Douglas Murray
Appearances
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And, you know, everyone had criticisms of him. But when you saw what came after him, it just... It was among other things, what I learned from her and other friends from that region was that, I suppose, two things. One is, of course, is that it's a sort of central conservative insight. You know, things can always be worse. They can always be worse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Never say this is rock bottom because, you know, like you might have a Shah with hundreds or even thousands of political prisoners in cells.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
But you could always have Ayatollah Khomeini butchering them all, including the people who helped him get to power, like the communists and the trade unionists who simply were fighting against the Shah and then were very useful for the Ayatollah until he didn't need them anymore. But the other thing I learned from that particular friend and others was that was this thing that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And again, it's very hard for the Western mindset, very hard for the American mindset in particular, that there is such a thing as fanaticism, real fanaticism and real ideological and real religious fanaticism. And the thing that I described leads to the death cult mindset. That fanaticism is something which is very easy for the West to forget because we haven't seen it in a while.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
You know, we get very distant echoes of it in our own societies, really. And we're highly attuned to hear them, which is good in some ways. But Khomeiniism not only vastly set back the Persian people, the Iranian nation, but has managed to keep it in subjugation since 1979. And your question of why gets to one of the really, the biggest questions really that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
the answer to which has to be understood, which is what Solzhenitsyn says at one point in Gulag Archipelago, in that passage where he describes, when we heard the footsteps on the staircase and the knock was on our neighbor's door and we knew our neighbor was being taken away, why did we not stop them?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
In the case of the revolutionary government in Iran, it's the same answer as whether it's Hamas governing Gaza with whoever the people in Gaza are who would have liked to have seen them overthrown. People don't realize that despite the rhetoric and everything else, everything changes if the other guy might kill you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And I had significant sympathy for him in finding it bewildering. Because it would be bewildering.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And that, you know, when the Green Revolution in 2009 started in Iran, why was it put down? Why didn't it work? Why, like you, the sort of Iranians who I... really hope one day get their country back? Why did all these smart young students and others, why after they came out, why was it put down?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
It was put down because the Basij militia will shoot you in the head and they'll take you to a prison as they did with the Iranian students and they'll rape you with bottles and kill you. And even a little bit of that goes an awfully long way to tell the rest of society not to do it again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
You know, we know it happens like that from films, but too few people understand that regimes like that in Tehran operate like that on a grand scale, on the biggest of scales and with the ultimate of brutality. And that's how they stay in power. And one other thing on that, by the way, which is, I was reminded of this the other day, but you know,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
thinking about this sort of, you know, what I've just described as a sort of a problem in democracies is that we just, you know, we like to think everyone thinks like us and, you know, we'd like everyone to sort of be like us. And we, we believe fictions that were taught in films, like, you know, everyone basically wants the same things as us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And you go, you haven't stepped outside the walls of the city, if you think that. But the second thing is this thing of the death cults of why, why, why we singly fail to understand that this is possible. Harmonism is both very specific and also very strongly linked to totalitarian and radical and extremist death cult movements that are not that far in our past. There's a moment in
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
When Oriana Falaci interviewed Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, one of the very few Western journalists to do so, she says to him, these people in the street, this movement, this revolution you've begun, it's guided by hate. It's hate. It's all hate. And Khomeini says, no, no, it's love. It's love. And
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And it's actually a scene that appears in the Satanic Verses of Rushdie where that exact same thing happens. But I was thinking about this recently because I was thinking, but how can you explain to a Western mindset that that's something that's going on? There are people directed by this hate that calls itself love. And I was reminded of a book I read.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
haven't read since I was probably a teenager or something, made a great impression on me then. Did you ever read The Tragic Sense of Life? Miguel de Unamuno, a great Spanish existentialist philosopher who died in the 30s. Unamuno had an encounter with students at the university in the 30s when he realized, I mean, this is the early period of the Francoists, de Rivera and all those people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Unamuno is at this meeting and the chant goes up. From the eager students who have fallen into this sort of phalangist, Francoist ideology already, they end up chanting in front of him as he's trying to defend the principles by which he has lived his life. They end up chanting in front of him, viva la muerte, long live death, long live death. And he tries to explain to them this is...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
This is a necrophilic chance. Yeah. But those young men in free Francoist Spain shouting long live death, they have their counterparts today. They are the people who taunt Americans, Westerners, Israelis, and others with lines like, we love death more than you love life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Marjorie Taylor Greene's boyfriend.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I mean, the whole data might be wiped. I... I suspect there's a weight on you because every major world leader you interview, and you've done some amazing ones, but I mean, presumably, you have a set of people saying, you've got to ask him about this. You can't not address this. And that's a very challenging one because, of course, although in an interview, the politician should not be supine,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
The things you know. See, you're a real journalist. He's from one of the new, I'm all for opening up the White House press pool and all that sort of thing, but it means that you get some people in who are sort of Yeah, from a blog land, there's nothing wrong with that, but it means that you get somebody who will do something like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
nor can it be endlessly interrogative because you're not the prosecutor and they don't have to be the guilty party answering to you. And I've noticed the number of people who interview people, world leaders and others, who go in with a set of sort of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
those things and they and at some point the other party can just just i don't need this and people criticizing you don't realize that you just can't do that yeah i suppose why journalists behave the way they do although i have increasingly less and less respect for the journalists uh
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
There's a very interesting line that Robin Day, who was a very distinguished interviewer back in the day, said about Jeremy Paxman, who was a very interrogative interviewer in the UK.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Robin Day, who was quite good at being rude to politicians but carefully, said the problem with the new approach, as he saw it from the 90s of political interviewing, was he said, if you think the person you're speaking to is a liar... You should get them to reveal that they're a liar. Don't just call them a liar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
The problem with that interaction, as I saw it, was that guy asked that disrespectful question. And I think it was disrespectful. I'll very quickly say why. I mean, I think that... I think that when a man comes from the realm of war into the realm of peace, the people in the realm of peace should have some respect or at least concession that the other man has come from the realm of war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And I think that is, again, it's something that a lot of people sitting on the other side of the screen don't realize, is that it may satisfy them that you call a person a liar to their face, but it doesn't do anything. And it actually reveals nothing. If somebody is a liar and they reveal themselves to be a liar, then that's something else. But yes, I mean, I hear you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Obviously, you have a lot of different voices telling you what to do. It's also difficult because one of the things that I don't think anyone really understands is that in the end, it's just you. I'm sure you have this about Putin. People say, I know exactly how you can... They could give endless advice. At the end, it's you sitting down talking to him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
It's like everybody knows how to behave on the presidential debate stage, but only a few people have done it. In person, it's actually pretty difficult. It's very difficult because you've got all this weird behind-the-scenes stuff as well. You've got all of the games that people play.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
One of my favorite things anyone has ever said, or it's only ever happened, I know a couple of cases of this happening in private, A friend of mine once years ago was debating against the, this is before the civil war in Syria, was debating something to do with the Middle East. And one of the people on the other side was the then Syrian ambassador in London.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
The then Syrian ambassador in London says something about the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. And my friend stands up and starts talking about Assad senior's massacre of the Palestinians in Hama, where they killed like 10,000 Palestinians in a day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Um, and my friend starts talking about the hammer massacre by, uh, Assad senior and the, the big fat Syrian ambassador like stands up to respond. And he says, that is, that is none of your business. And my friend was like, Oh, I thought we were going to get it in denial.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
