Saving the west, one polemic at a time

Most foreign journalists are barred by Israel from entering Gaza. Most, but not all. In October 2024, the right-wing polemicist Douglas Murray was given exclusive access to the Tel al-Sultan district of the southern Gazan city of Rafah, the scene of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s assassination by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). In sunglasses and a flak jacket, his hands gripping a protective helmet, Murray posed for the camera in the armchair in which Sinwar had perched shortly before his death.

“It wasn’t ‘luck’ that the IDF finished him here,” Murray wrote in his accompanying column for the New York Post. “It was the culmination of a year of hard, gruelling work by Israel’s soldiers, and brave and careful decisions made by the country’s politicians. The region, and the whole civilised world owes them an apology and a debt of thanks.”

The word “PRESS” on Murray’s flak jacket seems misleading. Muckraking investigative journalism this was not. Instead, Murray was seemingly acting as a mouthpiece for the IDF, a role he has excelled in since the horrific events of 7th October 2023, when Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups stormed southern Israel, killing 1,139 people and kidnapping 251 others.

A week after 7th October, Murray told readers of the Spectator, where he is associate editor, that it wasn’t the place of non-Israelis to give advice on how the country should respond. Then he proceeded to do just that, in a breathtakingly belligerent key. “Maybe Israel will cut off Gaza and starve Hamas out. Maybe they will have a full-scale military operation to rescue the Israeli captives,” Murray wrote. “Or maybe they will finally put an end to this insoluble nightmare, raze Hamas to the ground, or clear all the Palestinians from that benighted strip. A strip which Egypt owned but nobody wants. It would be a good time to do it.”

Such enthusiasm for violence at other people’s expense has not gone unrewarded. In April 2024, Israel’s right-wing government presented Murray with a commendation for being a “steadfast ally in countless international press interviews”. When the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, gave a speech to the United States Congress in July 2024—a speech in which he omitted the blunders of his own government in the lead-up to 7th October—Murray’s role as faithful retainer to the Netanyahu regime was in evidence for the cameras: he was pictured seated in Congress next to the tech billionaire Elon Musk. Since 7th October, walking with Murray through Tel Aviv is like being with a member of the Beatles, according to the US journalist Bari Weiss. (Murray has a weekly column in the Free Press, Weiss’s online outlet.)

Telegenic and erudite, Murray is of an English pedigree for which there is seemingly unlimited demand in the US. An acquaintance of his has told me that his accent has grown more pronounced over time. To some Americans, Murray is a set of affectations—a Wodehousian fantasy of Englishness brought to life. The dinner jacket, the knowing arch of the eyebrow, the repository of droll witticisms, the brio and the charm. Confronted with a tiresome interlocutor, Murray will roll his eyes at the folly of those around him, then pause for a moment before saying something deliciously acerbic. And yet he is more than his mannerisms: Murray is a captivating pundit of the right, who speaks with clarity and power.

Born in London to an English civil servant mother and a Scottish father, Murray attended a comprehensive—“an inner-city sink school” as he has since described it—before winning a scholarship to the private St Benedict’s School in Ealing. He later won a scholarship to Eton, and from there he progressed to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied English and wrote a well-received biography of the poet Bosie, otherwise known as Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s lover. The late journalist and critic Christopher Hitchens—whom Murray occasionally writes about with great reverence—was full of praise for the precocious young writer, describing the book as “remarkable” in the pages of the New York Review of Books in 2000. Not bad for a 20-year-old undergraduate student. The book also won the Lambda Literary Award for gay biography that same year. (Murray is openly gay.)

For some on the political right, Murray has taken on the mantle of Hitchens since the latter’s untimely death in 2011. Hitchens, a former darling of the radical left whose wit and pitch-perfect prose slayed innumerable right-wing dragons, became in later years a full-throated supporter of American wars in the Middle East. It is this later incarnation of the legendary journalist that mostly lives on through videos on the internet: Hitchens the bombastic critic of political correctness and Islam, whose cerebral character assassinations are affectionately referred to in the online vernacular as “Hitchslaps”.

Murray is of an English pedigree for which there is seemingly unlimited demand in the US

Murray, who is 45, has been a fixture of what used to be called Fleet Street for a quarter of a century. He has been writing for the Spectator since 2000 and has been associate editor of the magazine since 2012. In recent years, he has successfully transitioned to the polemical cauldron of social media, a crossover star of the internet’s right-wing ecosystem. You can still find him archly castigating somebody in print, but nowadays he is as likely to feature on YouTube, preening contentedly in the admiring glow of like-minded fellow culture warriors such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Lionel Shriver.

