Dave Smith Slams Douglas Murray for Accusing him of Antisemitism while Arguably "Watering" Islamophobia Himself

New clip from my podcast with Dave Smith.

In this new segment, Dave and I walk through what I see as a huge hypocrisy in how people like Douglas Murray and Sam Harris argue about expertise, bigotry, and Dave “watering dangerous ideas” with his criticisms of Israel. Dave points out that the same people now dismissing him as “just a comic” with no qualifications would absolutely destroy that argument if it were used against them on topics like Islam, gender, race, or Black Lives Matter. I agree, and I cite examples I’ve seen firsthand: critics saying Douglas has no “gender studies” PhD so he shouldn’t write about identity politics, or that Sam Harris isn’t an Islamic theologian so he can’t critique jihadist ideology, or that Jordan Peterson isn’t a biblical scholar so he shouldn’t talk about biblical scripture.

In all those cases, we’d rightly say: either engage the argument or don’t—but you can’t wave it away by attacking credentials. The same goes for claims that “saying X encourages racism or antisemitism.” I bring up the Sam Harris–Charles Murray vs. Ezra Klein fight, where Klein said simply discussing race and IQ “waters fertile ground for racism.” That’s not a rebuttal; it’s a guilt-by-association veto. By their own earlier standards, what Douglas and Sam are now doing to Dave is exactly the tactic they used to criticize.

From there, we broaden the lens to how accusations of antisemitism are being misused to dodge substantive debate about Israel–Palestine and U.S. foreign policy. I acknowledge, clearly, that antisemitism and conspiracy thinking are real problems, and that any serious critique can be misread and abused by bigots. But I also note that Douglas’s own work on Islam and migration has undoubtedly been taken by some people to ugly, anti-Muslim extremes—just as post-9/11 “war on terror” rhetoric helped normalize catastrophic violence against Muslims abroad.

The through line, as we both see it, is that they invoke broad, emotionally loaded concerns—antisemitism, non-expert populism, conspiracism—without ever tying them to a specific thing Dave said or refuting his claims about Gaza, Ukraine, or U.S. intervention. It’s a way to never touch the argument itself—because on the merits, they can’t.

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