joining me now is one of the finest thinkers of his generation bestselling author Douglas Murray Douglas let's start in the Middle East where the fragile ceasefire in Gaza has been shattered Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the authorized the renewal of military action against hassk after their failure to release hostages or abide by the conditions of a US proposal to extend the ceasefire this military action has been condemned by the likes of the Saudis Qatar Egypt a number of countries in the region all very predictable but Douglas Israel is also facing heavy criticism from France
and irand and a number of other European countries uh what do you make of that what do you make of this refusal to un from from so many in the west to understand what Israel is facing right now well it's sort of PA of the course unfortunately um hamz has repeatedly broken its side of deals in the stage one of the ceasefire agreement we saw that not least in its obscene uh Handover ceremonies of Israeli hostages including its obscene uh uh parading of the coffin of Israeli babies uh to in front of jubilant crowds in
Gaza the other week uh on top of the war crimes that hamaz has committed by abducting and torturing killing Israeli citizens uh it's of course continued to commit war crimes during this phase of the ceasefire deal uh phase two of the ceasefire deal by the way has always been a problem because it requires Hamas to hand over all the remaining hostages as they should have done on October the 8th 2023 but it requires them to do so um and for Israeli troops to withdraw completely from uh the Gaza now the problem for that is of
course is that hamz although it's been significantly degraded is as we've seen from these obscene Handover ceremonies not completely destroyed in Gaza and there is therefore a likelihood inevitability that hamz would continue to rule or misgoverned to the Israelis because the Israelis had two stated War aims from the beginning of this war number one to get back every hostage stolen from their homes by Hamas and two to destroy hamz and you just can't allow Hamas to remain in power the Israelis can't the the uh various countries in the region condemn that is completely unsurprising uh
that's sort of what they have to say even as in some cases they're urging Israel on the fact that France uh uh would criticize Israel among other Western countries is also unsurprising sadly uh it'll be interesting to see next time France fights a war uh when it does uh whether it holds its Army to the kind of accountability that the Israelis do theirs uh my own observation of French military action in the K Divo and the Middle East and elsewhere is that they do exactly what they want and they don't listen to any any International
condemnation so you know sad as it is to say perhaps the isra should ignore the French just as the French tend to ignore the world that's good advice there um I want to ask you about the Russian Ukraine war President zalinsky we know has accepted the us peace deal and earlier today the White House released details of President Trump's discussions with Vladimir Putin Douglas uh Trump is pushing the Russians to agree to an unconditional ceasefire but so far Putin is only ordered his military to adhere to a 30-day ceasefire on Ukraine's energy infrastructure zalinski says
he fears the Russians don't want an end to this war Douglas what do they have to gain by extending this mutually disastrous conflict well what Russia has to gain is that they will hope that Western support for Ukraine uh runs out or runs down uh and that they can slowly incrementally whether or not during this presidency of Trumps or whether during a future presidency continue their war and take over the whole of Ukraine as they tried to do in 2022 um I I mean it's extremely hard with agreements with people like Putin not that there
are that many but we have quite a number of dictators in the world now as always it's it's hard to know what of their word you can trust because the obvious thing is absolutely nothing um zalinski is answerable not just to Western uh itical uh alliances that are supportive of him uh but is also of course has to be uh um having the backing the support in the end of the Ukrainian public and indeed the Ukrainian Army uh who are fighting on uh um whereas Putin doesn't really have to have anyone's support it's just himself
in his own view uh along with a small number of people around him uh and so then you know you have this sort of thing of well what of Putin's word can you trust and I don't think anyone has ever dealt with him or ever seen the way he deals would think that you can trust Putin very much the the the promise not to attack uh um energy and other infrastructure is not a very useful promise from Vladimir Putin given it that it's one he's he's given only within recent weeks and promptly done exactly what
he said he wouldn't do he he gave another Assurance some time ago that the Russians would not attack Ukrainian energy infrastructure and then the next night actually whilst I was there they did exactly that so um it's extremely hard um president Trump is trying to negotiate a final piece and I think should be uh um admire you know acknowledged for doing so but uh it's an extremely difficult deal uh to pull off and we we'll see it is extremely difficult to pull off as as you've explained uh to the UK uh the uh you've written
about this issue the attacks on Free Speech free expression the starma government there wants a working definition of the term islamophobia I could uh help them with that but I don't think they're going to like my suggestion uh you've argued that islamophobia laws are just censorship uh another attempt it to uh invent special rights for just one Faith group what do you say to those who argue do Britain's Muslims need further protection well I I think it's pretty outrageous for lots of reasons I mean one of them is that British Muslims have the same protection
as any other citizen in the United Kingdom uh you're not allowed to harass or you know attack or attack places of worship or buildings or anything else and those laws exist for everybody of any faith and none and the problem about this attempt by by uh the labor government with a really disastrous former conservative MP leading it uh to set up this commission that's going to try to identify so-called islamophobia is um is among other things it's simply not going to work nobody's ever been able to satisfactorily Define islamophobia um because it's almost impossible in
