Making Sense - Sam Harris - #339 — The Infernal Logic of Jihad

00:00:00.000 welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing

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00:00:38.900 okay well this is the first of two podcasts i'm going to be releasing in the coming days on the

00:00:53.900 topic of jihad early next week i'll release a solo podcast on all that we've seen in recent weeks

00:01:02.480 in response to the unfolding war in gaza the global eruption of anti-semitism and support for hamas

00:01:11.540 and all the moral confusion suggested by that response but first i want to bring you a conversation

00:01:18.480 i had with the atlantic writer graham wood graham has been in israel since a few days after the

00:01:24.860 october 7th attacks he is a staff writer for the atlantic and the author of the way of the strangers

00:01:31.260 encounters with the islamic state which is well worth reading he joined the atlantic in 2006

00:01:38.080 and has since reported from every continent except antarctica and on a very wide variety of topics

00:01:44.940 he's also a member of the council on foreign relations and he teaches at yale university

00:01:50.080 graham has been on the podcast several times before he really has been my go-to resource on

00:01:56.880 the topic of jihad and the way these ancient ideas of martyrdom and holy war have been playing out in

00:02:03.720 the modern world so we speak in some detail about what happened on october 7th and these details are

00:02:10.400 fairly gruesome so be aware of that this is definitely not an episode of the podcast you

00:02:16.240 want to be listening to with your kids in the car but i think it's necessary to talk about the details

00:02:21.700 because so much of the reaction to what happened on october 7th and in particular the reaction to

00:02:28.660 israel's response to it is not making contact with the specific differences in the acts of violence

00:02:36.060 perpetrated by the two sides the moral logic of what happened on october 7th and the logic of its

00:02:44.320 support in the muslim world to the degree that it is supported is quite a bit different than the

00:02:52.120 logic of israel's response so graham and i discuss that as well as a wide variety of geopolitical concerns

00:03:00.040 that follow from the current conflict once again a reminder subscribers to the podcast can share links

00:03:07.740 to full episodes now you can share them one-to-one or post them on social media needless to say the way

00:03:13.880 to support the podcast is to subscribe at samharris.org and if you can't afford a subscription you need only

00:03:20.740 send an email to support at samharris.org and you will be given one and now i bring you graham wood

00:03:28.080 i am here with graham wood graham thanks for joining me sam it's good to be back so when um october 7th

00:03:43.700 happened you and i uh i think you you and i have had a shared response on on uh many points but uh one

00:03:51.360 stark difference is that given your job description you were quickly booking an airline flight to israel

00:03:57.840 uh so i i should just say that there's uh you know some amazement uh on the part of a a bystander

00:04:03.980 like myself that you can do that with such uh alacrity uh remind people the kinds of topics you

00:04:10.180 have focused on as a journalist that that would make sense of this behavior uh yeah so i was booking

00:04:16.320 tickets to israel and i'll say a bit more about the complications of that in a second but yeah i've been

00:04:22.220 reporting on this region for a long time reporting on the iraq war when that was going on the afghanistan

00:04:28.300 war as well and then for years i was reporting on isis which has become sadly relevant with this

00:04:34.780 conflict there's there's been a lot of discussion especially from the israeli side saying hamas is

00:04:41.800 isis and you know that that's that's a really complicated thing for me given that if you look

00:04:47.200 at isis for as long as i did that you can start to see some salient interesting differences there

00:04:53.520 but yeah as soon as the 7th of october happened it was you know it's like hearing and an old song that

00:05:02.460 you heard all the time at some point and you just couldn't get it out of your head and for me it was

00:05:07.940 like hearing the old isis rhythms coming back and first thing i did was try to get a ticket

00:05:15.660 which was difficult because airlines were canceling flights left and right so it took two or three

00:05:20.880 tries before i finally got into israel a few days after the attack yes i want to get into the the point

00:05:27.160 you just um indicated about jihadism not being a unified front and and there are interesting

00:05:33.460 differences there and i just want to talk about jihadism in general and how i think that's the

00:05:39.140 appropriate lens to throw over current events unlike terrorism and other terms that we we tend to use

00:05:47.220 but let's just start with just what your experience has been uh in israel what what i think you've uh you

00:05:55.140 were there not that long ago what is it like i mean i got to imagine the the the analogy that we've

00:06:01.240 heard you so often that this is there september 11th immediately struck me as wrong in in several

00:06:09.780 respects uh and i think this is quite a bit worse than what september 11th was for american society

