Debunking Douglas Murray's Zionist Lies.

The Pompous "Expert" Is Actually Dead Wrong On All Of His Claims About Gaza.

In a recent viral episode of the Joe Rogan Experience show, the libertarian comedian Dave Smith debated the neo-conservative journalist Douglas Murray on foreign policy.

Watching the debate, every time Murray opened his mouth, all I was able to think of is the famous scene in the classic comedy film “A Fish Called Wanda” where Kevin Klien’s character calls John Cleese’s character a “pompous, stuck up, snot-nosed, English, giant twerp, scumbag, dickhead, asshole”.

Throughout the debate, it was clear to me that Murray was following the long-standing tradition of people who say stupid things in a posh British accent to an American audience, who then think it is intelligent.

Murray began the debate with a smug, pompous, condescending lecture about the importance of “listening to experts”.

Murray stated that “there's been a tilt in the conversation” on Gaza “largely to do with people who have appointed themselves experts who are not experts”.

Murrary stated that “I think authority matters” and that those who comment on events without expertise in the alternative media are “not knowledgeable about anything”.

He claimed that many in the alternative media say “I'm not a journalist, but I'm going to spend my time talking about this thing. I'm not an expert on this, but I'm going to spend my time talking about this thing.”

After this condescending lecture, Murray - the supposed foreign policy expert- went on to spout a long string of lies and outright falsehoods about Gaza, showing at best he is a moron and at worst (and more likely) he is intentionally lying.

In this article, I will document all the Zionist lies Murrray told in the Podcast.

Murray’s Lies About October 7th.

During the Gaza section of the debate, Murray said “of all the Israeli women who were raped that morning (Ocotber 7th), much of the international community does not want to listen to them at all and certainly doesn't want to believe them”.

This is most likely because there are no women that claim they were raped by Hamas on Ocotber 7th.

Even Moran Guez, the top Israeli prosecutor for alleged Hamas crimes on October 7th, has admitted this.

In an interview with the Isreali newspaper Ynet, she admitted that “it will be very difficult to prove” that rape occurred on Ocotber 7th because “In the end, we don't have any complaints” of it happening.

She even said her team had “approached women's rights organizations and asked for cooperation” but were “told that they simply weren't contacted” about any claims of rape occurring.

The New York Times put out a fraudulent article that claimed to name victims of rape, but people close to those named in the story actively came out to say the rape alleged never happened.

The piece named two young girls from the Kibbutz Be’eri who were supposedly raped by Hamas, but the top spokesman for the Kibbutz came out and said “It’s not true” and that they “were not subjected to sexual abuse”.

Gal Abdush, another supposed victim of rape named in the piece, had multiple member of her family including her mother, brother in law and sister come out to say she was not raped on Ocotber 7th.

Furthermore, the Times of London newspaper found that there is “no depictions of rape” in “all the Hamas video footage and all the photographs” taken on October 7th.

Israel has put out supposed “confession videos” of captured Hamas members admitting to mass rape, but the UN human rights council found that the videos were made under “coercive circumstances” and “distribution purely for propaganda purposes” and therefore not “proof of the crimes confessed”.

The only actual “evidence” for rape occurring on Ocotber 7th comes from supposed second hand witnesses, with no credibility.

One groups that claimed to have witnessed the “mass rape” was Zaka, which the Times of London reported is “an ultra-orthodox volunteer force” who “are not trained in forensics”.

The paper reported that the group’s “accounts cleaved to stories handed down about the horrors of the pogrom” and that they claimed to have witnessed mass rape due to the fact that they have “read a lot of Jewish texts that depict the raping of women”.

Many of Zaka’s other claims about what happened on October 7th also turned out to be false, such as the claim that they “found a baby baked alive in an oven” or that they saw a “pregnant woman and her slaughtered fetus”.

Another one of the main witnesses claiming to have seen rape on Ocotber 7th was Rami Davidian, who the Isreali journalist Racic Drucker recently revealed was repeating “stories made up from beginning to end. Hair-raising stories that never, ever occurred” and was “repeating over and over again, stories that simply never happened”.

