Douglas Murray, gruesome toady

 

Douglas Murray, gruesome toady

Reading the man without dignity

Sam Kriss

May 11, 2025

https://samkriss.substack.com/p/douglas-murray-gruesome-toady

 

Georges Ruggiu is a former special needs teacher from a small town in the south of Belgium. He grew up as the youngest of four: three sisters; sneering, cruel. When he became a man, he was a very quiet, careful man. Conscientious, rule-following. Five feet tall, skinny, with weird staring eyes. Permanently single. He didn’t move out of his parents’ home until he was 35 years old, when he went to the big city to reinvent himself. The big city in question was Liège, about twenty kilometres away. For a while he lived alone in a tower block there, not really talking to anyone. But one day his neighbour’s water pipe burst, and Ruggiu helped him fix it. The neighbour was called Jean Bizimana, and he was also an outsider in Liège, a Rwandan civil servant interning abroad. Ruggiu ended up falling in with Bizimana’s friend group of Rwandan expats. Some of them had political connections back home; they kept inviting him to visit. The first time Ruggiu went to Kigali, fifty people were there at the airport to welcome him to the country. When he moved there permanently, the Rwandan government gave him a house and a job, presenting a French-language show on Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, also known as Radio Genocide. Ruggiu’s broadcasts were more sophisticated than a lot of what went out on RTLM. He referred to the Tutsis as cockroaches and told people to exterminate them on sight, but he also referenced De Gaulle and the fight against fascism, Robespierre and the ideals of the French Revolution, Dante and the European humanist tradition. He called on the Interahamwe to hack children to death in the name of civilisation.

 

Ruggiu’s motives are cheap and obvious. He wanted to be respected, he wanted people to like him. The first people who ever gave him the time of day turned out to be a bunch of Hutu Power maniacs, and Ruggiu ended up being the only European convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, but for a while he must have thought he’d got what he wanted. But I think he was wrong. I don’t think his new friends in the Rwandan government ever actually respected him. He was their pet. I’m sure they were very amused at the way he managed to express their genocidal resentments in the language of liberalism and justice. I’m sure they found it cute, the way this outsider pretended to be so utterly convinced by the righteoussness of the Hutu cause. They sent crowds to welcome him; they gave him a house. But no one respects a suck-up. Nobody respects a toady.

 

Anyway, in other news, the British political commentator Douglas Murray recently appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience to promote his new book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilisation. The appearance raised some hackles—there have apparently been a bunch more meta-podcasts about it, in which the participants all try to advance their own interpretations of events—because instead of promoting his book, Murray spent the first hour of the podcast going after his host. As Helen Lewis gushed in the Atlantic, finally ‘someone had been on Joe Rogan’s show and pointed out that getting your opinions entirely from stand-up comics, Bigfoot forums, and various men named Dave might not be the optimal method for acquiring knowledge.’ Murray’s complaint is that Rogan’s recent guests include people like Darryl Cooper, a podcaster who has claimed that Churchill, rather than Hitler, was the ‘chief villain’ of the Second World War, that the mass deaths in the Nazi concentration camps mostly took place ‘because the Germans didn’t have enough food to feed their own army, let alone prisoners,’ and that Nazi-occupied Europe was ‘infinitely preferable in every way’ to the present. But the way he put this complaint forward was very strange. Murray is upset that there are Holocaust deniers on the world’s most popular podcast, but he’s infinitely more upset that these Holocaust deniers lack the proper credentials. ‘My point is, this is not a serious historian. He’s not a historian.’ Later: ‘He’s not doing scholarly work, nor is he working in the archives… I think it’s weird to mainstream very fringe views constantly.’ Another guest asks: ‘What’s all the appeal to authority stuff? I mean, what, you have to be an expert?’ Murray snaps back: ‘I think authority matters.’

