Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Douglas Murray LIVE: The Final Show

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Douglas Murray LIVE: The Final Show · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

0:00
Hello, hello, good evening, Melbourne.
0:07
No.
0:09
Too kind.
0:11
Douglas rules about us follow around the country.
0:14
This is our last show, but it's brand new.
0:16
We do a different show every night.
0:18
It's great to be here in Melbourne.
0:20
If you have a VIP wristband, one of the blue wristbands
0:23
and you didn't manage to meet Douglas before the show,
0:26
then stay seated after the show,
0:28
or else leave, and we'll take you to our secret lair.
0:31
And ideally, no phones and cameras and things.
0:34
People don't want to see you taking photos of us videoing us.
0:37
It's not us, it's just the rest of the crowd.
0:41
It's been so, so fascinating.
0:43
We've had so many different conversations.
0:44
Douglas, one thing that I have not asked you about at the beginning
0:47
of any show so far is you went to Israel on what,
0:52
as soon as you called after October 7th.
0:55
You're much never left.
0:56
You've been living in a hotel there ever since.
1:00
What's it like?
1:03
What's the mood?
1:06
Yes, I went as soon as I could after the 7th.
1:10
I was in New York on the 7th.
1:13
I've been there ever since until coming to this fair country.
1:20
And the truth is that the mood has changed quite a lot.
1:27
The initial impact for 7th was ended up with a country in deep, deep trauma,
1:37
which I'm not sure was understood very widely outside of Israel.
1:43
And the trauma, if I could put my finger on it, was this,
1:46
that I immediately went to the massacres sites to the communities
1:54
that had been attacked on 7th.
1:58
And then to the site of the Nova Massacre, much more.
2:03
And as I went around the hospitals and the morgue and spent a lot of time
2:10
with the kidnapped families,
2:14
what I found was an enormous number of the parents had said to their children
2:24
when they were hiding in their safe rooms.
2:27
And some people might wonder, why did they have safe rooms?
2:31
And why did they not lock?
2:34
And the answer is that every house in the South, however poor,
2:39
and some of these communities are very, very beautiful places like Berry, Near Oz,
2:44
for us.
2:45
They're very, they like these beautiful villages of 400 or 1000 people, sometimes the biggest ones.
2:52
They all had safe rooms because rockets were a daily event.
3:00
Everyone was used to getting rockets from Gaza and they had been since 2005.
3:07
And so children in these communities, these villages, grow up with a siren goes
3:17
and you go to the safe room and you sit there until all clear goes
3:21
and then you go out and continue your day.
3:24
But the rooms, although they shut, they didn't lock
3:29
because nobody ever expected door to door tourists.
3:35
And an awful lot of parents that I spoke with said that they had said to their children
3:45
on that terrible morning, don't worry, the IDF will be here in minutes.
3:52
And they weren't.
3:54
Some of those places stood alone for hours,
3:58
almost a day, some of them, before the IDF were able to get in and make me all clear.
4:04
And the result was deep, deep trauma, which is ongoing inside Israel.
4:11
Now we saw as more sympathy, empathy for outside the country, which is the trauma of thinking
4:18
this is one place in the world where Jews are allowed to defend themselves and we're defenseless.
4:27
What I describe as the fowderization of Israeli society, the idea that doesn't just exist in Israel,
4:36
but it exists outside Israel and the diaspora.
4:38
And among non Jews, you just sort of think everyone took the old boast
4:44
that they can't sneeze in Gaza without us knowing.
4:49
And it turned out not to be true.
4:52
And I made to give you one very quick example rather ugly place to stop,
5:00
but nevertheless war is ugly.
5:03
There was a father I spoke with when I first got to Israel who was in the hospital,
5:10
and one of the hospitals in Tel Aviv.
5:12
And he had been in the safe room with their kibbutz, Betty, and he was there for hours with his 14-year-old son
5:25
and 16-year-old daughter and his wife.
5:30
And on the morning, as everyone else, the sirens came, so they went to the safe room.
5:36
Then they started to hear the gunfire, and then they realized the gunmen were in their house.
5:44
And the gunmen couldn't open their door because the father was a big man.
5:47
He could hold it shut, and I've spoken to lots of people who couldn't hold it shut.
5:53
And he made us hold it shut so the terrorists of Hamaz started to set fire to the house.
6:01
But he could already hear the screams of his neighbors, and he worked out if we run out of the house or just machine gun us.
6:08
So he persuaded that his whole family to sit in the house and they covered their faces with towels.
6:15
And then he couldn't bear it anymore and he thought, I'm going to burn alive with my family.
6:19
But he said, I said to my son, don't worry, the IDF will be here in minutes.
6:25
And they ended up opening a shutter, which a lot of the safe rooms have, just that they were dying.
6:31
And he opened the shutter to let some air in, and the Hamaz noticed.
6:36
And they threw a grenade in, which immediately killed his wife, and his daughter was hiding in the corner.
6:47
And then a clash of the cough came through the window.
6:51
And they shot his son through both sides of the chest.
6:55
He bled out in front of his father and sister.
7:00
And his father said to me, the last thing his son said to him was, I'd like to be, he was a keen surfer.
7:07
He said, I'd like to be buried with my surfboard.
7:10
And as we sat in the hospital, he said to me that the authorities that sent him the day before,
7:19
you know, we found some of the remnants in your house.
7:22
Is there anything you want?
7:23
And he said, there's only one thing I want, if you can find my son surfboard.
7:27
And he buried him with it.
7:30
But I had the opportunity to put this point to Prime Minister Netanyahu when I interviewed him the other month.
7:37
I said to him, I've just spoken to so many survivors, and they all said the same thing.
7:42
The IDF will be here in minutes.
7:44
And they weren't what went wrong.
7:47
And the truth is nobody really knows for sure what went wrong.
7:51
But whatever it was that did go wrong at the intelligence level, the military level, whatever it was.
7:57
That is a deep trauma for any society to go through, particularly for that society.