Murray is not only repeating this debunked hoax as fact but smearing members of the “international community” for not buying into it.

In another part of the podcast, Murray claims that “The aims of Hamas, their stated aims, include the annihilation of the Jewish people, and on October 7th, they had their best go at doing that.”

This is also blatantly false. Hamas, no matter what one thinks of the group, fights in the name of opposing Zionism and the occupation of Palestine, not to “annihilate Jewish people”.

The group’s official constitution even states this, saying, “Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project, not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine.”

The constitution also says, “Hamas rejects the persecution of any human being or the undermining of his or her rights on nationalist, religious or sectarian grounds. Hamas is of the view that the Jewish problem, anti-Semitism, and the persecution of the Jews are phenomena fundamentally linked to European history and not to the history of the Arabs and the Muslims or to their heritage”.

Murray can ascribe any views to Hamas he wants, but their “stated aims” explicitly state that the group is opposed to Zionism and occupation, not Judaism.

Furthermore, the idea that Hamas did the October 7th attack because they wanted to “annihilate the Jewish people” is just ridiculous.

The attack actually happened in response to the Abraham Accords, a supposed peace deal that Trump negotiated that allowed Israel to normalize relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco.

The purpose of the deal, as Vox news explained, was to “let their support for the Palestinians slip” in hopes that they would “side a little closer with the Israelis”.

As the New Yorker’s David Remnik said, the point of the deal was to “sideline the Palestinians yet again”.

The point of the deal was for Netanyahu to be able to signal to Palestinians that he can normalize with Arab States without any concessions to the Palestinians.

As journalist Jeremy Scahill wrote, the deal “effectively excised the issue of Palestinian self-determination as a condition for normalization, a major victory for Israel”.

Scahill reported that :

Two weeks before the October 7 attacks, the Israeli leader (Netanyahu) delivered a speech at the UN general assembly in New York, brandishing a map of what he promised could be the “New Middle East.” It depicted a state of Israel that stretched continuously from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Gaza and the West Bank, as Palestinian lands, were erased.

Scahill reported that “Netanyahu portrayed the full normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia” through the Abraham Accords “as the linchpin of his vision for this ‘new’ reality”.

As Scahill reported, this was the final nail that led to a response from Hamas on October 7th. He reported that “Hamas monitored these developments carefully and saw the U.S. moves toward circumventing a Palestinian resolution in its normalization campaign as an existential threat.”

Basem Naim, a top Hamas official, told Scahil, “If Saudi Arabia signed, it means the whole region, when it comes to the Palestinian question, will collapse. It is not a plan. It is not a peace process. It is an integration of Israel in the newly created Middle East. They have started to talk about Middle East NATO. It is a coup against the heritage, the history, the values of this region and against the future, all this together”.

The Palestinian writer Susan Abulhawa told Scahil, “The status quo was unsustainable and untenable, especially when Arab leaders began normalizing and the writing was on the wall for our total disappearance and total destruction”.

Contrary to Murray’s claims, the October 7th attack happened as a response to Netanyahu openly threatening to wipe Gaza and the West Bank off the map while normalizing with the most powerful states in the region.

Pictured Above: Netanyahu’s plan to create a “new Middle East” by wiping Gaza and the West Bank off the map and normalizing with Egypt, Sudan, Jordan, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia.

Douglas Murray’s Lie About The Blockade.

Another lie that Murray repeated again and again on the podcast was denying that the pre-October 7th blockade on Gaza from Israel was starving Gaza.

First, he blames Palestinians for the blockade, saying:

The Israelis did not make them vote in Hamas. The Israelis would not want a terrorist entity that wants to annihilate the State of Israel that is there on their doorstep, constantly firing rockets, starting wars every few years.

Why would the Israelis want a group there? That means that if you're living in towns like Sderot or Ashkron or Ashdod, your children grow up knowing that they might have to go to the bomb shelters. And that's during peacetime.