 

One reason this is a weird way to make this complaint is that while the guild of serious scholars does exist, Douglas Murray is absolutely not a member. He went to Eton and Oxford, which is still enough to make Americans think you’re some kind of magus, but this island is full of witless Oxbridge mediocrities and I can sniff them out a mile away. I don’t think any serious scholar, even ones who shared his politics, would ever confuse Murray’s books for anything of intellectual merit. They’re overlong newspaper columns. The references in his endnotes are full of tweets.

 

The other reason this is a weird thing to say is that he said it on the Joe Rogan show. I’m not a listener, because I’m basically allergic to podcasts in general. Podcasts make you stupid. When you listen to one you’re not really listening; you’re just bathing in simulated friendly chatter to convince the monkey part of your brain that you’re not a terminally friendless loser, which you are. (Consider: you could watch a film or a TV show or even some YouTube bullshit with a friend or romantic partner, but never a podcast. Podcasts are only consumed alone.) But despite not being a listener, I’m aware of what Rogan is. He has the world’s most popular podcast because he’s provided a welcoming environment for fringe weirdos, and people like to hear from fringe weirdos. Maybe the canonical Rogan guest is Graham Hancock, an amateur archaeologist who believes we’re living in the ruins of an advanced globe-spanning civilisation that flourished before a snap ice age 13,000 years ago. As it happens, I interviewed Graham Hancock for the Telegraph a few years ago. I liked him a lot. He is one of England’s great eccentric theorists, and his ideas are always entertaining even if they’re unlikely to be true. There is a beauty in the thought that our great monuments are actually fragments of another world, of which we know nothing. It’s good to keep these people around, and the Joe Rogan Experience is the perfect place to keep them. The whole point of the show is to be a repository for interesting fringe beliefs. Still, it’s unsettling that the fringe beliefs circling around on the edge of the mainstream are no longer just about cryptids, lost civilisations, or fad diets, but whether the Holocaust really took place. I don’t blame Rogan for this; he’s just doing his job, which is to hold up a net to the winds and see what flies in. But the winds have turned cold. Something in the world has gone very badly wrong.

 

Of course, Douglas Murray couldn’t say any of this. He couldn’t make the obvious argument—that the problem is genocide denialism, rather than people saying things without the proper credentials—because Douglas Murray is engaged in his own project of genocide denialism. He’s busy denying the genocide that’s happening right now. And he knows it.

 

There are many reasons On Democracies and Death Cults is a very bad book. For one thing, the man cannot write. Here’s a sample passage. Murray’s at the UN in September 2023, listening to Israeli diplomats discuss the situation in Gaza, totally unaware of what’s coming. ‘There was something else in the air that morning which was unmistakable,’ he writes, ‘and which in hindsight made me feel sickened. It was the unmistakable, nauseating stench of hubris.’ It’s not just the clumsy repetition or the schlocky language: there is no such thing as a stench that only nauseates you in hindsight. People occasionally try to describe Murray as a latter-day Christopher Hitchens; say what you will about Hitchens, but he would have joined the Taliban before he let that line go out under his name. Murray also likes to say things that are not technically lies, but display a level of smug, slimy contempt for the reader that’s somehow worse. Near the start, he writes that the Islamic Republic ‘spent its decades in power taking over not just Iran but the wider Middle East. In the 1980s it fought a bloody war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, which killed around half a million people.’ Who started that war, Douglas? But as a reviewer, the thing I found most frustrating about this book is that, like a lot of sloppy, lazy, and duplicitous thinkers, Murray refuses to ever really define his terms. Still, it’s possible to reconstruct the logical structure of the thing, which goes something like this:

 

Among the possible ways of organising society, there are democracies and death cults.

 

Democracies are good.

 

Death cults are evil. More than that, they’re evil in a way that defies any rational comprehension; their evil is sourceless and total, leaving no crack through which the intellect could open it up to understanding. They are devoted to death for its own sake. In this, they are more evil than the Nazis, who were not a death cult, because they at least ‘sought to cover over their crimes,’ which indicates some sense of morality. Murray writes: ‘Evil does exist as a force in the world. Indeed, it is the only explanation for why certain people do certain things.’ Later: ‘Evil is a force that sometimes seems to just descend on the world.’ Nothing can be done with evil except destroy it utterly.

