stuff on, for instance, the continent of Europe. On the continent of Europe, when this dark game is played about World War II, what they try to do is they demonstrate they cannot contend with the utter atrocity of Nazi fascism and try in the end to either downplay it and upplay Soviet Communism in some zero sum game, which is never going to end well, try to get around the mountain of the Holocaust and in the end find a way to absolve their country’s history of this.

And I understand this, but it’s also lamentable because they have to contend with the histories of collaboration and fascism and much more. One of the reasons, again, why, in an incredibly British way, I reassert that, the fact that some of us, historically, our countries didn’t do that, so have the right to feel some pride for that.

But the thing on the American right that’s always existed on this is that World War II was a catastrophe to enter into, as was World War I, because America should have let the Nazis and the Soviets battle it out and we didn’t need to get involved. And that’s the dream. I mean, I still, that itself is an interesting revisionist exercise and it’s one that’s happened for years. I saw Pat Buchanan argue this years ago when he had a book out very unconvincingly, but it was stimulating in a way, and stimulating to see him prove wrong. But, but in any case, that’s a game because as Clive James used to say, we’re here because history happened. There’s a sort of limit to which you can play this. So why do you want to play it? You want to play that dark game because you want to get onto a different game now.

The Rise of Conspiracy Thinking

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, there’s also, I don’t know if you have the same degree of conspiracy thinking in the continental version of this. Yes, the Jews are often at the bottom of many conspiracy theories going back over 100 years. But it seems to me that there’s an appetite for conspiracy thinking in America now. Again, I locate the epicenter of this somewhere near Joe’s podcast. Unfortunately, that is, it’s just. I mean, it has been algorithmically boosted to a degree that it seems in danger of subsuming everything else.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: It’s a complete disaster. Because of course people need to hold in their heads the thing that some things that are called conspiracy theories turn out to be true.

SAM HARRIS: Right?

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Yeah. The COVID lab leak. Obvious example in recent time. But when you look at the fact that for instance a majority of Americans believe the CIA was involved in the assassination of JFK, President Trump releases the last JFK files. And to the amazement of many, it seems that the man who the Dallas police fingered for this a few hours after the assassination of the President might have actually done it, was the person who did it. And the man then Lee Harvey Oswald, who had a gun that his wife noticed was missing that morning from the house and who, when the police come to her house, say, “Was it my husband who did it?” It seems like it was probably Lee Harvey that did it. And that, you know, the one member staff of the book depository who was heard to be firing rounds on the floor above and was the only person to run out of the book depository immediately after the shooting, may have done the shooting.

SAM HARRIS: And the shooting which supposedly was impossible for one man to accomplish, but has been replicated by several shooters.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: You know that “no sharpshooter could possibly” this, but it’s demonstrated and Lee Harvey Oswald was a practice sharpshooter. But it just goes on and on. But the point, my point is simply that I made this point a little while ago about Bobby Kennedy Jr. Which is I said, you know, if I was living in a country where I honestly believe that my father and my uncle, two of the most important people in the country had been assassinated by the government, I think I’d hot footed out of the country quite fast. I think it’s a dangerous place to be.

So that’s just one. But you can do this on multiple areas of American public life. Look, America is the only country where the citizens are encouraged to generate conspiracy theories about America’s successes. Look at the moon landing on the great successes of American engineering and exploration and significant chunks of the American public do not believe that America did this.

And one of the things, by the way that’s fascinating about that is if you speak to Russians who grew up under Soviet communism where you were lied to about everything, everything was a lie. “This year’s crops are particularly good,” always a lie. But even in that world of lies, they didn’t think that Yuri Gagarin didn’t go up into space because they were proud of it and they wanted it to be the case. So I do think and, and I know now that now I can predict there will be a flurry of, “Ah, you haven’t seen the way in which the… The flag…”

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: “…holds up.”

SAM HARRIS: And the shadows are in the wrong direction.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: The shadows are in the wrong direction.

SAM HARRIS: And all this.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: I know I can imagine the inbox now.

SAM HARRIS: But Joe used to be one of those guys, and I gather he reversed.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Course because he ended up recognizing that America couldn’t have got away with faking the moon landing because the Soviets would have exposed it.