8:02
Because if there's one thing that was a lesson after the Second World War,
8:08
it was that Jews had to be in charge of their own security, their own future.
8:16
They had to look after themselves because the world could not be trusted and look after them.
8:21
And that has held pretty much.
8:24
Even 1973, it's held pretty much.
8:28
I think something very, very deep happened on the 7th, where people felt it's not held.
8:35
When you say that nobody knows why the IDF took so long,
8:38
one theory about why the IDF took so long is that Benjamin Netanyahu's hard-right government has spent the past 15 years building so many settlements in the West Bank
8:47
that they require so much protection that the southern border was unprotected.
8:51
The southern border wasn't unprotected, but there was a congruent for events.
8:55
One was that a lot of people went home for Sukhap Torah, the religious holiday.
9:00
Too many people were sent home from base, definitely.
9:04
It's not the case that the IDF was distracted by the West Bank, although there is an argument that will come out from the Commission of Inquiry,
9:10
which I think will be brutal.
9:12
A lot of the IDF who ended up going there were going from the West Bank to there.
9:16
Some were, but most were all around the country with their families elsewhere across the country.
9:27
We'll find out. I've got some early feelings of what went wrong, but some ideas of it.
9:33
Fundamentally, there was what, even the politicians have admitted publicly in this very heart,
9:39
but for politicians, of course, as we all know, to admit anything has gone wrong.
9:44
Because if they admit something has gone wrong on their watch, then they're culpable.
9:47
You know, you can get military leaders, intelligence leaders, they can have admitted because they're in post.
9:53
The minute a political leader says I marked out, you know, your toast,
9:59
and that's all your political opponents will play as you say, I'm sorry.
10:04
And although I tried to get that in the eye, I would say that he didn't.
10:08
He doesn't strike me as the kind of guy who that comes easily, too.
10:12
He's, yeah, I mean, it's a tough region, so it needs tough leaders.
10:19
If they don't have the luck, sure, you wouldn't be tough and humble.
10:24
I like to think so.
10:27
But I mean, they don't have the luck, sure, that this country has of having New Zealanders and nearest neighbor.
10:37
And that's it.
10:41
Not so quibble, but I think it's public New Guinea.
10:46
But not heavily armed, I think.
10:50
I think that the one that the politicians will admit went wrong
10:55
was what they call the conception was wrong.
10:58
And I've interviewed most of the people who are the masters of this conception.
11:02
And the conception was broadly speaking, but, and it was a, I mean,
11:06
it was a historic, unbelievable era that Hamas, although they were indeed violent,
11:13
genocidal in that intent towards the Jewish state, were keen on remaining corrupt
11:20
and enriching themselves and buying luxury apartments in Doha and so on.
11:25
But that they, that therefore this status quo wouldn't be disturbed,
11:30
not by a really big event.
11:33
And that turns out to be one of the most historic mistakes ever made by any government official.
11:39
So let's talk about the fallout, because I want to talk about here
11:42
and what's going on in terms of public opinion.
11:45
There's clearly been a shift in the wake of the catastrophe.
11:49
There was, of course, some cohort of people who were sympathetic to Hamas
11:54
and some cohort of anti-Semites who will always be irredeemably anti-Israel.
11:59
And yet none the less over the course of the past five months,
12:02
there's been a rise in sympathy for Palestinians, I would say.
12:06
A rise in sympathy for people who have questions onism as a project
12:10
and wonder whether the whole thing is a misbegotten venture.
12:15
It's a war that's tailor-made for TikTok, 15-second images of babies in rubble.
12:21
It's no picnic in Gaza, is Israel losing the PR war?
12:27
I mean, first of all, the most important thing,
12:30
I always think it was a war isn't to win the PR war, but to win the war.
12:35
It matters a lot more.
12:37
It's more importantly, winning Gaza than they win on TikTok.
12:41
Are you sure about that?
12:43
I'm pretty sure.
12:45
Nobody dies yet because of TikTok.
12:51
But they will die if the idea was on the rise.
12:55
The theory would be that for Israel to thrive over the course of the next century,
13:00
it's going to be necessary for global public opinion to not regard it as a complete pariah.
13:05
That's absolutely true.
13:06
And it mustn't be regarded as a complete pariah,
13:09
but it's tricky because there are lots of countries trying to push them into being a pariah.
13:12
Principally, of course, the revolution Islamic government in Iran,
13:16
which is extremely clever in its global manipulation.
13:22
I mean, the South African goers, it's South Africa last week before I count them up.
13:29
Last week we were in Perth. That's different South Africa.
13:32
It has some similarities.
13:34
Now, I remember the distinction because in Perth, the lights remained on.
13:40
I remember that distinctly.
13:46
I was in South Africa, of course.
13:48
You know, they had just taken the Israel to international court for this absolutely fallacious claim of genocide.
13:54
And they had done so clearly at the behest of the Iranian government.
13:58
Immediately after the 7th of October, the foreign minister in South Africa flew to Tehran,
14:04
and they just got a delegation back.
14:06
I said to their politicians, I didn't manage to see the ANC leadership.
14:09
They were too busy lining their pockets.
14:12
But I saw the heads of all the other parties.
14:15
I said to them, you know, your country has one very, very strong thing on the international stage,
14:21
which is the moral capital of the defeat of apartheid,
14:25
and the peaceful resolution to that awful period.
14:29
And I said to them, you should know that your government has sold your moral legacy very cheap to Tehran.
14:39
But you're right. I mean, there's definitely...
14:42
There is a PR war and it does matter.
14:45
And I think that most people, you know, around the world,
14:48
most people look up and use in the evening on their phone, pick up the paper if they still do.
14:55
And they just see killing and they say, I want the killing to start.
14:59
And that's completely understandable. I mean, everyone wants the killing to start.
15:03
But there is one thing I gotta say, which strikes me very, very clearly about covering this war,
15:10
is that the year before this, I was in the Ukraine with Ukrainian armed forces
15:16
as they were retaking territory from the Russians inside Ukraine.
15:21
I went in, I was on the first people in the Curson when it was taken back after a month of Russian occupation.