The reality is that Israel actively wanted Hamas in power in Gaza to use the group as justification for the blockade.

A leaked diplomatic cable from 2007 quoted Amos Yadlin, who was the head of Israeli military intelligence at the time, saying “Israel would be 'happy' if Hamas took over Gaza because the IDF could then deal with Gaza as a hostile state”.

Murray also claimed that “there was no starvation in Gaza after 2005” and that “there was no deficit of goods coming in.”

Murray also smugly told Dave Smith, “I slightly get an idea of where you're coming from. You've read about this blockade. And so you imagine that that's what it is. I imagine you've read all the people who say that Gaza was a concentration camp. And you probably think that too.”

Murray also claimed that the Israeli blockade was not intended to deprive Palestinians of their basic needs saying, “The reason why trucks get searched is not because the Israelis want to search through grain or flour, it's because they wanted to stop the trucks containing the arms and the munitions that the Gazan, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad fighters were going to use to fire against Israel.”

Contrary to Murray’s claim, a senior Israeli government advisor, Dov Weisglass, admitted that the intention of the blockade was “to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

A 2012 report from UK-based Medical Aid for Palestinians found that the blockade caused “10% of children under five” to experience “stunted growth due to prolonged malnutrition”.

The report also found that it caused “58.6% of Gaza’s schoolchildren” to be anemic along with “68% of children aged nine to 12 months and nearly 37% of pregnant women.”

The UN found that the blockade caused “more than 90% of the water from Gaza’s only aquifer” to be “unsafe for human consumption due to pollution” while Gaza’s “sewage and water infrastructure cannot be carried out because of Israeli restrictions on the entry of building materials and equipment”.

The UN also reported that “Gaza suffered from severe shortages of electricity due to Israeli restrictions on imports of equipment needed to replace and repair the electrical infrastructure”.

A 2012 UN report found that due to the blockade

By 2020 there will be virtually no reliable access to sources of safe drinking water, standards of healthcare and education will have continued to decline, and the vision of affordable and reliable electricity for all will have become a distant memory for most. The already high number of poor, marginalized and food-insecure people depending on assistance will not have changed, and in all likelihood will have increased.

Furthermore, contrary to the claim that Israel only enacted the blockade to stop weapons, they actively sabotaged peace talks with Gaza in order to continue it.

A 2010 intelligence assessment from the U.S. government-connected intelligence firm Stratford found that “While Israel has agreed to engage in negotiations with the Palestinians, it seeks to force the failure of these negotiations by making unrealistic demands and then blame that failure on the Palestinians' unwillingness to meet those demands.”

The assessment found that the reason for this was so Israel could “appease U.S. and international pressure” to end the “blockading of the Gaza Strip” in order to “show the world that Israel's attempts at peace are being sabotaged by Palestinian intransigence.”

Finally, despite the fact that Murray denies the fact that the blockade turned Gaza into a concentration camp, even former UK prime minister David Cameron admitted that the blockade turned Gaza into “a prison camp” and “an open-air prison”.

Murray Has Done No Real Reporting In Gaza.

Murray, while never citing a single fact and figure, consistently presented himself as an expert on Gaza and Israel because he had been there.

He repeatedly said things like, “I've seen plenty of this up close; I've seen plenty of this with my own eyes” to back up his claims.

Murray attacked Dave Smith for never having been to Israel and even rejected a fact Smith cited from the World Bank by telling him to go to Gaza and “do your own analysis”.

But the only actual “reporting” Murray has done in Gaza was an IDF-guided propaganda tour in November of 2023.

In his article “reporting” from Gaza, he writes, “the IDF yesterday morning gave permission for a small number of journalists to go into Gaza with its forces to see the full scale of the war that Israel is waging against the terrorists of Hamas.”

In other words, he was taken on a guided propaganda tour and shown only what the IDF allowed him to see.

He even wrote in the article that he was taken on a “tour” of Gaza by the IDF.

Pictured Above: Murray’s IDF-guided propaganda tour in Gaza that he thinks makes him a qualified expert.