00:06:16.200 what what is it like in israel and and what has your experience been so far so i've been here almost

00:06:22.640 continuously since a few days after the attack and i i have seen things change you know on arrival

00:06:29.620 there was an atmosphere of mourning but more than anything else people were just stunned i mean

00:06:34.420 it it had been a while since say the second intifada when the last time it really felt like

00:06:40.200 in one's daily life in this country that you'd you'd wonder whether when you left the house you

00:06:47.600 come back to the house whether the bus you were on was going to explode that kind of thing

00:06:51.900 and this really did reach into the daily life of israelis and you could just you could just feel

00:06:57.200 it i mean there's an atmosphere of of mourning also an atmosphere of fury that i i don't think

00:07:03.860 really pertained in the time immediately after september 11 in the united states that there was this sense

00:07:10.720 i think that of a lot of israelis that they were betrayed like deeply betrayed by their own government

00:07:16.900 and by the idea exactly like they expected that hamas would do this if it could what they didn't

00:07:22.780 expect was that their own government would allow it to happen especially a government like the

00:07:29.120 government led by the prime minister benjamin netanyahu who the reason he was in power was because

00:07:35.940 he said i have taken a hard line against the against terrorism against palestinians and i have

00:07:44.680 delivered security and that's going to allow us to consolidate gains and so to come back to israel

00:07:51.360 after watching the internecine political squabbles in israel earlier this year and then to see even

00:07:59.760 the people who loved netanyahu saying you are scum of the earth you're just horrible that the idea that

00:08:07.280 you would leave us defenseless like this is the deepest betrayal of a leader of this country what do we

00:08:14.020 make of the fact that they were murdered in the south so defenseless i mean did have you interviewed

00:08:23.260 anyone who's in a position to actually describe what broke down there as far as intelligence failures

00:08:29.780 or just i mean there have been reports or rumors that there was hacking of the actual monitoring system

00:08:36.620 what what what what actually happened that explains not not only the fact that hamas was able to get

00:08:43.840 across the border in that way but that it took so long for the idf to respond yeah the the actual

00:08:53.200 tactics that they used we don't know the full story and i guarantee there's going to be a commission

00:08:58.560 that the israelis have to discover exactly what happened but you know on other parts of the border i've had people tell me

00:09:06.620 that a bird cannot fly across that border without the israelis knowing so for them to be so blind that

00:09:13.140 there can be upwards of a thousand armed men who go across the border and then have the run of the

00:09:19.200 place in several different israeli communities for for hours and hours and hours afterward is just an

00:09:26.340 incredible failure and you know it's it's not just a failure in the sort of everyday sense of wow that

00:09:35.960 was a security breach it it it reaches as you may know really deep into the israeli psyche because

00:09:42.600 what what happened what resembles pogroms that you know people might have heard about from 100 130 years

00:09:51.500 ago it it it it it it really it taps an ancestral horror of you know stories of great great great

00:10:00.280 grandma being raped by cossacks or massacres and kishnyev in 1903 this is this is just utterly horrifying

00:10:09.220 in precisely the way that israelis thought they were immune to because they were in israel

00:10:15.460 how it happened it's it's still unclear but the fact that it happened in this way at this scale

00:10:22.920 has horrified the country i think one of the other aspects of the surprise on october 7th probably had

00:10:32.040 something to do with the attention that the idf was paying to the west bank the west bank is of course

00:10:37.840 separate from the gaza strip and the reason they weren't paying as much attention as they might

00:10:43.240 otherwise have been paying to the gaza strip was because over the last year settlers have been

00:10:48.200 pushing palestinians off of land in the west bank and they've had to do that with the help of the idf so

00:10:55.980 you find that there's a growing number of resources that were devoted to the settler project that is

00:11:04.160 israelis who have tried to create outposts on the west bank and grab land there usually at the

00:11:11.140 expense of palestinian communities and to do that without violence breaking out you have to have a

00:11:16.760 military that oversees the whole thing and is often present at the very moment of the dispossession

00:11:22.620 so if if that happens more and more there's only finite resources and those resources were probably

00:11:29.340 taken away from gaza and that probably meant that gaza was more vol i mean that the that the communities

00:11:35.320 on the edge of gaza were more more vulnerable than they otherwise might have been

00:11:38.660 yeah i saw the article you wrote about your encounter with settlers there's not a neuron in

00:11:44.300 my brain that is supportive of jewish religious extremism much less his claims upon real estate is it

00:11:51.300 your understanding that netanyahu has covertly encouraged that or what what culpability is there