15:28
And I was very, very upbeat about it at the time,
15:33
because they were making so many advances and it was just terrific, great momentum.
15:38
And the one thing I noticed that nobody said to me when I returned,
15:43
when I wrote about it, when I reported from there, nobody said to me,
15:48
you know, maybe the Ukrainians should be more careful about civilian casualties.
15:53
Maybe the Ukrainians shouldn't, you know, I mean, are you sure they're being okay with the Russians
15:58
and treating them well?
16:02
I got mad they made sure they're Russian opponents of fully fed and watered.
16:08
And nobody said this.
16:10
And in fact, I'd say more than that, nobody said they must be a ceasefire.
16:16
Everybody around the world said we want the Ukrainians to win.
16:22
And with Israel, the world always says the same thing, which is they must fight to a draw.
16:29
They must fight to equal.
16:32
And I think that is one of the reasons this conflict has gone on all of our lives.
16:37
It's because Israel is never allowed to win.
16:40
And winning, among other things, means that you stop the precursor of the next conflict.
16:47
Every conflict, Israel has been involved in particular since the withdrawal from Gaza,
16:51
is a two or three year cycle where Hamaz, once again,
16:55
do an extraordinary barrage of rockets and then Israel has to go in.
16:58
This time, of course, a massive incursion, a 4,000 terrorist incursion into Israel.
17:04
And, of course, they have to go in.
17:07
But I mean, the difference, of course, with the Ukrainians,
17:09
that people don't regard Ukraine as being complicit in the status quo that was untenable.
17:13
People do regard it as a big deal.
17:16
Of course, they do in Moscow.
17:18
We're talking about public opinion here in the West.
17:20
I mean, if October 7th had happened in a context in which instead of spending the previous 15 years
17:26
aggressively expanding settlements in the West Bank,
17:29
and sort of being okay with Hamaz being in Gaza,
17:33
as long as it splits the Palestinians and detonates any possibility of a two-state solution.
17:38
If instead of that, there'd been some framework for peace,
17:43
for what the day after looks like in Israel,
17:46
maybe as much sympathy for ed designism today.
17:50
I think there would be.
17:52
I think there would be another reason for it.
17:54
I think there would be another reason for it.
17:56
I think it's a pathology.
17:58
There are some things, you know, too deep for political analysis.
18:03
They come from a pathology.
18:05
They need a psychiatrist to work it out.
18:08
But like the Indian government was backing Israel on October 8th.
18:12
You know, the Saudis were making all the right noises.
18:15
Does the Indian government have an anti-Semitic pathology?
18:18
Perfectly possibly.
18:21
I mean, they do their own business whenever they want to.
18:26
Like God, say with all the countries that have fallen away.
18:30
I mean, everyone does what they want.
18:33
If, you know, when terrorists attacked in Paris,
18:38
when ISIS attacked Paris in 2015-2016,
18:43
the French government immediately started bombing a raft
18:46
along with my government and the American government
18:48
and nobody cared about civilian casualties at Mosul.
18:52
Nobody cared.
18:53
There was a job.
18:54
Get rid of ISIS, destroy them, kill them.
18:56
We can't live with these people.
18:58
I believe it's the same with Hamas.
19:00
They have to be destroyed.
19:01
We can't live with these people.
19:03
Everyone in Israel knows that, but the wider world doesn't.
19:06
And I think there will always be a reason.
19:09
There is a pathology about it.
19:11
This isn't to say that there are all sorts of legitimate arguments
19:14
and criticisms that can go on.
19:15
I don't agree about the problem of settlements.
19:17
I don't think that is the main problem.
19:19
I don't think it's even a second-order issue.
19:22
It's just symptomatic of a worldview,
19:24
which is that Israel should be Israel.
19:26
As a smokerish Lahad write finance minister said last week
19:29
when he was allocating another two and a half thousand acres
19:32
of the West Bank to settlements,
19:33
he said Israel will be Israel, including Judea and Samaria.
19:36
The fact is, and the international community doesn't always understand this,
19:41
is that it is a very odd thing if the Jewish state
19:45
exists right to decide its historic homeland.
19:53
I mean, it's a very...
19:58
I mean, if you do in Samaria,
20:01
the places where the prophets walked,
20:04
this is where they're buried.
20:06
And, you know, they're not buried in Tel Aviv,
20:10
lovely city as it is.
20:12
And so, of course, people feel the intense belonging to these areas.
20:18
Now, of course, there are Palestinians in the areas as well.
20:21
I spend lots of time living among them as well.
20:24
And it's my conclusion that that is going to be the world's ugliest border
20:30
but it basically works as two states anyway in my experience.
20:34
I mean, the PA has their sort of corrupt entity
20:36
and they have all these ministry buildings all built by the Europeans
20:40
and they have their own police force and things.
20:44
And they have their own areas and then there is Jewish areas.
20:47
And, you know, the one thing everyone knows is that the whole of the West Bank
20:50
will not be given over to the Palestinians,
20:52
principally, because if you stand in the hills of the West Bank in the night,
20:55
you can look over and you can see the likes of Tel Aviv,
20:58
Haifa and Ben Gurion Airport.
21:00
And there is no darn way any sensible Israeli can hand over a territory
21:04
which will be within rocket range of these three places,
21:07
no way.
21:08
No, but no proposal would have a militarized border.
21:10
The proposal would be that would be a no man's land.
21:12
It'd be a demilitarized state on the other side.
21:15
But I remember when Gaza was meant to be demilitarized.
21:19
You know, I remember when, I remember when the south,
21:22
I covered the 2006 Hezbollah 11 on the Israel War.
21:26
And I remember the way that war finished was the Resolution 1701 was passed
21:30
by the UN and it said that the Hezbollah will not have any rockets
21:34
south of the Natali River in Lebanon.
21:36
And I was up there, I've been up there quite a lot in recent weeks
21:39
where there's a lot of activity and the Hezbollah 160,000 missiles
21:44
pointed at Israel.