His article in Gaza contained no critical reporting, instead consisting of repeating whatever the IDF told him.

In his article, Murray claimed that Israel was “trying to save civilians from Hamas” by creating a corridor to “allow Palestinians to leave the zone of the most intense fighting and get to safety” which he claimed proved Israel wanted “to allow safe passage for innocent Palestinians who do not want to get caught up in the war.”

Even NBC news, which went on the same guided tour, debunked this.

In their report, the outlet noted that:

For many of the more than 1.6 million people who the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, says have already been displaced in Gaza since the conflict began, the route feels like a forced displacement.

The report noted that:

Some who have journeyed north to south have described horrors along the way, including walking past corpses and dismembered body parts, and hearing the sounds of intense warfare nearby. UNRWA has said many are ‘exhausted and dehydrated’ after having made the trek ‘amid unusually high temperatures.’

Unlike Murray, NBC actually spoke to a Palestinian in Gaza named Tarik Yaghi who fled through the corridor and said, “The journey was not even a journey, It was basically torture”, and said he saw “bodies thrown left and right, including dead children”.

Of course, Murray’s claim that the corridors were set up to save civilian lives was fully disproven in May of 2024 when Israel began bombing Rafah, where Palestinians displaced through the corridors resided.

The total of Murray’s on-the-ground work he so smugly touted on the podcast was a guided propaganda tour where he attempted to paint Israel’s forced displacement of Palestinians and humanitarian.

Murray is in no way any kind of neutral reporter. In April of 2024, he even received an award from the Isreali government for his propaganda services, presented to him by the Isreali president, Isaac Herzog.

Amichai Chikli, the Isreali Diaspora Minister, even thanked him for pushing Isreal’s propaganda, saying at the award ceremony, “For six months now, Douglas Murray has been right on the front lines, offering an eloquent, informed and compelling voice in defense of Israel”.

Pictured Above: Douglas Murray receiving an award from the Isreali government for his propaganda services.

Murray’s False Claims About Gaza

Finally, Murray made an endless slew of false claims about Israel’s conduct in Gaza and their intentions behind it.

Murray claims that Israel’s genocide in Gaza is being done because Israel wants to “retrieve the hostages”.

He even said, “If they had given them back (the hostages), and they could give them back tomorrow, it would all be different”.

The reality is, Hamas did offer to release the hostages in exchange for Israel not entering Gaza shortly after October 7th, and Netanyahu rejected it.

The former Israeli spokesman Haim Rubinstein revealed to the Times of Israel that:

We later found out that Hamas had offered on October 9 or 10 to release all the civilian hostages in exchange for the IDF not entering the Strip, but the government rejected the offer

Murray also claimed that “No Israeli soldier I have spoken to ever wanted to go and see Gaza again” after the ceasefire and that “They were dragged back because of Hamas's actions.”

Elsewhere on outlets like Sky News, Murray has claimed that the Gaza ceasefire was broken due to “Hamas repeatedly breaking phase one”.

These claims are just flat-out false.

A report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz found that Netanyahu intentionally sabotaged the ceasefire.

The report wrote that “Israeli sources believe Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu intends to sabotage the hostage release deal, and the delegation heading to Qatar will not advance Stage 2 of the agreement.”

One insider source told the paper, “Netanyahu is signaling quite clearly that he doesn't want to move to the next phase. He's sending a team without a mandate and without the ability to do anything.”

Another said, “Netanyahu knows he doesn't have a government if he proceeds with the deal” due to “Right-wing voters.”

A third source said:

The process is working, hostages are being released, but Hamas is doing this with the expectation of a second stage, leading to a [full] cease-fire and Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Once Hamas realizes there won't be a second stage, they may not complete the first

Hamas isn't stupid. They see the politicization of the negotiations, the appointment of Netanyahu loyalists Ron Dermer and Gal Hirsch, and the statements from Smotrich and other right-wing ministers threatening to topple the government. They'll understand where this is headed

Furthermore, Israeli sources have admitted that Netanyahu repeatedly violated the ceasefire, while Hamas did not.