00:11:57.020 for the the current government for that behavior enormous culpability many israelis when they look at

00:12:03.720 the failure of their government to protect them on october 7th they notice that these resources were

00:12:09.800 diverted to the west bank by netanyahu's government they also notice that members of his government have

00:12:16.240 been explicit about all this that they want to take that land they want to seize it by force if

00:12:22.480 necessary and they're going to for ideological purposes expand onto that onto that land so yeah it's been

00:12:31.560 a major part of his coalition to to take a very very strong pro-settler stance i think many people

00:12:38.600 expect there to be a massive political reckoning at some point based on this failure to keep israelis

00:12:45.580 safe do you think that reckoning is going to come before the unfolding war in gaza is over i mean is it going

00:12:54.000 to come faster than anyone wants or is it going to be safely shelved until the more immediate existential

00:13:01.040 concerns are dealt with i think netanyahu personally is toast his political future is sealed so is the political

00:13:09.140 future of most of the people in his government but not yet there's a belief that the the heads of the

00:13:16.740 idf and the political leadership they stay in until the moment is right for them to to move but the the main

00:13:26.880 proposition that netanyahu offered israelis was i will keep you safe we the right built a wall we have kept

00:13:35.340 there from being another intifada we've had the iron dome intercepting rockets coming in and now

00:13:42.000 they've presided over the worst massacre of jews since the holocaust which is clear evidence that

00:13:48.360 whatever they offered before they've utterly failed at which is why you you see jews in israel saying

00:13:55.220 things like you know i came to israel because the whole point of israel is to avoid having massacres of

00:14:02.500 jews which could have happened in anywhere else where you find jews except for possibly the united

00:14:07.140 states and you can't do that if that's the case i'm just going to go back to morocco i'm just going

00:14:13.500 to go back to to the lands of my grandparents or parents because if you can't provide that then

00:14:20.060 what good are you so netanyahu and his government will bear the full brunt of that anger from across

00:14:28.140 the spectrum and it's impossible for me to imagine that they could survive politically after that

00:14:33.180 so let's talk about what actually happened i mean there's been obviously a lot of reporting on this

00:14:39.960 one thing that has changed recently and you wrote a piece in the atlantic about this

00:14:45.200 is that the idf felt the need to actually bring journalists and perhaps others into an auditorium

00:14:54.280 and show them some of the body cam footage and the the nanny cam footage and the dash cam footage

00:14:59.700 that was that they had acquired of what actually happened i mean first before we talk about the

00:15:05.480 details this was not only hamas i mean i think you saw footage from like you know gopro footage that

00:15:11.500 hamas themselves shot to document their atrocities but there were other ordinary gazans who came across

00:15:19.200 the border and participated was that captured in the footage you saw or is that just something that

00:15:24.820 we know of based on you know other reporting it's not captured in the footage that i saw in the idf

00:15:32.460 screening so the idf screening was truly raw footage i mean it was it was just images that were captured

00:15:40.060 as you say by nanny cams by security cams by gopros but there was no indication of of which faction

00:15:47.120 from gaza was was doing what but you know there's lots of other footage too i've seen i've seen lots

00:15:52.640 of footage of people stealing you know tvs solar panels and ordinary gazans crossing over the border

00:15:58.700 simply to loot so that that's that's a big part of what what what people have seen and also they

00:16:05.040 also participated in taking of hostages it seemed that it wasn't just hamas that was gathering people

00:16:12.520 to be brought back to gaza but there were other just gazans doing it yeah i mean there's every

00:16:18.400 indication that that people were just streaming across the border and taking what and whom they

00:16:23.520 could and you know i i i believe hamas has even suggested as much that some of the time since

00:16:31.480 then has been spent just figuring out who they got you know they they don't know what they have to

00:16:38.360 bargain with because different groups have taken different people to different places

00:16:42.160 right so this was disorganized in a way i mean it's almost that they succeeded it seems at least

00:16:49.560 that they may have succeeded beyond their wildest imaginings and they encountered much less resistance

00:16:54.700 than they were imagining so they just they had this kind of embarrassment of sadistic riches where they

00:17:01.260 they had all the time in the world to kill people and torture people and desecrate their bodies and

00:17:06.640 then decide what they wanted to do next whether that was bringing hostages back to gaza or standing and

00:17:13.160 fighting a final battle that would would end in their martyrdom but you know that that was so slow

00:17:18.940 in coming that it seems like they um they were surprised by their own success yeah i i think that's a