fact it is impossible to draw a line uh between um you know well among other things to allow it to remain to say anything critical of the religion of Islam or anything that seems to offend any large Muslim group or indeed any individual Muslim I mean when people in in the UK as in other Western countries start talking about islamophobia laws among other things I really want them to answer the question of why it is they are so obsessed with this non-issue of defining an absolutely indefinable term and why they don't spend more time for
instance instead of talking about this fake phobia talking about I don't know the school teacher in Bley in the north of England who remains in hiding several years after he was accused of blasphemy by local Muslim leaders in the north of England for um talking about cartoons of uh Islam's founder Muhammad I mean I wouldn't mind if the government was looking into Batley grammar school phobia uh for its teachers or the the the many other things like I mean how about the uh I mean what about looking into why one of rmps uh David Amos
was slaughtered by a jihadist a couple of years ago when he was meeting constituents I mean what what what are there more protections that the rest of the population can have against uh uh people driving cars into the crowd shouting Allah abbar and so on uh are we allowed to talk about the intimidation of of journalists writers and others across Europe uh and citizens teachers all sorts of people or are we just going to always have this pandering uh to a a small community that makes itself extremely vocal and unfortunately as I said in that
piece in the telegraph um has this this tendency to say instead of we are ourselves going to separate out the extremists in our faith from everyone else instead of doing that uh uh say how can we better protect our faith from any external criticism I think this is a a disastrous route to go down and I'm afraid that the government will discover that in due course well it seems to be all about submission here it's it's it's pandering and it doesn't end in a in a good place I can can tell you that from someone
who escaped an islamist country uh the pandering uh leads just to more demands and uh yeah it's it's and it's bizarre at a time when we've had this explosion in anti-Semitism in the UK that there's so much focus on islamophobia so perhaps I don't know look at where some of that anti-Semitism comes from right absolutely I mean this is this is one of the things is if you identify for instance the fact that significant number numers of Islamic hate preachers have at mosques up and down the country since October the 7th preached the most rancid
hatred of Jews and encouraged and here we get into into the real bit that should be uh uh illegal actually encouraged the violence of terrorist groups like hamz um where do you what stage do you get to when even highlighting that which isn't highlighted enough could instead of being a a a legit complaint about extremists in a minority Faith group be said itself to be a thought crime or a hate crime um they will never be able to work this out these uh self-appointed theologians like these idiots from the British government and the and the
former idiot conservative MP they'll never be able to do it uh and they will never be able to draw as fine a line as they think they can because such a line does not exist H well said now let's talk about something a little bit more more frivolous uh tonight we have the Melbourne Premiere or preview of Snow White uh Disney's latest version of the classic fairy tale but it's a woke reimagining and Douglas you wrote in the New York Post that Disney's uh seems to be quietly terrified of how this project will fare uh
so much so that they are pretty much hiding the star of the movie Rachel zegler and uh if you watch this you'll understand why the original cartoon came out in 1937 and very evidently so um there is a big focus on her love story um with a guy who literally STS her weird weird so we didn't do that this time oh gosh Douglas this remake is reportedly uh to have cost more than 200 million and Disney seemed too scared to properly promote this movie it it's it's quite Disney has had a terrible run of it
uh because it's it's still it's still as a studio trying to pump out the sort of uh material which might have been briefly thought to be a good idea in I don't know the summer of 2020 um but really looks horribly dated and actually misreading situation now I mean you know I think I've said to you before Rita but that in general when they do these remakes and they're done by people who hate the original like you know Snow White just has to be the woman she knows she can be and the leader she believes
she can be um maybe you should just invent a different story uh and and and call call it something different um and uh uh Disney seemed to know that they've uh got another stinker of a movie here I might be wrong uh but um they seem to know rather like their pretty woke remake of Peter Pan a couple of years ago that bombed at the box office Disney clearly know that they've got to silence their star and uh that's why last week that the the huge launch uh of of the film was in the middle
of nowhere in Spain at a castle that was said to have inspired uh the original cartoon the castling question is is is far away uh from most people there about 100 people were invited which you can't say is the uh average uh sort of movie premiere set up uh I mentioned in my post column but as well as sending her to a far off Castle you can't help thinking that Disney's executives must have been wishing they could also give the star a poisoned Apple that would set her to sleep uh for many years so she
didn't appear in front of the world's press again anytime soon and diminish the movie She's meant to be promoting oh I'm sure they have Market tested the reaction to Rachel Ziggler and found it to be enormously negative so we can understand why they're trying to hide her but you're so right if you want to have this empowering story about a woman who doesn't need a prince to save her it's all about her career and finding herself whatever the write a new story why do you want to trade off the Snow White Title and then completely
uh change the story that people have loved for Generations Douglas Mar you and I need to get into Hollywood and just straighten that place out uh thank you for your time tonight thank you
