Brendan O’Neill
Spiked, Apr. 14, 2025
‘If you throw a lot of shit out there, there’s some point at which “I’m just raising questions” is not a valid thing.”
You could almost feel Douglas Murray’s vexation. There he was, invited on by the weed-puffing, free-thinking king of the podcast bros, Joe Rogan, to debate prick-kicking comic Dave Smith. Smith has wielded his contrarian cudgel against everything from lockdowns to ‘woke insanity’. And yet what was Murray hearing from this supposed slayer of sacred cows? Israel-bashing. The kind of thing you get from every Guardian pod and every keffiyeh-sporting rich kid of the Ivy League.
That’s what this viral spat brought home for me: the sheer omnipresence of ill-will for Israel. Every online subculture, from the showily unwoke to the pronouns people, feels a frothing animus for the Jewish State. There’s little difference between the views of brash libertarian Dave Smith and the faux leftists of the Queers for Palestine cult: both say Israel is a uniquely barbarous nation. You could accidentally switch between the motormouth rantings of crank rightist Candace Owens and the daily musings of Novara Media and not notice you’d done so: both will be wanging on about Israel’s ‘genocidal mania’.
I share Murray’s frustration at this heedless loathing for Israel that has taken hold of both the conformist left and the contrarian right. He criticised Rogan for ‘platforming’ more Israel haters than supporters. And for having cosy chats even with people whose hot takes come from the Middle Ages. Like conspiracy theorist Ian Carroll, who thinks Israel was behind 9/11 and Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad asset sent to ensnare America’s horny elites. And Darryl Cooper, too, the creep who makes madly long pods hawking the lunatic idea that Churchill, not Hitler, was ‘the chief villain’ of the Second World War. ...SOURCE