00:17:25.940 that's a really important point that explains a lot of why we're at where we're at that they did not know

00:17:32.960 how successful they were going to be they did some things that are just standard military practice

00:17:40.820 you know you attack an outpost uh you succeed and then you create a perimeter around it you sort of

00:17:49.160 expand that perimeter so it's as defensible as possible and that perimeter in the different places

00:17:55.000 where they attacked expanded and expanded and expanded to to include you know whole civilian areas

00:18:00.940 where i think they were i'm certain that they were expecting to attack civilians to take them hostage

00:18:07.760 but the idea that they would take 200 plus civilians hostage that they would not encounter significant

00:18:15.860 resistance for several hours that doesn't seem to be even in in their plans so you know you often hear

00:18:22.660 people asking hey well did hamas what did hamas think was going to happen did they think that they that

00:18:28.500 the israelis weren't going to go into gaza and destroy gaza as a result of this how crazy must

00:18:33.520 they have been i i think they actually didn't think that this would happen because they didn't think

00:18:37.820 they'd kill and kidnapped so many israelis and that's what actually happened so we're in a state

00:18:43.920 where neither israel nor hamas thought they would be in at the beginning of october there's this

00:18:50.680 misconception that israel is a heavily armed society because everyone does their stint in the army but

00:18:56.740 if i'm not mistaken people return their guns to the army when they leave the army right so this is not

00:19:02.960 like texas where most homes have guns in them am i correct in thinking that yeah that's right so

00:19:10.480 it's very common to see people with handguns in israel it's very uncommon to see people who are

00:19:18.440 or it was uncommon a month ago to see people who are out of uniform carrying around assault rifles so

00:19:26.140 i think it if if hamas fighters came into a kibbutz and encountered resistance they were

00:19:34.940 likely to be encountering a few people with handguns against their kalashnikovs their rpgs so yeah it's

00:19:44.520 it's an armed society but it's not like trying to take over a town in texas so what happened i don't

00:19:50.260 know how much detail you want to go into based on the footage you saw but i think it's worth

00:19:55.880 discussing something in detail just because i think i mean obviously there's we're in such a

00:20:03.120 strange moment now where we have what we're literally witnessing demonstrations on the campuses

00:20:08.560 of ivy league universities really in explicit support of what happened on october 7th seemingly

00:20:15.680 knowing the details of what happened and you know there are photos of hostages that get ripped off

00:20:21.220 of of walls as though that were some intelligible way of supporting the palestinian people and making

00:20:29.360 some sense of their immiseration in gaza under hamas's rule as they you know are used on an hourly

00:20:37.660 basis as human shields in this conflict it feels like it's worth describing what actually happened

00:20:44.360 because i would argue it makes no sense in political terms and it makes a lot of sense in

00:20:51.480 jihadist ones which is to say it's unsurprising i will get into a discussion of jihad proper and

00:20:58.560 differences between hamas and other groups but what happened was so it really seemed like a kind of

00:21:05.560 violence you would not expect in the modern world certainly not in a in a normal modern military context

00:21:13.120 and yet when you think of it in terms of jihad it's not actually fundamentally surprising so i think

00:21:21.580 it is worth describing anything you you are comfortable describing from what you've seen

00:21:25.840 yeah so here's what happened on the morning of october 7th there were multiple breaches of this wall

00:21:35.560 between gaza and israeli communities on the other side of the wall and these communities they tended to be

00:21:41.800 kibbutzes so basically like there were agricultural co-ops and these intentional communities filled with

00:21:50.800 people who kind of lived together in some cases ate together and who in the morning i would actually i would

00:21:58.340 just add here that one very painful irony here if anyone on the other side could be susceptible to this

00:22:05.080 is that the people in these kibbutzes were not right-wing settlers these were not fans of netanyahu i would imagine

00:22:13.620 many of these people most of these people have been described as left-wing idealists of one form or another

00:22:20.000 and precisely the kinds of people who would volunteer to drive gazans across the border to get medical treatment in israel

00:22:27.700 yeah totally i mean these were peaceniks these were 60s throwbacks these were labor zionists the kibbutz

00:22:35.320 movement goes back you know before i was born you know into a period when when people were they had a

00:22:43.740 kind of utopian peace-oriented view of the world and a lot of these people who were like 85 years old who

00:22:49.880 were taken hostage they came from from that so what happened first was the hamas and others breached the border wall

00:22:58.460 attacked a number of military outposts and were just wildly successful in taking over these outposts