The Moral Confusion in the Israel-Hamas Conflict

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, that’s a nice counterpoint. All right, so I want to get to your book, and we’re not leaving the current topic, because the goal here is to make the case that the moral confusion you were up against in that podcast interview is as bewildering as your temper suggested. I mean, it was just. The moral high ground is so obvious here.

And the wider concern. I mean, it’s one thing to view this as Israel, its specific history with the Palestinians, its right to exist, the legitimacy of Zionism, and get sort of wrapped around the axle of all of those specifics. It’s another to actually look at the conflict in Gaza and in Israel’s history generally as part of this larger picture of a jihadist and Islamist conflict with the West, which is what I tend to do now that your book doesn’t focus on that. But it’s important to keep that in view. And it becomes incredibly clear where the moral high ground is when you look at the details.

But let me just. Before I let you run, I want to point out that there are two very different lenses through which people look at this conflict, and they explain the impossibility of discussion. Because the lens that certainly Dave Smith and his fans have here is that the extremity of Hamas’s violence demonstrates the immensity of Palestinian suffering. I mean, the fact that they would behave this way can only be attributed to the fact that they’ve been pushed past the point of sanity by the Israelis.

So in some strange way, the onus for the atrocities of October 7 and other atrocities, the sort that you saw during the second Intifada, and this reasoning gets mapped onto jihadist atrocities everywhere, the onus gets put on the victims of the atrocities. And this is a point that Paul Berman made brilliantly 20 years ago in his book “Terror and Liberalism.”

So there’s that weird distortion, the opposite way of seeing this, and I’m convinced, and have been convinced for more than 20 years as the true one, is that jihadism is an independent variable. And you can find this death cult behavior in people who have been immiserated by occupations and been treated badly. And you can find it in people who have not been immiserated. And so it’s the ideas that give you the death cult.

And conversely, you can find people who have been treated far worse than the Palestinians and they never manufacture an endless supply of suicide bombers. So it’s the ideas, it’s the culture and you know, so you know, the most glaring scotoma in Dave Smith’s non-expertise is a complete failure to appreciate the reality of jihadism and just what Israel is actually dealing with in Hamas.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: I believe that it’s also a strain of anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism which is a belief that nobody in the world can do something wrong and bad unless we have somehow pushed them to it.

SAM HARRIS: Yes, this is Noam Chomsky’s gift to our politicians.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Yes, yes. It used to be on the left and now it’s on the right as well. This is a profound and deep anti-Americanism which I cannot sign up for and will not. Profound anti-Westernism sees the world actually funnily enough, Edward Said, to the extent that his theory on Orientalism holds at all, might have found this trend interesting of Westerners now looking at the rest of the world and saying they can’t do anything unless we make them.

SAM HARRIS: Totally without any agency of all the people you would otherwise give no moral agency.

The Death Cult Ideology

DOUGLAS MURRAY: And if there is an explanation for why somebody goes and blows themselves up and everyone that they can kill on a bus in Jerusalem, it’s because of something to do with British mandate policy 80 years earlier. I completely reject this and I reject it for many reasons. But one is that riding shotgun with the claim that only the West, only America can lead anyone to do bad things is what you rightly identify, Sam, as the utter inability to recognize that some people seek utterly different things than we do.

You remember there was a story some years ago that seemed to me to be emblematic. I must look it up again. I think it was actually reported in the New York Times of an American couple. A nice couple. I don’t wish to make any sort of laughs at their expense, but they decided to give up their jobs somewhere in San Francisco and cycle around the world. And they kept a blog and the aim was that they wanted to show their belief that essentially everyone in the world wants what they did, which is, you know, security, comfort, well-being, happiness, a bit of money to bring up your kids well and you know, love and peace.

Their journey log ends when they’re cycling through, I think it was Tajikistan. And unfortunately for them, a truckload of ISIS fighters are driving the other way. Can’t believe their luck. But there are these two Americans on a tandem and stop and torture and kill them, and there’s where their story ended.

I use it as an example because it’s a particularly unpleasant one, but emblematic of a total failure of imagination or study from many people in the West who do not realize that when it comes to what I’d call the death cult ideology which has manifested on the right and the left in history. It manifested in Spain in the 1930s with the Falangists chanting to Miguel de Unamuno, you know, “Viva la Muerte.” Long live death. And you know, the great Spanish philosopher of his era realizes his life, his work is just done because it’s over. Because he’s in front of a group of young men chanting, long live death. And this is. It’s over. It’s over. Reason and rationalism will no longer work.

