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in which Nazi propaganda is rife, routine and commonplace. In Arabic and in English, you know, the offerings for things like Mein Kampf is very commonplace in the Muslim world. A lot of... To what extent are we potentially about to go through what some are calling the Lebanonization of Europe? Everything can happen. Do you foresee it? I gave every warning.
Only one in four British Muslims believe that Hamas carried out murders on October the 7th. They say things like, Israel kills babies. Hamas... Broadcast hits killing of babies every time. The accusation they make against the Jewish state is the thing they are guilty of. How did the debate go with Dave Smith on Joe Rogan? How do you feel it went? Hang on, you're talking about crossing...
And not only have you never been to a crossing point in either Egypt or in Israel, but you've never even been to the region. Joe's a friend. I was concerned that he has spent much of the last 18 months platforming. Dave Smith kept getting the name of the first president of Israel wrong. It felt like he wanted to make that point. I wanted to make that point. I don't know if, I mean, it's obviously landed with some people and not with others. 61% of regular Heretics viewers haven't subscribed.
can I ask you a favour? If you love these fearless conversations, hit subscribe now because it's free, takes two seconds and powers our mission. Join hundreds of thousands of fellow heretics. Subscribe and let's question everything together. How did the debate go with Dave Smith on Joe Rogan? How do you feel it went? Well, a few days ago.
I don't know. I mean, I thought I said much of what I had to say. Joe's a friend. I was concerned that he... spent much of the last 18 months platforming one side an argument and not really given any voice to the other and uh felt that was the same not only with israel and Russia and Ukraine as well, to a great extent, whatever people's views. And I'm all for the airing of all types of views, but I do.
you know he can choose whatever guests he wants but i was i was concerned by the possibility that his his listeners who are very considerable in number almost as big as yours um could have been misled into thinking that what he was presenting was the mainstream view. And he brought this comedian. debate me and i know i mean he has some good points uh he obviously feels very strongly about a conflict Doesn't really know, I think.
His right to have those views, my right to counter them, anyone else's right to tell us both to F off. What's it like, a debate like that? You're going into one and you're sort of debating Joe as well. You went in quite early as well, quite hard. And I think a lot of people wanted you to as well. what's the atmosphere like beforehand and afterwards? Perfect nice. I mean, Joe's a great guy.
Great guy, very warm, very talented guy. And, you know, equally warm afterwards. I just thought I couldn't not raise, you know. something was on my mind um and uh There were some parts, for example, you said Daryl Cooper said Churchill was the chief villain of World War II. And they said, no, he never said that. He never said that. But I had a look. He did say that very clearly. And he's written it. There were a few points like that. Do you feel like there was some unfair aspect?
Well, the unfair aspect is just that... I don't think it's incumbent upon anyone to absorb extremely fringe and not remotely respected pseudo-historians. who i mean the weird play that kept happening was well this historian is wrong all the major historians counter this person then it was like well he doesn't say he's a historian but what i found amusing about that was that
I don't know how much you know about MMA fighting. No, very little. If you went on to Joe's podcast and wanted to talk for three hours about your views on MMA fighting, he would fairly early on. and would call you out. I just would like to see the same levels of public discussion. that would be applied to discussion of a...
to a discussion of a war. I suppose it's complicated because I know nothing about MMA, whereas these guys would say that they know a lot about Israel and us. You could fake it quite easily. You could spend an afternoon online. You could go to Wikipedia. could claim favorite fighter and then get their name wrong. with the first president of Israel wrong. But that's fine. You could do it. It's just I think there's no...
That's interesting. I mean, I looked at a few of the Joe Rogan things recently. There was Ian Carroll was another one. And there was something he said I thought was really interesting, and I wanted to get your thoughts on it. He said, I realized I better fucking understand this thing before I create my new channel and career on this topic. This thing being? Israel.
Before I crater my career on this topic, I don't understand. If I'm going to take a stance against Israel, I should understand why and how. So I started doing research. So to me, that was a cognitive. slip up. Do you see what I'm saying? Sure. He didn't know what he was doing and then decided to mug up fast. That's something you can do in the internet era. I'm very suspicious of this thing of I've done the research.
Well, also because he started from a place of bias. I'm going to have this anti-Israel blog or whatever. Now I better go and research why I hate Israel. You're always going to, if you say, I want to believe flat earth.
You can find enough stuff to make you... There's plenty of material online. Yeah, and I've argued with flat earthers, and it's not as easy as it seems. No, famously Orwell said that. Did he? Yeah, in one of his essays, he talks about... how tricky it is actually to debate something like that because you start to come up the sort of edge of your own knowledge.
lip of the horizon stuff. I mean, I've been to Australia. If somebody is immersed in a kooky corner of a subject like that, they can throw people off. You can't. It's so hard to argue with that. There's a rhetorical trick that's, I mean, go back to fighting. I mean, if somebody was a white belt and a black belt, you've got to accept that there's a hierarchy.
And there is. Well, if you were speaking to a white belt karate guy who was pretending to be a black... and wasn't again that would be called out again somebody who says they aren't a historian but they're writing about history and is totally debunked or alternative history or weird, not even revisionist history, it's just returning to things that have regurgitated. But if you're holding yourself out like that, pretending you're kind of black... you should be called out on it.
a real black belt in that case a real historian Andrew Roberts, Churchill's biographer, most recently, Churchill's biographer, you would think that there could be a difference. And there is a difference. There's all the difference in the world. There's between a white belt and a black belt. There is between... a pretend historian like some of these guys and a real historian like Andrew Roberts. And I'm not willing to pretend that there isn't a difference.
I feel there was an interesting point that a lot's been made of online where you said about experts. And, you know, some people are saying we mustn't listen to experts. And you said, have you been to these places? And I think it's hard for people to understand when they're listening to that who haven't read your book. your brilliant book on democracies and death, cults, Israel, Hamas, and the future of the West.
