Douglas Murray Warns that October 7th Will Happen Again, in the West

Per a rule set by Douglas Murray in his recent Joe Rogan Experience appearance, I typically avoid commenting on events in a land I’ve never visited. Kibbutz Re’im is 2,222 miles from my home in London. I am not Jewish, and I have no more connection to Israel than I do to Iceland. But I am forced to take an interest in the ongoing war between the Jewish state and Hamas because successive governments have imported a demographic for whom Gaza matters more than Great Britain. Thus, our national politics has been held hostage over the fate of Palestinians since the October 7th massacre. Given the utter capitulation of our institutions to the mob’s demands, one gets a horrifying feeling reading Murray’s new book, On Democracies and Death Cults, that, if an October 7th-style massacre were to happen in the West, our governments would side with the terrorists.

The book is a must-read for its harrowing eyewitness accounts from October 7th:

Please note: some readers may find the below details distressing. 

Of Major “Y”, an American who enlisted in the IDF, who was fired upon by a Hamas militant lying prone beneath an elderly woman in a wheelchair, using her as a human shield.

Of Rada — one of three Druze brothers who catered the Nova festival — who recalls watching three terrorists argue in Arabic over whether to kidnap or kill a 19-year-old girl, before another Hamas militant arrived and shot her in the head. She was still begging for her life after half her face had been blown away.

Of the women at the Nahal Oz military base, whose tendons were cut to stop them running away, and raped for impregnation by Hamas militants, before 66 were shot dead.

Of IDF soldier Nimrod, who arrived at the scene of the massacre, and stopped to cover the bare and bloodied buttocks of dead women before gunning down more than 30 Hamas militants. He said, “I saw Auschwitz before my eyes … That day I promised I would be a combat soldier for the rest of my life. I also promised myself that I would tell the story for those that cannot.” Stories like 74-year-old Bracha Levinson’s: whose murder was filmed and posted on Facebook, and whose charred remains took a month to identify.

Murray makes no bones about his book being unabashedly pro-Israel. But given Britain’s state broadcaster made a documentary narrated by the son of Hamas’ deputy minister of agriculture, Murray’s account brings some necessary balance to the debate.

Murray attempts to derive hope from the love of family, faith, and nation which inspired so many young Israelis to enlist in the IDF after October 7th.

“Whatever criticisms the world wanted to level at Israel, why could they not see this? The difference between a country that had built hospitals to care for its people and a death cult that had used its hospitals to protect itself and deliberately put its people in danger? The difference between a society that built bunkers for its people and a society that built bunkers for its rockets?”

He believes this love of life is enough to counteract the thanatos of Hamas and their allies. But the contrast he presents of their counterparts in the West doesn’t give much cause for optimism. Legions of leftist and Islamist protestors planned to bring Western cities to standstill while the massacre was still ongoing. For weeks mobs marched in keffiyehs, shot fireworks at police, defaced war memorials, and projected “From the River to the Sea” onto Parliament during the ceasefire debate. Despite this violating a number of criminal statues, including the 2006 Terrorism Act, they went largely unpunished. Their calls for “Intifada” and “Jihad” were excused by the police, and rewarded by the government. Arabist former Foreign Secretary, Lord Cameron gave millions in aid to “support sexual and reproductive healthcare in Gaza”, while Conservatives considered decriminalizing abortion at all stages for British babies (Prime Minister, Cameron proclaimed his ambition to “open the door” for Muslims to take ”all across government, in positions of leadership and authority”). Their Labour successors have hosted Iftars in Parliament and pleaded with mosques to stem losses to a growing sectarian Muslim vote. Three lawyers are now working pro bono to overturn the designation of Hamas as a terrorist organization — arguing simultaneously that Israel is an apartheid state committing genocide, but that it is “unprofessional” to question if ideological biases led them to take the case.

The weight of British institutions being put behind the Palestinian cause explains why few but Murray have brought these stories from the frontline before the public. This brings me to my sole criticism of the book: Murray underestimates the extent to which British institutions are already ideologically captured by Islamist sympathies. The point Murray makes is that the same genocidal Islamist ideology which motivated Hamas on October 7th is lying dormant across Europe. Its adherents cannot be negotiated with, and will only take prisoners if they can use you as leverage against your loved ones. They attribute collective guilt, and meter out murderous punishment on racial and religious lines. They birth sons knowing one or more will be martyred for the cause. They believe “Children are tools to be used against Israel”, to be sacrificed “for the political support of the world”. They spend decades building tunnels larger than the London Underground network beneath homes, hospitals, and schools. So, do we really doubt their willingness to embed themselves in institutions, and wait for the day when things turn violent to use the might of the state against us?