21:45
And the international community peace keeps in the same way
21:51
that Unruh educates.
21:52
And I saw the other day, the driver on the border
22:05
Hezbollah fired a barrage of six rockets into Israel
22:09
and the UN peacekeeping force did a U-turn and went back to their base.
22:12
That's your UN.
22:14
And if anyone can tell me that any government in the world,
22:17
the Israeli government, the Australian government,
22:19
any government would put their security in the hands of an international force
22:23
that doesn't peace keep for just war watches.
22:25
You know, I've got a bridge to sell them,
22:28
but they had this extraordinary, I mean, just today I saw in the news,
22:34
in Tel Aviv, between Arsenal, I can say this because we're in private.
22:39
And as a fundamentalist I'm not in the screen, but the people I talk to.
22:45
But I can tell you, I live in a hotel with the residents of a place called Kiryat Shimonah,
22:53
a small-ish town in the north of Israel.
22:56
And all the residents were pulled out of their homes on the 7th October by the IDF
23:00
and they haven't been back since.
23:02
I've actually been to their homes more often than they have.
23:05
And they've been in Kiryat Shimonah quite a lot.
23:08
I saw that today Hezbollah fired 30 missiles at Kiryat Shimonah today.
23:12
And when you're there, because the Lebanon missiles are very advanced
23:17
and they're much better than the Hamas ones,
23:20
the rockets land and you hear boom, boom.
23:24
And then there's a brief pause and then the sirens go.
23:27
In other words, this is even closer than the communities in the south.
23:30
The sirens don't have time to pick up the rockets.
23:34
Nobody can live in that place.
23:37
And it's on the international community, not Israel.
23:41
The international community that said that they would make sure that didn't happen.
23:45
So it comes back to this fundamental thing.
23:48
I believe that all people, when they have an elected government,
23:52
they're in a democracy like Israel, like Australia, like Britain, like America.
23:56
The principal job of the government is to keep the people of their country safe.
24:01
That's the number one thing.
24:04
And that has to be your priority.
24:07
Everything else down the line is a nice extra.
24:12
But you know, if Australia had been savagely attacked in a similar fashion
24:17
and had about proportion of population lost,
24:21
say 10,000 people in a day brutally murdered, raped,
24:24
beheaded and burned alive in their homes.
24:27
And if you'd had about 1,000, 2,000 people stolen as hostages,
24:32
I would expect the Australian government to tear up the earth to get the hostages back
24:36
and revenge the attack.
24:38
Of course we would.
24:39
And so I don't know if we would.
24:41
There's a big question with every country on Israel,
24:43
the question is, what do you actually do something?
24:45
What would you do?
24:46
But even if you did, who would you accept advice from who knew your security better than you?
24:51
Well, when I say, of course you would,
24:53
I mean, of course it would be understandable
24:55
if one had a mentality of grief and revenge after being attacked.
24:59
When you look at the necessity of a government
25:02
in safeguarding its citizens' lives,
25:04
you need to look over the long term as well as the short term.
25:07
So many of the Jews who, you know, around the world
25:11
are ambivalent about what Israel is doing
25:14
and feel frustrated or stuck.
25:16
People like the most senior Jewish politician in history,
25:19
Senator Chuck Schumer, who came out last week
25:21
and called for elections in Israel
25:23
and said that Bibin Netanyahu has failed to have a vision of a day after.
25:28
What is the long term plan?
25:30
If you want to strategize about Israel being part of a community of nations
25:34
that are in an alliance against Iran and Russia and maybe China
25:38
and the alliance that could stretch from India
25:40
through the Gulf Arab states, through North Africa, into the European Union
25:44
and provide real solidarity,
25:46
that alliance is not going to have a member
25:48
who remains completely intransigent to resolving the issue
25:52
that the people of the world seem to care about quite a lot.
25:55
But not intransigent about it.
25:57
The problem is there's no partner for peace.
25:59
If the, you know, if there's an election tomorrow in Gaza,
26:05
Hamaz will win again.
26:07
And they were elected by the people.
26:11
And I believe there's a cost to electing an terrorist group
26:14
with your leadership.
26:16
The West Bank Palestinians, whenever they're polled
26:20
and it's not changed much since the 7th October,
26:23
75 to 80% of them say that they would vote Hamaz tomorrow.
26:29
And, you know, when people wonder why Mahmoud Abbas,
26:32
the head of the Palestinian Authority is currently 18 years
26:36
and is first four-year term,
26:38
because there's a record of Vladimir Putin would admire.
26:43
When people wonder why that is,
26:45
it's because the world knows that he knows that if they had elections
26:49
he'd be turfed out.
26:51
He'd come in and they chuck him off the top of a building
26:54
or hang him like they did his colleagues in Qatar in Gaza in 2006.
26:59
And in that situation, I understand the world's interest in it.
27:05
What I don't understand, to use a term of conflict
27:09
that's used only about Israel,
27:11
is this is a disproportionality of the obsession.
27:14
There I cannot understand.
27:16
I do understand, but I think it has darker undertones.
27:19
I think the obsession is unnatural.
27:22
Again, nobody worries about whether President Zelensky
27:27
has a day after plan for Ukraine.
27:31
Nobody wondered what hour the Allies who destroyed ISIS
27:37
or largely destroyed ISIS,
27:39
nobody wondered what our day after plan was for Lozor.
27:43
We didn't worry about death counts of civilians in Lozor,
27:47
which were about four or three to one civilians,
27:50
three or three civilians every one terrorist killed,
27:54
as opposed to the IDF figures which is roughly one terrorist
27:57
to about one and a half civilians.
28:00
It's terrible, but war is terrible.
28:02
The obsession with this particular conflict
28:05
that I believe it comes from a generational misunderstanding,
28:09
which exists in this country,
28:11
which exists in Britain and exists in America,
28:14
which is just lunacy of the idea that all the problems
28:18
of the Middle East would be solved
28:20
if only the Palestinians had another state.
28:23
I say another state because they were given a state in 2005.