I was reading this. I've been reading it the last couple of weeks and have completed it and finished it. And it's an unbelievably good book that's beautifully written and gave me nightmares. I think everybody must read this book. You being on the ground, as you were after October 7th and have been many times in Israel, is essential to understanding such a complex situation, is it not?
I'm rather surprised that people think that I was rather surprised that people were surprised that I have a role. trying to go to places that i'm writing about but i i mean i'm sorry you know it is a kind of journalistic rule On the most basic one, you cannot be the correspondent for Washington, D.C. if you live in Plymouth. You would be, I mean, you could have views on it, of course, but if you're a journalist, you'd have to be writing from Washington, D.C.
Again, if a British journalist wrote endlessly about American politics, but had never been to America. or wrote endlessly about American society and what you have to understand about American society and had never been to America, I think that was a basic failing of theirs as a journalist. And one of the reasons I put myself in some of the situations I do is simply because I think that's what you have to do as a writer and a journalist.
interested that there are many people coming up and voicing. their views, which again, they have every right to do, to say that they think that's some kind of elitist thing. It isn't. It's very basic, standard journalistic practice. I suppose we're in a bit of a difficult situation. It's something that I'm always trying to navigate myself. You know, I had someone on the other day talking about the COVID vaccine. For example, it was an anti-vaccine. I'm sitting there going, shit, I'm in.
What do I say? Do I push back? I don't even have the knowledge to push back. Why am I doing this? At the same time, if we don't do this, the legacy media, they're only pushing one story, which as you discussed on Rogan about. vaccines was wrong so yeah look that that is one of the great um look it's just something we're going to have to navigate and if we're going to navigate it we've got to be A lot of experts have proven themselves to be wrong. That does not mean that expertise does not.
And that does not mean that all opinions are relative or indeed of each. If you were being wheeled in for brain surgery in your local hospital and comic Dave Smith introduced himself as your surgeon. I think you would say, could I get a qualified doctor to do this? Yes. I mean, I acknowledge that it's a little less clear when it comes to who's a historian, who's a journalist. so on. It's a little less clear because we're in a very exciting moment of mass access to mass amounts of information.
But I still think that that doesn't mean that everything is equally valid as an idea or as an observation. And when somebody makes an observation that I know not to be true, because I've seen that what they're... I can't pretend that's all the same thing. And, you know, some people seem to think, you know, that I must be saying that people don't have the right to have an opinion. Absolutely not. Everyone has.
and everyone has a right to voice it. It just doesn't mean that every opinion is equally valid. And if you've put in the years of work that I have into on-the-ground reports... it is slightly irksome to have to refute claims that are untrue. from somebody who's never put in a day's work on the ground and Again, I mean, people think that journalism doesn't have many, many standards. We do have some.
But again, just getting back to this point of expertise, it's a really, I recognize it's a difficult one for people to navigate when it comes to less clear things than black belt karate and brains. Still, there are standards. There should be standards. And we shouldn't give up on them. I'm not going to agree that some David Irving-esque revisionist historian has the same... Is it fair then to say I felt maybe the first half hour, I listened to the whole thing, that you did feel?
And we're making that point. I always feel irked. Yes, you're an irked man. I'm an irked man. And I think after maybe an hour or two, then you guys got more into the... Then we got into, I think we went on to Ukraine, then we did. It felt like you wanted to make that point. I wanted to make that point. I mean, it's obviously landed with some people and not with others, but that's fine. I don't particularly care. I tried to make the point as well as I could.
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So stop overpaying. Seriously, click the link in the description, install Coupé for free and let it do the work for you. There's a great point you make in your book about... And I hadn't considered this a Jewish person myself. I know about this sort of changeable figure of anti-Semitism, but I didn't think about the way people project, different people project. Was it their worst fears or their worst bits about them? Tell me about that. It's fascinating, isn't it? I say fascinating.
because I'm not saying my idea is fascinating. It's an idea I found in the great Soviet Jewish writer Vasily Grossman, who in the middle of his masterpiece, Life and Fate, devotes for... In the midnight of the 20th century between Stalingrad and Treblinka, he takes this extraordinary passage and he talks about, yes, one of the things is that he said, Explains where antisemitism can be found everywhere, left, right.
It can come from any direction because it's a shape-shifting virus, but the observation that Grossman makes, which I'm really keen to put out there for more people to think about, as I have been. is that he says everywhere it's a mirror to the person who suffers from it. It tells us nothing about the Jews, but it tells us the person who suffers from it. It's a mirror to their own faith. And yes, one of the examples he gives is, of course, that the Nazis accused the Jews of being racist.
And wanting world domination. Yeah. Almost sounds like someone. Yeah. So the Nazis were telling us something about themselves in their accusations against the Jews. I think the same thing is happening today. I think we're seeing projection on a cloth. How might that work with, let's say, Islamists and woke people who are both in some... Well, Islamists accuse particularly the Jewish state of everything they want to do.
Only one in four British Muslims revealed in the poll last year believe that Hamas carried out murders and crimes on October the 7th. But they accuse the IDF of... By the way, I mean, it's a very weird one because having been embedded with the IDF, I don't think any IDF soldier goes into Gaza. Look at all the women here. I can. If I know. It's an obscene libel against the Israeli soldiers. But this is of course what Hamas did. and what they filmed and put out to the world.
