Douglas Murray, an apologist for the Gaza genocide, closely linked to the Islamophobic Henry Jackson society think tank, was intending to raise funds for Zionist soldiers perpetrating the Gaza genocide until his plans came unstuck thanks to a boycott by ordinary shop-floor workers.
Veteran Islamophobe, Douglas Murray, failed in his attempt to publicly raise money for Israeli soldiers in London.
Following his time embedded with the Israeli occupation forces in Gaza, Murray returned to London hoping he could contribute to the genocide effort.
The event that Douglas Murray was supposed to hold hit a stumbling block when workers refused to show up, even though they offered three times their usual wage. The Apollo Theater also refused to hold the event due to public outcry.
While Murray has recently become more transparently pro Israel, his relationship with the Zionist entity is nothing new.
Alongside executive director Alan Mendoza, Douglas Murray served as a director of the Henry Jackson society for many years. Mendoza is also simultaneously the president of the JNF, the biggest settlement building body in Palestine. The patrons include the Israeli President and Prime Minister.
The Henry Jackson society, in fact, shares funders with the West Bank illegal settlement and the Israeli military.
Former Israeli ambassador to the UN, Dore Gold, and Israel lobbyists, Natan Sharansky, are both patrons of the Henry Jackson society. At least two former employees of the Henry Jackson society have taken jobs at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Senior investigator at the Henry Jackson Society was once the Israeli Prime Minister spokesperson, the Israeli Minister of Defense’s media advisor and the head of strategic war games in the Israeli military’s Operations Directorate.
While in occupied Palestine, Murray spent time with President Isaac Herzog, and was gifted a map of occupied Palestine by Israeli military personnel, he all but took up arms himself in the war on Gaza.
This advocate for genocide will certainly find it hard to find support outside of the Zionist entity.
Astroturfing and Zionist influence in the Media
What is astroturfing and is Douglas Murray actually applying it?
So astroturfing means fake grassroots. So it’s a term which is supposed to indicate that that grassroots campaigning is actually being faked by big money, and usually by corporations, but in this case, we’re talking about Imperial interests.
Douglas Murray is this affable chap from a posh school and a posh University, who goes on to talk about how misunderstood Israel is, and in a way you could see him as a kind of posh ‘astroturfor’ for Israeli interests.
They have lots of these people who retail the Zionist talking points and appear to be independent journalists, who are actually pursuing the interests of the Zionists.
David Miller, Academic
Would you say that Murray was punching above his weight with this attempt?
I think it is interesting that David talks about the privileged background that Murray had because, obviously, he went to Eton and Oxford but he actually did start off in a comprehensive school, which his parents took him out of after a short period of time, and he has since that time talked about it being a city state school.
So he has that very privileged perspective from up high, which he looks down on people and I suspect it’s probably because he got the scholarship to Eton, that he’s able now to say and do some of the things that he’s saying, In terms of punching above his weight, obviously, as egalitarians we prefer not to label people in such terms perhaps but in terms of a skill set, it does seem very strange that some of the things that he comes up with in terms of identity from somebody who hasn’t got a sociological background, he’s very much fixated on obviously right wing philosophy.
So it’s not a critical thinking background at all. So in relation to punching above the weight, if we’re going to use that term, you know, you wouldn’t employ anybody other than a mechanic to mend your car or or engineers to create your bridges.
So you kind of hope that you have different people, if they’re going to give their perspective on society, in place other than Douglas Murray.
Jason Cridland, Journalist
David, give us just a bit of background on the Henry Jackson society.
The Henry Jackson society, created around 2005, is the leading Islamophobic think tank in the UK, there are others like the Policy Exchange, for example, but the Henry Jackson society is much more focused on Islam related stuff than that even the Policy Exchange is.
I mean, it’s funded, this is one of the key things we found early on when we looked at its funders, its top funders are almost all from Zionist family foundations who also fund illegal settlements, the IDF, and sometimes, Jewish supremacist groups.