00:23:07.000 i remember seeing the footage the day that it happened it came out that quick

00:23:10.560 they came into those outposts seemingly unopposed there wasn't really any preparation whatsoever and

00:23:18.540 they just massacred a large number of the the soldiers many of them conscripts who were there

00:23:25.600 so that's that's roughly what happened at the military outposts in the communities that they

00:23:31.760 would encounter not much more resistance than than that you can see in the videos they show up at the

00:23:39.320 at the gates of the communities these gates they're closed you have to like have a code to open them

00:23:46.160 up not that much more complicated than like a garage door opener and so in some of the videos you see

00:23:52.080 them just waiting there like hiding almost like in the bushes next to the gates waiting for someone to

00:23:57.660 drive up and shooting them killing them and then over and over in the security cameras footage you can see

00:24:06.120 there will be a some sedan that rolls up and you know you can you can just imagine what's going

00:24:13.260 through the heads of these israelis who notice that something's weird and then notice that what's weird

00:24:19.380 is that there's a guy with a gun who's who's there and then next thing they know they're being shot and

00:24:25.960 there's there's no shortage of of really disturbing footage but the way that the life of these israelis

00:24:33.620 went from extremely normal to a little off to over it was just horrifying these were people who like

00:24:43.040 they weren't even resisting in in the slightest and they're simply massacred and then their bodies

00:24:49.680 pulled out of the cars the cars looted a bit sometimes destroyed further and then once they can

00:24:55.460 finally they could finally get into into the gates of the communities then things got quite grisly i've

00:25:03.740 been to a few of them since and they're totally evacuated it's unclear whether they'll ever be

00:25:09.120 repopulated the the former residents are in other cities in israel now but you see some houses that are

00:25:16.080 completely intact and then others that are piles of of rubble and cinders and then others that are

00:25:23.580 just completely bullet riddled and over the course of hours we're talking between 12 and 24 hours

00:25:30.940 these houses were raided the occupants were hunted down shot tortured israeli houses now in order to

00:25:40.800 be up to code they have to if you build a new house it has to have a safe room that's meant to

00:25:45.900 withstand missile attacks or rocket attacks rather and so of course a lot of families went into these

00:25:51.780 these safe rooms the safe rooms are not meant to withstand 24 hours of diabolical terrorists

00:25:59.060 surrounding you and deciding to do whatever they want such as just light your house on fire and

00:26:05.400 and having you burn to death within it so a lot of people died that way there are from the gopro videos

00:26:13.260 lots of images of old people who were presumably just confused about the noise outside and through a

00:26:20.540 screen door you can see them just get shot and then some of the other images are some of the other

00:26:26.800 videos are they're just deeply disturbing i mean i've seen a lot of horrible stuff from covering isis

00:26:33.520 and this is horrible in a kind of different way isis would have much higher production values

00:26:40.800 and they would describe why they're doing this crucifixion or this beheading and then pronounce

00:26:47.260 the sentence and you know you'd see from four different camera angles what they're doing

00:26:51.620 in this it's more like we're entering everyday scenes of of normal life and someone's kitchen

00:27:01.120 someone's living room walking into their front porch and then interrupting it as violently as possible

00:27:09.500 you see early in the morning so you see people who are are in their pajamas half dressed who are

00:27:16.620 scrambling trying to figure out what they're what's going on and how to stay safe and within seconds

00:27:23.120 their families destroyed there is one in particular captured in a nanny cam where there's a father with

00:27:30.620 two young sons who are clearly woken up surprised but aware that they're being attacked and they

00:27:39.840 tentatively tentatively leave their house and then go to a little area in their backyard i think thinking

00:27:46.300 they might be able to hide there and pretty quickly the terrorists toss a grenade in and there's an

00:27:55.080 explosion you see the dad killed probably instantly i mean he's fallen over and and at least unconscious

00:28:03.160 and certainly never gets up again uh and then the kids covered in blood one of them's lost an eye and

00:28:09.640 then you hear them as they they run back into their house sit in their kitchen and you hear them talk

00:28:16.620 about the fact that their lives are about to end call for their mom talk about daddy daddy and then one

00:28:23.360 one of the children says to the other i think we're about to die and all of this happens while the

00:28:29.340 terrorists are still there the hamas the hamas guy presumably the same one who threw the grenade

00:28:34.180 walks into the scene and like opens up their fridge he says water water i think he's trying to give them

00:28:41.220 water but he there are other stories of of hamas fighters who go into people's houses and then eat