People have very little understanding of things if they're willing to say that because you're sitting down and talking with somebody, you are ego-platforming them, advancing their cause, being used, being a shill, or whatever like that. You might be actually just finding some things out, which I think is something you do expertly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And that if you're sitting in a political environment where you talk about people being destroyed and decimated and defenestrated and much more to a man who's for whom none of that is metaphorical, I think that's extremely hard to accept. And I think that probably also at that moment, there was a sort of sense of, you know, Zelensky is being disrespected by being asked about what he's wearing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And another thing your critics wouldn't realize is that life is long. And, you know, hopefully, God willing, we were both around for a long time, and therefore, you don't blow everything up at the request of some twat online. But I do think that a superpower of a kind is to identify the people whose opinion you care for and worry about their opinion and no one else's, really.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And you just keep your own guiding light. That's what's always done it for me, is that I... I've always said, I just don't really, I wouldn't care if I was the only person with my opinion and billions of people disagreed. I mean, I might be curious if the whole planet disagreed with me, but it doesn't fundamentally. That's not why I'll send you Churchill's great speech on the death of Chamberlain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I mean, it, he says the bet. He says one of the most wise and brilliant things. I was thinking about it slightly earlier when you were talking about Zelensky, because one of Churchill's greatnesses was his magnanimity. And when his great political opponent Chamberlain died in 1940, and Churchill had just taken over as prime minister, he could have used the opportunity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And we might even say that some politicians in our day won't be able to resist the opportunity. He could have used the opportunity to say, you see, I was right. And Chamberlain didn't know what the hell he was doing, and he's led us into this mess, and you should have all listened to me. Because that would have been a good time. It would have been a good time to say that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
That would have been one for the win, as they say. But Churchill doesn't do that in his great eulogy for Chamberlain. He talks about how hard it is for mankind to operate in the world. and how you can do it successfully. He very movingly says, he doesn't even mention the name of Hitler. He says, what would never change his flaws? He says, desiring of human peace, to be seeking peace.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And he says, the curse that he had was he was led astray by a very wicked man. But then he has this great passage, where Churchill says a beautiful resonant passage about how he says, it's not given to men happily for them, for otherwise life would prove intolerable to foresee or to predict to any great extent the unfolding course of events.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And he says in one phrase, men seem to have been right, and in another they're proved wrong, and then there's a different scale of values emerges. And he says, what is the worth of all this? He says the only guide to a man is his conscience. The only shield to his memory is the rectitude and the sincerity of his actions. And in fact, he says it doesn't matter what happens.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
If you have this, he finishes, he says, however the fates may play, that if you have this shield to guard you, he says, you march always in the ranks of honor. All that can guide a man is that. If you lose sight of it, and some people do, and maybe everyone does at some point, then it's a challenge. And then you get buffeted by the to's and fro's of the waves of popular opinion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And that's dangerous. But if you keep sight and hold on to what you believe, a million, billion foes don't matter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I mean, I get enormous encouragement from smart young people, actually. That's just the best thing ever. I was in Kiev the other week, and I was asked to speak to some students at the university. And irrespective of the rather tricky situation that they are in,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
It's just great to, as you know, to speak to a room full of students about things and then hang around afterwards and just answer all the questions you can and hear from them about their lives and what they want to do and remembering what you were like at their age and how goofy you were and how much you were going to get wrong and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
how much you know you had to learn and how much you're going to enjoy it and and seeing the the opportunities they have in front of them if things go right and and uh just smart young people giving enormous encouragement all the time it's that's the best thing i mean it's just yeah they're uh you can see endless possibility in their eyes and there's uh they're not like burdened by um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
when, as everyone knows, Churchill during World War II used to wear his fatigues on foreign visits. And it's sort of just that, it's to remind people that you're coming from the realm of war. And I think that probably in that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Even the cynicism, though, I mean, you can resist that. I mean, I've got quite a deep wellspring of it. But, I mean, you can't only fall into that because there's so much else it doesn't cover. It'd be like spending your life being ironic, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
One of the reasons why war is for a writer kind of the ultimate subject is because you see life weirdly at its ultimate. very strange thing, but it is the truth. Death, when it's in front of you, is something which gives terrible clarity to everything. You see how people will love and even sometimes laugh Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
in that moment, one of the things that would have been going through his head would be, but I mean, if this was Putin sitting here being assaulted by a journalist, you know, you'd hope your host stepped in and defended you. I mean, if, let me try this one out. I mean, if a journalist in the Oval Office, if Putin was sitting there
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
or a putative journalist said to Putin, you know, everyone knows you've had a lot of facial work done, and word is you've used the same guy that Berlusconi used to use. Can you comment on that? You'd say, well, that's a kind of disrespectful question for journalists to ask, and it's a little bit off what needs to be gone over. And it's the same thing with Zelensky with the outfit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I think it was just petty and threw things off in a bad way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
It's also, by the way, it's an example of the frivolity of a lot of the attempts to understand what's going on. I mean, my view is that since actually most people, in fact, everybody cannot be an expert on everything, one of the things that we always do is to seize on minor and really quite unimportant things. I mean, every side does it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Look at the way in which the American right for years talked about the Churchill bust leaving the White House Oval Office in the Obama years. I didn't want to hear another darn thing about the Churchill bust after eight years because... It was in lieu of trying to understand and actually critique Obama's foreign policy. It was just an easy shorthand. I think it's the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
We're always tempted to that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Oh, yeah. The language thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Yes, and apart from anything else, if he had agreed to have not done it in English, he would have bought himself the extra seconds in some of his replies that he needed, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
It's very interesting why it has happened. Why do you think it's happened?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Let's each pick a side and call the other dumb. I had a line I used recently, it was, the necessity of people who live too long online to try to wade their way out of the memes. It is so like that, isn't it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Because yes, I mean, I can understand the people who find it very irritating that so many people who would put BLM flags or pride flags or, you know, trans flags in their bio, then put Ukrainian flags in their bio, despite almost certainly not knowing where Ukraine was. And if that happens, the inevitable instinct of a lot of people who aren't really thinking, is to say, that's really annoying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
These people are really annoying. I'll sock it to them. But that's where you've got to try to rise above that and say, actually, funnily enough, the fate of a country doesn't depend on my tolerance for memes online today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
That's very skillful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Yes, the obvious one, I mean, I don't want to make it sound like it was all Zelensky's fault, but I mean, the obvious one was at the beginning of the meeting to say yet again, as he has done for three years, thank you to America and the American people and American politicians across the aisle for your support for my country and its hour of need. We're deeply grateful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And because he, for once, forgot to say that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
It's not that simple. It's one reason.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Yeah, no, sure. And they obviously failed on that occasion. But as I say, it must be bewildering to have landed in a place where people were seriously talking about Ukraine starting the war and Zelensky not Putin being the dictator.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I did the front page of the New York Post the day after the president's comments on that, saying that, the big picture of Putin, just saying, right, this is a dictator. And, you know, I think that people can be lithe enough to be able to recognize that, you know, you can make criticisms of Zelensky or the Ukrainians, but it doesn't mean you have to fall for Putin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And again, unfortunately, a lot of people in our time don't have that capability.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
He's a dictator who's very bloody, as repressive as you can be of political opposition, internal opposition. He's kleptomaniac of his country's resources, has enriched himself as much as he could. as he has with the cronies around him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
He's not just acted to destroy internal opposition in Russia, but has gone to other countries, including my own country of birth, and killed people on their, our soil, using, as it happens, weapons of mass destruction. The use of polonium in the center of London not good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
The use of incredibly dangerous nerve agents that could kill tens of thousands of people in a charming cathedral city like Salisbury, not good. If the sort of apologists of Putin would say, well, he's just a sort of tough man who's looking after his house business. Well, I don't think even if you think he has the right to do that, he should be doing it in third countries.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
