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

by Douglas Murray

Throughout this period, from the moment news of the massacre in Israel emerged, one thing in particular is worth noticing: there was not a single major protest against Hamas in any Western city. Not one. The people who carried out the massacre and started a war did not find themselves the object of criticism on the streets of one Western city. Some people will say that this is because Hamas would not listen to protesters on the streets of America or Europe. Or that Western countries have no control over Hamas. But the governments of all these countries had been funding the Palestinians in Gaza for years. They had given billions of dollars in foreign aid direct to the Hamas government there, through UN organizations among many others. This money had been used by Hamas’s leaders to either enrich themselves (the group’s leaders became billionaires) or to build the infrastructure of terror inside Gaza that allowed the group to carry out the October 7 attack, steal Israelis, and hold them hostage inside Gaza. With all of this going on, I decided that I should get to Israel as soon as I could. Several things persuaded me. The first was that sight in Times Square. The knowledge that if there was celebration of these attacks in New York, then there would soon be celebration around the globe. A second was a certainty that the scale of the atrocities carried out that day would soon be passed over. Not just because on that day, the 7th, long before the scale of the attack was underst...