Murray has a million followers on Musk’s X and more than 220,000 subscribers on YouTube (recent video uploads to Murray’s channel include “Great Men Will Save the West” and “A Holy War with Iran is Looming”). Many videos of him on YouTube have not been uploaded by him but by his fans, who have gone to the trouble of editing his waspish put-downs into digestible clips. “MUSLIM WOMAN DESTROYED By Douglas Murray’s FACTS!” declaims the title of one video; “Douglas Murray Destroys Cultural Marxism,” announces another.

His initial public persona was of a crusading neoconservative. In 2005, Murray, a vocal supporter of the so-called war on terror, published a book titled Neoconservatism: Why We Need It, a paean to US political philosopher Leo Strauss and a critique of left-wing opposition to the Iraq war. The creed that had helped embroil British and American forces in Afghanistan and Iraq was already deeply unfashionable by that point, and Murray would eventually lose faith in it too, as western attempts to export democracy ran aground. By 2014, as civil war was raging in Syria and the Arab Spring was giving way to despotism and conflict, Murray quoted Henry Kissinger to say it was a shame that both sides in Syria couldn’t lose. “Let them fight it out,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal. Three years later, in the 2017 Sunday Times bestseller The Strange Death of Europe, he wrote, “Whenever our governments and armies got involved in anything in the name of… ‘human rights’—Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011—we seemed to make things worse and ended up in the wrong.” The book depicts Europe as in the process of dying by “suicide”.

Getting the war on terror catastrophically wrong is apparently no impediment to claiming a monopoly on insight into today’s world. If neoconservative attempts to reshape global society have foundered, then it is vital, according to Murray, for the west to preserve its superior moral values by pulling up the drawbridge against outsiders. If it fails in this, “Europe will not be Europe and the peoples of Europe will have lost the only place in the world we had to call home.” The Strange Death of Europe comes across as a one-note amalgam of victimhood, paranoia and resentment. Militant Islam is ascendant. Immigrants are turning inner cities into crime-infested sinks. These same migrants (Muslims in particular) are overrunning a culture that has lost belief in itself. Murray writes of the “prophetic foreboding” of Enoch Powell, whose notorious “rivers of blood” speech in 1968 claimed that the “black man” would have the “whip hand” over the “white man” in “15 or 20 years’ time”. Murray believes Powell got the fundamentals right even if he “gave too much cover to people way to his right.”

This latter point–less about race but more about contra ideological thinking–might also be made about Murray, who has in the past heaped praise on various fascist mutants. In 2011 he described the racist street movement known as the English Defence League in a positive light as a kind of “grassroots” response to the way in which the police had dealt with Islamist groups (though he said he regretted that racists also seemed to be attracted to it). He has written in defence of Geert Wilders, the Dutch far-right politician who has called for the Quran to be banned. He has described Robert Spencer, co-founder with Pamela Geller of the anti-Muslim organisation Stop Islamization of America, as “a very brilliant scholar and writer”; Spencer had previously written that there was “no distinction in the American Muslim community between peaceful Muslims and jihadists.” He has defended some of the extreme reaches of right-wing European politics in Italy, Hungary and France. Moreover, he has described Islam as an “opportunist infection”, the Muslim population in Europe as a “demographic time-bomb” and the solution to terrorism as “less Islam”. 

Indeed, Murray has long blurred the distinction between a minority of jihadist fanatics and the peaceful majority of Muslims. In 2007 he founded the Centre for Social Cohesion (CSC), a thinktank that was subsumed into the Henry Jackson Society (HJS) four years later. The historian Marko Attila Hoare, a former senior member of the Henry Jackson Society, told me in 2013 that his opposition to Murray’s anti-Muslim and anti-immigration views got him driven out of the organisation. “It rapidly became clear that Murray had not tamed his politics and that actually they were becoming the politics of the whole organisation,” Hoare said. He wasn’t the first colleague to feel uncomfortable with Murray’s political views. James Brandon, a former associate of Murray’s at the CSC, wrote a piece for the Guardian in 2009 in which he described a “constant struggle” to “de-radicalise” Murray and ensure the centre’s output “targeted only Islamists—and not Muslims as a whole.”

A short time later Murray fell out with the frontbench of David Cameron’s newly elected coalition government over an inflammatory speech Murray had given to the Dutch parliament in 2006. At an event organised to commemorate the Dutch far-right politician Pim Fortuyn—who was assassinated in 2002 by an animal rights activist who claimed that Fortuyn was “scapegoating” Muslims)—Murray declared that “conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board” and that “all immigration into Europe from Muslim countries must stop.” The speech prompted the Conservative frontbench to cut ties with the CSC, leading Murray to claim in the Spectator that he had been “blackballed” by Cameron. In 2011 Murray would retract the most incendiary parts of his speech at the Hague on the basis that the comments were made during an “angry time”.

