On Democracies and Death Cults

Book review by Dr Anne Sarzin

In Douglas Murray’s recently published book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the future of Civilisation, the renowned journalist and author quotes Vasily Grossman, ‘Someone might ask: “Why write about this, why remember all that?” It is the author’s duty to tell this terrible truth, and it is the civilian duty of the reader to learn it.’ This epigraph foreshadows the tone, context and themes of Murray’s book and references his own deep-seated motivation for revealing to us the evil at the core of Hamas propaganda.

Much later in the book, Murray returns to Grossman for his insightful definition and elucidation of antisemitism. Grossman states, ‘Antisemitism is always a means rather than an end; it is a measure of the contradictions yet to be resolved. It 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 has written courageously and thoughtfully about the war in Gaza and the Western world’s ill-judged support of Hamas, a ruthless terrorist organisation responsible for the 7th October 2023 massacre in southern Israel and the kidnapping, torture and starvation of Israeli hostages.

Undoubtedly, this is a remarkable book with relevance to our contemporary world. It should be required reading at all educational institutions—schools, colleges and universities—to inform the ignorant and to expose the real nature of Hamas propaganda that is blindly endorsed by young people around the world who advocate for a Palestinian State and the wholesale destruction and annihilation of Israel. There’s a chance it might open their eyes to the real meaning behind the slogans they peddle and parrot so effortlessly, with which they laud Hamas and damn Israel.

Murray asks why the world’s sympathy was not with the victims of the Hamas massacre in Israel but with the perpetrators; and why the world seemingly ‘got this conflict so completely upside down’. He also questions why Israelis are the only people on earth who, when savagely attacked, only gained the world’s sympathy for a matter of hours, if that. In attempting to answer questions such as these, he became a witness, ‘following the facts wherever they led me’, from the morgues of Tel Aviv and interviews with pathologists, to maximum security prisons in Israel where he gazed into the faces of terrorists he recognised from their own videos of the atrocities they perpetrated.

This witnessing was important to Murray not only because he cared about the only thriving democracy in the Middle East and the only Jewish state in the world, but because ‘it matters to me also because I believe that what Israel stared into that day [7 October 2023] is a reality we might all stare into again at some point soon’. Murray peers into every dark corner of events, the twists and turns of that horrendous day. We grasp these realities in a different way as he delves beneath the surface. For example, in the writing of the Nova party, he evaluates the role of consciousness-expanding drugs that could have adversely affected the reactions and responses of many young people there, increasing their difficulty in comprehending their horrific situation. They were focused on the best aspects of the universe and, instead, found themselves face-to-face with the worst events imaginable.

With great empathy, Murray chronicles the horrors, his information and conclusions based on observations and interviews he conducted with witnesses and survivors, as well as with families and friends of those raped and murdered. He describes how Oriya escaped from the Nova festival in a car, together with her friends Sharon and Shahar. Tragically, terrorists dressed in Israeli uniforms killed all three. ‘They slaughtered our beautiful flowers,’ Oriya’s father told Murray.

Additionally, Murray was among the first observers to get to the centre of the Gaza Strip, where he witnessed ‘the utterly avoidable devastation that Hamas had brought on the people of Gaza’.

This book is so much more than a chronicle of factual events, however valuable such documentation might prove to be. It is a thoughtful analysis of substantive issues underlying a conflict with massive consequences for both Israelis and Gazans. Murray highlights the stark differences between a country that had built hospitals to care for its people and a death cult that used its hospitals to protect itself and deliberately put people in danger. He also comments on governments around the world, including Anthony Albanese’s Labor government.

In April, after the massacre in Israel, Murray visited one of Israel’s prisons where he recognised some of the ‘most dedicated and murderous people who had broken into Israel that day and been caught alive’. He adds, ‘There was nothing to learn from them. They had decided to live their lives with one ambition—to take away life.’

Murray ranges far and wide, gleaning information from Israeli ministers, interviewing Netanyahu, speaking to people from all walks of life and factions, travelling to Lebanon, Gaza and through the length and breadth of Israel. For Australian readers there are trenchant local observations, including a description of Hamas supporters breaking into the office of a Jewish professor of physics at the University of Melbourne, scrawling pro-Hamas graffiti on his office. ‘The professor’s crime, apart from being Jewish, was that protesters accused him of joint-hosting a PhD programme with an Israeli university,’ Murray adds. ‘The subject of study was the migratory patterns of birds.’ He concludes, ‘Conspiracies and manias that had spread across the Middle East by Hamas and the mullahs seemed to have gone far beyond the region. Spores of the virus were cropping up all across the Western world’.

There are excellent notes substantiating Murray’s sources. Murray, an associate editor of the Spectator since 2012, writes for the New York Post and the Free Press, the Telegraph and the Sun. He is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.

 

On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel, Hamas and the future of the West

By Douglas Murray

HarperCollinsPublishers, London, 2025