How did young people go so wrong they cheer killers and rapists of Hamas?

I’ll be launching my new book Friday afternoon at Columbia University. “On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization” will be available from all good bookshops on April 8th and is available for pre-order now.

I accepted the invitation from the good students of Columbia because it is at just such institutions that we have seen one of the most disturbing things to happen since the attacks of October 7, 2023.

You would have thought that when young women are raped by gangs of armed men that young Americans would not be on the side of the rapists.

When a party of young people at a dance rave in the early hours of the morning are attacked by truckloads of armed terrorists you would think it would be an easy one to understand. Should you be on the side of the unarmed, terrified young people being hunted down in the woods and the fields, raped, shot and macheted in front of their friends?

Or should you be on the side of the monsters who committed those acts — the people who roamed among the piles of dead bodies to see who might still be alive, who could be kidnapped and stolen from their families?

One survivor of the Nova party told me of seeing a young woman on her knees in front of a gang of armed men. Her best friend had just been killed in front of her. The terrorists were debating whether to kill her or kidnap her.

“I don’t want to die” she was screaming. The terrorists shot her in the face as she was screaming.

Is it hard to decide which side to be on after an atrocity like that? For me it isn’t. For most Americans it isn’t.

But an alarming number of people — especially the youngest and most privileged people in our society — chose the other side. Instead of being on the side of the victims, they sided with the perpetrators.

Douglas Murray’s new book “On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization.”

They could have sided with the people who had been kidnapped — including young Americans like 21-year-old Edan Alexander from New Jersey, who is still being held in Hamas captivity. Instead they sided with the kidnappers.

They did so long before Israel’s military response began in Gaza: an action with two aims — to release the hostages and to destroy Hamas.

We now know that on the day of October 7th pro-terror groups in the US were organizing to attack Israel — to demonize it and to lie about it. As I reported here in The Post at the time, on October 8th some of these terrorist supporters gathered in Times Square —to support the massacres as they were still going on.

None of this moral insanity happened because of Israel’s actions. It happened because we have people in our midst who are on the side of the rapists, murderers, beheaders and kidnappers.

What the hell has gone wrong? This is one of the big questions I ask — and try to answer — in my new book. I do because I believe that the outbreak of disorder and violence which has burst out on the streets and campuses of this city since October 7, 2023 is not Israel’s problem. It is ours.

Look at the people who are even now shutting down streets and campuses in New York. Now they are protesting about the detention of one of the organizers of the Columbia protests — Mahmoud Khalil. Yesterday students at Columbia chained themselves to a gate in protest at what they call Khalil’s “kidnapping” by the US immigration authorities.

I must have missed the time they chained themselves to the gates to protest the actual kidnapping of Edan Alexander. Or Hersh Goldberg-Polin from California who was kidnapped from the Nova music festival, held captive for a year and then murdered by Hamas.

Some campaigners for Khalil have spent recent weeks saying that he did nothing wrong. They are trying to pretend that this 30-year-old agitator on a Green Card who was weirdly living in student accommodation, despite not being a student, is some sort of free-speech martyr. They pretend even now that all he did was act as a “negotiator” for the pro-Hamas students.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Khalil served as the spokesman for a group that called itself “Columbia University Apartheid Divest” (CUAD).

This group declares in its own mission statements that it is “fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.” Good to know. It also claims that the attacks of October 7th were “a moral, military, and political victory.”

Wow.

So people like Khalil and his friends made it very clear which side they were on. They despise any and every action of Israel’s army to defend itself. They describe anything that the IDF does as “genocide,” “ethnic-cleansing,” “white-supremacy” and more. The IDF’s actions are none of these things.

None of these muppets can explain how the population of Gaza can both grow in size and be subjected to a genocide. Consistency and rationality are as much strangers to them as decency and morality are.

But these protestors have chosen their target well. They believe that Israel is absolutely central to the West. I agree with them. They believe that the Jewish State is vitally important. I agree with them.

Where we disagree is that I want the Jewish State to thrive and succeed — in peace with its neighbors. These groups want it wiped out.

And, as Khalil and his friends have made clear, Israel is only the first country in their sights. But it is by no means the last. These groups hate America more than anything. That is why they use this country, abuse this country, spit on this country, say they want to destroy this country and burn the American flag at any opportunity they get.

This is a civilizational moment. And I believe Israel shows how we can win it.

“On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization” is published by Harper Collins on April 8th.