And yet Murray has made similarly radioactive statements in the years since. Following the release of the 2011 census results, Murray bemoaned the fact that “in 23 of London’s 33 boroughs ‘white Britons’ are now in a minority.” London, Murray lamented, “has become a foreign country.”

When far-right rioting broke out in the UK in August 2024, Murray attempted to play the role of Cassandra. “What is happening in the UK this week is appalling,” he wrote on the day a Muslim woman in Middlesbrough had her front door ripped off its hinges by far-right thugs. “It was also all completely predictable. Indeed some of us warned about exactly this scenario for years. All of it was avoidable. But all warnings were ignored.”

This genre of commentary was ubiquitous on social media during the riots as right-wing culture warriors—who had never previously evinced much concern for the benighted provincial towns where trouble broke out—raged against the poison in the nation’s bloodstream. At no point did they consider that they might have helped spread some of the poison themselves.

As the riots were unfolding, a video taken from an interview Murray had given a year earlier went viral. In it, Murray complained to the former Australian deputy prime minister John Anderson that there were “hundreds of thousands” of people in the UK who have “no love at all” for the country in which they live. “I don’t want them here,” he said, before adding that many had come to the UK illegally. He then said either the army or the public would have to “sort out” demonstrators protesting about the war in Gaza, predicting that this intervention would be “very, very brutal”. The short clip was republished on Anderson’s YouTube channel during the riots and had been edited to sound even more incendiary.

Despite Murray being widely condemned for the remarks, the Spectator and the Free Press rallied to his defence. “Andrew Neil [the former chair of the Spectator] has rightly pointed out that hell really will freeze over before a Twitterstorm makes the Spectator turn on a star columnist,” wrote the magazine’s then editor, Fraser Nelson. Weiss’s Free Press praised Murray “as one of the most important and articulate defenders of the west”.

However, Murray doesn’t always extend the same level of generosity to his enemies, who are mostly depicted as operatic caricatures. For instance, Murray claims that Marx found “a lot of good to say” about the Atlantic slave trade. To make his point, he quotes from The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), in which Marx writes that “without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country.”

Marx is not defending slavery here but merely pointing out that the US owed much of its economic might to the abhorrent trade in human beings. He is also taking a rhetorical swipe at the French social anarchist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, with whom he corresponded and debated, by mocking his attempts to triangulate questions of political economy. As Marx writes elsewhere in the same passage, “For him, M. Proudhon, every economic category has two sides – one good, the other bad…What would M. Proudhon do to save slavery? He would formulate the problem thus: preserve the good side of this economic category, eliminate the bad.” Murray leaves out this all-important context, perhaps because it undermines the point he is trying to make. That Marx was vehemently opposed to slavery is clear from a letter he famously wrote to US president Abraham Lincoln (history’s most famous abolitionist) in 1864 congratulating him on his re-election and declaring “Death to Slavery”. 

Is it possible that Murray misunderstood the text he has quoted? Or perhaps hastily cribbed together material that some harried researcher had passed along? These things do happen. But if the stakes are as high as Murray contends—a “war on the west”, no less —it seems unwise to fudge the research. Perhaps, as his friend and podcast buddy Jordan Peterson likes to say, Murray should get his own house in order before criticising others. This is especially true if he is going to accuse the left of unduly litigating the past. Murray chafes with resentment at “woke” protesters who tear down statues of dead imperial icons in the UK and US. He pleads with readers to take a more nuanced understanding of the historical figures being targeted for reappraisal. In the case of somebody like Winston Churchill, many of us would concur. And yet Murray is perhaps happy to disregard his own calls for nuance when he wishes to perform a demolition job on a left-wing enemy.

There are more such howlers. Elsewhere in The War on the West, Murray confidently proclaims that the French philosopher Michel Foucault was a child rapist. He writes that Foucault “travelled to the developing world in order to rape young boys on a tombstone in a graveyard at night.” The source for this frightful story is the French-American professor Guy Sorman, who made the claim during a 2021 interview with the Sunday Times. The story has since been discredited: Sorman (who like Murray has an ideological axe to grind with Foucault) has admitted that he was parroting second-hand gossip. So much for historical nuance. Murray apparently sees no problem in using hearsay to trash the reputation of a left-wing philosopher after having demanded, just a few pages earlier, “balance” in the appraisal of demonstrable imperialists and slavers.

