The Blurry Line Between Democracies and Death Cults

Douglas Murray makes a poignant observation towards the end of his latest book, On Democracies and Death Cults—which examines Israel’s response to the brutal terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023. He notes that while Israel is engaged in a life-and-death struggle for its very survival, America is “obsessing about the exact date at which you should be able to abort a child,” and Britain is arguing about “when you might kill an old person.” Is this really “the highest [expression] of human achievement and peace?” Murray asks. Though I don’t know his position on abortion, I appreciate the implication. As Israel fights to protect the lives of its people, many in America and Britain fight to push the oldest and youngest of its people beyond the bounds of moral obligation. It’s a stark dichotomy, except for the fact that Israel is every bit as committed to abortion as America—at least in theory.

As I pointed out in December 2023, Israel kills more of its own children on any given day than Hamas did on October 7, and the Israeli health minister openly rebuked the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 for revoking the federal protection it had granted abortion since 1973. So when Murray suggests that “Canada, Britain, Europe, Australia, and America should be so lucky as to produce a generation of people like Israel has,” my first inclination was to think: Yes, but… That being said, the numbers tell a somewhat different story.

In 2023, there were a reported 15,089 abortions in Israel against 178,724 births. Excluding miscarriages, that means that 7.8% of unborn children in Israel were killed by abortion in 2023. In America, that number is almost three times as high. It currently sits at 22%. For England and Wales, a whopping 29% of their unborn children were aborted in 2022—the most recent year for which data is available. Israel also has a birth rate that significantly exceeds that of any other developed nation and, contrary to normal trend lines, has seen an increase in fertility since being dragged into war. America’s fertility rate reached an all-time low in 2024 at 1.6 children per woman. Britain’s fell to its own record low of 1.4 while Israel’s 2024 fertility rate climbed to 2.9 children per woman.

So when Douglas Murray says that Israel’s commitment to the preservation of human life supersedes that of its peers, I’m inclined to agree. In fact, the Jewish fertility rate in Israel was 3.06 in 2024, which is both higher than the national average and higher than the 2.75 attributed to Israel’s Muslim residents—who make up about a fifth of the population. That surprised me, and encouraged me. Because you’d be hard pressed to read On Democracies and Death Cultsand come away thinking that one world view is just as good as the next. I had softened a bit on Murray after his debate with Dave Smith and follow up with Bari Weiss, which were the only times I’ve heard him and been anything less than impressed, but his new book is compelling—and made the perceived severity of my own hardships entirely melt away. Israelis are used to Hamas trying to kill them with bombs and missiles. That’s why their homes are equipped with shelters. What they’re not used to is armed invaders trying to kill them with knives and firearms—which is why those shelters didn’t have locks on the doors. Reading story after story of families trying to secure said doors against their killers was a chastening exercise in perspective. I may have problems, but I do not have armed terrorists trying to torture, rape, and kill my family problems.

In light of all this, perhaps you’re wondering what gives me the right to introduce the subject of abortion at all. Aren’t there enough real problems in the world to be dealing with? That’s certainly how lots of people feel, but I’ll remind you that it wasn’t me who introduced the issue of abortion. It was Douglas Murray. He’s the one who pointed out that in times of peace, America and Great Britain are fighting for death—through the promotion of abortion and euthanasia. It’s also my job to make everything about abortion. The people who donate to Abort73 have essentially entrusted me with one thing: to not let the victims of abortion be ignored or forgotten. I may not be able to personally relate to having my private space invaded by assailants who want to tear me to pieces, but this is the literal threat being faced by unborn children every day—both in America and abroad. And while some Israelis did manage to hold off their attackers, children in the womb have no capacity for self defense. I am their stand in. Does that make me monomaniacal? Perhaps, but as Graham Linehan said to Megyn Kelly this week, “How can people not be monomaniacal about a thing which damages children?”

On Democracies and Death Cults is not a book about abortion, but as Murray puts forth in the introduction, it is about “the fight between good and evil.” That may sound smug or simplistic to some, but “in their search for endless subtlety and limitless understanding,” they are missing what Murray calls one of the greatest moral divides of all. And one of the primary ways that divide manifests itself is in the way each society responds to death. One society “mourns [the loss of] its sons and friends.” The other “is happy to hear of the deaths of their own family and other people's family.” One society builds bunkers for its people; the other builds bunkers for its rockets. One society grimly goes about the business of war. The other openly celebrates the murder of innocent women and children—broadcasting their brutality online as their apologists in the West close their eyes to the violence.