28:26
Gaza was effectively a state,
28:29
and they ruled it,
28:31
and my god did they misrule it.
28:33
But the idea that another Palestinian state
28:37
say in the West Bank with an ugly carved out border somewhere,
28:41
the idea that if that happened,
28:43
all the other problems in the Middle East would be mitigated.
28:46
I think it's for the fairies.
28:48
The Yemen's economy is not suddenly going to be
28:51
in the hands of great entrepreneurs that day after that.
28:54
They're not going to stop hanging gays in Iran
28:57
or giving women equal rights.
29:00
None of this changes if there's another failed Arab state.
29:04
But let me just go back a step before that.
29:09
Again, it's the session about it
29:12
that I find both fascinating and deeply worried.
29:16
I think there are explanations for its state by state.
29:19
Countries like this sometimes
29:21
they just have a misunderstanding about this.
29:23
They dream this stupid dream
29:25
that if you solve the Palestinian Israeli dispute everyone else
29:28
the region would go home and have a happy life.
29:31
And in Europe,
29:33
there are different psychopathies at play,
29:36
not least the deep desire of continental Europeans
29:40
to be able to accuse the Jews of what they did to the Jews.
29:43
I mean, wow, is that strong?
29:46
If you can accuse the Jews,
29:48
that's why they use the word as they do.
29:50
They say they're very, very specific.
29:52
Nobody accuses the Ukrainians of genocide.
29:54
Nobody accuses the Ukrainians of creating a wass or ghetto.
29:58
Only only watch out for one of those terms occur.
30:01
They only occur in relation to the Jewish state.
30:04
They say it because they want to wound Jews.
30:07
That's my belief.
30:08
They want to wound Jews hurt them.
30:10
They say things like they're behaving in a Nazi-like way.
30:13
And the follow-on from that is that they deeply,
30:19
deeply, they don't even, it's so deep they don't even know it.
30:22
They want to be able to say,
30:25
ah, evil the Jews have died.
30:28
So we can be absolved for the 20th century.
30:32
X.
30:34
We can get going again.
30:36
I wonder if there's something else.
30:38
Yeah.
30:39
I wonder if there's also something else feeding in.
30:44
I've been fascinated by my peers' reaction to October 7th.
30:50
And the amount of fatuous anti-Zionist nonsense,
30:54
especially on social media.
30:56
And I wonder if there's a kind of heuristic template that we all have.
31:03
And by we all, I mean, I suppose I'm referring to my colleagues in the press
31:07
who tend to be university educated mostly white,
31:10
mostly upper middle class elites who have absorbed a certain set of doctrines
31:15
about what you're supposed to say, about sexism and racism and colonialism
31:19
and oppression and gender and whatever.
31:22
And we all know this thought bubble, right?
31:25
It's like, it's so bloody boring.
31:28
And totally predictable.
31:30
And totally predictable.
31:32
And so it provides a template where if you see a conflict
31:35
and there's a white person who looks rich and is wearing a suit and has lots of bonds.
31:40
And there's a person of color sitting amid rubble.
31:44
Of course, your guilt, your post-colonial sympathy goes to the person in the rubble.
31:50
It's sort of been trained that this is a template that we can superimpose
31:54
onto wall conflicts and onto everything.
31:57
It tickles us.
31:58
It makes us feel virtuous.
31:59
It makes us feel like we're able to show other people that we're virtuous
32:02
because we're on the right side of history.
32:04
We're not on the side of the colonizers or whatever the settlers.
32:09
And it strikes me that that is just an off the shelf,
32:12
bed and bullshit that's being superimposed onto this conflict.
32:16
Yeah, I mean, there's no obvious reason why I can predict with 100% accuracy.
32:22
Your views on the Middle East based on whether or not you should be able to mutilate the generals of a child.
32:29
And it's absolutely the case if for instance somebody says,
32:34
I'm very big in supporting trans kids.
32:37
I know exactly what their views on the Middle East are going to be.
32:40
Absolutely.
32:41
And why should that be?
32:43
It's so strange.
32:44
It's an allocart political philosophy.
32:49
And it believes, yes, you're right.
32:51
I mean, this is a very, very deep one.
32:53
Believes that all the world can be divided into oppressor and oppress,
32:58
colonize, uncolonize, victim and victimizer.
33:01
And you just sort of obviously sort of fell out of the heads of people in the American Academy.
33:07
But that idea, which doesn't really work in America,
33:12
there's a horrible, horrible ideology.
33:15
It doesn't really work in America.
33:16
It doesn't work anywhere.
33:17
And then they try to transplant it on the Middle East to see if it can work there.
33:20
And the result of it is you end up calling for the eradication of the Jewish state
33:29
and the name of anti-nazis.
33:32
When you say it doesn't work in the United States,
33:34
how do you achieve civil rights and cultural progress without trying to undo
33:40
the biases of the past?
33:42
So it's taking this country, for example, it's not like everyone had a deep
33:46
and abiding understanding of what had happened to the First Nations people
33:50
in the 1950s here.
33:51
So there needed to be a redress now, whether that is now becoming ridiculous
33:56
because you've got four white, middle-aged women on an HR Zoom call
34:01
or doing their acknowledgements of country about the land of the traditional owners or something.
34:07
Who is this helping?
34:09
Who is the traditional owner of Zoom, by the way?
34:12
I'm sure he's fabulously wealthy, but he's probably not an indigenous Australian.
34:19
So you're going to argue about the ways that you do it.
34:23
Do you really need to be told when the plain lands, the quantest likes,
34:27
the traditional owners of the land?
34:29
Nonetheless, there was also something broken.
34:32
There was something wrong.
34:33
We hadn't reckoned with the stolen generations.
34:36
We hadn't reckoned with the way that First Nations people were treated.
34:40
So isn't it necessary to counteract the hierarchy by the installation of a deconstruction of the hierarchy?
34:47
Oh, deconstruction.
34:49
It's such a hideous word.
34:51
I'm deeply keen that after the era of deconstruction we have a new era which is the era of reconstruction
34:58
and not just a tear down but build, not just to problematize, but to solve some dumb things.