And so the people who accuse Israel's soldiers of racism are the people who are covering for racism or are racism themselves. It's an extraordinary thing. They say things like, Israel kills babies. Hamas... broadcasts its killing of babies. Hamas just had a dead baby parade in Gaza when they were handing back the Bibas children from captivity where they'd killed. Every time the accusation they make against the Jewish state is the thing they argue
Colonialist expansion as well, you mentioned. Colonialist expansion. Ayatollah Khomeini, when he thanked American and other students for coming out on the anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist cause on campuses and so on. When he thanked... He accuses Israel, as he has repeatedly, as the Iranian revolutionary government has repeatedly for decades, accuses Israel of being a colonizing state. Which regime has colonized the great people of Persia since 1979? The Iranian Revolutionary government.
who has gone on in our own lifetimes and in recent years, in particular, to colonize. colonize Syria, colonize and destroy the great country of Lebanon, formerly great, colonize Yemen, colonize Gaza. But they say that the Jews are colonialists. The one other obvious example is President Erdogan in Turkey, who accuses the Israelis of being occupied. i don't know if you've been to northern cyprus no
So that's occupied for the last 50 years by the Turkish government that illegally invaded Cyprus, stole the north part of the country. We're still in a situation half a century. where a NATO member states. occupies half of an EU member. You would have thought that that's the sort of thing people would be irked about. Annoyed. Maybe even protested.
But from one year to the next, there's no mass movement in any Western city, and there's not been any encampment in any American campus to right the injustice of the occupation of northern Cyprus. But again, all Erdogan is doing, all the Turkish government are doing by accusing the Israelis of being occupiers is revealing who they are. They're occupiers.
And then I suppose the woke, they see Jews sometimes and Israelis as super white and privileged, which they tend to be themselves. Well, I think that is a very interesting call. deserves thought. I saw the video the other day of Muslim students at Princeton screaming, go back home to Jewish... i mean that's some kind of what do they think they're not right welcome there i mean there's some kind of version of projection going on there and maybe they think
Fear being told to go back home. It's an extremely revealing... But as you know, and as I tried to bring across in that Rogan episode, you know, antisemitism is always a problem for Jews first, but it is my certain... that it's a problem for everyone else next. Because once you start playing with this dark matter, you are going to open the gates of every other hell as well. And you don't have to be a pseudo.
I think it's such an important point to make because even my show, people know I'm a Jewish YouTuber, but most of the audience are not Jewish. They couldn't possibly be just by the numbers. There aren't enough Jews, really. And I think people are starting to understand, people who are becoming more interested in this are starting to understand that, well, they would be next.
are still you know they're in trouble um i think it was it was hard thinking about what to interview about because you've been on a lot of shows at the moment really high okay, what is it in the book that's really different? And I didn't know this. And maybe I should know this, but I didn't. And that was how prominent the ideas of Hitler, actual Nazis and Hitler are in the Middle East. So tell me about that.
Yeah, I mean, it's something anyone who travels in the region has been to the region at all notices. I give the example that on a visit to Egypt, Mubarak's time. reading matter for the train to alexandria and you know i wanted a sort of recent novel or something like that and in arabic and in english you know the offerings were things like
Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, books about the perfidious Jew and so on. And that's just one example. You have many others, but it's very commonplace in the Muslim world. I've seen the same things even outside. In countries like Malaysia, the same thing occurs. just a lot of anti-Semitic Nazi style stuff is mainstream in a way, which thank God it hasn't been here in Europe since 1945.
And there are reasons for that. And one of the things that I mentioned at one point in the book is of all of the soldiers in the IDF who I interviewed who were doing house to house.
clearance in gaza that is after the civilian population being told to leave and only hamas fighters stay um they would go house to house and they work you know find looking for tunnel entrances where the hostages might be able to be found and looking for arms dumps of course and they found both right But they also always had the same thing, which is the amount of Nazi-style material routinely in Garzenhausen.
And in fact, it's also a very, very interesting thing that those who had been involved in the comparatively minimal but significant 2014 war, in Gaza, those who had also been called back to serve since October the 7th, 2023. very many of them told me how much worse it had got in that period. Like the fact that, you know, Mein Kampf was the coffee table.
too many houses, far more than before, that the protocols, all of this stuff was even more prominent, far more prominent than it had been just nine years ago. And there's a reason for that that I give in the book. We don't have to get into it now, but there's a very, very clear reason that I explain as to why the Muslim world remains the only part of the world in which Nazi propaganda
Nazi anti-Semitism and more is rife routine and commonplace. And I wish it were not, because among other things, it's, again, not only to the detriment of the Jewish state, to Jews worldwide. It's much to the detriment of those societies. There is so much potential in a country like Why would the population waste its time with this ancient, debunked, militarily and philosophically destroyed, hideous idea? You were hinting at the story of Amin al-Husseini. The Grand Mufti. Yeah, that's who.
spread a bit of well, it's I say at one point, if you follow the trajectory I describe of uh on this and it's a very interesting story i won't go into the whole thing now but it's a fascinating story of how uh the grand mufti who went to adolf hitler and said i'm terribly keen on your ideas i'd like to start my own ss batani that he is accused of war crimes in Europe, wanted in France, wanted in Yugoslavia, manages to leave through a rather shady deal. and returns home to Egypt to victory.
And that, I mean, as an intellectual journey, an explanation of how a strand of history... You might think of it like a strain of a virus managed to continue to gestate in that region. Don't forget, I mean, this is routine.
The day that Adolf Eichmann was hanged in Israel, for being the architect of the holocaust of course famously kidnapped in south america when our icon is hanged the egyptian papers say that his example is one that the Muslim people should follow, the Arab nation should follow, and they should finish his work. There is a reason why Nazi war criminals who escape... would, for instance, go to Syria and help Bashar al-Assad's Ba'athist government run the terror wing of its state.
This is a terrifying part of history, in the Middle East in particular, which is just too little understood. certainly too little understood in the West. Yeah, and the West, which is now importing a large number of people from areas where these ideologies are prominent. Yes, of course. A lot of these students shouting at Jews at Princeton have come from a region where it's acceptable to shout at Jews and more.