 

Israel is a democracy.

 

Israel’s opponents—that is, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the PFLP, the entire population of Gaza, Hezbollah, the Palestinian Authority, the Arab states, Iran, the international Palestine solidarity movement, and, depending on whether they’re trying to impose an arms embargo on Israel, the governments of Europe—are death cults.

 

Therefore, the war in Gaza is a ‘fight between good and evil,’ and we should support Israel.

 

But this is a pretty extensive reconstruction. Murray doesn’t bother to actually make this argument; instead of saying any of this stuff, or providing any of the scaffolding that might result in a potentially persuasive case, he just takes it all as a given. The two sentences on evil I quote above are essentially all Murray actually has to say about this conceptual category of the ‘death cult’ that he wants us to believe in. He says even less about his understanding of ‘democracy.’ At no point does he lay out how you can distinguish the two. Instead, he describes October 7th. The introduction is a lurid account of the massacre on October 7th. The first and longest chapter, ‘What Happened,’ is also a lurid account of the massacre on October 7th. The second chapter, ‘What I Saw,’ is yet another lurid account of the massacre on October 7th. The third chapter, ‘How the World Turned,’ is about how Western student protesters failed to respond appropriately to the massacre on October 7th. The fourth chapter, ‘The Disconnect,’ is appropriately named, because it’s a mess. We start once again on October 7th, before veering into some bonus sneering at Palestine activists, some stuff about how Hamas is failing to fight fair in Gaza, a few more jabs at pink-haired students, and then a bizarre digression about how appalling it is that some local councillors in the north of England have Muslim names. The final chapter, ‘From Defeat into Victory,’ is mostly about how Hezbollah wanted to commit its own massacre on October 7th, but didn’t. That’s essentially it.

 

Along the way, in dribs and drabs, we learn that every single Israeli is the most beautiful and kind person to live, with great hair and a beautiful shiny set of teeth. Their electronic music is sophisticated, their accents aren’t in the least bit grating, and their behaviour on the road is orderly and serene. The only bad Israeli to ever live was Baruch Goldstein, but no one Murray talks to in Kiryat Arba even remembers where his grave is. ‘We eventually found it in what was clearly a little-visited plot.’ (My experience of the place is different, but we shouldn’t assume he’s lying; maybe he just went on a particularly forgetful day.) Goldstein’s ideology is, he assures us, an insignificant fringe belief in Israel. This is true: it’s confined entirely to the yeshivas, the settler movement, the army, Channel 14, Israel Hayom, Arutz Sheva, the Knesset, and the Cabinet. Murray doesn’t let this spoil his sunny impression of the country. He walks through a kibbutz and notices that the trees are beautiful and the grass is green, which ‘makes it even harder to imagine who would want to attack such a place.’

 

Maybe I’m being unfair. I don’t disagree with Murray about everything. October 7th really did change the way I think about the conflict; it shocked me out of the idea that the only obstacles to a just peace are on the Israeli side. There are forces within Palestinian society that are frighteningly cavalier about individual lives. And, as I wrote at the time, the response of some people in the international Palestine solidarity movement to October 7th really was atrocious.1 Murray never actually explains the link between the events of that day and his ‘death cult’ category, but maybe we should consider it. It can’t just be the number killed, since Israel has killed many, many times more. But his descriptions tend to focus on the senseless, gratuitous aspect of the violence, the things that seem to indicate a deep nihilistic surplus of spite. Let’s start there.

