The only prob­lem with Dou­glas Murray’s On Democ­ra­cies and Death Cults is that the peo­ple who most des­per­ate­ly need to read it nev­er will. Giv­ing us a per­spec­tive that has been absent from most main­stream report­ing out of Gaza, Mur­ray doc­u­ments the human toll of Octo­ber 7th and argues that this tragedy was uncom­plex: Israelis who val­ued peace and life were sav­aged by Hamas, a cult that val­ues death. He unam­bigu­ous­ly des­ig­nates these sides good and evil before ded­i­cat­ing much of the book to the ques­tion: how have so many peo­ple in the West come to be so fanat­i­cal­ly in favor of Hamas?

Mur­ray inspects the full spec­trum of anti-Israel pro­tes­tors in the West, rang­ing from Islamist ​“rab­ble-rousers” in the streets of Lon­don and Syd­ney, to stu­dents and pro­fes­sors at America’s most elite insti­tu­tions in his search for answers. ​“Of all the con­flicts going on around the world, from Syr­ia to Myan­mar, from Sudan to Ukraine, why was this one that it seemed peo­ple from around the world had cho­sen to immerse them­selves in, to throw them­selves into, and not against the invaders but against the vic­tim?” Mur­ray points out the con­tra­dic­tions and incon­sis­ten­cies that allow the pro­tes­tors in the West to con­demn Israel but not its ene­mies or their enablers: schools and hos­pi­tals are sacro­sanct, unless it is Hamas that defiles them with ter­ror tun­nels and weapons; the UN and its res­o­lu­tions are invi­o­lable, except for those that affirm Israel’s right to exist, or restrict Hezbol­lah’s move­ments; impe­ri­al­ism is to be con­demned, except when it is Iran that is spread­ing its empire to Lebanon, Iraq, Syr­ia, Yemen and Gaza. Mur­ray brings the absur­di­ty to a cli­max with Aya­tol­lah Khamenei’s let­ter of thanks and praise to the stu­dents of America.

Yet where Mur­ray tru­ly hits his stride is in his will­ing­ness to state what many in the West would rather avoid. ​“The Mus­lim world is the one place where the virus of Nazi anti-Semi­tism did not just con­tin­ue unchal­lenged after 1945, but actu­al­ly flour­ished.” Mur­ray takes the read­er on a tour of a post­war world in which Nazism is going out of vogue with every pub­lic con­vic­tion of the war crim­i­nals who made up Nazi lead­er­ship — with the notable excep­tion of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Hus­sei­ni. Instead of being brought to jus­tice, al-Hus­sei­ni was wel­comed back to the Mid­dle East as an unbowed cham­pi­on. Mur­ray argues com­pelling­ly that this was the seed by which Nazi anti­semitism came to the Mid­dle East, where it found fer­tile soil in rad­i­cal Islam and spread across the region through the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood and their off­shoots, of which Hamas is one. ​“That is why, from a Cairo train sta­tion to the hous­es of Gaza, the Mid­dle East is the one region on earth where Nazi anti-Semi­tism is not seen as a strand of los­ing, tox­ic ide­ol­o­gy, but as the stance of vic­tors, and a hope for the future.”

Two hun­dred and forty pages may seem like slim cov­er­age of what is con­sis­tent­ly referred to as one of the world’s most com­plex prob­lems. But Murray’s brevi­ty stems from a will­ing­ness to call things as they are. It is a shame that it takes courage, in 2025, to state that the peo­ple invad­ing a sov­er­eign coun­try to rape and mur­der are evil and deserve our col­lec­tive scorn, and that kid­napped Israeli chil­dren and mur­dered civil­ians deserve to be includ­ed in our col­lec­tive sym­pa­thy. Murray’s body of work has been built on just that sort of courage, and On Democ­ra­cies and Death Cults is a wor­thy new chapter.