A Death Cult Masquerading as a Liberation Movement: The theology of murder, and the moral collapse of those who excuse it

A Death Cult Masquerading as a Liberation Movement

The theology of murder, and the moral collapse of those who excuse it

In episode #463 of the Lex Fridman Podcast, Douglas Murray, never one to shy from hard truths, makes an observation that cuts through the haze of geopolitical posturing and moral equivocation: the conflict in the Middle East is not, and perhaps never was, about the borders of a Palestinian state. It’s about the existence of Israel itself.

Quoting Salman Rushdie, Murray reminds us: “Palestinians have been offered a state time and again. They don’t want a state. They want to destroy a state — Israel.” This isn’t a fringe opinion; it’s an uncomfortable truth echoed throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, reflected in every peace deal rejected, every intifada launched, every charter that refuses to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist.

But Murray doesn’t stop there. He goes deeper, drawing a connection between the growing antisemitism masked as anti-Zionism and the internal collapse of Western moral confidence. In an era dominated by the Left’s theology of inescapable white guilt, many young Westerners — unable to escape the original sin of their birth — seek a scapegoat. Enter Israel. Enter the Jews.

Murray borrows from Vasily Grossman, paraphrasing: “Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, and I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.” In this light, the hatred hurled at Israel — the accusations of genocide, apartheid, colonialism — are less about the Jewish state and more a mirror of Westerners’ own unresolved sins. Colonial guilt? Project it onto Zionism. Racial injustice? Israel becomes the surrogate villain. The irony, of course, is that in their performative solidarity, the new moralists become what they claim to oppose.

In a world addicted to virtue and void of historical memory, truth becomes the casualty. And in Gaza and Tel Aviv, so do real human lives.

The day after the October 7th attacks, the sun rose over a landscape soaked in blood. The footage wasn’t vague. It wasn’t propaganda. It was real — shot by the murderers themselves. Civilians gunned down in their homes. Young women raped and paraded through the streets of Gaza like trophies of conquest. Children — toddlers — executed in front of their parents. Entire families burned alive in safe rooms. Israeli music festival goers — peaceniks, pacifists, the very people who marched for Palestinian statehood — hunted like animals, shot while running, dragged across the dirt like meat.

And in Gaza? Celebration. Fireworks. Cheers. Sweets handed out in the streets. A massacre of civilians — and the response was jubilation.

Some of the attackers, drunk on the ecstasy of blood, paused mid-rampage to FaceTime their parents and boast. “Look what I did, Dad.” Grinning men holding up bloodied women by the hair. Laughing about rape. About killing the innocent. About butchering strangers who had never raised a hand against them. Not soldiers. Not occupiers. Just humans. Mothers. Grandparents. Children.

And this is what we’re told is the resistance.

The victims that day were not fanatics. They were Jews and Arabs, Druze and Christians, students and stoners, musicians and aid workers. Many of them believed in peace. Many had protested the Israeli government just days before. They believed — foolishly, tragically — that if they opened their hearts, if they lowered their walls, something human might reach back.

What reached back was death.

Sam Harris once called it “a death cult masquerading as a liberation movement.” He was talking about the theology — and that’s what it is — that animates groups like Hamas. This isn’t political. It isn’t about 1967 borders or economic inequality. It is eschatological. The kind of violence we witnessed was not strategic. It was ritualistic. Religious. Sacrificial.

Imagine an American evangelical awakening — not fringe but mainstream — embedded in churches, media, local governments. They believe that Christ’s return requires a blood sacrifice, that the sins of modernity must be cleansed through fire and death. They gather arms. They train their sons. And one morning, they sweep north from the Bible Belt and the plains, launching coordinated attacks on New York, Chicago, San Francisco.

They livestream themselves raping women in Brooklyn, burning families alive in Oakland, crucifying children in Boston — quoting scripture as they go. Soldiers call home to their moms in Alabama and Texas, beaming as they show off the corpses of the “unbelievers.” They take trophies. They dance in the streets. Churches erupt in celebration. Social media explodes with hashtags praising the holy purge.

And then imagine this: instead of unanimous horror, major newsrooms equivocate. College students justify the attacks. Professors write open letters about “context.” Editorials in The New York Times frame it as “resistance.” Major cities light up their buildings — not in memory of the victims, but in solidarity with the murderers.

Would you say, “Well, this is complicated”? Would Harvard host a vigil for the attackers? Because that’s what happened. That’s what is happening.What Harris, Murray, and a few still-clear-eyed thinkers are trying to say is this: it’s not about borders. It never was. If it were, peace would’ve come in 1947, in 1967, in 2000, in 2008. If it were about dignity, the billions in aid wouldn’t be funneled into rockets and tunnels and guns.