 

What does a death cult look like, according to Douglas Murray? It looks like the Hamas militant who, on October 7th, phoned his family to say what he’d been getting up to. The footage was later leaked: we see the gunman grinning proudly as he reports that ‘we are looking for babies, but there is no babies left… I killed a girl, she was 12, but I’m looking for a baby.’ The voice on the other end laughs. It looks like the dozens of Israeli children under the age of twelve who were killed with a single expertly placed sniper round to the skull. Or the Hamas infiltrators who seemed to find a perverse sexual pleasure in going into Jewish homes, killing the occupants, and then rifling through underwear drawers. There are endless photos and videos showing Hamas gunmen posing in dresses, wedding gowns, lingerie they’d looted from the dead. The death cult is deeply rooted in Palestinian society; it goes far deeper than Hamas. When it emerged that Israeli hostages in Gaza were being subjected to extreme torture, including being gang-raped, raped with metal bars and cattle prods, raped by dogs, Hamas put some of the militants involved under arrest. Almost immediately, there were massive street protests by ordinary Gazans. They weren’t marching for peace, an end to the torture, or the release of the hostages: they were demanding that the rapists be set free. Some Hamas officials broke ranks to officially endorse gang-rape as part of their struggle. ‘If he is a Zionist,’ said Idris Khalidi, a member of the Shura Council, ‘everything is legitimate to do! Everything!’ And the same culture of death has sucked in people who live nowhere near the conflict. In Miami, an Arab-American opened fire on a passing vehicle because he thought the two men inside were Jewish. They weren’t; in fact, they were themselves Palestinian. One of them made a Facebook post from hospital. ‘They tried to murder us in the heart of Miami,’ he wrote, ‘but Allah is with us. Long live Palestine, death to the Jews.’

 

I could keep up this shtick for a very long time, but let’s pull back the curtain: none of the things I just described were done by Hamas; all of them were done by Israel and its supporters. The rape-torture camp is in the Negev, near Be’er Sheva, and it was endorsed by members of the Israeli cabinet. The man in the hospital didn’t say ‘death to the Jews’ but ‘death to the Arabs.’ Those children were picked off by Israeli snipers. Murray quotes an Israeli whose family members were taken hostage on October 7th: ‘This is humanity against evil. What happened, I don’t know if we ever saw it in the history of humankind. Why would you kill a baby? Why would you see a baby, one year old, two years old, and shoot him?’ Well: good question.

 

If we accept Murray’s framing, then Israel is, by any reasonable standard, also a death cult. You could try to argue that the Israeli violence is downstream of October 7th, but that would be to misapprehend the nature of evil. There’s no history. It’s not in response to anything. Sometimes evil just descends on the world.

 

It should not be so easy to rip apart Murray’s thesis with a few cherry-picked counterexamples, but the whole thing really does hinge on the idea that Israel is blameless. Most books, even bad books, are made of stronger stuff than this. Why would Murray put himself in such an incredibly tenuous position, so that any one of the thousands of documented instances of Israeli savagery and sadism would undermine his whole thesis?

 

This is a pattern. Murray keeps toadying, even when it harms his own case. At one point, he scorns the ‘Hamas casualty figures that were lapped up by the international press.’ But he’s not averse to a little lapping of his own. Shortly afterwards, he mentions two Al Jazeera journalists who were killed in a targeted Israeli air strike on their car. For some reason, Al Jazeera was upset about its employees being vaporised. But, Murray writes, ‘they did not mention that these “journalists” were in a vehicle with a Hamas drone operator while it was targeting Israeli soldiers.’ Well, Douglas, the reason they don’t mention it is that it’s not true. The journalists were using an ordinary commercial drone to collect footage of the devastation, far from any Israeli troops. (Israel habitually kills journalists who do this.) What’s Murray’s source for his claim? Well, the IDF, of course! What possible reason would they have to lie? Elsewhere, Murray reports that one in every two houses in Gaza contains either a stockpile of military weapons or an entrance to the tunnel system. If this were true, it’d make Gaza the most highly organised society in human history; Western governments should be setting delegations there to learn from Hamas’s extraordinary state capacity. Murray’s source? An IDF major. I find it hard to believe the major could keep a straight face, but watch Douglas Murray lap it up. There’s cream dripping off his chin.