35:07
You're right.
35:09
What this point is, though, is it incredibly difficult.
35:12
I pointed this out in my book, The Manors of Crowd, a few years ago about all these weird social justice movements that exist in our time.
35:21
And I said there that I think what is going on, in the case you say with Australia, is a good one,
35:27
is always this tendency, which considering how incredibly clever we should be, and how connected we are,
35:34
and how much we have ability to knowledge and books and access to information and swapping knowledge,
35:40
we're very bad at, which is how to correct a past injustice perceived or real without overcorrecting it.
35:51
And in almost every context of the moment, what happens is an overcorrection.
35:58
I mean, the most obvious one which I wrote about The Manors of Crowd was the overcorrection to do with relations between the sexes.
36:06
When in 2017, I mean, two movements started.
36:11
I actually saw Ronan Farrow somewhere last summer.
36:14
I didn't know what you did.
36:17
On the one hand, yes, there were cases of men taking advantage of their positions of power, definitely.
36:26
But the overcorrection, particularly America, where it became like that people were losing their jobs and livelihoods for a bad past,
36:37
you know, or bad date.
36:40
There was a comedian joke.
36:43
A bad joke, absolutely, which is, as you know, is everyone's right to me.
36:49
I make a lot of them, Douglas, I make a lot of them.
36:52
I noticed your defensive on that one. God damn, we have to make bad jokes.
36:58
But I mean, the bad past, there was a comedian Ansari who lost his job because a girl described a date they'd been on.
37:05
Nothing, non-consensual would happen, but she just, you know, sort of looked back and didn't like it much.
37:10
And no one clapped at the Emmy Awards when he was nominated. Did you see that?
37:14
They read out his name and the auditorium was silent.
37:17
Oh, they're such cowards.
37:19
They're such cowards.
37:21
It's like the fact that, you know, Kevin Spacey lost his career,
37:25
was found not guilty of the crimes that he was accused of.
37:28
And no one in Hollywood wants to touch him still.
37:30
I mean, there's such cowards.
37:32
It's all about patting themselves on the back for their bravery.
37:35
You never meet anyone more Callow than a Hollywood producer.
37:39
But no, I mean, they had this.
37:41
By the way, if you're going to reconstruct sexual norms, I've always thought that Hollywood is a bad place to base that on.
37:47
I mean, the town literally came up with a term casting couch.
37:51
It came up with, for a reason.
37:54
But it was amazing that that year, after Me Too started,
37:58
there was a perfectly reasonable place to take it, which was like, you know,
38:02
on Harvey Weinstein like people should not be allowed to get away with their behaviour.
38:05
There's no reason why, you know, they ended up with a situation that, I mean, effectively,
38:11
the way I said is that if you're not allowed to make a bad pass as a man,
38:17
you're allowed one pass in your life.
38:21
And it's got to be a bullseye.
38:24
You have got to hit it right first time, one shot, and it has to be your partner for life.
38:31
Good luck, boys.
38:34
Now that is, of course, completely unreasonable,
38:37
but that was a massive overcorrection.
38:39
And you heard people during that era saying all this stuff like, believe all women.
38:43
Now there's no more reason to say, believe all women than to say, believe all men.
38:47
Or believe all people who are five foot ten.
38:50
Why? Why people lie? People fit, people exaggerate, people regret, people do all sorts of things.
38:56
But that's an example of a culture where we cannot seem to not over-correct.
39:01
I mean, it's over-correction is actually a two-generous term for it in some ways.
39:07
Oh, good. I've always phased on two-generous.
39:10
Excellent.
39:11
There's something else going on, which is that there's a rise in the sort of virtue signaling about one's bona fides as a spokesperson for your own identity.
39:19
Yeah.
39:20
So if the over-correction was just that we were all becoming too much like Martin Luther King, Jr.
39:25
or too much, putting too much emphasis on a point of view about them just taking race as an example,
39:31
that even a present Barack Obama, as recently as when he was present,
39:37
it was pretty uncontroversial to say that you should treat each other on the basis of the content of your character
39:42
and not the color of your skin.
39:44
That is now regarded as a bit passe, a bit naïve, you're only ever going to overcome structural inequality
39:50
by pitting identity groups against each other, the LGBTQIA plus.
39:56
I'm sure I've met one out.
39:58
Community.
39:59
And so if it was just a matter of over-correcting, I'd be less worried about it.
40:04
I'm more worried about it because it seems a bit like veering off into a different thing, which is actually anti-agallitarian.
40:09
Well, it's not just anti-agallitarian, it's so darn boring.
40:12
I mean, I'm in big game myself.
40:16
I'm so bored of gazed off.
40:19
I mean, just give me a break.
40:21
You know, I mean, a few years ago, I might bank in there.
40:27
I've got to careful, I say this is this because you can beat the bank.
40:30
But a bank, because I bank with, did this thing for Pride Month?
40:37
Oh, Jesus.
40:39
I mean, it's, of course, Pride Parade became Pride Day, became Pride Week, became Pride Month,
40:43
with very lucky not to have Pride all year round.
40:46
But the bank had a massive redesign, if it's logo.
40:52
And in the big rainbow flag and it's Barclays, love happens here.
41:01
And apart from wanting to throw up, you know, I said with a tie, I wrote a piece of evidence,
41:07
but I said the things I banked with Barclays, I don't want love to happen.
41:13
I don't even want a quickie.
41:16
I just want them to have real people behind the till.
41:22
And also occasionally have a branch that's actually open.
41:26
And whenever I lose my statements, I don't want them to charge me five quid.
41:30
And that would, I'd feel that was an expression of kindness by Barclays.
41:35
But it's all this, it's all, it's all the overdoing it crap.
41:39
It's, you know, it's the thing of, you know, you know, you never see a policeman unless it's Mardi Gras.
41:45
And, you know, if you just, an old lady has been coshed over the head by a mugger,
41:51
you can't find a policeman.
41:53
You're sort of, best thing to do is find someone doing the Macarena.