deliberately using weapons that are meant to show that you could take out tens of thousands of British citizens.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I mean...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
It definitely helps a chap if he's killed all of his opponents.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
But, you know, I mean, seriously, you... if people are worried about, this is another of the sort of slightly Alice in Wonderland things recently about Zelensky is people are saying, why hasn't, he's a dictator because he hasn't held elections during a total war of self-defense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And it's like, well, you know, if you're really, really passionate about free and fair elections in that neck of the woods, you'd at least notice that Russian elections are not free and fair in any meaningful sense. But this doesn't mean that you have to say that, therefore, they should have Western-style elections and freedom, that Russia is ready to go and become a Western liberal democracy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
It doesn't mean any of that at all. It's just at least note that this is what Putin is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
It's what he's said for years, which is basically the reconstitution of the Soviet Union.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I would trust most my friends in Eastern and Central Europe who certainly do think that. There's a reason why the Baltic countries are the countries that are spending highest in percentage of GDP on defense, and it's because they're very worried. I don't think they're faking it. I don't think they're faking it for me or for anyone else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I think the Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and others are genuinely worried for the first time in some decades.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Yes. And the most obvious thing is that if Trump manages to negotiate a ceasefire, it'll be a temporary pause. And whoever comes in as president after Trump is Putin will use the opportunity to advance again. Yes. Again, one of the things that I have heard from parts of the American right and others is that all he wants is Ukraine. That that's all he wants.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And that he has no history of rhetoric or actions that suggest anything else. And again, it's one of the reasons why it's useful traveling to places and seeing things with your own eyes, because I very much remember being in the country of Georgia and After Putin tried to invade in 2008.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
So I just, again, people don't have to be the greatest supporters of the Ukrainian cause just to recognize that it doesn't seem to be the case that Ukraine is the only thing in Putin's vision.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
It's interesting. One of the fascinating things about the last few years is that there's been an act of sort of necromancy of certain figures who were totally, totally debunked in the area of Ukraine, Mearsheimer, and in the case of Israel, people like Finkelstein. And it's been interesting because these are people that one hadn't heard of for some years because...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
they were not listened to, usually for good reason. But by the way, first of all, I'm very skeptical of the term realist in foreign policy because most people, to some extent, will say that they are a realist in foreign policy. Very few people are surrealists in foreign policy. Very few people are unrealists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
A surrealist foreign policy analyst.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Yeah, I mean, maybe we should introduce the term. But, I mean, if you want to say, if you want to look gimlet-eyed out across the world, you're a realist. I think the steel man of their argument would be Russia has or believes it has a sphere of influence and is regrettable, but there's very little we can do about that. that would be about the best version of that argument that you can make.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And political power, yeah, more importantly in the case of China. Political power. Non-kinetic warfare to take over areas, Hong Kong being the obvious one. Behind that, isn't there always a kinetic threat? Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah. I mean, you disappear some booksellers and students are protesting, of course. But to go back to this, yeah, of course.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Okay, countries believe they have or would like to have spheres of influence. I do think at some point that the so-called realists on that have to try to decide how much leeway that allows you to give to a fairly rapacious regime. It's not the easiest calculation always to make.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
You have to work out whether or not, for instance, it is true that if Putin had managed to go all the way to Kiev in the first weeks of Thank you. Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
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Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
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Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
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Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
It's possible. We'll have to see. I think it's just too early and complicated to tell. That he wants to bring a peace seems to me to be obvious. He's stated it a lot of times. Whether he can, we're just going to have to see. It's extremely hard to see some of the parameters of the peace still. And I would suggest that the most
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Not the most difficult, but one of the most difficult is that there is no peace guarantee on paper that the Ukrainians can possibly believe. I just... It doesn't matter because we in the West, we some of the countries in the West have said it before that we'd secure their peace. And we haven't. And so...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
What other than NATO membership, which is not possible in my view, what other than NATO membership would reassure the Ukrainians that they are going to have their borders secured and the peace of Ukraine secured? I can't see.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
All of which still suggests that if there's enough financial interests in Ukraine, they would prevent another Russian invasion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
That would be ideal. It would be ideal if the regime in Moscow wanted it, but that's that. Again, you get into the thing of people accused of Russophobia, but I do believe that after the fall of the wall, Russia was ill-treated by the West, not treated. with some of the courtesy that it required. I do think that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And at the same time, that doesn't justify the actions of Russia in the last 20 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
It's possible, but the alliance they formed with this rogue alliance with China to a considerable extent, North Korea, not useful, and Iran is... something they seem to find bearable. It's not a very good alliance in most people's analysis, but it's an alliance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I think the premise is one that I've seen before. There was a famous... What was his name? Norman Angell. He wrote this book, which was a fantastic bestseller in his day, where he believed that Europe would be in a period of endless Kantian peace because the prospect of European powers going to war was so economically unviable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
The book was reissued after World War I, and I never got the second edition. But I assume it was significantly rewritten.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I'm saying that the idea that cooperation on an economic and other levels is any... significant preventative device to madness breaking out is not something I see. Could deter some people. It could deter some very, very rational, economically driven actors, but it fails to take into account all of the other things that motivate people to go to war and to invade and to go mad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I agree. I'm obviously for economic cooperation. But my only caveat is not to think that that is something which is of ultimate interest or even at the top of the list of interests of despots, tyrants, extremists who want something else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
No, it could be. I hope your idea is right. I think it's about the most peaceful way for this to be resolved. My only caveat, as I say, is... And also never forget to factor in that people want different things in this world. And some people don't dream as you dream.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not by any means urging you to regard Vladimir Putin as a millenarian madman who cannot be in any way understood.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
We'll see. If he can, then of course he is. He deserves enormous respect for galvanizing his people. for being elected in the first place, for galvanizing his nation at a time of incredible peril, for playing the international game of getting support for his country well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And sometimes the person who does that, not that there are many people like that, can be the person who also brings about a peace deal, and sometimes not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
That's possible. Again, it puts the onus on him, though. sort of slightly presupposes that Putin doesn't have the same human instinct on that. It is extremely hard. I've noticed this in a lot of conflicts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
It's extremely hard the way in which outsiders come in and others who haven't seen what you've seen or gone through what you've gone through and say, you know, it's time to get around the negotiating table and just, you know, you think you didn't see what I saw, you didn't go through what I went through. Who are you to tell me?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
It goes back to that thing of the visitor from the land of war and the visitor from the land of peace. The visitor from the land of peace can easily talk about getting around negotiating tables, but the visitor from the land of war has seen other things. And it's very hard for somebody who hasn't seen it to tell the person who has that they should act differently.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Yes, that's a struggle. That's definitely a struggle. It's like asking somebody to forgive. I've seen that at a lot of ends of conflicts. People say, you know, the important thing is that we forgive and move on. And then the other person says, you know, your child didn't die of shrapnel wounds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
People online are ruthless and misrepresenting and lying?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Good God, Lex. You've discovered a new phenomenon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
The one thing I would add to that, though, is don't forget that it also depends on whether or not there's a clear shot of winning. Sure. If there's a clear shot of winning, and that's the most important thing in wars is not final negotiations or anything like that. It's simply winning and losing. And if you have a clear shot of winning and you can take it and you're near it,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