00:28:50.160 the breakfast that the family had prepared so it's the interruption of life that is for me just haunting

00:28:57.120 so there have been reports of um you know decapitated babies and you know a baby put in an oven and

00:29:06.680 then there have been people who have doubted those reports what do you know about the the veracity of

00:29:12.240 the the most extreme imagery we've been told about so what i have seen myself is rubble when you go to

00:29:23.880 the actual places at the time when i was able to go there which was days not weeks after the events

00:29:29.580 already the the the scene had been tidied up a bit but it was clear that there's a horrible cataclysm

00:29:36.520 that happened there were though on the very day that it happened there were videos that were coming

00:29:41.020 out showing the most awful gruesome stuff so there is no doubt that what happened on october 7th

00:29:48.220 was an atrocity that there was sadism that there was an attempt to kill whoever could be killed and

00:29:57.700 to do it in a way that would be as painful for the victims as possible so that much is a certainty

00:30:03.820 and then the videos they should the things that the videos show even on those early days was there

00:30:11.320 decapitation yes i know there was decapitation because the video showed a thai worker who was

00:30:18.400 clearly already dying he had been gut shot i think and was lying on the floor and you can hear the

00:30:26.300 terrorists around him yelling give me a knife give me a knife presumably to decapitate him because

00:30:32.160 that's what they eventually tried to do and not having a knife they used a garden hoe so i had seen

00:30:38.500 part of this video where they hack it at his neck with a garden hoe and uh in the screening that the

00:30:47.840 idf did i saw the rest of the video where they they keep at it it's not one swipe that it takes to to do

00:30:54.000 that so there's no doubt that the atrocities that that that were done were maximal they were as as bad as

00:31:03.540 as as you can get now there are some specific claims that have been made that i myself as a

00:31:10.120 reporter can't confirm i haven't seen the evidence for them i've heard testimony and i've certainly

00:31:15.380 heard secondhand testimony where someone's someone's sister's friend was a first responder and observed

00:31:23.200 this or that what did antony blinken say that he'd observed didn't he give some testimony that he

00:31:30.020 he he was shown imagery that confirms whichever report was was then current and i don't have lost

00:31:37.900 lost connection to what those details were yeah antony blinken the secretary of state of the united

00:31:42.860 states he gave testimony that that he had seen a family that was bound uh and then dismembered before

00:31:51.120 being killed so kids with fingers taken off feet taken off a father with his eye gouged out uh and

00:32:01.940 then killed so that's that's the standard here at the margins there are particular atrocities that

00:32:08.680 have been described that you know i as a reporter i can't claim to have seen the videos of this so i i

00:32:14.860 can't confirm them but you know the dozens of decapitated babies uh the fetuses ripped from the

00:32:23.740 mother's wombs these these these have been these are on the list of things that that have have been

00:32:32.140 claimed and from my perspective what i know has happened is quite enough yeah and you know what the

00:32:41.280 the particular atrocities beyond that uh don't really change my opinion of the situation yeah i

00:32:48.320 would agree i mean maximal is is maximal and the reason why i wanted you to go into some gruesome

00:32:55.680 detail is not for the sake of the luxuriating in the horror of it but i just think there are layers of

00:33:03.600 moral confusion here that i'm noticing get deposited upon our you know public conversation about what's

00:33:10.800 happening and what you know what is right for israel to do and in light of what has happened that i

00:33:16.380 just think we have to cut through and so one species of confusion is to imagine that really body count is

00:33:24.900 all right so if israel if the idf drops bombs on gaza and kills more than 1400 innocent palestinians

00:33:34.260 well then at a minimum the balance is even with respect to the ethics of the situation their their

00:33:42.380 response has been proportional and the moment they kill more than that well then the israelis are the

00:33:50.100 evil ones and that's is really it's just that's how you do the the moral arithmetic and that's just so

00:33:58.380 obviously wrong i mean there are many many smart people who would sign up for that kind of analysis i

00:34:03.060 imagine someone like noam chomsky would think that's how you have to think about it and we

00:34:08.340 therefore on on his account therefore we are orders of magnitude worse than our enemies have been in

00:34:14.280 in quite a long time because of all the people we and the israelis and you know western powers

00:34:19.160 generally have killed as collateral damage and in recent wars but it just it seems to me quite obvious

00:34:25.260 that there is a difference between a group of people that would intend to murder non-combatants

00:34:36.460 up close and personal in totally inefficient and and painful ways and make a kind of