41:58
They're just not interested in their real job.
42:01
They're just massively overcorrect.
42:04
It's the same with the army.
42:05
I mean, they do this fantastically in America.
42:07
They're so, I mean, I live in New York most of time.
42:10
They're so bad in the overcorrection department.
42:13
You know, you can say that like the, I mean, again, it's not a typical organization.
42:17
The CIA, whenever it wants, you know, is doing a recruitment drive now.
42:21
You might say that in the past there were times when the CIA didn't have the most equal hiring.
42:27
It's not the biggest problem for a country.
42:29
I don't think anyone says I want to make sure that all my spies are exactly represented
42:34
to have every sexual kink.
42:36
But as it happens, that's one thing the CIA did for Bill.
42:41
Rather successfully.
42:42
That would be very top.
42:43
Absolutely.
42:44
But, you know, they did this one recent recruitment drive for the CIA and they had this woman
42:51
who she's a lady of color and she's on the big side and she is walking through the holes of the CIA
43:02
and she's saying, you know, I am and she identifies all the things she is.
43:05
And it's a whole list of conditions.
43:09
And one of them is bipolar.
43:12
And, you know, I'm proud of her mental health, the things.
43:19
And I thought, well, I hope she's not in charge of the drone program.
43:25
Because if there's one thing I'm keen on, it's that the drones are in the hands of pretty mentally sick people.
43:33
I do not want a manic depressive with access to the nuclear codes.
43:41
But they did it to kind of show the CIA can be for you as well.
43:46
But I just think that's preposterous.
43:48
It's the same thing with the Army.
43:49
The Army of Britain does these recruitment videos.
43:51
I mean, now if you're white and male and young and fit, you're the last person the British Army wants.
43:59
I mean, you know, if you're a sort of pacifist vegan transsexual, you know, you get fast tracked.
44:09
Get your own drone in no time.
44:13
And of course, it's preposterous.
44:15
And it's all just a massive overcorrection.
44:17
And you just want some adults to come along and just say, now stop it right there.
44:22
Stop it right there.
44:24
There's going to be no more rainbow crossings.
44:26
We're just going to be able to walk across the road and not get run over.
44:30
That's it.
44:31
We don't want like a pride death.
44:34
And no one seems to be able to do it.
44:37
It's like the only adults.
44:38
I mean, occasionally adults crop up.
44:40
Some friends are mine in Paris some years ago.
44:42
And me too was going too far.
44:44
Signed a wonderful letter.
44:45
Some actresses and philosophers and everything.
44:47
Oh, now I love French people sometimes.
44:51
Sometimes.
44:52
The, the, the, the, the, the, they, they sound like there's a hundred women from the women in preferred society.
44:58
Signed a letter saying all this stuff from America is too much.
45:02
They said, we like men flirting with us.
45:05
And we like relations from sexism.
45:07
We rather think they should go on.
45:09
And everyone in France pretty much agreed.
45:12
You know, they, they, they, they like a bit of Nuki.
45:15
I mean, and, and, and, and, and it was important for somebody to say that.
45:20
But it's so striking that what these French women all said that was so obvious
45:25
was not said by any woman in Hollywood or in politics in America.
45:29
It wasn't said by anyone prominent in any other country so far as they know.
45:32
Certainly not in English speaking world.
45:34
Out the grownups in the room really ideally supposed to involve the media as well.
45:39
I mean, this has made you be just me speaking from my own personal experience.
45:42
I was a, the ABC radio personality in Sydney.
45:45
What, what, what happened with that?
45:48
That's, that's a long story, Douglas.
45:53
Okay.
45:54
But one of the things that I noticed when I got,
45:56
one of the first things that I saw on the official ABC News Instagram feed in January
46:02
in the New Year, I thought I'll check in and see what's been going on.
46:05
I'd been abroad.
46:06
And there was a big nine page feature,
46:09
one of these big magazine style features that the digital department news department does.
46:14
That takes a lot of resources and is really meant to relate to people.
46:17
That's the issue when everyone's lips so bad.
46:19
And it was a mess.
46:20
Now, God bless this guy who they were having with profiling.
46:23
But, you know, it was like, I'm a farmer, I'm out on the land.
46:26
But I was born as a woman or I was assigned female at birth, as you're supposed to say.
46:31
And now there's a lack of resources or knowledge amongst regional doctors for dealing with menopause amongst transgender men.
46:38
And I was like, is this the most important thing that we need a nine page feature on?
46:45
And if it's not, what's happening?
46:48
They're trying to signal to each other that we're in the club, that we've got the memo,
46:53
that we're on the right side of history, that we likely underdog.
46:57
In other words, it's this sort of social justice dogma mission instead of news reporting.
47:03
Yeah, absolutely.
47:04
Well, there's an explanation for this, Peter Teelgay a few years ago.
47:07
He said that he thought that maybe as the salaries in media declined in this century,
47:13
the media started to pay themselves in a different currency.
47:17
Now, what's the currency?
47:19
It's the admiration and respect of your peers.
47:23
So, you know, I'm at the Washington Post fighting for democracy because democracy dies in darkness.
47:29
Turns out, democracy can die at the Washington Post, quite easily.
47:33
But there's something very interesting in this, because if a profession isn't paying less and less,
47:42
and the people going into it, of course, end up being significantly people who can sustain themselves,
47:48
that's another thing.
47:49
So, you get a self-supporting sort of class of trust fund babies and so on.
47:55
And then they pay themselves in endless awards about their own courage.
47:59
I've never known a profession which gives itself more awards for courage.
48:04
Firemen don't do it all the time, and nor the policeman.
48:09
It's the media that's forever slapping itself on the back.
48:13
And actors?
48:14
Oh, actors, of course.
48:16
But I think the really interesting thing is why this is happening.
48:21
My conclusion has been, since the 2008 banking crisis, when a form of...
48:29
Well, basically, if you're a young person, it became very hard to accrue capital and very hard to get on the housing ladder in all of our countries.
