Friday, April 3, 2026

On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel, Hamas and the Future of the West - Wikipedia

On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel, Hamas and the Future of the West - Wikipedia


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

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On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel, Hamas and the Future of the West
AuthorDouglas Murray
Subject2023 Hamas attack on Israel, Gaza war, Antisemitism
GenrePolitical journalism
PublisherHarperCollins (Broadside Books)
Publication date
2025
Pages240

On Democracies and Death Cults is a 2025 book by British journalist Douglas Murray. HarperCollins published the book in the United Kingdom with the subtitle Israel, Hamas and the Future of the West and in the United States with the subtitle Israel and the Future of Civilization.[1] In the book, Murray offers his own response to the October 7 attacks, the international community's reaction to the Gaza war, and what he deems to be Western societies' resurgence of antisemitism. In April 2025, the book debuted on the New York Times Best Sellers list for Hardcover Nonfiction.[2]

Background

The non-Jewish Murray spent several months in Israel after October 7, 2023. There, he interviewed survivors, hostage families, political leaders, military chiefs, and intelligence officials.[1] As part of his research, he visited Gaza embedded with the Israel Defense Forces as well as neighboring countries.[3] Murray's project was his investigation into what the October 7 attack revealed about broader ideologies in Western democracies.[1]

He became known internationally for his advocacy and support of Israel after the October 7 attacks in 2023.[4][5][6]

Articles in the academic journals Ethnic and Racial Studies and National Identities associate his views with Islamophobia[7][8] and he has been described as promoting far-right ideas such as the Eurabia, Great Replacement, and Cultural Marxism conspiracy theories.[9][10][11][12][13]

Content

The book's first chapter recollects the October 7 attacks with witnesses and survivor testimonies. Murray examines Hamas's ideological foundations, and argues that its embrace of death as a political and religious value stands in fundamental contrast to the values of Western democracies[1] In the book, Murray distinguishes between Hamas and Nazis – he notes that Nazis attempted to hide their crimes against the Jewish people in Europe, whereas Hamas openly celebrates them.[1] He also addresses the historical background to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict when he discusses of the 1967 and 1973 wars, the emergence of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Iranian influence across the region.[3]

The book also touches upon pro-Palestinian protests in the United Kingdom and on Western university campuses following October 7, which Murray says points to a resurgence of antisemitism in the West.[3]

Murray visited the grave of Baruch Goldstein, the perpetrator of the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre, as part of his investigation into extremism in Israel and the Palestinian territories.[14] He visited a high-security prison to interview individuals involved in the attacks and the perpetrators who committed them.[1]

“to look into the eyes of the people who had been so high on the thrill of death who had demonstrated such ecstasy as they brought it on men, women, and children that morning.”

Murray also recollects various rescue operations during the October 7 attacks, particularly about an individual named Ben Shimoni[15].

Ben managed to escape the party, taking four other terrified partygoers with him in his car. He drove them to safety in Beersheba, 30 minutes away. Then he headed back to the site of the party. On that trip he managed to save another group of five young people and also took them to safety. Each time, his passengers begged him not to go back into the firefight. But he had a mission. On the third attempt, carrying three more survivors in his car, the terrorists caught him …

His central conclusion is that Israeli soldiers fight out of a love of life, rather than a glorification of violence, and that Western democracies would benefit from a similar perspective.[1]

Reception

The Jerusalem Post described the book as presenting a "clear-eyed, reasoned, and deeply researched view" of the October 7 attacks, praising Murray's access to primary sources and his framing of Hamas ideology.[1] Jewish News praised Murray's historical depth, his dispassion as a non-Jewish commentator, and the power of the survivor testimony he gathered.[3] The book was also praised by U.S. President Donald Trump.[14] In the United Kingdom, it reached the national bestseller list in the Daily Mail. The Spectator lauded it as mapping the historical path to the conflict through first-hand testimony and scholarship.[14]

In a lengthy review in the Middle East Eye, journalists Peter Oborne and Irfan Chowdhury documented "factual errors, unsourced claims, and misleading framing" throughout the book.[14] Among the errors they identified: Murray incorrectly dated the first large London protest as October 15 when it occurred on October 14, he conflated a separate Hizb ut-Tahrir demonstration with the main Palestine Solidarity Campaign march, and he described three women in their late twenties who were arrested at a protest as "young girls".[14] They further alleged that Murray's claim that up to a dozen UNRWA employees were "found" to have participated in the October 7 attacks overstated the findings of the UN's Office of Internal Oversight Services, who had determined that only nine staff members out of over 30,000 had "possibly" participated.[14]

Oborne and Chowdhury contacted Murray through his publisher, agent, personal website, and direct email prior to publication to give him the chance to comment. He did not reply.[14]

The Manhattan Institute, at which Murray is a senior fellow,[16] called the book "deeply reasoned, clear-eyed, and grounded in fact," and an "essential read" for those seeking to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.[16]

Sales

The book debuted on the New York Times Best Sellers list for the week ending April 12, 2025, appearing on both the Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction and Hardcover Nonfiction lists.[2]