00:34:44.060 sacrament of that violence i'll get to what i mean by that later on and people who would

00:34:51.000 take fairly great pains to avoid killing non-combatants all the while knowing that

00:34:56.620 if they're going to wage any kind of war non-combatants will be killed right so they'll drop

00:35:01.700 leaflets telling people to get out of buildings they intend to destroy uh they'll call cell phones

00:35:07.060 to try to get people to leave those buildings and uh you know as i've said in previous podcasts you

00:35:12.640 know hamas is consciously using those non-combatants as human shields in a way that would be

00:35:17.780 completely unthinkable and just ridiculous if you reverse the logic i mean just imagine these

00:35:25.260 you imagine idf soldiers using those non-combatants on those kibbutzes as human shields against the

00:35:33.520 onrushing forces of hamas killing non-combatants was the point right so there is no using jewish human

00:35:39.500 shields to deter them but the reverse is not the case and israel you know if israel wanted to kill

00:35:45.380 non-combatants by the tens of and hundreds of thousands they could do that the fact that they

00:35:50.080 don't do that reveals that all the non-combatants they kill are at worst inadvertent right this is

00:35:57.720 not if they could kill only members of hamas and not kill a single woman or child in gaza that's what

00:36:05.460 the idf would do so there's a moral equivalence there that i think is it really it really has to

00:36:11.040 be cut through and and the difference has to be reiterated and so that some of the details you gave

00:36:15.640 i think are necessary to do that the other piece which i think is it's going to be very hard for

00:36:21.280 most rational secular people to understand is that the kinds of people who would do what you just

00:36:27.980 described are almost certainly i mean it's not to say there wasn't a psychopath or two among them

00:36:35.540 almost certainly these were psychologically normal people it's not like jihadism functions as a pure

00:36:42.840 bug light for the world psychopaths and you know these are people who would do horrible things

00:36:48.120 anyway but they're just doing these particular horrible things under the aegis of jihad this is

00:36:55.980 something i believe you and i have spoken about when we're talking about the islamic state in the past

00:36:59.780 it's not like all the people who were raping yazidis and taking them as sex slaves and killing

00:37:06.100 their husbands even the people who had dropped out of medical school in the uk for the pleasure of

00:37:10.780 doing that it's not like they were all psychopaths who were destined for a life a life of rape and

00:37:16.540 murder anyway and they just decided to do it here the deepest problem here that i think we have to talk

00:37:23.440 about is that their ideas that are so powerful and destructive that they create a kind of absolute

00:37:30.500 evil that you know to our horror doesn't actually require the presence of many evil people right i mean

00:37:38.280 normal people can be led to believe the requisite things that could justify precisely the kind of

00:37:45.200 violence you described and that that i think is just for secular people people who have never met

00:37:50.720 anyone who has met anyone who has been certain of paradise i think it's very hard to understand and

00:37:56.660 so anyway i feel free to disagree with anything that i just said there but that i think that is

00:38:01.880 something that uh you know i'm eager to um disabuse our audience of yeah i i think we're about to start

00:38:09.360 talking i think about hamas and isis and uh i'll introduce one difference after what you just said

00:38:15.360 which is isis worked very hard to make sure that everybody was on the same page ideologically a lot

00:38:22.560 of their project was an educational project it was you have to believe the following things in fact

00:38:28.040 that's how we know that you're with us is that you believe the following things and you don't deviate

00:38:33.000 at all because if you do deviate then we're coming after you even with that minor deviation and

00:38:39.260 from what i've seen of of the guys who were coming in from hamas absolutely most of them seemed to

00:38:48.020 have jihad on the brain they go in and they use particular religious slogans that are familiar from

00:38:56.260 from jihadism elsewhere uh that indicate they're thinking about this and they're phrasing what they're

00:39:01.660 doing in in those terms there's other people who are going in and and as we've noted stealing

00:39:07.680 kids bikes and bike helmets and i don't know how they're phrasing what they're doing to themselves

00:39:15.860 clearly they they've dehumanized israelis in their own minds so that they think it's a reasonable thing

00:39:22.660 to loot a place where people are literally burning alive within a few dozen meters of them so it's at

00:39:29.980 least a sense of of inhumanity and and uh hatred of of of their imagined enemy but it's unclear what

00:39:41.760 they all believe beyond that and there's a whole range of of of things that that that people might

00:39:47.420 have had going through their minds from hey i'm striking a blow against the ones who have dispossessed us

