Douglas Murray in Jerusalem: Churchillian in His Defense of Western Values

 

by Noson Waintman

For Douglas Murray evil is not banal. It is real. It walks this earth, and we must call it by its name when we see it. When he spoke last week in the ICC Jerusalem, it was the greatness of Athens and Jerusalem meeting in defense of all that is good and great.  

In an age of darkness and unreason, Douglas Murray carries the torch of Western values. His impassioned defense of Israel since October 7th is a defense of the West and all that is good in the world today.

While he is a man of culture and learning, Murray’s fame lies in his impassioned and brave defense of our values. 

Murray understands that while Israel and the West beyond it are imperfect, Western values have created a civilization with unmatched moral breadth and have taken humanity from misery and brokenness, from lives that were “nasty, brutish, and short,” to ones so long that too many seem happy to lie back in convivium splendor and wait to be sacked. And sacked we shall be without Murray and without Israel. 

As a graduate of Eton and Oxford – those torchbearers of the fading culture of the once Great Britain – Murray is a true British intellectual of the best tradition and indeed he was close with the late Sir Roger Scruton, one of the most perceptive British intellectuals of recent decades. 

Israel is the perfect place for Murray, this most perfect of British intellectuals, to defend. The British project that saw the creation of the most ordered and amiable civilization ever known to Man has an heir in Murray. The Jewish project that argued for morality in every area of life today has an heir in the State of Israel.

While Israel is an imperfect society, its faults have little relevance to the attacks on it. 

Rather, Israel is the soft underbelly of Western civilization. Remove Israel and the West and the whole world will regress both in material and in moral terms. “God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem.” Without Jerusalem, the greatness of the West will disappear. 

Without Israel, there will be little to stop civilization’s descent into dystopia. Into darkness so deep that even extremists on mountaintops may struggle to find bullets for their Kalashnikovs or power for their satellite phones.  

During his speech, Douglas Murray spoke about how his support of Israel is rooted in the values of right and wrong that he was taught and how we as a civilization must continue to be motivated by the values of right and wrong, values that are being forgotten. 

Douglas Murray’s clarity of moral vision is very different from the ambivalence or even outward disgust towards the State of Israel and Jews that often English intellectuals are identified with. It is the moral tradition of Churchill (and Wilberforce and Disraeli).

In recent decades, British Intellectuals such as Murray’s old friend Christopher Hitchens were highly identified with the anti-Israel left. Although for Hitchens that may have been at least partially connected to his friendships with Jewphobics like Edward Said and Gore Vidal, not to mention his professed Marxism and the whole Dickensian complications of his father’s prejudices and his mother’s ostensibly secret Jewish identity. 

To be fair to Hitchens, perhaps this antipathy or suspicion of the State would have dissipated. His developing moral arc can be plotted with his support of the Iraq war, his stands against Islamic extremism, and his late-life suspicion of some of the excesses of the progressive project.

Other great recent British intellectuals like Clive James or even Isaiah Berlin were caught in the tangle of moral equivalencies and stumbled with tone-deaf talk of the so-called “occupation. But Murray has no patience with these sorts of things. 

And of course, he has no truck with the sort of donnish rubbish one finds in the mothball Marxism of the London Review of Books or the fervent fantasies of The Guardian. Not to mention the “never mention (who caused) the war” type nonsense of the BBC or The Economist. 

Instead, Douglas Murray is heir to the tradition of Winston Churchill. A glorious tradition of vigorous defense of Western Civilization. And Murray does it without the baggage of Churchill. 

Churchill in his vigorous defense of the West against the Hitlerian clouds, combined the roles of “prophet” and politician. 

While Churchill was sidelined from power during his “wilderness” years, he still spent much time in power and would return as Prime Minister later. Power kept Churchill’s hands from possessing the cleanliness of those who never served in that arena. 

Churchill’s time in power fates him to be second and third-guessed today by those who would have most assuredly failed the great moral tests of the Second World War. 

Douglas Murray has never been in power. He is a “prophet” and not a politician. He does not carry the baggage of power. His voice is clear, it comes in a still voice that is heard. 

And like Churchill, he realizes the stakes. All too much. 

“There is no Israel for me (to escape to),” bemoans Michel Houellebecq’s protagonist in Submission, his novel of an Islamized France. And in The Strange Death of Europe, Murray points out the great depth of this thought and indeed has spoken in interviews how “we don’t have an Israel to go to.” 

Murray realizes that our times are ones of great risk and danger. 

And he lives this. At great personal cost and risk to life and limb.

During his speech, Murray spoke of how challenging times make great people and of the heroes created in this struggle. Heroes that I am sure we hope will save the West.

In the words of Churchill, 

The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the world war by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

And the same is true today. A few hundred thousand IDF soldiers are holding back the hordes of hobgoblins of hell. Protecting the billion or so people of the West from complete chaos and the six or seven billion in the rest of the world from civilizational collapse.  

And just like Churchill all those years ago, Douglas Murray joins the defenders with his weapons. His terrible swift sword is his tongue, his pen is his bow of burning gold, and like Churchill, he enters battle with the English language, his glorious inheritance.

And like Churchill before him, Douglas Murray is a hero.

During his speech Murray mentioned the words of Ezekiel, “And they, whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear, (for they are a rebellious house,) yet shall know that there hath been a prophet among them.”

There is a heroic prophet among them. And he is Douglas Murray. 

And where better for a prophet to speak but in Jerusalem, the city of prophets? 

About the Author

Noson Waintman obtained his M.S. from the Zicklin School of Business of the City University of New York and his B.A. and Rabbinic ordination from Yeshiva University. A native of Canada, he currently resides in Rehovot, Israel.