Well, the death cult that I write about here is the death cult of Hamas that really could have not done what it did. And as I say in one of the passages in the book, after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, there was a Palestinian state in Gaza. They were even encouraged to have elections by the George W. Bush administration, Condoleezza Rice and others. They had elections. They voted in Hamas, which states that it’s a genocidal terrorist organization which wants the annihilation of the Jewish race and then get onto everyone else.

They voted in Hamas. Hamas immediately used the billions of dollars that came in to make sure they built up a terror infrastructure, tunnel systems, not for the citizens of Gaza, but for the rockets and for their fighters kept on importing rockets and other military hardware to fire at Israel. And after many iterations of the war, in 2023, 4,000 of their terrorists flood into Israel and massacre their way through the south. This is the fruit of Hamas. This is what Hamas wanted. This is what its leadership wanted. And they do not want to live in peace and coexistence. They want to murder and slaughter, and they even want to die themselves. And I think that, I mean, we’re sitting here in LA. Why would anyone in Los Angeles understand this?

The Pattern of Jihadist Violence

SAM HARRIS: I mean, you do, but we had 9/11. We had our own. Insofar as you’re a student of the news, I mean, this is of a piece with what happened in Paris on multiple occasions. Bataclan most horrifically in your country, the Manchester bombing, I mean, this is just. I mean, we memory hole it and other things, other bright shiny objects capture our attention.

But this is, you know, we’re talking about. It’s the same species of confusion and anti-Western bias that caused people to blame the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists for getting, having the indecency of getting murdered by jihadists. And then you had the PEN America foundation rescind the award that they were going to give them for courage. I mean, this confusion is everywhere.

I want to actually just draw a few bright lines where people can see them to show the moral high ground here. There are just some striking differences between the two sides that you elucidate in your book. One is that one side takes hostages, even young children and old women. And its community, it’s, you know, the non-combatants receive these hostages not with looks of horror, but with, you know, open celebration. Right. Like it is completely intelligible from a cultural standpoint within Gaza, that this is exactly what you do. This is the good is on your side for stealing these infants and young children and old women and forcing them underground for years at a stretch.

One side uses its own civilians as human shields. One side murders its civilians when they try to flee to safety. And if you try to flip this, if you try to imagine the other side, that is the Israelis doing any of these things, it is obviously unthinkable. And anyone who is standing in criticism of their behavior, I think still wouldn’t go so far as to imagine that the people of Tel Aviv are capable of using their own women and children as human shields, or that they would celebrate that the IDF would want to seek to maximize civilian casualties on its own side. I mean, even that is not as confused as people are. No one seems to me as confused about that. And yet they don’t see the relevance of these differences.

The Denial and Projection

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Lots of reasons, ones I don’t want to. If you were supporting a side that turned out to have done October 7th, some people say to me, oh, no, no, no, the world’s sympathies with Israel. No, they weren’t. No, some of the world’s sympathies were briefly with Israel. But in London on the evening of the seventh, hundreds of people gathered in the streets of Knightsbridge to wave flares and celebrate the ongoing massacre on 8th October. I relate in the book that I was in Times Square to see a pro-Hamas protest as the massacre was still going on. This started very early.

And we get back to that strange collection of simultaneous thoughts that people can have. Hamas GoPros and records and Instagrams their atrocities and their followers can. It’s another one of these double moves, these jiu-jitsu moves. They say simultaneously how thrilled they are about the atrocities and also the atrocities didn’t happen. And then the third move is the atrocities are actually carried out by the other side. You set your watch and you’ll see it.

Last year there was a claim that IDF soldiers had gone into Gaza and were raping the women of Gaza. There are many reasons why this is completely implausible. And not just implausible, but deeply offensive. But all these people who were repeating this smear of the Israeli Defense Forces were all the people who were denying that Hamas had raped women on the seventh.

There’s a muppet of a journalist, not really a journalist or a commentator agitator in the UK who passed around the libel that the IDF was raping women in Gaza, who when he saw a version of the 43 minute atrocity video, came out of it and reviewed it by saying it was disappointing because you didn’t actually see any women being raped and therefore it seems unlikely any rapes occurred.