And too many of them have been inculcated in that hatred. Not all. I know some remarkable Palestinians and others in the West who have managed to drop this self-destructive. but undoubtedly many others have not. To what extent are we potentially about to go through what some are calling the Lebanonization of the United Kingdom, or of Europe? Well, we're already... There's a very powerful moment in a book called Disturbance published by one of the journalists who survived the Charlie Hebdo.
And he reviewed the book when it came out some years ago. It was a brilliant, long, remorseless work describing the events in the office. And he was shocked. spent a long time in recovery. He was still recovering for the January attack when the November... And there's a haunting, haunting phrase in that book. He says, after the Bataclan, Judas started the stage.
dressing his wounds, says, we're going to have to live, we're going to have to learn to live like the Lebanese, and to think I used to... Does that mean for those who don't know about what the Lebanonization means or what happened in Iran or I think Afghanistan, am I right, that they got to points where...
Islamic groups came to power? And is that something that we're facing in the next four years' time, for example? Well, we already have sort of confessional politics, don't we? I mean, we have... a group of MPs in Parliament who were elected to the UK Parliament simply because they stood on a Gaza ticket and riled up a base, saw the base, grabbed it. any MP you've spoken to for years.
their post bag where it relates to foreign affairs relates to only two things really one is israel and the other is sometimes quite The Kashmir question becomes a question in Britain. And there's a reason why our capital city... the hate marches and it's because we have a lot immensely riled up whenever the Jews fall.
I can't bear that. You've made a point recently. I can't remember. I saw you talking about this. I've seen you on a few things. Stop me if I repeat myself. No, no. No, genuinely. There's different audiences. They're all different slightly. But that point you make about they can't stand losing to a Jew. That's worse than many more deaths in Syrian civil wars and all of those things. Of course.
I mean, London was not shut week after week during the Syrian Civil War, in which for more than a decade... the number of deaths that have happened, that if you take the highest... If you take Hamas's own numbers, which I don't, but if you take Hamas's own numbers of the dead in Gaza, which they say 50,000, they've just diminished that. Of course, that includes their terrorists, but they...
The highest figure that Hamas puts out for Gaza in the last 18 months of about 50,000 deaths, which is terrible, and I get somewhere between, I mean, there's certainly been civilian deaths, no doubt about that. It always happens in war. It's terrible. But if you take that highest number that Hamas points out, that's less than an average six months in the Syrian. So why, why the streets of London are not shut down?
Why people objecting to that? Why the three to four hundred thousand people killed in Yemen? Why that? Nothing. Why? There are protests today I saw in London outside the Sudanese embassy. The streets of London and Manchester and Glasgow do not get shut down by people objecting to the actual genocide going on in Sudan. So obviously it's because the Jews are involved. Obviously.
Well, that's why I ask you about what's going to happen in the next few years. I'm Jewish, my family is, and we're thinking bloody hell. And we are genuinely having those conversations on Friday night, dinner, or whatever it might be, where we say, where would we go? And I've mentioned that before, and then a lot of...
the sort of dissident right, so to speak, say, ah, you see, because you're Jewish, you're not part of us. You would just flee. And I said, well, hang on, I'm not fleeing. I'm putting my face to this. And, and, you know, when you're an anonymous. Twitter troll or whatever. They're so brave, those guys. Yeah. And then I said that and somebody said, yeah, well, I would lose my job. And I'm going, well, yeah. You get it then, don't you? I'd lose my life.
So we're sitting here going, okay, well, maybe I'll... Argentina? Is there a way to get a visa to go back there? Is it America? Would that be the place to go? Can you foresee in our lifetime or in sometime soon, because in Iran, they got in and then killed all the left who helped them get in. Is that right? Yes, the communists and the trade unionists who inadvertently helped the Khomeiniists to power. Yeah, they were massacred in the prison.
of Tehran and elsewhere in the 80s by people, including somebody who lives in Harrow. Wow. So can that happen here? Everything can happen. Do you foresee it? I'm careful about the future. um i uh i said almost everything I didn't know. I mean, in your book, you mentioned, I think, Hamza Yousaf, his opponent, Kate Forbes. What happened with her? I didn't know about this. Oh, that's remarkable. Yeah. Kate Forbes is a Christian, Scottish nationalist.
And yes, she was running for the head of the SNP at the same time as Hamza Yusuf, who is, of course, a pretty devout Muslim, married to a Palestinian, which obviously has colored. views on lots of things uh i just thought i mentioned in passing because it was very interesting to me kate forbes was lambasted for the fact that the church of which she's a member does not have Stonewall's views on gay marriage. Stonewall didn't have, used to have Stonewall.
marriage many years ago before it was legalized, and Ms. Stonewall said it wasn't a priority. But there you are. Anyway, the point is that Kate Forbes, her church does not have the most progressive views on LGBTQIA+. question mark issues. She was lambasted for it. It was as if somebody, somebody who could not be in public life. Remember that hopeless man who used to run the Liberal... But you remember the one, Tim Farron? Yeah. He's a Christian of, again, a pretty devout set.
And because he has theological opposition to... gay stuff he um he couldn't do an interview like he was trying desperately when he was doing interview rounds to talk about something other than gay sex and everyone was just asking him about gay sex because they wanted to nail him on being this Be careful on the phrasing there. They wanted to nail him on this whole issue of, you know, are you this Christian bigot?
Nobody applied the same standards when it came to Hamza Yusuf. And the minute he becomes SNP leader, he leads a prayer to Mecca in his office. boasts about it on social media must be the first time that people you know this has happened in the office of the first minister and this sort of thing and does that repeatedly throughout his extremely unsuccessful time in the leadership of Scottish politics.