then having somebody else come in and saying, why not stop just before victory is very hard. That's one of the many, many complexities of the conflict we're talking about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
It's perfectly possible. Yes. That's the hard thing. It's very hard. It's all hard, but I'm just, again, it's. Victory can be won in wars and is often won in wars. And you're right, they can also grind on because nobody has the capability to make a breakthrough. The wisdom about civil wars tends to be that they sort of burn out after about 10 years or so for similar reasons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
It's a very good question. And you mean troops on the battlefield or military leaders or political leaders?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
No, you're right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Yes, it's an interesting insight. It's like the way in which there's a force in nature, which is that if you amass an army, amassing it will pull you in to using it. Extremely hard to amass an army somewhere and then say, let's go back. Yes, you're right. No, it's one of many, many interesting aspects to warfare.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
There's so many historical analogies you can give, but just surely not rewarding Putin's actions in any way would be a good way to deter him and other dictators from trying to grab land. in the future.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I mean, of course, almost everybody, not everybody, but almost everyone would like the killing to stop immediately. Of course.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I share your frustration because I've seen a lot of it with my own eyes. There was a battalion I was with the other week, and they were hit just after I left their base, and you wouldn't believe what a thermobaric bomb can do to the human body. And I share your frustration with that. At the same time, one of the things that happens if you are rushing...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
is that you do and i've seen this elsewhere you you will put pressure on the people you can pressurize and you will not put enough pressure on the people you can't pressurize and that is one of the worrying things that could happen with this simply you can put america can put extraordinary diplomatic, financial, intelligence, military pressure on Ukraine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And it can put significant pressure on Putin, but it's much easier to pressure Zelensky. And that's one of the many things that makes it harder, is that the temptation to rush for peace, accepting that peace is the most desirable thing, accepting the horrors of war, which you know, we can linger on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Accepting all that, if somebody says, we've got to get peace today, and the three of them around a table, the most likely thing is that it'll be the person who you can pressure most easily.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
who will be the person that you pressure, and as a result, have an outcome which, yes, might stop the killing as soon as possible, but might also set up a situation which rewards the aggressor and effectively punishes the victim. And that's an extremely... ugly and common thing to happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Well, the book on democracies and death cults is a mixture of firsthand reporting and observation interviews and a wider reflection, not just on the war that's been going on since the 7th of October, but the war that's been going on a lot longer. And also, I suppose, on what for me is one of the overwhelming questions, which I'm sure we'll get to, which is the reaction in the rest of the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Obviously, on the 7th itself, it was a... brigade-sized attack on Israel from Gaza. Hamas broke through the security fence and attacked all the softest targets they could. They swiftly overwhelmed things like the observation base in Nahal Oz.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
They ran through the communities in the South, very peaceful, peacenik, effectively, communities of the kibbutzim, as they're called, the communities, and murdered and raped and burned and kidnapped. Of course, they, from their point of view, had the great good fortune of also coming across hundreds of young people dancing in the early hours of the morning at a dance party and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
rampaged through that with RPGs and Kalashnikovs and grenades and hammers and more, and got within, well, 20 kilometers into Israel on places like Ofakim and Sderot, important towns, and carried out their massacres there as well. We now know that the plan was that Hezbollah did the same thing from the north.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Hezbollah joined in the war within 24 hours by starting firing rockets again in very large numbers into northern Israel from southern Lebanon. But the plan was that they would do the same thing from the north and carry out similar massacres there and effectively be able to meet in the middle and garrote Israel from the center.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
The interesting reason why I think it will be found out in the future, but why they didn't coordinate better was Hamas didn't trust any line of communication to Hezbollah to let them know exactly when they were going to do it that wouldn't be intercepted. The Iranian revolutionary government in Tehran, which obviously funds Hamas and Hezbollah and trains and arms, knew of the plan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
It was a very successful attempt to annihilate the state, but they didn't get close to that. But they got worryingly closer than people might have thought they were capable of. I think from the Israeli side, it was obviously one of the most, if not the most catastrophic intelligence and military failure since the foundation of the state. And I think there are several reasons why.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
One is a perception problem. What a lot of military commanders and others described to me is the conception. The conception that had prevailed in Israel for some years in security and military establishment was that Hamas were content with being corrupt and governing Gaza and lining their pockets and living in Qatar and becoming billionaires, but that like many other terrorist groups and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
you know, cults that they would end up becoming just corrupt and not losing their ideology, but the ideology becomes secondary. That's the first thing was there was just a massive error of the conception in Israel. And then there were the multiple manifold security and military failures of the day and leading up to the day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Um, and there will be a, there already have been quite a lot of people held to account for that. And there doubtless will be in the future as well. Um, the, the single, uh, thing I heard, which I heard most, um, which was most distressing in a way was the number of people who described to me, you know, who survived the maskers in the South who said that,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
You know, they'd said to their children, don't worry, the army will be here in minutes. And they weren't. In many places, it was many hours until the army got there. And there are reasons for that. There are some reasons that will be military failings, leadership failings. Other things were very, I discovered, were very human failings.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I don't want to overstress the failure of the army because actually certain units and things got down very fast. There was a unit of Devan who got down to the junction, you know, by within about an hour and 90 minutes of the massacres starting and joined in the fight. And then there were self-starters who I write about in the book, extraordinary people who just
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
like broke orders and just realized the magnitude of what was happening and said, we're needed in the South, go, and fought very hard for hours, days, in some cases. But the complexities on the ground were unbelievable. I mean, as usually happens in warfare, but what they call the fog of war is a very real thing. You can see it in hindsight, but you can't see when you're in it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And one of the things that made it very complicated was, for instance, Hamas coming in, taking uniforms off dead Israelis, wearing them, coming in with Israeli-style apparatus on them. There's a Muslim doctor I quote in the book I interviewed who
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
describes how he was going to his, he's an Israeli Muslim Arab, and he was going to, he's a doctor, he was going to his shift at the hospital at 6.30 in the morning. The rockets start coming in because the rockets started first and then the full invasion. And he described to me how, you know, he's one of the members of this group, the United Had Salah, which is a first responders group.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And they sort of, you know, they get an alert and it tells them that you know, a car has crashed nearby and they put on their, you know, first aid kit and so on and go. And he got one of those alerts, one of the junctions, and realized there was a car that something had happened and there were some dead bodies. And he stops and he sees these men dressed as soldiers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And he's wearing his Hatzalah gear and they start firing at him. And he just thinks, what the hell? What the hell is going on? And they turned out to be Hamas dressed as Israeli soldiers. They used him as a human shield to try to protect from any air assault. And in the end, they shot him and left him, and he survived. He was a very, very brave man. So there was a lot of confusion like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
There was a girl whose father I interviewed. She was at the Nova Party, and... I met him at one of the reunions of the party in the weeks after and the reunions of the survivors and the family and so on. And he described how in the last moments of his daughter's life, she phoned him on her phone like a lot of people. He reassured her that the army would get there and so on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And her boyfriend was shot in the head and was lying on her lap. And she was obviously panicked. And they'd managed to get into a car and escape the party. But they went to a community where they thought they'd be safe in the south of Israel. And they were told to stay where they were by somebody who she said was a policeman. And he wasn't a policeman. He was Hamas dressed as a police.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And she died. She was shot and killed as well. And so there was a lot of confusion like that. Hopefully, the world will find out. exactly what went wrong. Israel will find out exactly what went wrong that led to this catastrophe. But, I mean, it was a complete catastrophe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I mean, I think... There are people who say that there were parts of the intelligence network and so on that were withholding the information. I don't know. Again, people will find out. There's an awful lot of politics inside Israel, and it's hard to know that at this stage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I think most people are sort of still Israeli and not Israeli, including people who are anti-Israel, who just believe that Israeli military and particularly intelligence dominance is so strong that There must have been some kind of conspiracy. Otherwise, how could this have happened? I don't think you need to go into that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I think that, I mean, for instance, some of the young women at the observation base are on the record. They've said, I've spoken to myself, who said that they had been warning in the weeks running up to the 7th that they were seeing maneuvers and training by the border, which suggested that Hamas was... was going to do something like this. And they say that they were ignored.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