This is one of my. This has become, as you know, I call it Grossman’s Law now, after Vasily Grossman. This is this thing of tell me what you accuse the Jews of and I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of. Absolutely 100% application of this law. The side that says it’s both good to kill babies and denies that they kill babies, then attack the IDF and IAF for killing babies. It’s everywhere.

This form of projection, I suppose, which is one of the things it is, and it’s deliberate desire to not recognize the difference between deliberately maximizing civilian casualties, as Hamas did on the 7th, and deliberately trying to minimize them, as the IDF has this. If the IDF had wanted to carry out a genocide in Gaza, it could have done. They were accused of having a genocide in Gaza since 2005, which is weird because the population doubled after 2005 up to 2023. But then it’s not like consistency’s particularly important. It seems, in this era, after all, the same people who claim that, who say that there is a genocide in Gaza are the same people who say why don’t the Israelis realize that they are operating militarily in an area with a disproportionate number of people under the age of 21?

SAM HARRIS: You have a line in your book, forgive me if I don’t get it verbatim. But it was something like, how do you fight an army that wants to maximize the loss of life on its own side? Right? I mean, this is. People don’t, it seems to me, make contact with how, one, how just morally perverse that situation is. But two, what an insuperable obstacle it is to actually practically fight in a war so as to minimize the loss of civilian life.

The Reality of Israel’s Military Operations in Gaza

DOUGLAS MURRAY: I mean, hundreds and hundreds of Israeli soldiers have been killed in the last 18 months because they are going methodically and in exceptionally dangerous situations, house to house. In areas of Gaza that are meant to have been cleared of everyone but Hamas fighters, hundreds and hundreds of young Israeli men primarily have been killed by, instead of carpet bombing an area, going assiduously through it at enormous personal risk.

Every soldier you speak to has the same stories of, for instance, people coming out of a civilian area with their hands in the air, and then from their midst, a group of Hamas terrorists come dressed exactly the same as the civilians and start firing at the soldiers. Soldiers in the knowledge that the soldiers either have to just receive the incoming fire and lose their own lives, or they have to fire back and risk killing some of the civilians that Hamas has so gleefully sprung out among. None of this is just. All of this is what every soldier has faced for the last 18 months. Every single one.

And Hamas leadership say. There was an interview on Al Arabiya the other month with one of the remaining leaders of Hamas who was asked, if the Israeli airstrikes from the air that you describe are so devastating, why don’t you allow the citizens of Gaza to shelter in your very extensive tunnel system? And his reply was, because the tunnel system is not for the civilians of Gaza. The tunnels are for our rockets and ammunition and for our fighters. And asked who should build shelters for the citizens of Gaza, he said, the international community. That’s their responsibility. The international community.

SAM HARRIS: But I have the same community that gave them billions and billions of dollars to build those tunnels effectively over 18 years.

The Scale of October 7th in Perspective

DOUGLAS MURRAY: And I have a genuine, genuine offer I’ll put out there. I can’t attach a cash prize this time, but this is a completely sincere offer to anyone listening to pick me up on the following challenge your listenership. I’m sure Sam is intelligent enough to understand what it is to extrapolate out civilian or other casualties by ratio of population. Not everyone gets me on this, but of course, Israel is a country of 9 million people. America is a country of about 340 million people. Nobody knows how many people are in the UK so it doesn’t work there.

SAM HARRIS: But we soon won’t know how many people are in America, given all the dodging. But well.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: And again, just preempting any of the morons who want to claim that, I’m saying that a Jewish life is worth 10 in American lives. No, it’s extrapolating out from population. So if October 7th had happened in America by proportion of population, it would have been 44,000 Americans murdered and burned alive in their homes in one day and another 10,000 Americans taken hostage.

So my challenge is whether in Gaza, with 1200 civilians in Israel murdered and 250 taken hostage and the two stated war aims of the Israeli government, the return of all the hostages and the destruction or capture of all of Hamas leadership and fighting brigades, whether it’s in the case of Israel trying to carry out this operation of rescue and so on in Gaza, or whether it would be how America would get back 10,000 hostages in an equally built up, intensely booby trapped terrain. If anyone watching has a battle plan for how to do that, send it to me and I will send it to everybody I know in Israel.

Because I’m sure that if there is a military genius watching and listening, who knows how you would carry out that operation with no civilian casualties on the side of the Gazans and minimal to no casualties on the side of the IDF. I can assure anyone watching, I and many others would be all ears. But I hear no such thing. I hear no such thing.