I find this an amazing double standard. If Kate Forbes had got into office despite the slurs and the slurry of opprobrium which was pushed on. And I've met her, by the way. She's a lovely, lovely person. And she would have been great in a Scottish pod. she could have actually addressed some of the things that the Scots need to have addressed. Like instead of involving themselves in the Middle East conflict, maybe they could have, for instance, stopped drug overdoses in the east end of Glasgow.
would be helpful. They don't seem to care about the east end of Glasgow. East end of Gaza, that's a different matter. But Hamza Yusuf, this is what he did. If Kate Forbes had come into office... been elected first minister, head of the SNP, and immediately celebrated the Eucharist in the office, I submit that the Scottish press and others would have gone bananas. They'd have said, we've got a religious fundamentalist.
And why this, why this, you know, it's one thing if a society wants to be open. and tolerant and all of that and i'm for all of that it's another thing not to take your own side or your tradition into account and actually want to spit on And never celebrate anything that is ours, but celebrate everything that is historically not been. Well, because it's cool. It's more.
more than that cool is a bit of it but cool plus some very ugly other things such as a form of self-criticism that i regard as being one of the deep bombs underneath which is that self-criticism is one of the best aspects of our societies. Our societies are able to criticize. Any politician in the UK can say that the press can say what they like. Same thing in America.
And it's not just at that personal level, at any level. We think about things like, you know, there's been the recent debates on very significant moral issues like euthanasia. up to the moment. But we can do the self-criticism. Should we be doing this? Should we not? Is this right? And that also applies to history. I always say I never want to shut down any historical inquiry. I want more.
But there is a moment when revisionism or revision of your past, re-looking at your past, turns from being self-criticism, which we do and have done, into self-laceration. than self-flagellation and eventually self-destruction. It's an extremely careful salami slicing that you've got to do to see where one goes to another. But I said many years ago, I think in The Strange Death of Europe, that there's a very easy way.
to do this fast which is there's two types of criticism you can apply to a person or to a country There is a criticism of somebody who wants to improve you, and there is a criticism of somebody who wants to destroy you. So if I said to you, better example, if your mother said to you, I trust you have a good relationship with your mother. Reasonable. Yes. Very good. Good. Good Jewish boy. Yes. I assume you have a good relationship with your mother. Your mother wishes you.
If your mother says to you a piece of advice... Darling, I think that jacket. You've been itching to say that, Douglas. No, I admire your jacket. But if she was to say to you, I don't think that jacket looks great. You would probably take it into account. This is a frivolous example, but you might. But you would regard it in some light because you know that your mother wishes you well.
Yeah. And the same with a friend. If a friend says to me, I don't think you should have done that. Or I do that differently. I listen because I know that friend wants to improve. But if somebody hates you or me and attacks your jacket or something I've done, they're not trying to improve. Because there's a difference between talking to somebody as a critic and talking as an enemy. an enemy will say things about that are deeply demoralizing, designed to be demoralizing.
and hope that they manage to demoralize you. And that's not the same as a critic. you know it would be like um a a critic in the theater wants to generally speaking, improve the state of theatre and go to better shows. But you would discover quite, and then people say, well, what, how do you tell the difference? We all know the difference.
If somebody was a theatre critic and every night they went in and said theatre is over, it shouldn't exist as an art form, everyone should go to the football, you'd know that this person was not a lover of theatre. If somebody speaks to you in your life saying horrible things. and they hate you, that isn't just criticism that wishes you well.
We all know the difference between these two things. And for some reason, we are so bad when we know it on a personal level and a personal experience in our life. We're so bad at noticing it societally. Yet if I went to, if my parents had gone to live in Pakistan, for instance, before I was born, and I'd been born in Pakistan. and i spent all my time in pakistan talking about the ills of pakistani
and the wicked things that Pakistani governments have done, and the terrible things that the Pakistani population have done, and the miserable rates of this and the appallingness of that. And I just did that all the time. I think people would say you seem to have a problem with- And they might even say, why don't you move? Go somewhere where you'll be happy.
But at some point, if I said, I want to change everything in this country, I think the people of Pakistan would have a right to say, I'm sorry, but we're quite happy with what we've got. And why do we not know? how to do that on the national and cultural level when we know it so clearly. Well, Hamza Youssef, I think, showed his true colours because he went on that rant, didn't he? The anti-white racist rant. I couldn't believe that. Yeah, it seemed to me to be highly racist.
Unbelievable. Again, if my parents moved to Pakistan and I ended up joining the Pakistani parliament, which, by the way, I couldn't. I mean, one of the amazing things about our society is we're gloriously pluralistic, gloriously diverse. and endlessly allow people just to insult. But if at the same time as our society actually providing the ladders by which people show we are not what they say we are, if we were the racist society that they say we were, you wouldn't have a Hamzi.
at the top of politics. You wouldn't have a Rishi Sunak as prime minister. You would have any of these things. They just lie. But just to finish that point, if my parents had moved to Pakistan and, you know, by the grace of Allah, I managed to get into the parliament. And I use my time in the parliament to say, I can't believe how many Pakistani people there are here. Why are there not more white people? Why do I not see more of myself? Why am I not reflected more in this parliament as a...
pasty white British guy who burns in the sun very easily. People would say, what the hell are you doing? Where do you think you are? It's a very, very... very straightforward and at the same time as i say salami sliced thing what is the point when your virtues get used against you when is the point where the turns into a tolerance that is essentially
What would you say to those on the dissident right or the woke right, some are calling it, or the conspiracy theory riddled right? Are these all the same thing? I don't think. Oh, we would need more time. But those people who say that the attack on Israel from the Gazans
from Hamas was a false flag operation by Israel. They let them in on purpose, that kind. It was said about 9-11 as well. Yeah, it's always said about... morons yeah and evil people yeah i mean um you know no jews died in the 20s I mean, just look at the dead from Count of Fitzgerald. They always, some, as I say, it's a sign of an abnormality. psyche that they seek to make this lure.
claims against the Jews. I think it's a stupid person's way to try to understand a complicated world, is one of the ways you might say it, uncharitably. But I think truthfully. These are such sick people. I hear them saying things like, yeah, all the dead of the seventh were killed by the IDF. These are such morons. Evil, evil morons.
