Notes from Upstream: Reviewing Douglas Murray

Why "On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization" may be the book of the year.

Confronted with pro-Hamas demonstrators on campus a few weeks ago, Mississippi students drove right to the point and drowned out the demonstrators’ nasty chants by singing our national anthem.

These Mississippi young people get what supposedly more sophisticated Harvard students don’t: an attack on Israel is an attack on America. Even better, they not only get it, they object to it.

Douglas Murray gets it too. He sees the Jewish state for what it is: a precious bastion of western civilization powered by a religious tradition rooted in the love of life.

He also sees Hamas for what it is: a death cult. He documents the ecstasy Hamas fighters found not only in their atrocities against Israelis but also in the Gazan casualties they intentionally and systematically create. In their jihad to impose the rule of Islam on the world, they view every dead Arab woman or child as a success.

Murray’s book is primarily a work of journalism. With a consummate reporter’s eyes, ears and mind, Murray documents in detail the Hamas atrocities in Israel on October 7, 2023, as well as the world’s miserably failed response to them.

He then goes further and explains why it is an obligation for everyone who wants to preserve civilization to stand with Jews and the single small Jewish state.

After eighteen months of intense personal observation of and interaction with Israelis at war, Murray writes:

Of all the soldiers I saw in war, none took delight in their task. They could feel victorious on occasion, proud to have completed a mission and gotten their unit out alive. But from the south of Gaza to the south of Lebanon and the West Bank, none take a joy or pleasure in the task they have to do. They did it not because they love death but because they love life. They fought for life.

… “Choose life” is one of the most important commandments of the Jewish people. It is also one of the fundamental values of the West. They, and all of us, can win in spite of the enemy loving death. Because there is nothing wrong in loving life so much. It is the basis on which civilization can win.

Murray understands the war as one of life versus death, not as abstract propositions, but in the persons of those who love life defending it against those who hate it.

When he explains that he wants to “witness” the war, he uses language which may work more powerfully than even he may realize. In Jewish law, the word “witness” has a more limited meaning than in western law. To qualify as a witness to any crime, one must have warned the wrongdoer ahead of time that what he was about to do is wrong. Murray took on the witness role in full when he gently cautioned Joe Rogan about a podcast guest list tilted towards anti-Israel and antisemitic ignoramuses.

To cut to the point, I love this book. I recommend it. I’m grateful for it and to Murray for his diligence and hard work in reporting and writing it, and what must have been his intense suffering at being confronted with so much evil.

Like most of us, I experience a similar intense discomfort at the sight of evil on this scale.

That’s why I don’t watch genocide movies. I’ve never seen Schindler’s List. And I don’t avoid just movies about genocide against Jews. I’ve never seen Hotel Rwanda or The Killing Fields either.

Why? For one thing, so I don’t go crazy with rage. Also. I have a pretty good idea what happens in a genocide. For me and for most American Jews, whose families came here from Europe, it’s recent family history. I know the people murdered. They are me and mine, and by me and mine, I’m not referring only to other Jews, but to the Israeli Arabs and Druze slaughtered on October 7 as well.

I know who murdered and mutilated on October 7, who burned babies, who raped anyone and anything that moved, and who shot jubilant video exulting in their atrocities even while they were committing them.

And of course I know the excuse makers too.

Sometimes these peddlers of lies are jihadis themselves. Sometimes they are communists or other totalitarians. Sometimes they are proud members of an intelligentsia stupefied into dolthood by fraudulent intellectual pseudo-sophistication. Sometimes they are regressives who rewrite themselves as “progressives” (talk about rebranding!). Sometimes they are “conservatives” who strive for hipness so they can fit in with the other oh-so-hip twerps they so desperately want to impress.

And I cannot omit the “journalists” who have trained themselves to lie nonstop without even a smidgen of conscience or regret or self-awareness. Some of their organizations took personal part in the October 7 orgy of abominations they claim to report objectively.

I’m talking about you, AP, not to mention Reuters, CNN, the New York Times and others, including of course the Qatar dictatorship’s mouthpiece Al Jazeera and your accomplices in the UNRWA.

I know them all better than they know themselves. I have read and listened to and considered their ignorance and even met them and suffered the most disheartening and dispiriting conversations possible, and I say with all sympathy and compassion and understanding what a pathetic chickenshit lying bunch they are, too lazy and slovenly and unserious even to consider any information which will cut them off from their safe refuge among their friends, the ones who all think and talk exactly like themselves.

They are morally and intellectually and spiritually dead and don’t even know it.

There’s one trope in which they take special pride: they love to accuse the Jewish state of “genocide.” It’s the insult they freak on the most. It gives them an illicit thrill. It’s a form of porn, but with an even sharper kick. Some of them think it lets them off the hook. I don’t know what hook exactly, but maybe that’s explained by what an Israeli psychologist once said: “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.”

Of course, for the time being, Auschwitz still lives in modern memory.

Here’s a fact which doesn’t: even if we leave out the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, the majority of Jews who have ever lived have died violently because they were Jews.

I know this because I’ve done the math.

In the Passover Haggadah I just read at our Seder, our Rabbis tell us, “For not just one alone has risen against us to destroy us, but in every generation they rise against us to destroy us; and the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hand.”

As always, our rabbis aren’t kidding.

These days, some learn about the Holocaust and wonder at its outrageous evil and think to themselves, “I will never act like that. If that kind of antisemitism comes again, I won’t just go along with the haters. I’ll be different. If that starts to happen here, I’ll be one who resists.”

But a genocide doesn’t just happen. The engineers of mass death must lay its foundation. The Nazis created what one historian called a “common sense” of Jew hatred spread through society. And the number one foundation for that all-too-common sense is an all-encompassing slander towards Jews.

Germans didn’t just up and start killing Jews for no reason. The Nazis had to prepare the other Germans. It was simple, actually. They just lied. The lies were nonstop and overwhelming, in every newspaper, on every radio station. On every kiosk on every corner in every German neighborhood, one learned what awful things Jews did. No German could get away from it.

Engulfed in this tsunami of lies, even a few German Jews had to wonder if they’d done something wrong. And sure, as human beings, Jews have done wrong things.

But people don’t hate Jews because of what’s wrong with Jews. They hate Jews because of what’s wrong with themselves.

These days, as the Jewish state, Israel is the target of a slander campaign unique among the nations. Israel has become the Jew of the world.

So no, you won’t resist, not if you credit the lies. In fact, you already aren’t resisting. You’re going along with it just as you promised yourself you wouldn’t. Have you listened to yourself lately, complaining about those brutal Israelis?

You don’t resist because you choose to believe all the same worn-out lies the haters have been trotting out for the past three thousand years. You accept the lie that Israelis operate an “apartheid” regime; that they indiscriminately kill Arab children; that the IDF is “disproportionate” in its response to Hamas, whose rapes and baby burnings never happened and were justified even if they did; that the “Palestinians” are victims of “settler colonialism,” something you can’t define, and if you could define, you’d recognize as the reason all those tens of millions who live outside one tiny region in Saudi Arabia call themselves “Arab” and speak Arabic as their mother tongue.

How and why did all those other nations turn Arab and Muslim? Have you ever wondered? Can there be any connection between that stunning history and the current behavior of Hamas?

I could go on at length about what is untrue about this endless torrent of lies, and what to do about them, but Douglas Murray already does that beautifully in his book.

I’ll cut short my own contribution to this idiotic but necessary debate with this observation:

No one ever went broke lying about Jews.

Max Cossack is a Jew, an author, attorney, composer, and software architect (he can code). He recommends Douglas Murray’s New Book to everyone.