So this is an organization which is set up to push Islamophobia, and to push the government, in particular, to go further and farther with Islamophobic policies like, for example, the government’s counterterrorism policy PREVENT, to target especially Muslims and not to look anywhere else for extremism, especially not in the British Jewish community in relation to the support, or sections of support, for Zionism.
David Miller, Academic
A number of members of parliament are also involved, are they not?
Yes, indeed, this is an elite organization, It’s not on the streets, English Defence League, pushing Islamophobia.
It’s in the corridors of power. It has MPs, members of the House of Lords, on its advisory board, including Labour MPs, of course, and it’s supposed to operate at an elite level to push government in more and more Islamophobic directions.
And that’s been very successful.
David Miller, Academic
Jason, what do you think of Douglas Murray’s relationship with the Murdoch media empire?
It’s not surprising, is it Chris, if you look at the background of Rupert Murdoch in relation to the News of the World and the Sun, it is linked to Talk TV, it is linked to Fox News, etc.
He seems to be the classic type, Douglas Murray, to fit the glove of the type of person that that Murdoch likes to propel into positions that have an audience.
Jason Cridland, Journalist
We know that Murdoch, himself is very supportive of the Zionist entity and organizations supportive of Zionism.
But, what do we know about the Technion organization which sponsored Murray’s talk?
Well, the Technion is an Israeli University. You know, one of a handful of Israel universities, each one of them has a charity in the UK to raise funds for them there is the Ben Gurion University, the Tel Aviv University.
There is even a university called Ariel which is in an illegal settlement. And there’s an organization in the UK that raises funds for that as well. And all of them, of course, have some involvement in the settlements.
Obviously, Ariel is directly in a settlement, but all the other universities are engaged with the IDF, engaged with the settlements, and so [with] each one of these organizations there’s reason to raise questions about boycott in relation to them.
But Technion itself, the charity in this country, I mean, there’s a real difficulty here and all the charities which are operating legally in this country, supporting effectively what’s going on in Gaza.
The Technion, specifically in relation to this question of the IDF, It’s supposed to be a university charity, supposed to be supporting learning, and actually we see that it is engaged in directly supporting the IDF, an indication that the problem with charities in this country goes much further than just those charities which directly support the IDF to a whole range of other charities.
David Miller, Academic
Where is the Charity Commission on all this? Have they said anything? Have they investigated? Have they have called them to account for this?
I don’t think there’s any investigation on the Technion yet, but there is an investigation on several other charities for example, there’s one called the Association for the Wellbeing of Israel’s Soldiers (AWIS), which we dealt with in a previous program, there’s an investigation in relation to that.
I suspect there will be many more investigations because we’re finding more and more charities. Just the other week we find another 25 or so charities supporting the IDF.
So there’s a real question here about why the Charity Commission doesn’t deal with these things. It has previously investigated very many Muslim charities for doing not very much at all.
David Miller, Academic
How receptive do you think they’ve been?
They’re not receptive because, of course, there are prominent Zionists at the top of the Charity Commission; Lord Shawcross was there for some considerable time.
And that’s the problem with almost all elite organizations like that you have prominent Zionists in place who can block this kind of thing.
David Miller, Academic
Jason, what does this say about public perception that the workers initially refused to staff Murray’s event at that first venue, where he had to beat retreat from as it were?
This obviously has shadows of your experiences in 2019, Chris, when we were trying to organize a book launch in Brighton at the Labour Party Conference, and it was shut down by people who were obviously trying to prevent the voices that were challenging the way in which anti semitism was being politicized.
But in this instance, obviously, it’s a different scenario in that, in this instance, it’s challenging the genocide, It’s challenging the Zionist voices that are propelling this vile narrative.
And, ultimately, you’ve got to applaud people who very much are willing to say, ‘I’m not prepared to do this. I’m prepared to stand up for my morality and my principles, over and above the three times the hourly income that you’re prepared to pay me in order to turn up at my job’.
I think, ultimately, we should celebrate that and we should continue celebrating that sort of society when people unite in communities to stand up against oppression and, as I say, disgusting voices.