What a thing to say. What a stupid thing to claim against all of the evidence, of course, all of the evidence. One of the reasons why I wrote this book, one of the reasons why I went to Israel as soon as I could after the seventh was I knew. Smell it. They always do it. They always do it. They will. This is one of the reasons, by the way, it's one of the reasons why I get firsthand testimony from the hospitals and the morgues, the prisons, the massacre site.
I knew that these people, there would be some wicked people out there who would do this. One of the purposes of this book is to put down what I saw, what I know, who I spoke to. I talk about the military failings, intelligence failings, manifest failings that meant that 4,000 terrorists were able to invade. I talk about that. Definite security and intelligence failure.
But it was Hamas that did the massacre, and the people who would like to pretend no one was massacred or has done... by the israelis or something these are just sick demented people this is one of the reasons by the way why early in the conference When the Israeli government put out, will compile. 47 minutes, I think it was originally, it went down to 43 minutes of the massacre footage that Hamas took themselves. Again, has to be stressed.
The footage we have from the 7th is very largely footage recorded by Hamas themselves because they're so darn proud of their work. This is like if the Nazis had had GoPros in the 1940s and had been live streaming from Buchenwald. or Treblinka. This is what Hamas were doing. The footage is mainly from them, because they're proud, because they're a death But this footage...
which I saw early on and was shown to journalists. There was a big debate inside Israel and out about whether that just unbelievable should be made publicly available. And it's a very interesting, it was a very interesting moral, as well as strategic conundrum. Some of the video but there's stuff which couldn't be. And there was some one baby was murdered very brutally and in particular
And that's their right. And my view was always, if any of the families don't want it out there, it shouldn't be out there. And that's a perfectly normal request. It's like Daniel Pearl's parents, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was beheaded. graduate of the London His last moments, as jihadists did with others, were recorded so that they could show her proud.
and daniel's parents of course spent years trying to make sure that that video was not being pumped With 1,200 people killed on the 7th of October, many more injured, 250 kidnapped and taken. i thought it was the right of families who did not want the last
seen to have their feelings respected. But I had another reason why I thought that what I... uh in that footage should not get a wider viewing and that was that i i said to friends whenever we debated this i said you just you better if this was released online, there will be sickos who immediately will be doing what they've been doing.
the sickos the warped-minded perverts will say that the you know the is holding as he's trying to behead a young man on the floor and shouts alo akba with every blow they'll say that oh you know the shadow of the shovel doesn't fit the shadow of the thing and therefore false flag or something. They'll do that. And I just thought it is all so fresh, all so recent, all so painful. Who wants to push? the loved ones of those murdered people through that additional additional
horror. And yeah, but these people are around. They lurk in the woodsheds of our society. The job is to make sure they stay there in a way. There are echoes of what you're saying in Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22, when he describes waking up. after 9-11, I believe he was in New York and being astounded to see that people already were blaming America, not necessarily blaming the Jews at that point, but blaming America.
That was sort of his waking up point. Yes, that's when he said, I think he had forgotten that. Yeah, he said, what was it? He said, it's everything I loved. It's scary how much it repeats itself and it's still going on. I wish he was still here and we'd be having that conversation. Why does Israel uniquely face this proportionality attack? And I want to at the same time ask why the UN has more resolutions against Israel. You described Turkey.
Nexation, is that the word? Occupation. Occupation of northern Cyprus. No one seems to be bothered. Is it right Natasha Hausdorff was saying that there's more resolutions against Israel than all the other countries in the world combined? Is that right? Yeah, I believe so. Well, there's an old joke that I repeated recently in my column on Spectator that the United Nations should have a football team. I said, well, sure, but who would they play? Israel, of course.
Yeah, of course. Look at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. An utter asylum outbreak, if ever there was one. I think the Iranian revolutionary government once again recently got put in charge of the Women's Rights Commission. Shut up. Did that happen? Yeah, that stuff is always... You know... just the most ghastly backward. anti-women, you know, anti-minority countries on Earth will routinely be put in charge of the, you know, the sort of...
future of children project. I kid you not. Everyone can look it up. There are just so many absurd examples. It's the norm of the human rights category. And it's the norm at the UN in New York. horrible countries and horrible despotisms show up at the UN and defame Israel. But this is like, this is an old story. You know, the famous 1975 UN resolution, Zionism is racism, which flat out wrong.
The 1975 Zionism is racism resolution, at which point the great, late, great Democrat, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, gave one. an abomination and the the united states of america will not buy it buy it and will not you know it's a magnificent moment people can look But that resolution, claiming that Zionism, the idea that the Jewish people have a right to a state in their ancestral homeland, that that is racist.
It was proposed, if I remember rightly, by Idi Amin. The Wife Eater, among other things, which on a technical copy... most pleasing thing in my life when I once described him as a wife eater I had a copy editor say you must mean be must be beater I wrote back But Idi Amin, irrespective of that lurid story. one of the most brutal despots of his time, a psychopath at a clear, famous, notorious level. Even people in 1975 knew that.
a mass murderer. And he proposes a resolution. And do you know who threw the drinks party to celebrate the passing of the resolution? Kurt Yeah. Gosh. One time president of Austria. So you have an African warlord. and a former Nazi celebrating the defamation of the Jewish state at the United Nations. For many of us since then, I find what the United Nations says on some things interesting. I don't doubt that some of its wings do a lot of good. A lot of it is.