References

  1.  Teller, Neville (May 3, 2025). "'On Democracies and Death Cults': Douglas Murray lauds Israel's youth – review". The Jerusalem Post. Retrieved March 11, 2026.
  2.  "The New York Times Best Sellers – April 27, 2025". The New York Times. April 27, 2025. Retrieved March 11, 2026.
  3.  Baz, Jonathan (April 14, 2025). "Book Review: On Democracies and Death Cults – Israel, Hamas and the Future of the West". Jewish News. Retrieved March 11, 2026.
  4.  Gordon, Dave (28 February 2024). "Fierce Zionism propels Douglas Murray's intellectual celebrity". National Post. Retrieved 5 January 2025.
  5.  Isaac, David (2024-11-21). "Douglas Murray, Ben Shapiro tell thousands in Jerusalem: You are the 'tip of the spear in a civilizational battle'". Jewish News Syndicate. Retrieved 2025-01-05.
  6.  Zeitlin, Alan (2024-10-02). "How Douglas Murray Became The Most Persuasive Pro-Israel Voice On The Planet". Jewish Press. Retrieved 2025-01-05.
  7.  Ekman, Matthias (2015). "Online Islamophobia and the politics of fear: manufacturing the green scare". Ethnic and Racial Studies. 38 (11): 1986–2002. doi:10.1080/01419870.2015.1021264. S2CID 144218430. Retrieved 3 January 2021. Important Islamophobic intellectuals are, among others, Melanie Phillips, Niall Ferguson, Oriana Fallaci (d. 2006), Diana West, Christopher Hitchens (d. 2011), Paul Berman, Frank Gaffney, Nick Cohen, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Douglas Murray (Kundnani 2012b, 2008; Carr 2006; Gardell 2010)
  8.  Allchorn, William (2019-10-20). "Beyond Islamophobia? The role of Englishness and English national identity within English Defence League discourse and politics". National Identities. 21 (5): 527–539. Bibcode:2019NatId..21..527A. doi:10.1080/14608944.2018.1531840. ISSN 1460-8944.
  9.  Multiple sources:
  10.  Pertwee, Ed (2020). "Donald Trump, the anti-Muslim far right and the new conservative revolution". Ethnic and Racial Studies. 43 (16): 211–230. doi:10.1080/01419870.2020.1749688. Ye'Or's Eurabia: the Euro-Arab Axis (2005) is the canonical work of the genre (Bangstad 2013; Larsson 2012), but extemporizations on her basic theme can be found in the work of many conservative writers during the late 2000s and 2010s, such as Melanie Phillips, Mark Steyn, Bruce Bawer, Christopher Caldwell, Douglas Murray and, more recently, Alt-Right-linked figures such as Lauren Southern and Raheem Kassam. The conclusive differentiator between counter-jihadist and more mainstream conservative laments about Western decline is the former's decidedly conspiratorial framing...
  11.  Yörükoğlu, Ilgın (2020). "We Have Never Been Coherent: Integration, Sexual Tolerance, Security" (E-Book). Acts of Belonging in Modern Societies. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 27–51. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-45172-1_2. ISBN 978-3-030-45172-1. S2CID 226723768. Retrieved 6 January 2021. It is not only far-right political parties and 'alt-right' blogs that are fueling the fire of xenophobia. In our century, be it the Financial Times columnist Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on a Revolution in Europe (2009) that recapitulates the idea of a slow-moving Muslim barbarian invasion, along with the Muslim 'disorder, penury and crime', or the works by Douglas Murray and Thilo Sarrazin ..., a number of European and American best sellers have supplied the emotional force to the Eurabia conspiracy in particular and the alt-right in general.
  12.  Ramakrishna, Kumar (2020). "The White Supremacist Terrorist Threat to Asia". Counter Terrorist Trends and Analyses. 12 (4): 1–7. JSTOR 26918075. This Great Replacement motif articulated by Murray, Camus and other prominent conservative intellectuals has been weaponised as a rallying cry for white supremacists around the world, including Robert Bowers, who killed 11 worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue in October 2018 and Tarrant, the Christchurch attacker, whose own manifesto posted online is called 'The Great Replacement'.
  13.  Stewart, Blake (2020). "The Rise of Far-Right Civilizationism". Critical Sociology. 46 (7–8): 1207–1220. doi:10.1177/0896920519894051. S2CID 213307100. Acclaim for Murray's thought has been widespread, and ranges from liberal French public intellectual Bernard Henri-Levy, who claimed him to be 'one of the most important public intellectuals today', to authoritarian anti-immigrant hardliners such as Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who went so far as to promote The Strange Death of Europe on his Facebook page in Spring 2018... Murray's book [The Madness of Crowds] remodels a much older theory of so-called 'cultural Marxism', which has long history in far-right thought.
  14.  Oborne, Peter; Chowdhury, Irfan (February 1, 2026). "Douglas Murray on Israel and Gaza: Spinning a bestseller from his own 'bullshit'". Middle East Eye. Retrieved March 11, 2026.
  15.  Schultz, Matthew (2025-05-01). "Israel and the Future of Civilization". Jewish Journal. Retrieved 2026-03-17.
  16.  "On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization". Manhattan Institute. Retrieved 2026-03-17.
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