Author and journalist Douglas Murray was presented with the Moral Courage Award before a sold-out audience at the 2025 UN Watch Gala Dinner. Upon receiving the award, Murray delivered a rousing speech and was interviewed on stage by UN Watch Board Member Guy Spier. Here are some of the highlights from the Q&A:
On Iran:
“We have the Iranian Revolutionary government that says that Israel, the Jewish state, is a colonialist state. Yet the government of Iran, since 1979, has been colonizing the entire Middle East, from Tehran to Beirut to Yemen. So when they tell us this, they just tell us about themselves.”
On UN corruption:
“UN Watch and others have demonstrated for years the way in which this system is corrupt, and we all know that, of course. But as you say, the problem is a lot of people we know will still say, ‘Oh, but the Red Cross said X,’ or ‘Amnesty said Y.’ I suppose the most valuable tool is one of the tools that UN Watch wields, which is the tool of revealing the actual truth.”
On antisemitism:
“Once a society indulges in antisemitism, it demonstrates the ill health of the society. It shows that the whole society is going wrong. You start to get into conspiracy theories. You start to get into counter-facts, to non-facts being elevated into facts, and this is just something which I think everybody can battle and push back against.”
“There’s a poem by W. H. Auden that I’m very fond of, September 1, 1939, where the poet writes, ‘All I have is a voice to undo the folded lie.’ But a voice is not nothing. And if you use yours in the time you have, well, you could undo an awful lot of folded lies. And I think we can do so together.”
On Israel’s response to terror:
“Hassan Nasrallah famously said repeatedly, ‘The problem with the Jews is that they love life, and this is their weakness.’ And the jihadists always say this about the West as a whole. They say that we’re just people who love life. And I spent years thinking, what do you do in the face of hate like that? What do you do in the face of something so evil? And I realized that, and I said, at the end of this book, there is an answer. And in my observation, the people of Israel have provided the answer.
Firstly, of course, you make sure that if people like Hassan Nasrallah love death so much, they get it. But the second thing is perhaps much more important, which is simply to turn around to the death cults, to the people who support the groups like Hamas and so on, and you say: You know what? Fine, we do love life, and it’s not our weakness, it is our greatest strength, and has been for thousands of years, and will be for thousands of years more to come.”