The UN is the UN. Well, I mean, I've come to the conclusion that, you know, you could get out and set up something similar, but it'll always sort of go in a similar way. And there's a reason for that, as Kirkpatrick and Moynihan and others. since most of the countries of the United Nations are not the same as, you know, the democracies, or at least many. And there will always be a bias against the liberal democracies. You've got 50 of the OIC.
cooperation countries that always vote the way they do um always anti-israel always anti-western And you have all the totalitarianisms of the world, all the dictatorships. Putin's dictatorship in Russia, you've got the Chinese Communist. I've always thought that although the UN is a useful place to meet, people should not cite its judgments as if they were the judgment of God, because they're not. They are judgments by highly flawed, often wicked acts.
I think while the left often accuses the right of being supremacist in some way, white supremacist or whatever, I started thinking that there might be a sort of... supremacist feeling on the left because there seems to be this idea that our culture, almost like the end of evolution, as if evolution had an end goal, which it doesn't. If we just give money and resources to these places and to these ideologies, they'll turn out like us and everything will be fine.
Do you think that's maybe misguided? And that's a new criterion about the lamentable. Hannah Arendt essay, Kambok, Eichmann in Jerusalem, A Study on the Banality of Evil. And I mentioned in that that it seems to me that the... capacity to use the term evil seems to have disappeared in our
And obviously it's something I've thought about and seen a lot in recent years in particular. I believe that there is such a force as evil in the world and that even if you don't... think you need theological framework or language to use that term, you'll find... um what i mean by that is really one of the reasons why we're bad at using is that there has been a presumption for some time in the era of secularization
saying unweighted as a phrase for now that there has been a period in the period of secularization in which we we many people have come to the idea that there's no such thing as evil there's just sort of people we haven't understood Or, you know, maybe they had a bad... had childhoods and yet they somehow managed to refrain from firing rpgs at their neighbors um the The loss of this term, it's everywhere in the culture. Look at any Netflix drama. Look at any documentary.
about a serial killer or something. There's always any book about a serial killer. Everyone wants to know. And it is very interesting, of course, because these are pathological outrunners. But we want to know how they came about. And there is a sort of presumption with, you know, a Fred West or a Jeffrey Dahmer or something, that you will be able to find it. And it's fascinating. And it's a very deep human desire.
And yet, as I quote Gita Sereni, In a way, anyone who's covered war or conflict and atrocities are much more... in the end you sort of can't help but think that there is a force that is evil in the world and maybe it's born in people maybe it's developed in people maybe it comes down occasion. Most likely it's in the heart of everyone and that's what disturbs us about it.
yeah we um the reluctance to use this term on the left means that there is this, there are these sets of presumptions such as if the living standards only improve. And yet there are billions of people in the world who have terrible living standards and they do not decapitate their neighbors. There are billions of people in the world who live in misery, but they do not seek to create misery in others. I think it's such an insult to so many people.
It's an insult, apart from anything else, to the Palestinian people that these people pretend to care about and are merely using as a proxy for their own bigotries most of the time, in my view. It's a sign of theirs. They really think that the Palestinians can't help it or that they're pushed and there's no other way. And what would you do in this situation? That's one I hear.
I have an answer to it, by the way. It's worth throwing out there. When the Israelis withdrew from Gaza, tore every last Jew from their homes, and even dug up the bodies of Jews from the graveyard. In 2005, Gaza was handed over to the Palestinians. They were given a stake. They could have used the billions of dollars that poured in from taxpayers in the UK, taxpayers in the US, taxpayers in the EU and much more. They could have used the billions of dollars to create a thriving, thriving...
Gaza before the 7th of October was pretty good, actually. The living standards were much better than most countries in the region. I've seen lovely videos or tourist videos. Yeah. It was quite nice, actually. It was, I mean, you know, there were luxury restaurants and all sorts of things. But the billions of dollars that poured in were used by the leadership of Hamas, who the voters of Gaza voted in.
And they used them to enrich themselves. As I mentioned in the book, every Palestinian leader who's died an early death in the last 18 months died a billion times. dollar that came in, every euro, every bit of sterling that came into Gaza could have been used to improve the lives of the Palestinian people, build a good state. with good governance that did not teach its children to annihilate their neighbor.
And today, the whole story of Israel and the whole story of the Palestinian people in Gaza would be utterly... But they chose a different way. They chose to prioritize the killing of their neighbors and the nurturing of hate about their neighbors over the teaching of peace and coexistence with their neighbors. And people say to me things like, well, you know, wouldn't you fire rockets if you were in Gaza? No, I think I'd try to restrain from that.
I think I would try, I think I would try to make sure that Gazan children born after 2005 got the 18 years until 2023 to become really impressive in education and in learning and in development and much more and created things. Yet they took a different way. And the brutal truth of it is that there is a price to pay.
for voting in a terrorist group that repeatedly starts wars of annihilation against its neighbor and lose and in the whole history of warfare if you keep starting aggressive wars against your neighbors and lose them you lose territory and much more That's a very unfortunate, sad, aspect on top of many other unfortunate and sad aspects about the region. On that note, I think there's that feeling on the left that if Gaza had the money and the wherewithal, they'd all be sort of like the West.
But there's 50 countries around it that are Muslim and don't allow gay rights, don't allow women to be treated as equals. I mean, yes, we shouldn't. Yeah. I don't like to prioritize as it were liberal rights over everything. Let's just say that, I mean, just go to living standards. or the ethos, the guiding ethos. Salman Rushdie, who has been a lifelong supporter of the Palestine.
recently said in an interview that by now, he said, you can't come out with any other conclusion than that if there was another state given to the Palestinians. that it would just at best be another Iranian revolutionary government. I mean, it's the same in Judea and Samaria in the West. It's a less violent group, Fatah. They have the same aims. They want to annihilate all of Israel, but they have the same aims as Hamas, but a different clock.
