Douglas Murray Spoke To A Sold-Out Crowd In Toronto

Canadian Anti-Hate Network

Douglas Murray. Source: Elekes Andor/Wikimedia Commons

A man who built a career casting Islamophobic insults and promoting racist conspiracy theories against Muslims and Islam spoke at a synagogue in Thornhill on Wednesday. 

Douglas Murray, a British author and political commentator, has spent the better part of two decades campaigning against Islam and Muslim immigration. 

Through his writing, Murray has been accused of “mainstreaming” the so-called Great Replacement Theory, which has animated mass murders, and invoking the Eurabia conspiracy theory (the idea that white people in Europe specifically are being replaced through immigration).  

In 2006, Murray told the Dutch Parliament, “Conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board: Europe must look like a less attractive proposition.” 

In the same speech, he advocated for a total ban on all immigration into Europe from Muslim countries. 

In his 2017 book, “The Strange Death of Europe”, Murray wrote, “Any trip to thousands of locations across Europe can spark the fear of what the French writer and philosopher Renaud Camus has characterized as 'Le Grand Remplacement'." 

“Europe is committing suicide. Or at least its leaders have decided to commit suicide … As a result…the peoples of Europe will have lost the only place in the world we had to call home,” Murray wrote. 

In 2018, the Ireland branch of the white nationalist organization Generation Identity, called “The Strange Death of Europe” a “very important read in the metapolitical situation the continent faces,” from their since suspended Twitter account. 

Murray is also a frequent commenter on Israel and Palestine. In November 2023 he made the argument that Hamas are worse than Nazis, writing, “average members of the SS and other killing units of Hitler’s were rarely proud of their average days’ work.” 

Earlier in the year, Douglas Murray made another comment about the Holocaust, which UK organization Hope Not Hate says “trivialis[ed] the fact that the Nazis systematically murdered six million Jews during the Holocaust.” This came after he spoke in defence of nationalism at the 2023 National Conservatism Conference in the UK. Included in his remarks, Murray said that he could “see no reason why every other country in the world should be prevented from feeling pride in itself because the Germans mucked up twice in a century.”

A regular television guest on the topics of Muslims, Islam, and immigration, Murray is currently the associate editor of The Spectator. He was previously the associate director of the Henry Jackson Society. 

Tafsik, a small pro-Israel organization, invited Murray to a Thornhill-area synagogue for an evening of discussion on “extremism and the impact of woke/DEI radicalism on democracy in Canada.”

Tickets ranged from $118 for general admission to $648 for a meet and greet with Murray and were reportedly sold out ahead of the event. Social media posts from Tafsik say the sales happened despite the “global anti-democracy, anti-Israel, anti-Jewish, anti-Persian, anti-Hindu, anti-Christian far-left woke and Islamist extremists called to cancel” the event.

The event launched a new coalition announced by Tafsik, The Emergency Coalition Against Hate (TECAH). On its website, Tafsik says TECAH includes members of Canada’s Persian, Jewish, Christian, Hindu Azerbaijani, and Albanian communities, “coming together to stand up against extremist ideologies that want to crush our democracy, and western way of life.” 

Attendees of Wednesday’s event included leaders and groups representing multiple ethnic minorities - the Coalition of Hindus of North America, the International Christian Embassy of Jerusalem, the Network of Azerbaijani Canadians, the president of the Canadian Albanian Network, and others. Also in attendance was Ontario MPP Goldie Ghamari. 

Oh hi there @DouglasKMurray. pic.twitter.com/lNmYdnXQfG

— Goldie Ghamari, MPP | گلسا قمری (@gghamari) February 29, 2024

A video posted to X (formerly Twitter) by Salman Sima, an Iranian-Canadian activist and refugee who was formerly imprisoned under the Iranian regime, shows both MPP Ghamari and Daniel Bordman on stage at some point in the evening. Bordman was previously successfully sued by Walied Soliman, a Muslim lawyer and chair of Erin O’Toole’s Conservative Party leadership campaign, for claiming that Soliman was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and had terrorism connections. Soliman was awarded a $500,000 judgement.  

The Tafsik website states it was founded after October 7, 2023, in response to the “horrifying genocide of 1200 Jewish civilians, including women, children, toddlers, babies, and the elderly, the kidnapping of 250 hostages and the horrifying support for terrorists from the global community.” However, its website and Facebook page were registered in 2021.

Tafsik is a small operation with several defunct social media accounts. There are no entities incorporated federally or with the province of Ontario under the same name.

It claims to host a database on its website to highlight antisemitism, but the database is broken.

Previous events held in February by Tafsik included “45 Years Of Terror: Toronto Stands Against The Islamic Republic Of Iran.” 

Speakers included Daniel Bordman, who called the Ontario Teachers College a “communist-type training ground,” during a speech he said was meant to call out “Islamists, socialists, Khalistanis and all the other forces of evil that threaten the West.”

Tafsik and Murray did not immediately respond to requests for comment.