48:38
And as a result, I believe that after 2008, politicians in the West, broadly speaking,
48:45
said, let the meat identity politics.
48:49
That was the Antoinette invitation.
48:52
We can't improve your lives in a material sense.
48:55
We don't really know how to.
48:57
We know China's eating our lunch.
48:59
We know that we seem to be not doing all that well.
49:05
Let's give the public some easy fodder.
49:10
Let's pretend that there are massive issues which still need to address all of which, by the way,
49:15
almost all of which are ones that have been addressed before.
49:19
I mean, the discussion in this country, obviously, I'm only a guest in your country, so I have to be careful what I say.
49:24
But the discussion in this country, whenever it comes off about the Aboriginal questions,
49:29
all my life, Australian politicians have apologized for this.
49:36
I mean, I've mentioned some of this in the strange death of Europe, but I mean, you know,
49:40
the Sea of Hands and the Sorry books and things were the late 90s and the early 2000s.
49:47
Kevin Rudd did a full-on apology.
49:49
Yeah, the official one was 2008.
49:51
Right. And how many, just how many times you meant to do it?
49:55
It's like, in Britain at the moment, one of the things that is a little noted, but sad thing is that
50:01
no minor member of the Royal family can go anywhere without being urged in the world to apologise for slavery
50:09
and indeed pay some money.
50:11
Some of the local shakedown artists disagree about when the printcent would actually just hand over the cash himself or not.
50:19
But what always happens with it is that these people say the British Royal family hasn't apologise for slavery,
50:24
or Britain hasn't apologise for slavery.
50:26
And I was just like, we did. You just don't know.
50:30
There's a difference between your ignorance and reality.
50:35
You know, King George III signed the Anti-Slave React into law in 1808.
50:41
My country has more than paid its debt over slavery.
50:46
And yet a new generation of people come along, they say, no, no, no, you haven't yet made compensation for it.
50:53
You just don't know that throughout the 19th century every household in Britain had paid more in goods,
50:59
because we would not deal with and trade with Slaven nations.
51:04
And this was in an era where an average man in the North of England working in a mill died at 37.
51:10
And started working at about eight, the age of about eight.
51:14
And our sailors sailed the high seas for 60 years, policing the world to stop the slave trade.
51:24
And to stop Brazil, for instance, which kept Slaven into the 1880s,
51:29
none of the people who come along today know a single bit of this history.
51:34
They don't know the young men who sailed around the seas and lost their lives very often.
51:39
Thousands of them lost their lives getting on to Slaven ships and saving the crew.
51:44
And in fact, the Queen Victoria's Jubilee in 1900, there were thousands of people there, black, freed slaves,
51:53
who were waving the flags of Britain, saying we were freed by the Queen.
52:00
Then, because of the inheritance of the American culture,
52:03
there's absolutely no stream of America.
52:06
All of us.
52:07
I notice it in this country with the volume media.
52:10
I mean, it's the same as in the UK, it's as if anything that happens in America happens here.
52:14
You know, they catch a cold and we get the flu.
52:17
And of course, I mean, that's why all these movements of recent years have happened.
52:23
I mean, it was simple.
52:24
So incredible about the slavery thing in particular,
52:26
the self certainty with which people assert that they would have known what the right
52:32
thing to do was if they'd been alive and that they would have had the courage to do it
52:36
as well.
52:37
Like, as if there was something uniquely pernicious about the people back then in their
52:41
time doing abominable things that everybody thought were okay.
52:45
Like, my general take when people are quite sanctumodious about how they would have behaved
52:51
in the past is to say you show me an issue right now on which you're completely outside
52:58
of the mainstream at a taking a wildly brave and courageous moral position that's so extreme
53:04
you seem whack-a-doodle to everybody else but is so perceptive that you'll be proven
53:10
right in 100 years and then I'll believe that you would have opposed slavery in the 1700s.
53:15
But if all of your views just happen to align with precisely the social justice dogma
53:20
that all of your peers believe and of course you wouldn't have opposed slavery because
53:23
you're a conformist.
53:25
Absolutely.
53:26
Most people are.
53:27
Well said.
53:28
Yeah, I mean, most people are conformists.
53:31
I love it's always been the problem of the moderns that they think that they know better
53:37
than Plato because they lived after him.
53:40
So, the preposterous.
53:44
But just very quickly, yeah, of course, yeah, but just very quickly, I mean, an amazing
53:47
thing about this is of course they have this 2020 vision in the rearview mirror and they
53:52
would have been anti-slavery in the 18th century, they'd have been urging that women should
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have the vote in the 19th century and been arguing for gay marriage in the 17th century.
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And I don't think any of that's true.
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I think they'd have all been exactly like everyone else around them.
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Most people did not have the courage of a William Wilberforce.
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You know, these remarkable Christian people in England who argued against slavery because
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it was a moral obscenity, and that was how we banned it, a few remarkable people, but
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they weren't the norm at all.
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And as you say, most people do think they know exactly what they would do.
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Well, Melanchandera has this lovely line in testimonies between the great Czech righty,
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has his lovely line in testimonies between, he said, man walks in a fog and stumbles along
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a path and creates a path as he walks it.
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So that's not the interesting thing.
54:45
The interesting thing is when we look back, we see the man and we see the path, but we
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don't see the fog.
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It all looks so obvious after it's happened.
54:57
Thank you for uploading questions on that web on the app slide.
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It was better than having people come up and ask questions and drone on for seven minutes,
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isn't it?
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One person says, as a member of a so-called minority, you have benefited from progressive
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movements as a conservative.
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How do you judge which progressive movements have merit?
55:18
That's a very good question.
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I believe that the rights.
55:25
To hear the rest of this conversation, go to uncomfortableconversations.substac.com-slash-listen
55:31
and you will get your own personal, premium podcast feed with at least three extra episodes
55:38
of the podcast every month and heaps of extra stuff, including the remainder right now
55:43
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55:45
If it was worth listening to this much of, don't rob yourself of the rest.
55:50
Well, let your phone light now and search for uncomfortable conversations.