 

The reason he does all this is that he is an asset. Funny to watch him on Rogan, so appalled at the idea that someone might have a view on the conflict without having physically visited the region. When Murray’s in Israel, he’s not finding things out for himself; he’s being taken on a walk by his handlers. On his trips to Gaza he doesn’t have to worry that his name will be added to the list of journalists killed by the IDF, because he’s riding along with them. At one point, he gets to visit a secret prison in an undisclosed location, where Israel holds Hamas militants captured during October 7th. This is, very possibly, the rape-torture camp I mentioned above. Do you think the Israelis let anyone wander around in there? They showed it to Murray because Murray can be relied upon to stay on message.2 (What does he learn from his visit? Absolutely nothing, of course! There’s no point even trying to understand why the people in there did the things they did; they’re just evil. He literally says this. ‘There was nothing to learn from them. They had decided to live their lives with one ambition—to take away life.’) The Netanyahu government has even given him a special award for being so dependable. At the ceremony, Isaac Herzog said that ‘Douglas Murray has been articulating a coherent, intelligent, and persuasive defense of Israel, and of the truth and our shared values.’ He walked away with a big shiny medal for being such a wonderful pet.

 

I think Herzog was wrong. Murray’s toadying comes at the cost of coherence, intelligence, and persuasion. He is a uniquely bad advocate for Israel. A neutral observer would probably start with the assumption that anyone fighting a war will probably end up having good reasons to lie, and that therefore neither official Israeli organs or Hamas should necessarily be trusted. Meanwhile, Murray has to operate with the axiom that everything Israel says is automatically trustworthy and everything Palestinians say is false, like he’s trapped in a lateral-thinking puzzle. This is not going to convince any reader capable of stringing two thoughts together, but then Murray isn’t really writing for a neutral, persuadable observer. He knows full well that he’s writing exclusively for people who already agree with him.

 

On Democracies and Death Cults reached number 1 on the Sunday Times bestseller list. It got the second spot on the New York Times’. Fourth on Amazon. A lot of people are buying and reading this thing. But who? And why? This is a genuine question. I truly can’t imagine the kind of creature that would want to read this thing. Who needs to be told that their own side is composed of faultless angels who have never done anything wrong in their lives, while their enemies are all bubbling in a black ooze out of the deepest chasms of Hell? How much love are you lacking in your personal life, that you need to be sucked off through the pages of a trade nonfiction hardback?

 

I do actually agree with Douglas Murray that there is such a thing as evil in the world. Where we disagree is that I think there is a germ of evil buried inside all of us, and most of the time that germ is something perfectly mundane. Georges Ruggiu just wanted to be respected: that desire is not evil in itself, but it can make you do evil things. (There’s evil in me as well. I’m no stranger to the pleasure of hating; I’m doing it right now.) I think the sadism and cruelty of October 7th—and the far greater sadism and cruelty Israel has displayed since—have their origins in entirely ordinary human frailties, the petty self-deceptions and insecurities that churn away inside everyone’s mind basically all the time. But according to Murray, people like me have been deluded in our ‘search for endless subtlety and limitless understanding,’ which is why we’re ‘missing out on one of the greatest divides of all.’ Instead of trying to understand anything, we should just accept that morality works in basically the same way that it does on Power Rangers. There are goodies and baddies. Sorry, but this is not serious. HarperCollins might as well have published a book about how when it rains, that’s God crying. To see a 46-year-old man speaking in this childish register produces a genuine shudder. The horror of the man-child, the pervert or imbecile who never managed to grow up. The political equivalent of an adult baby diaper fetishist.

 

But I don’t think Murray really believes in this infantile moral universe he’s conjured. That’s for his readers. He is secretly on the side of the death cults.

 

The official story is that Murray likes Israel and Israelis because they embody the same liberal values as the West. But that’s not it at all. In fact, he thinks Israel is better than the West. He keeps going into raptures over how much more mature and well-developed Israeli teenagers are than their peers in America and Europe. He meets a group of IDF conscripts, and discovers that they’re nineteen years old. ‘It nearly floored me. These girls were the same age as a student going to college in America or Britain. They were the same age as people in the West who are treated like—and act like—children. But these Israelis were not children. They were young women. And soldiers at that.’ (Big talk from a man who’s just spent a hundred pages whimpering for his lollipop, but I digress.) What, at root, is the difference between these Israeli Überfrauen and the ungrateful toddlers of London and New York? ‘Young Israelis do not have the luxury of deciding whether they like war or develop grand ideas such as “war doesn’t solve anything.”’ He’s not wrong! If you’re a young, non-Haredi Israeli Jew and you decide that your moral convictions forbid you to join the army, the state can arrest you and send you to prison. Older Israelis don’t have that luxury either; they’re routinely arrested for criticising the army or mourning its victims. I think I prefer the decadent West.