You speak to some of the more senior commanders about that, and they say the thing is that this stuff was happening all the time. So it's very hard to know at the moment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Well, Hamas, in a way, quite easy to understand because they say what their ambitions are. They say what their beliefs are. They've said it from their governing charter onwards. And you also have the advantage with Hamas that they, as it were, in trying to understand them, is that they tend to do what they say and act on what they believe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
primary aim of Hamas is to destroy the state of Israel and then see. They're not an unusual group, sadly. The bit of it that is hard for some people to understand, I think, is that they really do mean what they say and that they really do mean what they say they want to do. And I give a number of examples in the book of this, but I mean, the most, uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
obvious is the case of Yahya Sinwa, the Hamas leader, who is generally regarded as having orchestrated and arranged the 7th of October. We know a fair amount about him because he was in prison in Israel in the 2000s for murdering Palestinians in Gaza.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And he was released in the prisoner swap for one of the more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners inside Israel who was released in a swap for Gilad Shalit, the abducted Israeli soldier. And Yaya Sinwa, in prison in Israel, talked to, among others, a dentist who ended up saving his life because Yaya Sinwa had a brain tumor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And this dentist identified this and actually sent him to the hospital in the Israelis famously. removed the tumor and saved Sinoir's life. But this dentist used to speak to him in the prison regularly and has related, not least to the New York Times, his conversations with Sinoir.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And Sinoir said in one of those conversations, he said, you know, he said, at the moment, you, Israel, are strong, but one day you'll be weak and then I'll come. And that's what he did.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Both. Thank you Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. ,,,,,,, ,,,,,,, They militarized the whole of Gaza. By the estimations of troops I've been with there, every second or third house had weaponry stashed there. Bombs, RPGs, Kalashnikovs, rockets, tunnel entrances. The network that they just embedded all these years was total.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Well, I mean, several things. There's political angles which are forever changing, but... On the human level, as you know, if you visit troops, frontline troops, you have that admiration for people defending their country, defending their homes, defending their families. I'm struck by the way in which that is at a remove from the sort of political noise and the media noise. and much more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
You know, one of the many, many tragedies of this is that whatever you're reading of the rights and wrongs of the Israeli withdrawal in 2005, it was an opportunity for the Gaza to become something else. It could have become a thriving statelet. It could have been a thriving Palestinian state. It's just that Hamas, like the PLO before them,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
decided that they wanted to destroy Israel more than they wanted to create a Palestinian state. And that is to the great, great detriment of the Palestinians of Gaza, to put it at its mildest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
By the American taxpayer and by the European taxpayer as well, yes. Yeah. Well, yeah, but I mean, it's not just about stealing the money. It's about using the money and the infrastructure to annihilate your neighbor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Yes, a cynicism, certainly, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Yes. Because they've elected them. They elected them. The what-ifs are endless, but very unwise of the George W. Bush administration to push for elections in Gaza after 2005. But Hamas were elected, and they... then in 2007 killed the other Palestinian faction that was their main challenger, Fatah, killed them, threw them off rooftops, dragged their bodies behind motorbikes through the Gaza.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
It's very easy to get caught up in the to's and fro's of today's news, but that, to my mind, that's the single thing that struck me most in my visits there, is just the people I've met. who are fighting for a cause which, at that level, is unavoidable, undeniable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And from that point, they had total control. And this is difficult because you can get into the realm of being accused of advocating or in any way justifying collective punishment. if you talk about this, but it should be borne in mind that Hamas had effectively 18 years to run the Gaza. And that's the time that it takes from the birth of a child to the end of their formal education.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And in 18 years, they could have presided over and produced a generation of young Gazans who were productive, productive for their people, for their society, for their neighbors, for the rest of the world, and they didn't. They spent 18 years indoctrinating the children of Gaza into a death cult and into a genocidal hatred, which
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
obviously was most dangerous to the Israelis, but it was obviously disastrous for the people of Gaza.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
If you speak to soldiers who were there in 2014 when Hamas started a war again, one of a set of rounds of war since 2005, if you speak to the soldiers who were there in 2014 going house to house and who were also involved in the war since 2003, they all say the same thing, which is the marked radicalization of the Gazan population.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
marked increase in the numbers of copies of Mein Kampf in Arabic in an average Gazan household, the protocols of the learned elders of Zion. There are so many what-ifs and other paths that Hamas could have taken, but that was the one they took. They decided to take the path of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
using their time in power to build up their infrastructure, radicalize its population, and encourage them to believe that they could destroy the state of Israel. And then on October the 7th, they gave it their best shot. And by the way, There is no organized collective punishment of the citizens of Gaza.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Collective punishment would just be dropping bombs with no purpose across civilian areas, carpet bombing, this sort of thing. This is simply not what the IAF and the IDF have done since the 7th. They have been fighting house-to-house war against this terrorist group. They do do aerial strikes. Gaza is very, very badly beaten up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
The buildings, I mean, the infrastructure that existed, there aren't many buildings standing. But this is not the result of just wild and imprecise bombing by the Israelis. It's been extremely concerted. It's extremely difficult. But when people say, well, this must be collective punishment, I think that the people who say that simultaneously, that's not true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And also, there is not a hostage who's come out who Donald Trump made this, President Trump made this point recently. There is not a hostage who's come out who I've spoken with who found any Gazan, Palestinian, who expressed even the slightest human kindness to them. If you look at the footage from the 7th that Hamas recorded themselves of them taking young Jewish women into Gaza and so on,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
you will notice that the trucks and the motorbikes and so on are not stopped by horrified guards and civilians saying, why have you got this Israeli girl whose tendons you've cut and why are you bringing her here? It's all celebration. It's all celebration. And it's the same with those couple of cases of hostages who managed to escape from the civilian houses they were being held in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
who were immediately returned by the citizens they met.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I mean, you know, people who have either lived under Russian occupation from invading armies and then come back out into the world, having been liberated as in late 2022, or the people now, and I was most recently there in recent weeks, who were just getting on with their job as soldiers whilst the world was talking about them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
You don't have to project it onto them. You can just listen to their own words. I'm sure you've heard one of many audio recordings you hear from the morning, but I'm sure you've heard the audio recording of the young man who ends up in one of the communities in the south of Israel and calls back home. Have you heard that? Yes, I've heard it. I quoted it in the first chapter of the book.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
He calls back home and he says to his father who picks up. It's on WhatsApp. I think he's on the phone. He's saying, turn on to WhatsApp because I can show you. He says, I've killed 10 Jews with my own hands. Oh, father, your son has killed 10 Jews. And his father is saying, where are you? Where are you? He goes, I want to show you, dad. I want to show you. I've killed Jews with my own hands.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Your son. Put mother on the phone. Mother comes on the phone. The brother comes on the phone. This is one of many, many stories from the day that suggests that something which I would say is not just indoctrination, but yes, evil.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
It would be a strange type of simple sort of, I don't know, pride in war, right? to go into an 80 year old woman's house and kill her on her floor and then film her dead body and her body in its final moments and send it round to all of that woman's friends on her phone, on her Instagram account. Um, it's, it's, you may have heard different things from me, but I mean, I would be surprised, uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
if there were even the most vociferous of Russian soldiers phoning back home to Moscow and saying, Mom, you won't believe my luck. I managed to rape and kill this 80-year-old woman. That's quite unusual, even in warfare. And that's one of the things about Hamas and what I describe as the death cult types, which makes them different from other people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
No, I disagree. You commit that once. I think that there is such a force as evil in the world, and I think it can descend and it can be used. It's very hard to find a non-theological way to talk about this, but of everything I've seen, there are actions that people like Hamas committed on the 7th that cannot be described as anything other than evil.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