“As evil as [the Nazis] were in general,” Murray observes, they still “attempted to cover over the worst of their crimes.” They still had enough of a conscience to know that what they were doing was publicly indefensible. Not so for Hamas, who considers the Nazi label a badge of honor rather than shame. “The Middle East,” Murray writes, “is the one region on earth where Nazi anti-Semitism is not seen as a strand of losing, toxic ideology, but as the stance of victors, and a hope for the future.” The photographs of Nazi atrocities that emerged after World War II were taken and published by those who liberated the camps. But the photos and videos of the atrocities committed on October 7 were largely taken and published by the perpetrators themselves—serving as both celebration and warning. Murray tells this story of being on the ground in Gaza as Israeli soldiers attempted to evacuate its citizens to safety:

Just a day earlier, video had emerged from up the highway where the road was strewn with the bodies of Gazan civilians shot by Hamas for trying to make their way south. Hamas had actually been gunning down the Gazan civilians, even as they accused the Israelis of wishing to do the same. Roadways like this one were already covered in bodies.

For Hamas, one apparent function of the violent imagery it publishes is to terrorize and control its own people. But it accomplishes something very different for those on the other side. Murray notes with some surprise how eager the survivors of October 7 were to show him pictures of the carnage—not in a perverse or gratuitous sense—but as a means of processing their grief, strengthening their resolve, honoring their lost loved ones, and showing the world exactly what those monsters did. “In Orthodoxy,” Stephen Freeman recently told Paul Kingsnorth, “the monks say you should always have death before your eyes, and that’s not a morbid thought. [It merely recognizes that] if you don’t know you’re going to die, then you won’t know how to live.”

Photographs of death help make the violence real; they give voice to the victims who had to give up their lives. And this, of course, is also true in the context of abortion. Though many abortion opponents decry the use of graphic imagery, calling it inappropriate or insensitive, Murray’s experience tells a different story. Graphic pictures of injustice—painful though they be—serve a therapeutic role. Their existence in the public sphere represents a refusal to let the memories of the victims go. A refusal to simply move on from the violence visited upon them. Murray speaks of having experienced a similar phenomenon while traveling in Africa. He writes:

In northern Nigeria, community leaders in remote villages sometimes produced a binder of images to show me. Image after image on page after page of bodies lying dead in the fields. Men, women, and children shot or macheted, the images of their bodies now incongruously placed in an office-style ring binder to show to a visitor. These bodies were evidence and the only way the communities could prove to anyone from the outside world that what they said had happened had in fact happened.

Even though we live in a world suddenly awash in fake, AI-generated imagery, the real thing still has tremendous impact—as evidenced again by the horrific murder of Iryna Zarutska last month in Charlotte. Her death had been almost entirely ignored until video footage from the train finally emerged, causing shockwaves of outrage and horror to quickly span the globe. The freeze frame of Iryna looking down at her phone as the knife-wielding arm of her assailant hovers just above her neck is almost too much to bear. And though legacy media outlets have done everything in their power to quash the story, video footage like that cannot be contained. Nor should it be. The United States legal system failed this woman, this Ukrainian refugee, in profound and unforgivable ways.

Photos and video may not have the power to move the die hards, those who are already entrenched in their support for, say, Hamas or Planned Parenthood, but pictures can and do reach those who are still on the fence—If we’d only be willing to use them. It struck me at some point in Murray’s book that one of the difficulties facing Israel is the same one facing we who oppose abortion. It’s one of offense versus defense. Here’s what I mean. Israel’s Iron Dome defense system is a technological marvel. Its ability to automatically neutralize incoming missiles is unprecedented, but Murray points out that it comes at a steep price. That’s because the cost of the average incoming rocket is an estimated $300, but the cost of the average antimissile rocket is closer to $100,000, and two of them are frequently required to knock out one incoming threat. You can see the longterm problem—causing Murray to wonder if Israel wouldn’t have been better off taking an entirely different tact. “If New Jersey [continuously] launched rockets at New York City,” he asks, “would New York State find a way to shoot these down and learn to live with it?” Or would it seek instead to destroy that which was launching the rockets in the first place?