The New York Times reported that

The current standoff stems in part from Hamas’s accusation that Israel has not upheld its promises for the first phase of the cease-fire. Israel was required to send hundreds of thousands of tents into Gaza, a promise that Hamas says Israel has not kept.

Three Israeli officials and two mediators, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter, said that Hamas’s claims were accurate.

Meanwhile, the Israeli newspaper, Maariv, admitted that “The defense establishment and the IDF say that so far the terrorist organization (Hamas) has not violated the (ceasefire) agreement”.

Not only is Murray’s claim that Hamas violated the ceasefire wrong, but this shows that if Netanyahu stuck to the deal, he could have returned the hostages that Murray claims he cares about, but he chose to sabotage it for his political career instead.

In the podcast, Murray finally fully leaves reality when he says “There is no desire or aim by the IAF or the IDF to go into Gaza and kill women and children.”

This is fully disproven by the fact that 70 percent of all people killed in Gaza by Israel are women and children and the fact that “the ages most represented among the dead were five to nine-year-olds”.

Furthermore, there are endless examples of the IDF deliberately targeting women and children in Gaza.

Feroze Sidhwa, a volunteer doctor who has worked saving lives in war zones across the world, said while he was working in Gaza, “Nearly every day I saw a new young child who had been shot in the head or the chest, virtually all of whom went on to die”.

This was clearly an order given from the top. Sidhwa “asked other health care workers” and “found that dozens were seeing the same thing”.

Since then, 44 international doctors in Gaza have testified that they have seen “cases of preteen children shot either in the head or the chest”.

The recent UN Human Rights Council report on sexual violence in Gaza found endless examples of the IDF targeting women, including deliberate attacks on reproductive healthcare facilities and a deliberate attack on a women’s centre, all with no military justification.

The report also cites several statements from Israeli officials encouraging violence against women in Gaza including a quote from the Former head of the National Security Council, Major General Giora Eiland who said “After all, who are Gaza’s elderly women – the same mothers and grandmothers of Hamas fighters who committed the horrific crimes on 7 October. In this situation, how can you even talk about humanitarian considerations, especially when you still have abductees whose situation God knows” and a quote from a commentator on channel 14, a mainstream Israeli channel who said “The woman is an enemy, the baby is an enemy, and the pregnant woman is an enemy”.

Murray even later said, “there is no intention on the Israeli side to cause the death of non-combatants”.

This has to be the dumbest thing Murray said in the entire debate.

Netanyahu is even on record calling for the IDF to bomb civilians. The Israeli newspaper Ynet recently reported :

When Halevy (Chief of the General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces) presented the Cabinet with the IDF's actions in the first 48 hours of the war, he noted that the air force had attacked 1,500 targets in Gaza. This is a huge number, which requires exceptional intelligence and operational capabilities. Netanyahu erupted in anger, shouting and banging on the table. "Why not 5,000?" he slammed the chief of staff. "I don't care about targets," Netanyahu replied. "Take down houses, bomb with everything there is."

Murray is claiming that Israel does not intend to kill noncombatants, while Netanyahu is on record banging on the table, calling to “take down houses” without “caring about targets”.

Furthermore, there have been 500 documented genocidal statements made towards Palestinians from Israeli officials, including from the former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant, who called Palestinians “human animals” to justify a brutal blockade that affected the entire population of Gaza.

Finally, the ICJ has ruled that it is “plausible” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, while the ICC has brought war crimes charges against Netanyahu and Gallant for “crimes against humanity and war crimes” .

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have also both put out lengthy reports that found Israel is committing Genocide in Gaza.

Trust the Experts?

Murray spent the entire first part of the debate going on and on about how important experts are just to go on to repeat a long list a falsehoods and lies used to justify the genocide he supports.

Murray wonders why people are turning away from the “official experts” more and more; the answer is that self-styled experts like himself get it wrong time and time again.