This is not a liberation movement. It is a religion of annihilation. And here in the West — soft, sentimental, guilty — we kneel before it. But this isn’t just about Western projection. It’s also about who we’re projecting onto — and who we’re excusing.

There is a lie at the core of every protest for “Free Palestine” — the lie that Hamas is the voice of the oppressed. That it is a people’s resistance. That it is liberation.

In truth, Hamas is a regime of billionaires, deeply entrenched and fully backed by the people who elected them. In 2006, Gazans were not coerced or threatened into voting. They chose Hamas in a democratic election. And when Hamas massacred Israeli civilians, they celebrated — not under duress, but with pride.

Western governments pour billions into Gaza under the banner of humanitarian aid. But the cement is not poured into schools or hospitals. It is poured into reinforced concrete tunnels that twist beneath the homes of the innocent — not to protect them, but to guarantee their deaths can be broadcast for sympathy.

These tunnels aren’t defensive. They’re offensive launchpads. They’re storage depots for rockets, weapons, hostages. They’re the arteries of an underground state built to wage permanent war. And the innocent live atop them like skin stretched over bone.

And while Gazan civilians are told to martyr themselves, the leaders of Hamas live far from the carnage. Ismail Haniyeh — the face of Hamas — resides in Doha, Qatar, not Gaza. He flies private, dines in five-star hotels, and sends his children to Western universities. He’s worth over a billion dollars. So are his deputies. It is a mafia state — cloaked in the language of liberation — feeding off its own people like a parasite.

Meanwhile, step into the average home in Gaza and you won’t find a copy of Martin Luther King Jr. or Gandhi. You’ll find Mein Kampf, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and children raised on the belief that Jews are animals. Not metaphorically — literally. “Sons of apes and pigs,” they are taught. Death is not a tragedy in this system. It is a calling.

This is not the story of a freedom movement. It’s the story of a society shaped by hatred, ruled by men who get rich off murder, and celebrated by Western institutions too blind or too broken to see the truth.

But the asymmetry goes deeper than just tactics — it is embedded in intention. In 2008, Yahya Sinwar, who would go on to become the leader of Hamas, was in an Israeli prison with a brain tumor. The Israelis didn’t let him die. They didn’t execute him. They saved his life. An Israeli surgeon — likely Jewish — operated on him and removed the tumor. Sinwar lived. And with that second chance, he doubled down on the mission of Hamas: to wipe Israel off the map.

What did Israel do with power? It saved the life of a sworn enemy. What did Sinwar do with survival? He planned October 7th.Hamas doesn’t hide its goals. It proudly prints them. Article 7 of the Hamas Charter reads:

“The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews and kill them. Then the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: O Muslim, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”

This isn’t metaphor. This isn’t fringe. It’s doctrine — recited in schools, quoted in sermons, and believed.And here is where Sam Harris makes perhaps the clearest moral diagnosis of the entire conflict:

“If the Jews of Israel put down their weapons tomorrow, there would be a second Holocaust. If the Palestinians put down their weapons, there would be peace.”

It is not complicated. It is a matter of what each side would do if given absolute power. Israel, flawed and human, would likely keep doing what it is doing — trying to survive, defending its borders, absorbing world condemnation. But if Hamas and its sympathizers were given unchecked authority, they would kill every Jew — in Tel Aviv, in Jerusalem, in London, in Brooklyn. They say it. They sing it. They believe it.

But how do you make peace with those who dance at the murder of children? How do you negotiate with men who livestream rape and smile? How do you coexist with an ideology that sees your existence as the problem — not your policies, not your borders, but your very breath?

You don’t. You confront it.

What happened on October 7th was not a tragedy in the classical sense. It wasn’t senseless. It wasn’t random. It was the product of an idea. A theology. A culture that worships death and calls it divine. And what followed — the applause, the rationalizations, the rallies in New York and London — proved that this idea is not contained to Gaza. It has metastasized. It has found fertile ground in the minds of those who hate their own civilization and need a surrogate devil to cast out.

Israel became that devil. And the Jews — again, as so many times before — became the vessel into which the world poured its bile.Douglas Murray is right. This is not just about antisemitism. It’s about us — our decay, our cowardice, our refusal to draw moral lines. And Sam Harris is right too. This is not a political struggle. It’s a spiritual one.

A culture that worships death cannot be reasoned with. A civilization that apologizes for life does not deserve to survive. And if the West does not find its spine, its memory, and its moral clarity, then we will deserve what comes next — because we saw the fire, and instead of putting it out, we offered it kindling.