Media Integrity and Geopolitical Influences

When we planned the conversation you’re going to hear today—a live conversation with Douglas Murray—we thought it would be a searching conversation that we’d release on the anniversary of October 7th, looking back at a year of war from a slightly quieter moment. You’ll hear some of that today. But the moment is anything but quiet.

As we prepared yesterday afternoon for this conversation, the war that Iran has outsourced to its proxies for the last year finally became a war being waged by Iran itself, as it launched over 100 ballistic missiles towards Israel. Israel’s 9 million citizens huddled into bomb shelters, while missiles rained down on their homes, with a handful making direct impact. As of this recording, two people were injured, and one person was killed—that person was a Palestinian man in Jericho. Just before that onslaught, at least two terrorists opened fire at a train station in Jaffa, Israel, killing at least six people and injuring at least seven others.

For many people, this war has been all we can think about since October 7th. But I fear that for many Americans, it still feels like a faraway war. But it isn’t. This is also a battle for the free world. As my friend Sam Harris put it in the weeks after October 7th: “There are not many bright lines that divide good and evil in our world, but this is one of them.” It is a war between Israel and Iran, but it is also a war between civilization and barbarism. This was true a year ago, and it’s even more true today. Yet this testing moment has been met with alarming moral confusion.

To choose just a few examples from the last week: at the UN, 12 countries—including the U.S.—presented a plan for a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon without mentioning the word Hezbollah. Rashida Tlaib tweeted “our country is funding this bloodbath” minutes after Israel assassinated the leader of the most fearsome terrorist army on the planet, Hassan Nasrallah, who The New York Times described as “beloved,” a “towering figure,” and a “powerful orator.” It read like a letter of recommendation. At Barnard, students chanted for an intifada moments after the Jewish community memorialized six civilian hostages murdered by Hamas. At Yale, students chanted, “From Gaza to Beirut, all our martyrs we salute.” In Ottawa, protestors shouted, “Oh Zionists, where are you?” and targeted a Jewish residential street filled with schools and senior living homes, simply because the street is filled with Jewish homes and institutions. During the UN General Assembly, U.S. taxpayer dollars provided personal security for Iranian leaders, so that they could walk the streets of New York and speak before the UN—the same Iranian leaders who are plotting to kill senior American leaders.

No one understands the moral urgency of this moment better than my friend and guest today, Douglas Murray.

Douglas Murray isn’t Jewish. He has no Israeli family members. And yet it is Douglas Murray who understands the stakes of this war and the moral clarity that it requires.

Douglas’s work as a reporter has taken him to Iraq, North Korea, northern Nigeria, Ukraine, and most recently, to Israel. Douglas remained in Israel for months as he reported back with clarity, truth, and conviction. Douglas is the best-selling author of seven books, and is a regular contributor at the New York Post, the National Review, and here at The Free Press, where he writes our beloved Sunday column: “Things Worth Remembering.”

There is no one better to talk to in this moment, as we watch in real time as the Middle East—and the world as we know it—transforms before our eyes.

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