The things that happened at the Nova Party were... especially appalling. I mean, it was all appalling, but it was especially appalling because first of all, it's a sort of party which people like you and I, or at least you and I when we were younger might have been at. And so everyone knows the world of a dance party and all night, rave in the desert to
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
commune with nature and the universe and to take some psychedelics and to, you know, expand your consciousness and your love and all of that sort of thing. The fact that people doing that at 6.30 in the morning then encountered people coming in to the party on trucks and military vehicles and just... massacring them and raping them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I give examples of the firsthand accounts of people who survived, but it's beyond belief of almost anything else I've covered in war. An army facing another army is one thing, A terrorist group in civilian clothing facing an army is another thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Yes, first time was in, I was with the Ukrainian armed forces when they retook Kherson. And I was back in recent weeks and was there when the Trump-Zelensky blowup happened. In fact, I was in a Ukrainian dugout at the front lines when I was watching it. How's the morale?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
A terrorist group facing a group of young people at a dance, unarmed, and doing what they did is pretty hard to comprehend unless you use the lexicon of evil somewhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Yes. What has happened in response is terrible, terrible for the citizens of Gaza. I was there on the first time a couple of days early and into the ground invasion. when the citizens of Gaza were coming south.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I was in the middle of the strip and the humanitarian corridor had been set up to try to stop the hostages being taken south, deeper into Gaza, and to try to stop Hamas leadership from making it south. It actually didn't really work because they'd already got a lot of the hostages south. It was an attempt to keep Hamas there and fight them in the north so as not to be dragged
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
all the way in, in the end, dragged all the way in anyway. But yes, I mean, watching the citizens of Gaza moving through the humanitarian corridor and, you know, and they're everyone... was being checked for, for bombs, suicide vests checked for, you know, particularly young men of military age.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Um, and, uh, you know, I mean, you look at this tide of human misery and you think this is terrible, but this is a terrible thing that had been brought upon them by the people had been misgoverning the place that they lived in. And, Of course, on a human level, you feel terrible that these people are going through this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
At the same time, human empathy for them can coexist beside an unspeakable anger that they had come to this point. Because of the fact that they elected a terror group to run their territory. And one of the things, obviously, is that a lot of people like to say, and it's true, of course, that this didn't all start on October the 7th. Absolutely true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
This particular round, this particularly intense round of war started on October the 7th, without doubt. Hamas did not have to attack on October the 7th. It wasn't like they were forced to liberate themselves or something, as some of the defenders of Hamas claim. But the conflict, of course, goes back a lot earlier.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
But you will have to always keep on contending with this fact that there is one central issue to the paradigm of that conflict. What used to be called the Arab-Israeli conflict and now has become interestingly rebranded the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But there is one absolutely essential issue to this, which cannot be forgotten, which is do the Palestinians...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And if they want to destroy the Jewish state, as they've tried many times, it's a disaster for them. It's a total disaster for them. If they want to create their own state, they've already had several very good shots at it, one of which is Gaza post-2005. But they've never shown
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And that's a catastrophe for the Palestinians.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
To take them in order, There's nothing about Gaza that was an open air prison. They had ability to trade. They had the ability to move in and out in increasing numbers. Egypt wasn't so keen on allowing Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt, still isn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
But at the time of the 7th, there was actually an interesting, one of the things the international community was pushing for was for more Palestinians to be coming into Israel every day through the Eretz crossing and others to work in Israel because they can make a better living in Israel than they can in Gaza.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And this, the, as it were, normalization route was slowly being attempted as being pushed on Israel by the international community a little bit too fast for Israel's comfort, but it happened. That completely came to an end, and that dream is done, gone, since the 7th of October. Can you clarify the dream, the normalization relations between Gaza and Israel? Gone. Really? Yeah, no normalization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
At one level, I mean, nothing has changed much. You know, it's a sort of... It's not a... a total standoff because intermittently each side gains territory from the others. But there'd been no very significant military gains by either side in the interim period.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
No, not after that. And one of the reasons is the number of people, again, who I've spoken with who employed Palestinians, worked with Palestinians, worked alongside Palestinians, encouraged more Palestinians to be coming from Gaza in order to work in Israel, and these were their brothers and sisters and so on and so forth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
One of the reasons why the massacres of the 7th were so successful in the kibbutzim, the communities in the south, was because of the number of the terrorists who came in with detailed house-to-house maps of those communities. I, I spoke with, uh, with one man who his community, they had a security officer chief and, uh, Hamas came in, they knew to go and kill him and his family first.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And then which families it was just, I've seen the maps myself. They were, they came in with incredibly, um, accurate information about these communities. How did they have them? Because it was given to them by the, by the brothers, by the workers. by the people of Gaza who were coming in and out. There is nobody that will trust that ever again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I mean, you know, if you've worked beside somebody and then found out they sold out your family, you will never trust again. And that, particularly in a small country like Israel, the word of that happening goes out very fast. The very beginning, there was intense, intense fear about that, including of the 20% or so of the population who are Arab Israelis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I actually think one of the few positive news stories of the period is that that population within Israel has, by and large, held. There hasn't been an intifada. One of the reasons why there hasn't been more terrorist activity in the West Bank, in Judea and Samaria, is because the Israelis have been very careful, along with the Palestinian Authority, to some extent, cooperating to keep that down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
But there wasn't a full war on three fronts, for instance, which was at risk of happening. So I think that the sort of coexistence within Israel has pretty much held. There are some terrible examples, far too regular, but not as regular as it could happen, of Muslim Arab Israelis carrying out acts of terror in, as it were, sympathy with Israel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Hamas, I was in the middle of one such attack myself late last year in a town called Hadera. And those things have happened, but that particular catastrophe has not occurred.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Well, he's certainly not evil. Interesting if people looking at this conflict were to be reluctant to use the word evil of Hamas and eager to use it of the Israeli prime minister, it would be sort of telling, I would say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Isn't it also, I mean, not to be flippant for a moment, it's a little bit like Who do you show your worst sides to? The people you love. My intense irritability is something that tends to be felt most by people who are closest to me because if I express it to absolutely everybody I met at the party or a social setting, it would be hard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
There's a tendency to lean heavily on the people who are closest to you, the people who will put up with it. And something similar happens in international politics. You pressure the people who will listen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I mean, it's one of the, I mean, one of the things you hear a lot in the last year, you know, people sort of ignoramuses in the governments in places like Britain, you know, will say we need to put more pressure on the Israelis to do X. And you go, well, you know, in part, that's because they will listen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
If you go, we need to put more pressure on the Ayatollahs in Iran to persuade them that Hamas are really bad and they shouldn't be doing this. What the hell do you think they're going to do? Are they going to listen to you? Are you going to give a damn? You're talking totally different worlds. Not just a different language, it's a different world. And by the way, that happens in Israel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I mentioned it earlier, but it happens in Israel. When the hostage families forum came about, I spent a lot of time there, got to know a lot of the families, and they're remarkable. But one of the things you did notice from them as well was that a lot of them They protest outside Netanyahu's house. They use klaxon horns to make sure he can never sleep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
They will put up great big posters by his house of him with bloodied hands and so on. And I have, you know, I think as much sympathy as you can for these families. The plight of knowing that your child is sitting in a tunnel in Gaza for a year, a day, an hour is intolerable. But there's a reason why the families protested Netanyahu. And that's because SINWA didn't care. That wouldn't work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Yeah, I certainly, on the front lines facing Crimea, became quite familiar with people who thought that the Ukrainians in late 2022 would even be able to get Crimea back. And that struck me even at the time when I said I thought that that was an overreach.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
