Douglas Murray, the 27-year old Oxford-educated British writer, was in town last week, talking at breakfast about his new book, “Neoconservatism: Why We Need It.”
He is an engaging, polished speaker, and the book is both an interesting theoretical and historical explanation of neoconservatism and a spirited argument for its centrality to contemporary foreign policy.
In his article in The New York Sun yesterday (hat tip: Scott Johnson), Daniel Freedman wrote:
Douglas Murray isn’t a man you’d immediately peg as being a self-described neoconservative and Zionist. Eton and Oxford educated, an Anglican — sorry, a "practicing Anglican," as he corrects me — and complete with the chiseled features and upper-class accent one associates with the British aristocracy, Mr. Murray almost seems out of place declaring his admiration for the Jewish State, Leo Strauss, and everything else the left sneeringly associates with neoconservativism.
But the man who tells me with complete certainty over a dinner on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that "any sensible person is a Zionist," who when in Holland needs police protection and stays under an alias, can hardly be described as an ordinary individual. . . .
Upon finishing
Oxford he wrote a play, "Nightfall," about the Swedish anti-Nazi hero Raoul Wallenberg. . . . Mr. Murray lectures and debates across Europe in support of what he describes as neoconservative foreign policy. He also writes for, and is profiled in, numerous publications, and is known on the British television chat show circuit as " Britain’s only neoconservative." With such a resume it’s hardly surprising that Mr. Murray has been described as a "prodigy" and a "great hope" in Europe. . . .
His book is worth reading. Here is an excerpt from pages 118-120:
[T]he events of 2001 confirmed what many neocons had held all along — that in the mine of twenty-first century terror, Israel had long been the canary. The warnings that what had happened to
Israel would happen to the West went unheeded. The warning that Islamic terror was aimed at the West and would strike there if, or when, it could also went unheeded. In 1995, Benjamin Netanyahu had written: It is impossible to understand just how inimical — and how deadly — to the United States and to Europe this rising tide of militant Islam is without taking a look at the roots of Arab-Islamic hatred of the West. Because of the Western media’s fascination with Israel, many today are under the impression that the intense hostility prevalent in the Arab and Islamic world toward the United States is a contemporary phenomenon, the result of Western support for the Jewish state, and that such hostility would end if an Arab-Israeli peace was eventually reached. But nothing could be more removed from the truth. The enmity toward the West goes back many centuries, remaining to this day a driving force at the core of militant Arab-Islamic political culture. And this would be the case even if
Israel had never been born. . . . For neocons, Netanyahu’s warnings had proved accurate. “The democracies have wasted much time in addressing the question of resurgent Islamic terror,” Netanyahu had warned in 1995. “They are approaching the twelfth hour. They can wait no longer.” Yet wait they did, and the twelfth hour arrived in the skies of
New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania.
In
Not bad for a 27-year old Anglican.