They use the money that comes in to enrich themselves and to reward terrorists and to pay terrorists. if the terrorist who kills Jews goes to prison or if he dies, the Palestinian Authority has a budget to pay more money to the terrorists or the family of the terrorists, depending on how many Jews they've managed to kill. And the payment goes up.
That's what our taxpayer money goes to. And so all these idiots who think you just pour money in, all you're doing is pouring money into luxury apartments in custody. into the rewarding of terrorism and the indoctrination of the next generation into an utterly utterly self-destructive belief which is the belief that they can kill their neighbors instead of Yeah, great woman. Yeah, I thought it was a really interesting part of your book, actually, the comparison of Arendt.
Sereni. I wish Sereni was better known these days. She was one of my great, great heroes when I was starting out as a writer and wrote one of the great books on evil, or several of them actually, Into That Dark. Unbelievable book. Let me ask you, it was going to sound maybe flippant, but I think it's important. You have a great speaking voice.
And that's important to be able to convey a message. Does that come to you naturally? As a 15-year-old, did you speak that? Everybody who listens to you, I'm interviewing Douglas Murray, look at it. Gosh, he's got a wonderful voice. Where does that come from? somewhere between my larynx. But there must be an awareness of it. You're aware of the voice you have. I'm not especially. I really spend very, very little time thinking about myself. I don't think about what people think about me.
incredibly self-conscious about my voice. Well, you know, you shouldn't be. I look at people like that. I look at Jordan Peterson. He's got an interesting voice and a great way of speaking. Jordan. Yeah, Obama as well. Brilliant communicator. Obama is a superb... One of the things that they and you sometimes do is you leave these gaps. And I think it's having the confidence to do that.
Because I feel everything. It may be almost like a Woody Allen anxiety. Whereas you guys, you go, you stop and you think and people just, and the weight of the moment is conveyed. I don't think I do that consciously. I almost left a pause before that. I don't think I do that consciously. I think that maybe
Maybe it's consoling to see people thinking on their feet. I think so. I think that's probably... I know there's a false, there are lots of false means of communication, but one of the ones that is, it strikes me as pretty false is you can tell when someone is over. a brilliant um woman i won't name her but who
very skilled communicator, but I remember hearing her speak some years ago and she had, everything was too practiced. She was supposed to say, and then I asked myself, what about that? And then, and I just jarred. As an interviewer as well as interviewee on occasion, one of the worst things somebody can say is, well, I always answer that question this way because it immediately communicates. You're always asking.
slightly boring. Yes. I love hearing. That's a wonderful question. I hadn't considered that before, Andrew. Yeah, of course. You haven't said that yet, though. Well, I wasn't going to. You've got a nice speaking voice. Well, thank you. That's why we do what we do.
Well, no, it's not. But it's a superficial aspect of it. But interestingly... Whilst we're on the point, we can, of course, plug the fact that the audiobook of On Democracy... on audible and is read by me well that's my next question because i've got one more question for you but this one is where can people get hold i mean obviously you know the places but where can they get hold of this wonderful book so you can buy on democracies and death cults
I don't know. There might be a bookshop in Brighton that decides to no platform me, but more for them. No, you can buy it at any bookshop in the UK. You can, of course, buy it at Watterson's. Everywhere in the world, you can buy it on Amazon.com.co.uk. You can buy it on Audible, read by me. And you can also get it on Kindle, of course, if you'd like an e-book. which I think it might be. That's how I read it. There you go.
how was it oh it's brilliant and it i mean it gave me uh nightmares as it should sometimes i think you should i meant how's the kindle version That's probably very similar to the book. No, I never read on Kindle because I'm a bibliomaniac. Of course. I mean, you travel a lot, though. Yeah, I know. I travel with a heavy bag of books.
I know. You know, I moved to Kindle and I've never looked back. I know. It's just I love seeing books I've read on the shelves. Of course. Because, you know, you walk past me. I forgot I knew that. You know, it's a nice feeling.
That's your book? That's my book, yeah. You've got to give me one. Well, I will then. I'll tell you about that. Yeah, but don't talk about it now. No, no, no. Everybody on democracies and death cults, don't worry about that. Don't buy the wrong book, ladies and gentlemen. Don't buy that ready-for-pulp nonsense. Who's a heretic? One of the great writers still shining.
I disagree with what you said. No, he didn't actually say it. I disagree with what you say, but I don't defend my death the right for you to say it. No, he didn't say it. It's a later summary of what... I don't think you would count as a heretic quite, but you might say that in the realm of writing, breaking the norms of his day i would say montaigne surely one of the great right
Have you read his essays? Oh, years ago. Because it's such an extraordinary form. He's heretical in that he sits in his library surrounded by books and writes his essays on everything. And just sort of things like, you know, what it's like to die. And why we weep and laugh. And just vignettes things, but in essay form, which is so gloriously readable. But yes, he broke the literary form. He made a literary form.
And he, a late friend of mine who was a professor of philosophy at Oxford and was a very close. told me some years ago that uh the dinner party game you know who would you like to have a dinner party from history and that sort of thing he would playing that once with
Who do you like to have a dinner with? Any historical figure. Of course, you can't choose Montaigne. The thing being, everyone would choose Montaigne. Interesting. I think a lot of people would choose you. A lot of people would say Ricky Gervais. He's good. He's a brilliant, brilliant comic writer and performer. I've got to get him on this show at some point. He should do. He follows the Twitter of the show, so who knows? You're almost in there.
People, please go and get Douglas' wonderful book. I put a link below to one of the many places you can get it. Kindle, audio, hardback. It's unbelievably good. So please, I actually want you to read this. So please go and read it. Hit the like button. Keep watching this channel.