If you said, you know, understand my plight. I'm a Jewish mother and my daughter is thing. You think Sinois, the heads of Hamas, care? You think the leaders in Qatar who host them care? The Qatari emir's mother, when Sinois was killed, praised Sinois. You couldn't talk that language to these people, but you can talk that language to the elected prime minister of Israel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Because that, first of all, he's somebody who might listen to your pressure, could be pressured. And secondly, he's simply the only person you can pressure. There's no one else. Hamas doesn't care. Hezbollah doesn't care. The Iranian Revolutionary Government doesn't care.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I don't see how you can call them freedom fighters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
The Indian polls last month in Washington showed him at an all-time high. But you were saying...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
The most devastating thing that anyone could come up against Netanyahu is that the seventh happened on his watch. After the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Golda Meir, who is a very distinguished Prime Minister of Israel and a remarkable woman, but she effectively took the political hit for the Yom Kippur invasion. by Israel's Arab neighbors happening on her watch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And I just thought that most critics, fair-minded critics of Netanyahu inside Israel and without would always hold that against him. I suppose that one of the criticisms you hear a lot as well is this thing of Israel being divided in the year before the seventh because of the judicial reforms
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I think there's a strong case for judicial reforms in Israel, but it's a sort of niche Israeli governance issue, which we don't have to get into. The point is that Netanyahu and his government were pushing these reforms through judicial reforms. And it was very divisive. And on the streets of Tel Aviv and other cities every weekend, there were protests.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And the police were tired because they'd spent week after week on overtime policing these protests, which often turned raucous, not to say violent. or sometimes violent, and you could say, well, if you see that something is dividing your country this much, why don't you stop?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
There is a claim by some people that one of the things that prompted the 7th was that Hamas and its backers in Qatar and Iran saw the division in Israeli society, saw the Israeli population, a significant chunk of it, every week on the streets, shutting down highways, shutting down services and so on, and thought, good, now's the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
In other words, what I quoted Sinoir as saying earlier when he was in prison in Israel was this thing, one day you'll be weak and then I'll strike. Maybe that is one of the things that Sinoir... thought. Israel was very weak. It had been divided and therefore the time strike.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
There's an argument against that, which is that the seventh was in preparation and being planned before the judicial reform process in Israel began. So you can look at it several ways. But you could use that. You could say, look, if your nation was divided, don't push through anymore on that. There's lots of things like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
You could say that Netanyahu was one of the people responsible for the conception. You could... There are critics of his, including critics who are in the war cabinet, who thought that he was too focused on Hamas and not focused enough on Hezbollah. Other people think he was too focused on Hezbollah and not enough on Hamas. So there's them and many other criticisms that people make of him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I would say I've interviewed, I think, every political leader in Israel from right to left, pretty much. and I have to say, I don't think there's any of them that wouldn't have responded similarly to the 7th of October to the way he has.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
It's strange if there is a widespread global loathing of the prime minister of a country of eight to nine million people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
There's an awful lot of people to hate in the world. There's a lot of wars in the world. It's always of interest to me, and obviously it's one of the things I go into on democracies and death cults, is this question of why is this so galvanizing for so many people? And I think that is a very, very interesting question. Why? By the way, let me do a quick addendum to that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
You can notice something else like that when people talk about the Republican failures in foreign policy in the last 30 years or so. It's very interesting. There's a certain type of person who will immediately mention Paul Wolfowitz. Yeah. And they will say, well, you know, Wolfowitz, you mean deputy under secretary of defense under George W. Bush? You think he guided everything?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Well, it was a very disturbing place to watch it from. Perhaps anywhere it would have been. And, I mean, obviously it was a meeting that shouldn't have happened. It was far too early. Why do you think so? There's not enough actual pathways to peace on the table?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Why would that be? other than the fact that his name, as Mark Stein once said, starts with a nasty animal and ends Jewish. That's a good line. So I do think that there are very deep things at play. That's a good line. There are very deep things at play. Netanyahu, irrespective of anything he does, for a lot of people, is a kind of devil. And you have to say, well, why is that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Now, of course, some people will say, well, that's because his terrible hawkishness and his actions and so on and so forth. The case for Netanyahu is that he sees it as his historic purpose to defend the only homeland of the Jewish people and that that's his life's mission. And On that basis, I think he's been, by any measure, a historic leader.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
He has warned the world about the threat from the mullahs in Tehran. He warned about Iranian revolutionary expansionism across the region, across Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen. And after the 7th, he has held together a very, very difficult
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
set of challenges to keep, um, international pressure at a tolerable level to do all sorts of things, but most importantly to oversee the two war aims that he set out at the beginning. I thought, let me just express this to you. I thought like a lot of people, when I heard about the hostages, my immediate instinct was they're all dead. They're all going to be dead. We'll never see them again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And that was the attitude of a lot of Israelis. But although there are still hostages being held, and as I've always said, the war could end tomorrow if they were handed back, or at least the beginning of the end of the war could begin tomorrow if they were handed back. Nevertheless, because of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
the actions of not just Netanyahu, but the Israeli government, most of the hostages have been returned, did not expect this to happen. And Hamas has not been completely destroyed, but it has been very, very significantly degraded. And you end up in the definition of what a total destruction of Hamas would look like. But they are not anywhere near the capability they were in November of 2023.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Their leadership has almost all been killed. The second tier of leadership, almost all gone. And this is a just response to what Hamas did. The moment, Netanyahu's reputation in Israel was at a low early on because of what had happened. But, and there's no doubt, and as I say in the final chapter of the book, I mean, General Slim had this phrase, from defeat into victory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Israel isn't at victory yet in this conflict, but when in September last year,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
There were a set of operational successes so extraordinary that, I mean, it was just like every day's news was... There was one day, I remember, after the Assad regime fell, when the Israeli Air Force took out the entirety of the Syrian Air Force in a day because they didn't want it falling into the hands of the new jihadist administration in Syria.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
It was story number four on the BBC News website. The leadership of Hezbollah, gone. Gone. The second and third tiers of Hezbollah, gone or wounded. Iran's Rolls-Royce, destroyed. These are very, very significant military achievements. And are, in my mind, a just response to the attempts by Hezbollah, Hamas, and other Iranian proxies to destroy the Jewish state.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Would another Israeli leader have been able to hold firm as Netanyahu has? I don't know, but I do know that any of them would have done something similar or would have tried to do something similar because there's no country on earth, no democracy on earth Thank you. Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And now mineral deposits, obviously. I'm really speaking at the edge of my mineral deposit knowledge here. No, I mean, from what I could see, the deal that the American administration was trying to get the Ukrainian government to sign was sort of too early to... too forced. The Ukrainians were ready to sign a deal, but were obviously under intense pressure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Thank you. Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And I think certainly Zelensky wasn't expecting to go until pretty much the day before, was obviously visibly tired and exhausted again, as you are after that amount of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
pressure for that long a time and um no i mean the thing that struck me and i i said this in my column the new york post from there that uh the thing that struck me was i said to some of the soldiers i was with uh you know what do you make of this and um you know one of them just said to me Well, you know, we're advised not to follow too closely the ins and outs of the politics of this, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. ,,,,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
But of course, everyone has Instagram or scrolls and among dog pictures and, you know, the hot women or whatever is, you know, what happened in the Oval. But what struck me was this same guy saying, I've got a job to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
It could be all of those things. I think it is, and a lot more. I mean, taboos, you know, taboos can be fun to break, I suppose, and I suppose there are some people online... who have grown up knowing that, you know, since the Holocaust, anti-Semitism was taboo. And they've run out of, it goes back to what we were saying earlier a bit, you know, they sort of run out of, they've got bored of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
You know, Holocaust, schmolocost, they'd say, you know, I've heard enough about that. And maybe those people have gone off in a funny direction as a result, but I don't think that's the main thing. I think that's like a detail compared to the real thing. The real thing is that anti-Semitism is back, and there is a certain type of person who's loving it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Well, it never goes away. It's just that since the 7th, I think that it's had a great resurgence. And this isn't to say, and that doesn't mean that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. No, it doesn't. But, as I have often said,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