The best I’ve had, I think it came up in that Rogan debate. The best I’ve heard is the hostages that have been released have been released by getting around a table and negotiating horseshit said by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. The only reason Hamas has released any of the hostages to date, including the dead bodies of babies, is because of the kinetic military force exercised for 18 months by the young men and women of the IDF. Only military pressure has made Hamas give any of the hostages back. They would all still be sitting in underground tunnels and in the basements of Al Jazeera journalists and journalists and much more if there had been no military action in Gaza. Sinwar would still be alive if the IDF had not painstakingly fought in Gaza for a year. People simply do not understand this. And when they say things like but wouldn’t it? Why don’t the Israelis just get around the table with Hamas? I’m afraid you completely demonstrate you know nothing about Hamas.

The Hostage Dilemma

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, yeah. What do you think Israel’s policy should be going forward around hostages. I know this is difficult for you to answer, perhaps, given the fact that you know many of these families. But, I mean, I think I can only imagine that there are very few people in Israel now who think that the Gilad Shalit deal was wise. In retrospect, that was the. You might summarize what that was, but that was the, I think the 1027 terrorist to one hostage exchange that freed Sinwar to mastermind October 7th. That piece of history looks increasingly untenable. And given the understandable pressure brought to bear by the hostage families throughout this war, given the fact that just the leverage is undeniable, once you have hostages, you have leverage. How does this get broken in the future?

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Let me preempt that by saying that there are similar cases around. When I was reporting from Ukraine recently, I was, among other things, interviewing families and children who had been behind the enemy lines, had been in territory captured by Putin’s forces. And it’s thought that around 20,000 Ukrainian children have effectively been kidnapped by Putin and the Russians. This includes people in orphanages, but it also includes children that were encouraged to go to summer camps and their parents sent to summer camps and then were disappeared.

I found out something very interesting the other week when I was looking into this story and trying to bring some more light to it, which is that there seems to me to have been an almost deliberate attempt at the Ukrainian side not to maximize this story because, and this is something of a supposition, speaking to some of the people campaigning for the kidnapped children, that the Zelensky government knew that the minute that it is about getting the children back, you will get intolerable pressure from your domestic population because anything is worth it to get the children home. Yeah, it’s just a terrible, terrible thing. And I suspect that some of their thinking on that has been influenced by watching the Israelis being pushed into this intolerable position.

It’s incredibly hard in Israel because not only is there the religious edict to fight for life, and this is one of the commandments central to the faith, but it is also a commandment that then is central to the state. Everybody, when they join the army, the air force or anything, everyone fights. Flying a dangerous raid over enemy territory is told, if something happens, we will come and get you back. We’ll come and get you back. We tear up the earth to get our people back. Everybody in the IDF know no man left behind. No man left behind in the battlefield.

And so Hamas, like Hezbollah, know that that is the Israeli view, that they put an exceptionally high Price on life. And by the way, that isn’t just the life of Jews. To preempt one inevitable line of attack. It is literally to get back every Israeli. And the Israelis who have been captured, by the way, included Bedouin, Arabs, Druze, and others.

But it’s agonizing. It is completely agonizing, as Hamas knew it would be. Some families of the hostages refused to engage in the Hostage Families forum and its work because they said, we know and our child knew. And sometimes the child left a message saying, please don’t swap me. It’s not worth it. Other families will suffer.

And they really do. I mean, there was a. In one of the swaps, I myself, having spent all this time there and getting to know so many people involved, victims and families and more. I myself had one the other month where one of the hostages released was someone whose family I know well. And one of the terrorists released in swap from Israeli side was a man who killed the brother of a friend of mine in Israel some years ago. So one family is celebrating in a way which you just. It’s like a miracle.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah. You cannot begrudge that celebration.

The Death Cult Mentality

DOUGLAS MURRAY: And on the other hand, there’s a family who knows that their loved one’s killer is free after only a few years in prison. So this is all just horrible. And it’s deliberately horrible because Hamas makes it so. The torture porn they push out on videos, videoing hostages watching the release of other hostages in order to double up the pressure.