As I have previously covered for Courage Media, the aftermath of the Manchester Arena attack was carefully managed by the Home Office’s propaganda unit, RICU, in order to contain public outrage. When asked by a Nova party survivor, “What would you do if this [October 7th] happened in your country?”, Murray writes, “I immediately thought, though I did not say, But it has.” He lists the 2015 Bataclan massacre in Paris, the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, and the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing. Of the last, Murray wonders:

“After twenty-two people—most of whom were young girls—were blown up by a suicide bomber at an Ariana Grande concert at Britain’s Manchester Arena in 2017, the response, pushed onto the public by the media and others, was to sing an Oasis song—“Don’t Look Back in Anger.” As though, after twenty-two young people have their bodies blown to smithereens by a bomb packed with nails and ball bearings, the important thing was just not to be angry. But why? If the murder of young women for the crime of being at a concert shouldn’t make you angry, then what should? Perhaps the British, like other people, just didn’t know what to do about it.”

But we know that “Don’t Look Back in Anger” was deployed to divert blame away from Islam. In the following years, referrals for Islamist terror to the counter-extremist program Prevent fell from their 2017 peak, while membership of the Home Office’s Islamic Network of Muslim activists grew to over 700. It isn’t that the British public aren’t outraged by these massacres; see last summer’s spontaneous riots after the Southport murders. It’s that their government has engaged in a sustained and sophisticated gaslighting program to ensure that mass Muslim migration continues without any effective opposition.

The most egregious example is the ongoing Pakistani rape gang scandal, which Murray has covered consistently. Last year, RICU staff dismissed the scandal as a “grievance narrative” invented by “right-wing extremists”. Still, the government remains obstinate to a national inquiry into these crimes, and the judiciary withhold transcripts of the trials, saying that the release of “such material in the context of such a debate would be contrary to public interest”.

As Murray asks of Israel’s critics, in the book:

“If an enemy breaks into your country, murders your citizens, rapes women at a music festival, and carries hundreds of your citizens into captivity what is the “proportionate” response? Would Israel be permitted to call it quits if it killed precisely the same number of men, women, and children as Hamas had killed that day? Or raped precisely the same number of women? Or kidnapped precisely the same number of innocent civilians from their homes and then held them in underground tunnels? Of course not. In fact, the world would rightly condemn any such move.”

But the world has not condemned the British government who have, for decades, allowed social workers, police forces, and local councils to cover up the rape, trafficking, torture, and murder of thousands of English girls by gangs of Pakistani Muslim men. It is an indictment of Britain’s politicians that they have not reacted to the rape-gang scandal just as Israel did after October 7th. Israel took the side of its people. The British state has not.

This knowledge that our state will side with our abusers is fomenting fears of civil war. Once the preoccupation of conspiratorial cranks and a mercifully few remaining swivel-eyed racists, temperamental moderates like Tim Stanley are warning of its imminence in the Telegraph. Stanley, however, focused more on the second-order issue of a white-identitarian retaliation, rather than its Islamic-sectarian provocation. Likewise, Inaya Folarin Iman has admitted that the Radio Rwanda-esque anti-white racism she once dismissed — and labelled the likes of me a “white identitarian” for being alarmed about — is a very real and institutionalized threat.

It’s easy to see, when police-hiring policies and sentencing guidelines render white men second-class citizens in their own countries. But this enshrines in law an ethnic contempt which has already been culturally normalized. When Murray lists the abundance of antisemitic literature on offer at a train station in Egypt in 2010 — copies of Mein Kampf, copies of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, and a range of other conspiracy tracts focusing on Israel and the Jews — one cannot help but recall the prominent displays of White Fragility, Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race, and How To Be An Anti-Racist in the windows of highstreet Waterstones stores while Black Lives Matter set American cities ablaze.

Just as the deans of Harvard, U-Penn, and MIT smiled in indifference to calls to genocide of Jews on campus, Western media, academia, and politicians have encouraged the revision of our history and replacement of our people — with the ironic pretext of preventing the return of Nazism. But in Britain, it isn’t just kids at the Cambridge campus encampments, or the Ummah selectively ignorant of their brothers suffering in Syria and Yemen, siding with Islamic terrorists. It is the civil service, the politicians, the police, and the intelligence agencies. Per anti-white recruitment policies, dressed up as efforts to “boost diversity”, these institutions will continue to be filled with people more likely to sympathize with the cause.

The fear befalling Westminster’s polite commentariat is the realization that, if an October-7th-style attack happened in the UK or Europe, our institutions would excuse it, encourage it, even enable it. It is a fear I feel when I walk around quiet London suburbs, hearing robins sing among the pink blossoms of early spring, knowing that a mob with no affinity for birdsong could burn down everything I love, like it was a kibbutz in Re’im. Should that fatal flare go up, we know our state will be standing on the opposite side to its people. Murray’s warning is to prepare for that day accordingly.

You can purchase On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel, Hamas and the Future of the West here.