Jason Cridland, Journalist
Particularly when people have been disciplined for taking a stand in support of Palestine or criticizing the Zionist entity.
Although Professor David Miller’s successful employment tribunal case, hopefully will put paid to some of that discrimination that we’ve seen people being subjected to in the past.
Ben Shapiro, US Astroturf
Another astroturfing Zionist Islamophobe, who has been pushed in the same circles as Douglas Murray, is Ben Shapiro. Long before his recent foray into rap music, Ben Shapiro penned an article about the Palestinians titled ‘Transfer is Not a Dirty Word’.
It has since been deleted from the internet.
The genocidal piece reads as follows: “If you believe that Israel has a right to exist, then you must allow Israel to transfer the Palestinians, and Israeli Arabs, from Judea, Samaria, Gaza, and Israel proper. Time to stop being squeamish. Transfer is not genocide.”
Before founding his current venture, The Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro was funded by Robert Schulman, a tech billionaire on the board of Israeli military charity, the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF).
Shapiro and the co founder of The Daily Wire, Jeremy Boreing, both helped Israel lobbyist Dennis Prager set up the YouTube channel Prager University, where they worked on the Israeli unit 8200 Military Intelligence.
In the early days of the daily wire Shapiro got millions of dollars of funding from fracking billionaires, the Wilkes brothers. The Wilkes brothers also fund the Liberty Council, which has a ‘Stand with Israel’ campaign, where they host Netanyahu as a speaker.
Today, the chief operating officer of The Daily Wire is John Lewis, a former intelligence analyst in the US Marine Corps.
The Daily Wire also employed former US military intelligence officer Wesley Schmidt in Customer Service Analytics. Also The Daily Wire is funded by Cape technologies, whose CEO is an Israeli intelligence unit veteran.
Ben Shapiro is another astroturf racist in the same vein as Douglas Murray, dispatched to wage psychological warfare to aid the Zionist entity and it’s a genocidal war against Palestinians and the people of the region.
When the activist Rachel Corrie was killed by a Zionist thug a few years ago, Ben Shapiro made some offensive comments about it.
He said that she was one of the greatest idiots at the time.
And of course, Rachel Corrie is an iconic figure. I mean, there is that famous video of her as a young child, talking about wanting to make the world better, and then of course she was murdered by the Zionists.
This is a non violent activist who is who is essentially murdered by designers for nothing and that’s the level of debate that we get from someone like Ben Shapiro.
David Miller, Academic
Jason, tell us about Rachel Corrie’s case and why Ben Shapiro’s words have been deemed so offensive.
Almost makes you choke with emotion when you talk about Rachel Corrie. As David said, she was somebody who was basically passively standing up against the Israeli regime. To cut a long story short, she was she was run over by a bulldozer. The Israeli state claimed that the Israeli driver of the bulldozer didn’t see her.
Her parents then appealed to the only place that they could go to the Israeli courts arguing that full extensive investigation never took place. And the decisions were very quickly made about who was responsible because the Israeli state effectively blamed Rachel for the outcome.
And (then) they went to the Supreme Court, which found in favor of the Israeli state, and then they repealed it, the parents repealed it and again, the Supreme Court found in favor of the Israeli state.
So we’ve never had a full investigation. We’ve never been able to identify exactly what happened. And it’s led to people offering suggestions as to what took place from both sides, which never should have happened because there should have been a very clear investigation that found out exactly who was responsible and why.
Jason Cridland, Journalist
Ben Shapiro’s position at the David Horowitz Freedom Center was funded by a director of the charity that funds the Israeli military.
What can you tell us about the so called friends of the IDF?
Well, let’s remember that David Horowitz Center is one of the key Islamophobic think tanks in the US, part of what’s been called the Islamophobic network, of course, largely funded by Zionists and, unsurprisingly, the people who funded this organization also fund the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, which of course, is the US equivalent of the organization, the Association for the Well Being of Israel’s Soldiers, and these send millions of dollars every year directly to the so called Israeli Defense Forces.