 

But Murray’s hatred of the West and our liberal-democratic values doesn’t end there. He writes that after spending time in Israel, home started to feel like a strange place. ‘Whenever I made brief trips back to America or Britain, I kept noticing the way these societies far from the front lines seemed to have been driven mad by war. In Britain the euthanasia debate had come round again, and the same moral issues were being rehearsed again. Is this really the highest moment of human achievement and peace, I wondered. To decide when you might kill an old person? In all this time, the place that felt least out of joint was Israel.’ I’m not sure how this counts as being ‘driven mad by war,’ but what he says is true: the debate over assisted dying has been a significant one in Britain. It’s one I’m interested in, because I’ve been on both sides in quick succession. I thought I was implacably against until earlier this year, when I had to watch my mother slowly dying in a hospital ward, and learned first-hand what unassisted dying really means. Maybe one day I’ll write about it. But Murray has no time for our democratic attempts to balance the values of life and dignity in the difficult spaces where they conflict. He prefers Israel, where they don’t argue about that sort of thing at all, and public debate involves people who say stuff like ‘Death to the Arabs’ and ‘Gaza must be made uninhabitable’ and ‘Blot out the tribe of Amalek.’ Ah! Sanity!

 

Clearly, what Murray really likes about Israel is its proximity to war. In his introduction, he writes that ‘perhaps the only force in the world even greater than evil itself is the great, collected, concentrated evil that is war.’ This is literally meaningless dreck. An example of a thing can’t be greater than the thing itself. ‘Perhaps the only lunch more satisfying than a sandwich is the great, meaty sandwich we call hamburgers.’ Murray has to talk like this because he’s trying to worm his way out of a contradiction: he knows he’s supposed to denounce war in general terms, but actually he’s not against it. His problem with Europe is that it’s no longer a martial civilisation; it’s ‘entered a postreligious era in which the very idea of fighting, killing, or dying for your faith is anathema.’ America, meanwhile, has ‘friendly countries to its north and south and ocean everywhere else.’ But Israel is a different matter. Israel is the giddy frontier, locked in a permanent demographic hyperwar against its own population, an endless struggle to kill and repress and subdue. Out of that constant struggle, you get a fierce, disciplined society. Just not a very democratic one. He likes Israel because it’s one of his death cults. I don’t think he’s ignorant about the massacres, the rape camps, the deliberate targeting of journalists. He knows, even if he pretends not to, that what Israel is carrying out in Gaza is a genocide.3 All the moralistic drivel in his book, the big toddler’s tantrum over goodies and baddies, is a very flimsy disguise for the pleasures of evil.

 

I don’t know why Douglas Murray is like this. Maybe it was tough being gay at Eton, maybe the other boys made him feel like less of a man, maybe that’s why he’s always hanging out just around the corner from the front lines, with his flak jacket and his serious face on. It’s usually something similarly tedious, but I’m not his analyst. All I can say with certainty is that whatever it is, it’s failed. Listen, Douglas—can I call you Doug?—listen, Doug, these Israeli friends of yours, these fat-fingered pig-eyed Israeli thugs you worship so much: they do not respect you. They’ll invite you for dinner and they’ll give you awards, they’ll let you pose for photos in the ruins they made, but they are laughing at you. You can play dress-up all you like; your body armour doesn’t fool them. They’re happy to let you debase your own name by attaching it to whatever lies they feel like spinning today, but they know very well that you are debasing yourself. No one respects a suck-up, Doug. No one respects a toady.