On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization

by Douglas Murray

Within a year of the October 7 attacks, an emerita professor at Harvard, Ruth Wisse, made a point that was so searing, nobody else had dared raise it. Israel and Jews around the world had often pointed out that the massacres on October 7 had been the worst atrocity carried out against Jews since the Holocaust. But, Wisse pointed out, saying this puts the emphasis on the Jews—on the victims. Some had the courage to mention this and to note its significance, but what almost nobody had the courage to address was who the people are who had carried out this massacre. If the Jews were the victims of the 7th, then why did nobody want to dwell on just who the anti-Semites and Nazis were this time? Why was there so little concentration on the ideology that drives Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamic government in Tehran? Were people not interested? Wisse raised another question: If people recognized the scale of the atrocities of Hamas—atrocities that Hezbollah joined—then why was there such large-scale support in the West not for the people who had suffered the massacre, but instead for the people who had perpetrated it? Some people had compared the outbreak of radicalism from October 2023 to the student protests of 1968. But while the protesters in the 1960s had their wilder aspects, they did not generally take the side of groups who wanted to massacre Jews. Nor were they in the main supporters of Nazism and genocide. What did it mean that on the streets of every major Western city,...