Murray, who calls himself a “Christian atheist”, also argues that the Enlightenment “produced a flourishing in politics, sciences, and the arts” and “saw some of the greatest leaps forward in human history.” It is his belief that defending the Enlightenment means asserting a more muscular Christianity. He supports this oxymoronic approach with the dubious claim that Enlightenment values are merely downstream from those of Christianity (such paeans to a smiley and ingratiating Christianity almost always skirt over its history of bloody persecution). From there Murray weaponises both cultural Christianity and the Enlightenment to argue that Europe should be kept free of outsiders. As the journalist and author Kenan Malik has written, such “defenders of the west” turn the Enlightenment “into a tribal affair: Enlightenment values are good because they are ours, and we should militantly defend our values and lifestyles, even to the extent of denying such values and lifestyles to others.”

If the existential threat to the west is diversity, then for Murray democracy, free expression and human rights are at best contingent values. He has described Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán—one of the most authoritarian and anti-free-speech leaders in Europe—as a greater proponent and protector of European values than the billionaire Jewish philanthropist George Soros. (Murray met Orbán in 2018, together with Donald Trump’s former consigliere Steve Bannon, and in 2020 spent a month in Hungary as part of the “Patriotic Talks” conference organised by a government thinktank.) Murray has also defended Trump against charges of racism and wrote in support of the Muslim ban he introduced in 2017. As for the cherished Enlightenment principle of “robust procedural due process” (Montesquieu), Murray has ridiculed the idea that Guantánamo Bay inmates should be treated according to the Geneva conventions; he has also called for British-born “Hamas supporters” to be deported (without specifying to where).

Various high-profile neoconservatives—including Dick Cheney, Bill Kristol and Cathy Young—have had the courage to speak about Trump as an existential threat to American democracy. Murray objected to the public disorder of 6th January along traditional conservative lines, describing what Trump did as “unbelievably dangerous”. However, he has denied that the events of that day constitute an insurrection or an attempted coup. As the writer John Ganz has noted, minimising the storming of the Capitol means to ignore those around Trump who have “consistently advocated ‘counter-revolution’ and a kind of custodial dictatorship or ‘Caesarism’ to save America from supposed terminal decadence.”

Many of Murray’s fellow culture warriors justified their support for Trump’s re-election by elevating the spectre of his opponents to apocalyptic proportions. Musk spoke of the “woke mind virus”. Peterson warned that the west was menaced by a shadowy cabal of “post-modern neo-Marxists”. Trump himself accused the incumbent, Joe Biden, of being “controlled” by communists. It’s a constant paranoiac drumbeat. Progressives want to “trans your kids”. Antifa is sowing chaos in the streets. Civil war is imminent. The west is backsliding into darkness. Immigration, immigration, immigration. Islam, Islam, Islam. Birth rates, birth rates, birth rates. To focus on Trumpian excess is to distract from the mortal threat posed to western civilisation by “woke” progressives. Despite his previously measured comments about Trump’s actions on 6th January, Murray spent most of the 2024 election cycle trashing Trump’s opponent, Kamala Harris.

The view is rather different in Kyiv, where a Trump presidency is unlikely to augur well for Ukraine’s defensive war with Russia. The war effort depends largely on American financial and military support that Trump has petulantly threatened to cut off. Should he follow through on this stated aim, the odds of Ukraine suffering defeat on the battlefield will increase exponentially. As recently as September 2024, Murray said that such an outcome would have “an unbelievably destabilising effect on the world.” And yet just two months later, in the heady and triumphalist atmosphere of Mar-a-Lago on election night, these dire warnings had apparently been forgotten. Emerging from the entrails of Trump’s inner circle, Murray reassured Telegraph readers that the president-elect was going to “show what American leadership on the world stage actually looks like.” 

Murray’s thinking these days is closer to Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations thesis than to the neoconservatism of the George W Bush administration. For Huntington, if the Cold War was a battle within western civilisation, the struggles after it would be between the Christian west and the Islamic east. If Huntington’s crude determinist nostrums were unpersuasive when they were first propagated in the 1990s, they map even less neatly onto today’s world. Russia, the largest power currently menacing western democracy, also claims to be defending Christendom against a west that Vladimir Putin has declared is heading towards “spiritual catastrophe”. Some of Murray’s fellow culture warriors apparently concur. Peterson, like so many others in the right-wing contrarian ecosystem, has blamed Nato for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and pondered whether Putin may well be on the right side of a civilisational struggle against wokeness.

