If any book could open the eyes of clueless pro-Hamas student protesters, Douglas Murray’s On Democracies and Death Cults would likely be the one. Packed with eyewitness accounts of the horrific October 7 massacre and Israel’s subsequent response, only ideological intransigents would instinctively ignore the massive moral gulf separating Hamas from its Jewish enemies.
Far from a philosophical analysis, Murray addresses the Democracy–Death Cult clash by relating what he saw; what he gathered from interviews; and, incredibly, by what was available via phone messages, social media posts, and filming of the atrocities — much done by the terrorists themselves. “Using GoPro cameras and mobile phones the terrorists broadcast their acts of violence with pride. By late in the day on October 7, it was already clear that these acts included burning people alive, shooting innocent people, cutting off people’s heads, and raping men and women. Sometimes before killing them. Sometimes after.”
The account Murray provides of the attack is vivid and personal. Parents get messages of their children’s last desperate minutes while Hamas fighters, unlike the Nazis, publicize the grisly torture they inflict on Jews. Relevant detours into the history of Israel’s struggle for survival come as a relief, as do paragraphs devoted to the burgeoning population of Gaza and non-Jewish Israel — figures that conclusively rebut the popular “genocide” accusations against Israel. “Apartheid state” calumnies are likewise countered with facts about Arab participation in Israel’s government even at the highest levels.
The story of one Hamas terrorist, Yahya Sinwar, serves as a singular representative of the Death Cult throughout Murray’s work. Sinwar was a leader of the October 7 attack, having been recruited into Hamas years earlier. In 1988, Sinwar was imprisoned for the murder of four Palestinians he suspected were informers — crimes to which he proudly admitted. One of the few Israelis who had regular contact with Sinwar in prison was a dentist, Dr. Yuval Bitton. In 2004, Bitton noticed that something was wrong with Sinwar and arranged for him to be sent to a medical center, where he was operated on for a brain tumor. Bitton visited Sinwar in the hospital, and the latter thanked him for saving his life.
The story doesn’t end there. In 2011, Sinwar was the highest-level prisoner released in a 1,027-to-1 swap for a young Israeli soldier who’d been imprisoned in Gaza for five years. (Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2006.) Upon release, Sinwar immediately resumed his position in Hamas and advocated taking more Israeli hostages to free other Palestinians in Israeli jails — a tactic expanded on October 7 to include even dead Israelis. On that same horrendous day, a farmer, Tamir Adar, and his family were apparently killed in the Hamas attack. None was ever heard from again. Tamir was the nephew of Dr. Yuval Bitton.
Near the end of his book, Murray recounts the killing of Sinwar a year after the initial massacre. “Sinwar had been killed in Rafah, in the south of Gaza, in the place where Vice President Kamala Harris and many other international observers had insisted the IDF should not go.” The comment about Harris and “other international observers” reiterates a point often made in the book — namely, the hand-tying, “proportional response” demands regularly imposed on Israel by world leaders who dismiss the devastating impact of Hamas and Hezb’allah missiles on community life. “Why was the whole country so littered with bomb shelters that on the 7th people ran into them across the south and were promptly massacred inside them by Hamas? How was this a way to live? And who else would live like this?” Even so, Murray notes that civilian casualties in Gaza have been exceptionally low by historical standards — a fact that didn’t prevent the International Criminal Court from designating Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal.
Chapters three and four are largely devoted to Western responses to the October 7 Hamas atrocities. That very evening, “a great crowd of anti-Israel protesters had gathered outside the Israeli embassy in London, among other places, to celebrate the massacres of the day. They waved flags and lit flares while shouting the same war cry and victory cry as the terrorists, ‘Allahu Akbar!’” A Times Square protest against Israel occurred the next day “while Hamas terrorists were still murdering their way through the south of Israel.” The general frivolity of student protests on American campuses, where chants of “intifada” went out alongside demands for more accommodating toilet facilities and “alternative milk,” blatantly contrasted with Hamas atrocities and the courageous response to those acts occurring in Gaza and Israel, sometimes by females the same age as the privileged protesters.
Throughout the Western world, these anti-Jewish protests proliferated, egged on by professors whose words would have gotten them fired if directed against gays or blacks. One example of many: “Cornell University history professor Russell Rickford was filmed at an anti-Israel rally praising Hamas’s massacre and telling the crowd, ‘It was exhilarating, it was energizing.’” What does it mean, Murray asks, that “on the streets of every major Western city, people who must have known what had been done on the 7th publicly took the side of the aggressors?”
A psychological explanation was previously given by Soviet novelist Vasily Grossman: “Anti-Semitism .. is a mirror for the failings of individuals, social structures and State systems. Tell me what you accuse the Jews of — I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.” Murray expands this dictum to apply to the student-protesters, whose view of Western culture has been warped by radical leftists: “Tell me what you accuse the Jews of — I’ll tell you what you believe you are guilty of.” For Gazans and persons throughout the Arab world, a historical explanation largely suffices, starting with the still celebrated pact between Hitler and the mufti of Jerusalem — a collaboration that continues to make Mein Kampf a bestseller.
These “explanations” constitute only a small fraction of Murray’s book, which is devoted overwhelmingly to describing what happened on October 7, how individual Jews responded, and how the Western world responded. It is those journalistic details that make On Democracies and Death Cults a work that might even turn the heads of students more interested in performative protest than in the truth about good and evil, life and death.
Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: “Who’s to Say?” is also available on Kindle.
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