SAM HARRIS: But interviewing a hostage they’re releasing knowing that his family has been killed, but he doesn’t know it. Yeah, that was every permutation of this.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: He got back. Bebet’s father gets back, believes because he’s been separated from his wife and kids, that they must be alive, and then finally is released from over a year of torture and deprivation in the underground tunnels of Hamas, and then discovers that both his babies and his wife, dead.

SAM HARRIS: But I think, if memory serves, I think they asked him on camera whether he was looking forward to seeing his family knowing the status of his. That’s right.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: That’s right. It can’t be understood enough this from the Western viewpoint, that the reason I use the term death cult is that some people, some groups literally worship death. They glorify in death. They love death.

SAM HARRIS: “We love death more than you love life.” That has to be taken at face value.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Yes. As Nasrallah said in 2004, he said the great weakness of the infidel is their love of life. And we will use it against them. But as you know, that’s one of the things I meditate on in this book is what is the answer to that? Because for much of my life, I thought it was almost unanswerable. What do you do against a movement that not only glorifies in your death, but glorifies in the deaths of their own side and sometimes in the deaths of their own family? Like Ishmael Haniya, who finds out that his sons, all Hamas leaders, have been killed in an airstrike.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, we have the video. We can see his reaction to that knowledge. He’s happy.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: He’s happy.

Beyond Evil: The Religious Dimension

SAM HARRIS: So this is a piece that I think it’s very difficult for people to understand, especially secular people, and it’s easy for us to allied or seem to allied in our description of this phenomenon as being evil or as being an expression of hate, because it’s worse than that. I actually think jihadism, I think there’s something worse than evil. I’m not saying that there isn’t evil to be found here or that there isn’t hate to be found here, but misguided religious exaltation, misguided religious triumphalism allows for actually psychologically normal and otherwise compassionate people to be part of a death cult.

So I was reading your book, and I had this thought that the framing, the evil framing, was somehow not capturing what I was worried about here. And I’ve been worried about it again for now, going on something like 25 years. And I remembered that I saw an ISIS video. This had to have been at least 10 years ago, maybe 2014, of ISIS members throwing gay men and boys, or men and boys who they claimed were gay, off of rooftops. I think they were also toppling walls. These are traditional punishments.

But I remember seeing some video where there was actual tenderness being expressed by the ISIS fighters toward the people they were about to kill. I remember seeing. And I wasn’t sure whether I hallucinated this or that, you know, just that it was fabricated, the memory. I remember seeing the reassurance. Like, it’s going to be okay, Brett. Like, we have to do this to you, but this is. You know, you say the Shahada, and you’re going to be fine. Right? Like, it was not clearly not an expression of hatred. And just before this, I did a search. I couldn’t find the video, but I found a still from what I am sure is the video. I want you to look at this because there’s so much contained in this image.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Yes.

SAM HARRIS: Now, the vibe being communicated by the two people who have hands on that man’s shoulder, right, is not hatred. Everyone you see there is an ISIS fighter and the man who’s in a hood is about to be hurled off a rooftop, right? There’s something more disturbing about this for me than mere evil. Again, the evil is there. I have no doubt that Sinwar was a psychopath and a sadist. And we have a tremendous amount of testimony on that point, much of which you give in the book.

But what is worse is that it’s possible for a death cult ideology to subsume the values of even good people, even normal people. Once you recognize that these people actually believe that, they know the moral structure of the universe and how to live within it. And they know there’s one way to get to paradise, and that’s the only thing that matters. And this world is worthless, right? This is just an antechamber to either hell or paradise. And the only thing that matters is that you’re going to the right place.

Then I think we’re in the presence of a very different phenomenon, which is quite a bit scarier. What is scary is that when you think of something like the Nova Music Festival, which you write about in such a searing way in the book, I mean, that, for me, crystallizes this collision between Western freedom and tolerance and compassion and the Jihadist Project.

[Audio ends abruptly…]

Related Posts

• Transcript: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Intelligence: Sam Harris
• Transcript: Producer Dan Farah on Joe Rogan Podcast #2416
• Transcript: 9/11 Widow Kristen Breitweiser on Tucker Carlson Show
• Transcript: Ryan Montgomery on Roblox, Minecraft, Discord & the Darkest Online Cult – Shawn Ryan Show (SRS #255)
• Transcript: Ryan Montgomery – #1 Ethical Hacker on Shawn Ryan Show (SRS #56)