The events of 7th October 2023 were galvanising for Murray—an opportunity to put himself on the right side and stand up to “barbarism”. In his recycled Huntingtonian lexicon, he said Israel was engaged in a “civilisational” war with radical Islam that Europe had been shirking—a Europe that, as Murray once said in his speech commemorating Pim Fortuyn, is “too weak-willed, tired and degenerate to act decisively.” Israel is apparently made of sterner stuff.

Such sentiments have gone down well with the Jewish community’s right wing and with parts of Israeli society still reeling from the 7th October attacks. Murray told Fox News that he thought the “most telling” part of Netanyahu’s July speech to Congress was “when he said that they’re coming for Israel first, but it’s you, America and Americans, who are the main targets of…  these anti-western forces.” For Murray, the Jews represent western values under assault by Islam.

This symbolism is shared by populist and far-right movements—as is a propensity to conflate violent extremists with ordinary Muslims. In November 2023, Murray labelled the former Scottish first minister Humza Yousaf, a Muslim whose wife has family in the Gazan city of Deir al Balah, “the first minister of Gaza” after Yousaf spoke out against Israeli bombardment. “People like Humza Yousaf, I say it carefully, have infiltrated our system,” Murray told the right-wing podcaster Dave Rubin. Sunder Katwala, director of the thinktank British Future, told me the comments were a way of “deliberately crossing a line” to see what’s acceptable to say in public about these issues and what isn’t. “[Calling someone] an infiltrator is a totally different kind of claim than ‘you’re too sympathetic’ or ‘you’re biased,’” Katwala said. “Infiltrator is the claim that your whole purpose as a Scottish nationalist or a Scottish politician is just to disguise that [Humza Yousaf] wants to be an Islamist.”

For Murray, Jews represent western values under assault by Islam

But for a supposed friend of the Jews, Murray can be surprisingly flippant about antisemitism that does not fit neatly into his binary division of the world along “civilisational” lines. He has absolved Orbán of charges of antisemitism—despite Orbán’s promotion of the image of powerful Jewish financiers scheming to flood Hungary with Muslim immigrants. (The Netanyahu government is a close ally of Orbán’s.) In common with Peterson, Murray also sees the baleful influence of “Cultural Marxism”—a dog-whistle phrase for the far right—behind many a calumny. The concept, which originated out of a conspiracy theory directed at the predominantly Jewish interwar Frankfurt School in Vienna, recycles an older antisemitic trope of a shadowy cabal of Jews conniving to overthrow society and impose Marxism. The best which can be said of Murray’s use of the term is he is playing with fire while forgetting that fire is hot.

Murray has argued against a planned British Holocaust memorial on the basis that “German war guilt keeps being spread across Europe,” and because its “focus will be on how Britain did not let in enough Jewish refugees in the 1930s.” He faced a backlash from many Jews after casually suggesting at the 2023 National Conservatism Conference in London that Germany “mucked up” twice in the 20^th century. The anti-extremist charity Hope Not Hate accused Murray of “trivialising the fact that the Nazis systematically murdered six million Jews during the Holocaust.” In a November 2023 piece for the Jewish Chronicle—which has taken its own hard-right turn in recent years—Murray duly put his foot in it again. This time he tried to argue that Hamas were worse than the Nazis (do they need to be?) because members of the SS were “rarely proud of their average day’s work”, unlike the Hamas militants who boasted about murdering Israeli civilians. “Very few [Nazis] felt that shooting Jews in the back of the head all day and kicking their bodies into pits was where their own lives had meant to end up,” Murray wrote. The comments were both offensive and ignorant. As Johannes Blaskowitz, the first German military commander of occupied Poland, testified in a memorandum that got him sacked during the first winter of the war, “bestial and pathological instincts [were] raging unchecked” behind German lines. 

Such lapses by Murray are symptoms of his need to portray the savagery of 7th October as a specifically non-western and Islamic phenomenon. To quote Hannah Arendt, Murray’s binary division of the world into distinct ideological camps—“civilisation” and “barbarism”—blinds him to the “numerous small and not so small evils with which the road to hell is paved.” 

Looking back at Murray’s public career, which spans more than two decades, what is striking is how little the core of his thinking has evolved. Instead, it has calcified, expressing itself in an ever-belligerent posture of ethnic and cultural chauvinism. What does it say about society that such a figure should be considered “one of the most important public intellectuals today”, as Bernard-Henri Lévy informs us in a jacket blurb for one of Murray’s recent books? Probably nothing good. Indeed, perhaps it is not Douglas Murray who has changed but the world around us. His growing intellectual celebrity is thus a reproachful mirror for the times we live in, and perhaps an ominous portent of things to come.