The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Mon, 12 May 2025
What really happened on October 7th? What does it reveal about Israel, Hamas, the West—and the future of civilization?In this gripping and deeply disturbing conversation, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson speaks with author and journalist Douglas Murray about his newest book, "On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization." Together, they walk through the harrowing details of the Hamas invasion of Israel, the unprecedented October 7th terrorist attacks, and the shocking moral inversion that followed in Western media, academia, and public discourse. Douglas Murray is a journalist and bestselling author of 7 books. His latest publication is the international bestseller, The War On The West. His previous book, The Madness of Crowds, was a bestseller and ‘book of the year’ for The Times and The Sunday Times. The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, published in 2017, spent almost 20 weeks on The Sunday Times bestseller list and was a number 1 bestseller in non-fiction. Mr. Murray has been a contributor to The Spectator since 2000 and has been associate editor at the magazine since 2012. He is a columnist for The New York Post, The Free Press, The Sun, The Telegraph, and contributes regularly to National Review and numerous other outlets. This episode was filmed on May 2nd, 2025. Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy | Links | For Douglas Murray: Douglas’s latest book, “On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization” https://a.co/d/fjx85qB “The War on the West”https://www.amazon.com/War-West-Douglas-Murray/dp/0063162024 On X https://x.com/DouglasKMurray?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/douglaskmurray/?hl=en On Facebook https://www.facebook.com/DouglasKMurrayOfficial/ On YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@douglasmurray
Chapter 1: What happened on October 7th?
The billions of dollars that went into Gaza were largely used by Hamas leaders to enrich themselves, to build an incredibly elaborate terrorist infrastructure throughout Gaza. The misconception was Hamas leadership were happy with just being corrupt.
The terrible hand of Iran is behind Hamas and Hezbollah. Iran has absolutely no compunctions about sacrificing every single Palestinian to the cause. What possible response could Israel have except to roll over and, what, submit?
MUSIC
Hey, everybody. So I'm talking today to Douglas Murray, who just wrote this book on democracies and death cults, Israel and the Future of Civilization. That's this. We basically walk through the book chapter by chapter. It's a relatively short book, although it doesn't lack in intensity. What happened October 7th when Hamas invaded Israel?
What I saw, Douglas' account of his sojourn through Israel in the aftermath of the catastrophe. How the world turned. We discussed the protests primarily originating on university campuses, much to their eternal shame.
The disconnect, the fact that the propaganda exercise and what would you say, the zeitgeist of the West was such so that Israel was demonized almost immediately after the attack for daring to defend itself. And then Douglas's conclusion from defeat into victory. Well, that's where the conversation got a little bit more,
Theological, possibly, and inevitability when talking about the existence of good and evil.
We discussed Douglas's observations that the Israelis have been very successful at pushing forward a truly pro-life, pro-abundance ethos, and the consequence for their thriving, for their resilience in the face of really insuperable opposition, and the meaning of that for hope, not only in Israel, but in the West in general, and a hope we most desperately need in these strangest of all times.
Join us for that. So, Mr. Murray, I read your book on democracies and death cults, Israel and the Future of Civilization. Yeah, it's a pretty rough read in like five different dimensions. It's brutal and unnerving and like terribly relevant and not merely relevant. merely because of the situation in Israel. So I think what we should do first is, I'm going to ask you questions about each chapter.
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Chapter 2: How did Hamas execute their attack on Israel?
And then the terrorists who killed their father walks into the room with a Kalashnikov and just looks at the boys, goes to the fridge, opens the fridge, and gets out a Diet Coke and starts drinking it in front of them. And also later asks where their mother is.
That's how you demonstrate that the suffering is irrelevant. With that casual consumerist gesture, right? And that, what would you say? That perversion of hospitality.
Yeah. So inevitably, yes, you get to the question of how does so many people get taught this or encouraged into this? And I was very struck, this is very much in your wheelhouse, but one of the reunions of the survivors of the Nova Party, I got talking to a remarkable woman who was a therapist who was working with them.
And these were, of course, all deeply, deeply traumatized young people who, you know, have difficult time for the rest of their lives. But there was a therapist who'd been working with them, who I spoke with, who said to me then, and it was something I thought about a lot, which was, you know, don't forget, Douglas, that a psychopath is probably born. Sinoir was a type of psychopath, clearly.
But she said, don't forget sociopaths you have to make. And that was something I thought about a lot because of course, what would happen if you had control of a civilian population, like the almost 2 million people in Gaza, a population that doubled in the time that Israel was said to be doing a genocide there, by the way, but part of that aside is a mere fact.
What would you do if you had a civilian population for 18 years and you were a death cult and you ruled it? You would teach what Hamas taught in Gaza, which was to teach the young Gazan Palestinians how to join the death cult, to admire it, to be part of it, so that when... To strive for attainment within it. To strive for it.
It's all very well documented, but the soldiers who were going house to house from... In 2014, there was a relatively minor war in Gaza compared to this one. And there are many soldiers I spoke to who were involved in the relatively minor conflict in 2014 who were also in Gaza since October 2023. They all said that they noticed when they did house-to-house clearing
going through trying to find hostages, trying to find weapons, trying to find tunnel entrances, and trying to find the architects of the massacre.
They all said the same thing, which was that in 10 years, there was a marked radicalization in the books, in the households, in the learning materials, in everything from, and it's not satire, you know, math textbooks of, you know, if you kill two Jews and kill another two Jews, how many dead Jews do you have? You know, this is the way you learn arithmetic in Gaza under Hamas.
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