If you don't ever express any interest in the murder of Muslims in Syria, not any interest in genocide in Sudan, killing of hundreds of thousands of people in Yemen, but on the 8th of October you're on the street with a placard attacking Israel, I'm sorry, you're an anti-Semite, for sure. You may not know you are, but that's what's motivating you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I watch it. It does. I watch it. I mean, it's one of several things you can always see get huge engagement. I mean, it's like if you say that there's like a massive pedophile ring run by prominent politicians... it might be total horse shit. It's likely to be total horse shit, but it'll also get a hell of a lot of engagement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
which is very interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
It is. And I mean, you see it with, I mean, some of the people who've made minor celebrities of themselves with a sort of made up version of history with a smattering of this and a little bit of that. And then the just asking questions and, you know, I'm not saying, but, and all there's certain, you know, rhetorical sites of hand that have, um, have helped this along.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
But as I said earlier, it's just the lowest grade explanation of a certain type of mind looking for a pattern and looking for meaning. And I mean, I can give you just one quick example of why that in the case of Israel is so extraordinary, is the number of otherwise semi-intelligent people who will tell you that The problem is simply that the Israelis need to give the Palestinians another state.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And that if they do, it will solve the problems of the region and the wider world. And irrespective of the fact that the Palestinians have been given to several states, the claim that this particular land dispute would unlock every other injustice in the world should be seen on its face to be preposterous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
There is no reason why if the Palestinians got another state, either in Gaza or in parts of Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, there is no reason why we should expect the economy of Yemen to boom. It would not inevitably lead to the mullahs in Tehran giving equal rights to women or anything else. The most likely thing is you simply have another failed Arab state run by a sort of proxy of Tehran.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
That's the best case scenario. And by the way, even lifelong defenders of the Palestinian cause, like Salman Rushdie, He said recently, he said, I've always been a supporter of the Palestinian people and their cause, but it is an unavoidable fact that if another state was given to the Palestinians, it would simply be, at best, another front for the Iranian regime in Iran. At best.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I don't think by any account it was a successful step forward, unless... To some extent, it was a play from DC to say to Putin, look, we've daft off Zelensky and now give us something. That's the only remedial idea I have about what might have been behind it. But I think it was just one of those extremely, I mean, just awful political moments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
So why the passion about... Why the unbelievable, wild passion about this? Why the... And I say some of it can be, should be argued out and so on. Some of it can be explained. But there's definitely a realm of it, a layer of it, which is simply at that level of this excites something within me. This excites something within me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Look at the prominence of semi-prominent people who are willing to play around with the idea that 9-11 was an inside job and somehow it was done by the Israelis. Or the Jews. I mean, look at the, like, this shit is going around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Usually opening up Pandora's boxes they don't understand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Yes, because you've got a very specific task that could be highly complicated. Yes. But you get to apply yourself to and to solve.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Well, it's because there's so many variables. I mean, this is one of the reasons when you were trying to lure me onto prognostications on Ukraine, I was saying, I just, I've seen enough to know that. I just don't know because I know the amount of things that can change all the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Some years ago, I was talking to a former public servant in the UK when Boris Johnson was prime minister and COVID started. And I mentioned to this friend, I said, well, you know, it's it's pretty bad luck for Boris that, you know, he came in to do one thing, which was Brexit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And then there's a global pandemic from Wuhan, you know, and he's got to like mug up on that and then gets it really wrong. But anyway, and I was really struck by the fact that this man, a man of great insight who happened to disagree politically, but said to me, but Douglas is always like this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And he said, you know, look, Tony Blair came into power in 1997 wanting to reform education in the UK, ends up trying to remake the Middle East. And I do, I mean, as I say, one of the reasons why I am scornful of conspiracy theorists And most conspiracy theories, not to say that there aren't some that do actually turn out to be, you know, to have something in them. And that happens.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
A lot of things are called conspiracy theories that turn out to be true. Lab leak. But in general, the suspicion and the scorn I have for people who fall into this is, as I say, it's a very low-grade, low-resolution look at the world by people who clearly have never seen the... wildness of actions in the world and the way that they reverberate and the number of events.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I once spoke some years ago to a politician who literally said to me, I won't name the country, but said to me, can you help us out with just how to cope and understand the day-to-day struggle we're having with the cycle. And I said, what are you talking about? And they said, our experience in government is that every day something comes up, which we have to firefight.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
And that's what we do that day. And then the next day, something else comes up, which we have to firefight. And we're not getting... our policies done. And I, and I just thought for me, that rings an awful lot truer than that, that country gets the odd phone call from a member of a Jewish family telling them, I just, you know, it's like, come on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Zelensky was obviously deeply irritated by the interpretation of the war that he was hearing from Washington. It was only a week after the Trump comments about Zelensky being a dictator and people in the administration implying that Ukraine has started the war. And I think that must be, for Zelensky, a pretty Alice in Wonderland situation to be in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
I know, as you know, I start on democracy and death cults with the flight taking the Ayatollah Khomeini from Paris to Tehran. The flight that you say you wish never happened. I think it's one of the two worst journeys of the 20th century.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Lenin's train getting to Petrograd.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Yes, I know. I'm really a transport guy. No, wait till my book of 10 best journeys. Across the world. No, just as the train to the Finland station brought the basilisk of Bolshevism, into Russia. So the flight coming from Paris, bringing the Ayatollah Khomeini to Tehran, brought the basilisk of Khomeiniism, the most radical form of Shiite Islam, to Tehran and to Iran.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
It's one of the great tragedies of the modern era, what happened there. Like you, actually, I have a lot of Persian friends and I had the great good fortune early in my life to have a very close late friend who had grown up in pre-revolutionary Iran, was very fond of the Shah and so on. Her father had been an Ayatollah before the overthrow of the Shah.
Part Of The Problem
Thoughts on the JRE Debate
Interesting question is whether you're busy watering it.
Part Of The Problem
Thoughts on the JRE Debate
Absolutely. Okay, you should. Absolutely. I have all four going back and looking at mistakes.
Part Of The Problem
Thoughts on the JRE Debate
It's a very weird thing to go back, zone in on a man, say this one thing is a mistake and should characterize him, and you ignore everything else.
Part Of The Problem
Thoughts on the JRE Debate
In the archives, clearly. Come on. I mean, he is not the historian of our era.
Part Of The Problem
Thoughts on the JRE Debate
This is the thing, Joe. This is like punching jelly. No, but you don't consume his work. What I'm saying, because I don't need to consume endless versions of a revisionist history. I understand.
Part Of The Problem
Thoughts on the JRE Debate
Yeah, I know, but okay. So this is my point about jelly. It's a shape-shifting thing. Comedian or historian? He's not a comedian. Historian or podcast? Would be historian or actual historian? You say he doesn't claim to be a historian, but he's pumping out tens of hours of history.
Part Of The Problem
Thoughts on the JRE Debate
Weird jujitsu move where you say, hang on, you know all about this as well. You say, I'm not a historian, but I'm going to spend my time talking about history. I'm not a journalist, but I'm going to spend my time talking about this thing. I'm not an expert on this, but I'm going to spend my time talking about this thing. It's a weird move, yeah? No. You don't think?
Part Of The Problem
Thoughts on the JRE Debate
I've noticed you can. But what's the point? The point is, what are you pushing? What are you watering?
Part Of The Problem
Thoughts on the JRE Debate
Okay. That doesn't mean we are on the verge of a war. I mean, you keep referring to we being in wars. There's a very big difference between a country having a military that's engaged and a country being at war. This country has not been at war for 25 years. You have not been fighting for the American homeland for 25 years.
Part Of The Problem
Thoughts on the JRE Debate
You haven't been randomly picking on them. I mean, Afghanistan, you went... I didn't say it was random. Yeah, right. Okay. It wasn't like you suddenly decided... Just pause it for a second.
Part Of The Problem
Thoughts on the JRE Debate
Or get Myanmar or something. We went to Afghanistan to find bin Laden and take revenge for 9-11 and stop an attack like that happening again on the American homeland. That is very different from a country being at war.
Part Of The Problem
Thoughts on the JRE Debate
Oh, I said it was a war. It's your use of we, as if you're personally like suffering this war.
Part Of The Problem
Thoughts on the JRE Debate
You take it obviously very personally and that's your right to do so, of course. I'm just trying to make sure we're accurate here.
Part Of The Problem
Thoughts on the JRE Debate
And there's a very good argument to make on that. I'm still slightly bemused about this move from I'm an expert on this and I have views to I'm a comedian.