Douglas Murray, a voice of reason in a sea of confusion

On Democracies and Death Cults

Douglas Murray

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By

James Pew

The opening words of On Democracies and Death Cults by Douglas Murray contains a disturbing fact about the situation Israel, and the entire Western world, were thrust into immediately following the barbaric terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023:

“Sometimes a flare goes up and you get to see exactly where everyone is standing.”

Indeed. Out of all the conflicts occurring all over the world, many of which are more devastating by orders of magnitude and in terms of the scale of humanitarian catastrophe than the IDF’s Gaza campaign, why would Westerners care so much about it? Why do Canadians and Americans take to the streets and occupy college campuses over it? These and many other vital questions are asked by Douglas Murray in On Democracies and Death Cults.

So why should this particular October 7th event, and the IDF’s subsequent military response, which is taking place halfway around the world, be the one that reveals “exactly where everyone is standing”? Murray knows the answer, as do his readers and most clear thinking people who do not harbour secret loathing’s for the Jewish people. The reason is clear and plain as day: the Jews are defending themselves and their homeland from a terroristic death cult bent on their destruction, but for some reason hoards of people from all political stripes from virtually all corners of the world, believe this to be a wholly unacceptable thing for the Jews to do.

The shame I felt for Canada, or more correctly, for things that had been allowed to take place in Canada following the October 7th massacre in Israel, was immediately apparent in the introduction when Murray wrote:

“In Canada alone, after October 7, synagogues were firebombed and shot at, Jewish schools were shot at, Jewish shops were fire-bombed, and Jewish-owned bookshops were vandalized.”

Future generations will need to contend with the fact that in the immediate aftermath of the worst crisis to strike the Jewish people since the Holocaust, anti-Semitism erupted throughout the West. An inexplicable “shapeshifting” hatred that “locks Jews in an unresolvable set of challenges.” Murray writes:

“Jews were once hated because of their religion. Then sometime after the Enlightenment it became hard to hate people because of their religion. At that point the Jews were hated because of their race. Then, after the twentieth century it became unacceptable to hate people because of their race. So, in the twenty-first century, when civilized people cannot hate the Jews for their religion or their race, Jews can be hated for having a state–and for defending it.”

Murray’s head is constantly in two places: 1) Israel, including the war zone in Gaza 2) The West. The question of why Israel seems always to be the object of relentless and obsessive international scrutiny, is top of Murrays mind. But as well, the infiltration of radical Islamic ideologies into the Western institutional edifice is not lost on him. Indeed, this knowledge leads him to such observations as the following:

“While there were certainly plenty of non-Muslim politicians in the West who decided to attack Israel from the moment the conflict started, it should also be noted that elected Muslim politicians across the West seemed to have a special beef with the Israelis and supported the Palestinian side…”

Canada has no shortage of the exact political personage Murray is referring to. The signs of Islamic infiltration and subversion into Canadian society are everywhere. The recent adoption by the Toronto District School Board of policies concerning Anti-Palestinian Racism, is but one example of the phenomenon.

Early in the book Murray mentions the Iron Dome – the Israeli missile defense system. One thing I never considered was the economics involved with the constant rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza. Whereas the cost of a rocket shot from Gaza is estimated at around $300 US, the cost of one of the defense missiles deployed to eliminate Hamas’ rockets is around $100,000 US, and sometimes two defense missiles are required to shoot down one $300 dollar terrorist rocket. The vast amount of economic resources eaten up by the asymmetrical terrorist warfare waged by Hamas is astounding, when one considers the years over which these rocket assaults have taken place.

Considering Israel’s hi-tech defense shield from another light, later in the book Murray observes:

“With the assistance mostly of the United States, it had managed to create a world-class system, of which everyone was very proud, to shoot down the regular rockets. But perhaps this had not been a good thing at all? If New Jersey had launched rockets at New York City constantly for a decade, would New York State find a way to shoot these down and learn to live with it? Or would it take out whatever infrastructure was launching the things?”

I think we all know the answer to this. Of course we do. So why does the West push Israel toward such an irreconcilable situation, and in doing so, why do we hold them to such an impossible moral standard concerning their defense that no other nation or people group has ever been able to live up to? As a consequence, “Israel had slipped into its own system of response and has seemed for a time to be consoled by it.” But of the constant reminders that things are just not right in Israel, Murray asks, “why did all those homes across the north and south of the country need safe rooms?”

No Westerner would tolerate a lifestyle scenario where safe rooms were a survival imperative. Nor would they tolerate the ever presence of bomb shelters made necessary by the relentless firing of unguided terrorist rockets into civilian areas. Nor the breaching of borders by 1200 vicious killers who slaughtered over a thousand innocent people. So again, why should Jews be subject to such ongoing assaults, and why should we expect them to normalize this when none of us would ever consider accepting any of it as normal? Can you imagine being attacked by terrorists, and instead of receiving understanding and empathy from the world, you get demands for a ceasefire and peace negotiations? Imagine you were treated with hostility in spite of what you just suffered. And treated with suspicion over concern that you might harm those who just slaughtered half your family. Inconceivable, the Western mind would not reach these conclusions if it were faced with these circumstances. That this rationale is expected from Israelis defies logic and decency.

Those following Israelis politics will remember that on the eve of the October 7th attacks Israel had never been more divided. Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed judicial reforms had caused what felt like an inconsolable rift across Israeli society. Then October 7th happened and everything changed. Murray writes:

“...many people I spoke to in Israel after the 7th said that what happened was almost biblical. The Jews were all arguing among themselves and then something happened–perhaps the only thing that could happen–that would bring them to their senses: an existential threat. The potential of extinction.”

The stakes are indeed this high for the Jewish people. The persecution and hatred they face are unique in the world, and the moral standards they are held are cruelly unachievable. They must be permitted to defend themselves without the meddling of Westerners who have no conception of what it is like to have a death cult as a neighbour.

I recommend reading On Democracies and Death Cults in an intensive sort of way. You don’t want to linger on it too long. You are better to immerse yourself in it, but also get it over with quickly. It is an excellent and vastly important work, but its subject matter is heartbreakingly tragic. My plan was to read it in one day. At just under 200 pages that should have been easy. It wasn’t. It took two days. I had to keep taking breaks to catch my breath, to sit with the stark reality that the Jewish people of Israel and around the world live with everyday. I had to take walks and get fresh air, where I would reflect on the precarious nature and fragility of life. And the tragedy, oh the awful tragedy of it all. I imagined more than once what it must be like to have a safe room in my basement, to hear warning sirens and rocket blasts several times a week, to be woken by them in the middle of the night and have to scurry with my kids to the nearest bomb shelter, to have friends or family killed or injured by terrorists, or to be kidnapped and imprisoned in a dungeon in Gaza by people who hate me at a monstrous scale. But I could not. My imagination is not that powerful, the suffering the Jewish people are living through is inconceivable to me. All I could do was feel sad and look lost and pathetic. There was an anger beneath it all as well which I found entirely unsettling (and why I recommend not loitering on this book for too long).

That may not sound at all like an enthusiastic endorsement to read Murray’s book. However, I assure readers that of all the books you read this year, and for perhaps the next ten years, On Democracies and Death Cults is perhaps the most urgent, the most exceptional, and of an existential importance rarely found in any book. I don’t often write book reviews so that should tell you, for me at least, it is an extraordinary work and an absolute must-read! Painful, necessary, edifying, and ultimately hopeful.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author read, Elite Media Are Worse Than You Think

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