Douglas Murray's Indiana Jones fallacy.

The writer's confrontation with Dave Smith could have been a decisive turning point, but instead hit the mark by debating the framing of debate.

“You’ve never BEEEEN?!” That question still resonates in my mind when recalling the amusing but indecisive Joe Rogan Experience debate/conversation (view below) between Douglas Murray, Rogan, and libertarian comic Dave Smith. Spoken with his posh Eton School and Oxford accent where been sounds like bean, I can’t help but laugh at how much Murray embodies the living stereotype of the upper class public intellectual. The sentence and the conversation surrounding it concerned the fact that he had visited the Middle East and particularly Gaza, and was surprised that his counterpart Smith had not and yet he had clearly formed political opinions notwithstanding his absence of first-hand experience.

Many of my friends both in real life and online felt like Murray had conclusively won the argument, but my impression was different. Smith (and Rogan) certainly didn’t agree, and the statement makes for endless parody analogies. Does someone who has never hacked through the brush and vines of the Amazon jungle with a machete and a pith hat have the standing to talk about piranhas? If you’ve never gone fly fishing can you not talk about trout? So who was right?

Walk > Talk

Murray has a point, which is that one whose views are shaped only by what they have read, heard or seen from secondary sources or the media may get only a shallow or narrow appreciation of what is in reality a more sophisticated situation. So I agree that visiting the Gaza Envelope as the Israeli communities surrounding the Gaza Strip are called, or even the Strip itself would afford Smith perhaps an explanation of the things that just viewing them through their phone or tablet doesn’t fully convey.

Where he goes wrong is to imply that his lived experience automatically makes his opinion more accurate. I certainly had a better grasp of the situation in the West Bank during and after serving in the IDF over 20 years ago and manning checkpoints than I did prior to that point, and it was a more direct perspective than Murray’s. That doesn’t make my perspective “better”, but it is a first hand practical one as opposed to a second hand anecdote or a hypothetical. Multiple people can live through the same event and react in different ways. So while Murray’s perspective is more enriched, it is not necessarily more correct than Smith’s. Other journalists like Chris Hedges have visited Gaza and Israel coming out with views and opinions diametrically opposed to Murray’s.

More strikingly, Murray’s position that novice opinions should be disregarded in favour of those with more expertise went down terribly for many viewers as it brought back the bad taste of COVID and the attempts to bully the audience into accepting changes to their lives and health based on the pronouncements of arbitrary and unconvincing public health officials. But here again there is a false equivalency: COVID was not a case where the “experts” were wrong and the laymen were right, but rather one where only the experts of one perspective were allowed a platform. There were many dissenting voices on COVID who disputed the lockdowns, masking, vaccines, and data collection used to justify government policies, from biochemist Dr. Robert Malone to former New York Times journalist Alex Berenson to attorney and public health activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Their expertise such as it was simply deemed dangerous by tech companies and their political overlords.

The larger issue that Murray was addressing was the fact that Joe Rogan has the unique status of being able to illuminate the largest audience in the English-speaking world to whatever content he chooses, and yet often those choices provide a warped or ignorant view of whatever they are talking about. This works in the other direction too: In 2019 the comfortably mainstream Bari Weiss, then of the New York Times, called Rep. Tulsi Gabbard an “Assad toady” because she had been willing to journey to Syria to mediate with the dictator. Rogan demanded an explanation and objected when she didn’t have one, saying that Gabbard was a personal friend. Weiss’s prejudiced views regarding the topic were exposed as being poorly formed and impossible to articulate.

I do agree with the opinion below that Murray started the debate off strong on the attack and then fizzled by getting bogged down on the issue of who has standing to be listened to on the topic of war, but I don’t agree that he lost the debate.

While Murray got a great deal of praise from the pro-Israel contingent on X and elsewhere, I have yet to see someone who was in the middle on Gaza or the Ukraine War who was swung by him.

On the other hand, today there actually was a Dave Smith debate where he got exposed by his opponent John Spencer for what he is: a smarmy commentator with no practical insights on the topic of war and peace besides that the former is bad and the latter is good. Facing each other on Piers Morgan, the two were able to agree on only one thing which is that Smith holds Israel’s conduct in the war to be intentional and criminal despite the fact that he couldn’t refute Spencer’s contention that the IDF’s conduct was compliant with the laws of war.

Spencer also pointed out that Smith was constantly invoking the analogy of Israel’s conduct being that of a man whose family was kidnapped so he burnt down the home of the kidnapper with both of their families in side. As he masterfully stated, the rules of civil law that prevent violent retaliation by placing the use of force in most circumstances to the police in real life simply don’t apply in time of war. From here Smith pivoted to saying that the issue for him was not the legality of actions done during war like Spencer, but rather the morality of it, which demonstrates that his opinion is completely based on a subjective value system rather than an objective set of rules that everyone agrees to.

While he didn’t have the elegance and style of Murray, Spencer actually demonstrated the weakness of Smith’s opinion not based on his lack of expertise, but rather on his framing of the topic of war crimes based entirely on his own personal leanings and divorced from standard definitions.