The problem for Israel—and the problem for the anti-abortion community—is the problem of public perception. The moment Israel goes on the offensive, they are roundly berated by the global community for crimes against humanity. “(Even) its international allies,” Murray notes, “condemned them at every stage when they had tried to defend themselves; their best allies had simply helped them find more and more ingenious ways in which to cower.” You’ve probably already seen the parallel, but here it is just in case. Pregnancy care centers—and their armies of ultrasound machines—are the equivalent of the Iron Dome. I don’t say that disparagingly. They serve a crucial function, but their role is entirely defensive. And they’re nowhere near as efficient in their counterstrikes as their military counterpart. The vast majority of pregnant women intent on having an abortion never make it through the doors of a crisis pregnancy center. That’s why the offensive campaign—which is much less popular and much more subject to rebuke—is so essential. Without it, an exorbitantly high number of abortions are still getting through.

Waiting to combat abortion until after a crisis pregnancy has taken place is simply too late. The window of reason and objectivity has already closed. If we don’t reach young women and men before they find themselves in a crisis pregnancy, no amount of mobile ultrasound units will be able to stem the tide. Because most of the women who are serious about abortion will never go into one. And most of the women who do had already made up their mind to not have an abortion. Meanwhile, abortion opponents who do take the fight into the public square, and use graphic abortion images to make their case, are routinely accused of being unloving—by those on both sides of the debate. But pastors, elders, and lay Christians who categorically refuse to publicly expose the evil of abortion are not just failing to love their unborn neighbors, they’re also failing to love all the women who will be devastated by the bloodguilt of abortion in the future, and they’re failing to love all the women who already live with that guilt today. Let us not forget that it is sorrow that leads to repentance—not good vibes.

I suspect that if you were to look at the average church budget—which is surprisingly difficult to do—you’d find that it doesn’t contain anything for the ongoing defense of abortion-vulnerable children. But if it did, that money would almost certainly be in support of crisis pregnancy clinics. Please don’t misunderstand me. These are important ministries. I’d love to see a pregnancy care center next to every Planned Parenthood in America, but even the best defense in the world can’t overcome a lack of offense. You have to score points to win the game; you have to advance to win the war. This means that giving exclusively—or even primarily—to work that is entirely defensive is likely doing more good for your conscience that it is for the potential victims it’s supposed to be serving. Sometimes you have to do that which is less popular, less sympathetic, and less comfortable for the simple fact that it is more effective. I was reminded of that afresh while reading Murray’s book.

If there’s anything I take issue with in On Democracies and Death Cults, it would be the title itself. Because it seems to imply that the thing separating good societies from bad is nothing more than democratic elections. If only it were that simple, but there is nothing inherently righteous about democracies. Historians may dispute some of the specifics, but theres’s no denying that both Hitler and Hamas came into power through democratic processes. The tyranny of the majority is not a named entity for nothing. Andrew Klavan recently put it this way, “You can’t protect the weak against the strong (i.e. those who hold a majority) unless you impose morality on the strong.” In other words, just because something has broad popular support doesn’t mean that something is righteous or acceptable. No doubt Douglas Murray would agree with this, but I’m not sure his solution fully recognizes the problem. Here’s how he explains the divide.

This difference (between a society that mourns death and a society that celebrates death) seems such a difficult concept for the Western mind to get its head around. Every college student and adult knows the banalities to trot out: that people around the world are the same everywhere and essentially want the same things; that everybody wants to just live in peace and bring up their family in safety. Yet some people do not. Not because they are born that way but because they have been raised that way.

Yes, it is certainly true that those who celebrate life and those who celebrate death were raised differently. But the real question is why? And that’s a much harder one to answer. Why are Palestinian children raised to hate Jews? Why are they raised to believe that killing their Jewish neighbor secures for them divine favor? Education is often trotted out as the solution, but education has no more intrinsic value than democracy itself. It’s the content of the education that determines its worth, just as it’s the character of a democracy that determines whether it acts judiciously or tyrannically. When my 12-year-old son asked me last week what a transphobe was and why someone would shoot up a church full of children, my answer was admittedly archaic. Because there are demonic forces in the world who hate God and hate his people and delight in nothing so much as killing the children who are so uniquely precious to him. Even though Israel has largely abandoned the God who chose them, the enemies of God have not abandoned their efforts to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.