And, you know, the whole problem with this is that it is embedded in US culture, like there is in UK culture, there’s a massive support for genocide in Palestine and there needs to be defective action taken against these kinds of organizations is a 5013 c nonprofit.
It should be closed down; there should be no space in US public culture for such an organization.
David Miller, Academic
Do propagandists like Shapiro and Murray actually get a lot of traction or indeed any traction with young people in this country?
I think it’s quite a complicated discussion.
The right, as David has pointed out, have far more resources and because they have far more resources, they can utilize social media and they can utilize the different outputs that exist.
Also, we tend to live in a society, unfortunately, where the level of critical thinking and the level of understanding operate within a very much consumerist society and also operates within society, (in) which social media obviously has become very much the norm.
And therefore, the attention spans of people generally, not just young people, is very much not about being an analytical evaluative but it’s about passing through very, very quickly, different types of stories.
So if you’re being bombarded by the right wing voices, as opposed to alternative voices, they’re the ones that obviously, will blight your consciousness.
So it’s a difficult question, because ultimately, young people as well, when they come to have an opportunity at the ballot box are one of the lowest groups in terms of turn out. So you don’t actually get to see who they vote for.
But then of course, the current climate means that you can vote for the conservatives, or you can vote for Keir Starmer’s Labour doesn’t really give us a picture of either.
So, I would say the potential is there for us. Yes, for young people to be captivated by certain people who have access to multimedia channels across the board and because of their resources and because also, they are offering a simplistic answer.
They’re offering an emotive answer, as opposed to a much more complicated answer that the left provide, even if we do need complicated answers to complicated questions.
Jason Cridland, Journalist
In terms of the influence on young people, obviously they’ve got a lot of resources that you’ve identified that they deploy to try to dupe young people, and I suppose the population in general, but just looking at the turnout at the pro Palestinian marches around the country, a lot of young people are taking part now.
So maybe it is not as effective as it had been in the past, wouldn’t you say?
Well, we certainly hope that’s the case, but until they’re given the democratic freedoms in order to propel their narrative forward, unfortunately, it just demonstrations, where young people, especially from urban areas, are congregating.
But we need to give them so much more empowerment and so much more space.
Jason Cridland, Journalist
What steps do you think should be taken to hold the venue accountable that did eventually host Murray’s event?
The venue was the St. John’s Wood synagogue, and that’s obviously a place of worship for Jewish people. And the St. John’s Wood synagogue is part of what’s called the United Synagogue, which is the largest synagogue movement of the five or six that exist in the UK.
Now until December last year, on its website, the United synagogue had that it was a Zionist Organization; It seems to have removed the epithet ‘Zionist’ from its website.
Although, of course, there are a number of Zionist organizations which are registered to the same address as the organization itself, so this is a Zionist synagogue movement.
And so we shouldn’t be surprised that they would host an Islamophobe like Douglas Murray. But it also means, of course, that this is a charity and it’s vulnerable to complaints to the Charity Commission, the United Synagogues Charity and St. John’s Wood Synagogue itself is a charity vulnerable to complaints to the Charity Commission about putting on and ‘platforming’ racists.
That’s what we should be doing with all of these organizations.
These organizations should be given the opportunity to say ‘we have seen the error of our ways. We no longer sign up to Zionism and genocide and we will remove ourselves and resign from the Zionist movement’. That makes sure that they’re just there to represent Jews.
David Miller, Academic
Jason, why do you think these propagandists get so much mainstream support?
Their backgrounds, they come from similar backgrounds in terms of the public school networks, in terms of the top universities, so it’s very much (a matter of) who you know.
In terms of, obviously, the power of lobbyists, very much again, they are more right wing, pro-capitalist, they have much more money behind them so they get their voices heard.
We have Tufton Street which is a basically a street full of right wing think tanks.
The very wealthy owners of our media are, of course, generally right wing, and, as I say, billionaires, and powerful, and influential, and also advertising.
The competition for advertising across the media means that the narrative is kept relatively simplistic.
And as I said before, the right wing voices tend to be more simplistic.
Jason Cridland, Journalist