00:39:54.600 to i'm doing something that god is going to reward me for with the the highest rewards of heaven and

00:40:01.940 then to add to that you know even in gaza especially in gaza the approval rate of hamas is very very low

00:40:09.700 gazans do not like hamas in general and so to see them doing these horrible things in the name of an

00:40:17.540 organization that is known to be corrupt and incompetent is again it's it's very strange and

00:40:26.300 different compared to isis where with the fighters for isis they thought that isis for whatever faults

00:40:32.860 it had represented the will of god was preordained and prophesied as the standard bearer for islam

00:40:41.400 bringing about the end of the world just as as as god desired so in a way it's more unsettling to see

00:40:49.060 people doing these horrible things for an entity that they seem to know is defective but they're

00:40:55.780 doing it anyway and with the same amount of cruelty yeah okay well that's um let me just pass over some

00:41:01.820 of that terrain again because i think there's a few more distinctions and caveats to add i mean one is

00:41:06.000 i've heard that while hamas is very unpopular in gaza probably for their um conscious immiseration of

00:41:12.480 the gazans by stealing all of the resources for the purpose of building terror tunnels etc they're

00:41:19.260 actually still popular in the west bank and they probably would win an election today if held in the

00:41:24.020 west bank um have you heard that discrepancy or not yeah i think this actually illustrates things

00:41:31.280 nicely i mean it's exactly crisscross where in the west bank which is governed by the palestinian

00:41:37.880 authority on the palestinian side hamas is relatively popular and then in gaza which is governed by

00:41:44.660 hamas and where the palestinian authority was kicked out the palestinian authority is more popular so

00:41:50.540 in in both cases they're misgoverned i mean these are terribly misgoverned statelets and the one who's

00:41:58.860 not misgoverning you is the one who's more popular yeah and the other caveat i would introduce is that

00:42:05.920 however unpopular hamas might be there's probably a distinction between you know hating them as a form

00:42:13.580 of government and not supporting what they did on october 7th right it's conceptually coherent to me

00:42:21.600 to believe that there's some people who thought october 7th was a great victory and even knowing the

00:42:27.000 details they would fully support it but they also think hamas is a terrible governing organization

00:42:33.000 and and they've ruined gaza yeah those are not incoherent i agree yeah i i think that the thing

00:42:40.660 to remember about hamas is that it's had years in power and the ideology that it stands for is

00:42:47.660 rather well laid out it's it's in favor of an eventual worldwide muslim government it is in favor

00:42:55.180 of the muslim brotherhood's view of of of of government and of how islamism should work

00:43:01.000 it is not though isis in isis isis operated with crystalline clarity extreme simplicity where you

00:43:11.020 could describe the system of government that isis wanted on the back of a three by five card

00:43:16.820 whereas hamas as a entity that actually has to you know pick up trash and do do a lot of of of

00:43:25.660 things for for years not not just briefly as isis did is a pretty messy thing and not nearly as as

00:43:33.740 as ideologically pure clear and simple as as isis was yeah well let's talk about the fragmentation of

00:43:42.380 the jihadist landscape for a moment because i think it's interesting i i don't think it's as

00:43:46.500 consequential as we would want it to be i mean we would want it to be totally internecine and and

00:43:52.840 self-canceling right it'd be great if the jihadists were just killing themselves and focused on on their

00:43:58.100 their hair splitting theological differences and uh really just let them have at it but in their

00:44:04.760 hatred of secular pluralistic i.e western values i think they're united in their aspiration to you

00:44:15.820 know triumphantly spread islam whatever form they favor to the end of the earth they're ultimately

00:44:21.860 united obviously there's a split between shia and sunni there's the infighting among sunni jihadist

00:44:28.980 groups you know we have we've got the islamic state that would more or less excommunicate everyone

00:44:33.680 for their lack of purity it was certainly as you point out in a recent article in the atlantic they

00:44:39.600 would consider hamas more or less apostates because they're willing to play the political game the

00:44:44.960 nationalistic game and they're and above all they're willing to collaborate with shia in being backed by

00:44:50.500 iran and being allied with hezbollah i think that detail is confusing to people what do you make of

00:44:56.020 hamas's machiavellian adaptability to collaborating across the shia sunni divide in a way that the

00:45:04.440 the islamic state would never countenance yeah not just would never countenance but order number one

00:45:10.860 of business for kill those people would be whoever was doing that yeah kill them kill the shia as

00:45:15.820 quickly as possible so they think that anybody who would collaborate with the shia including hamas

00:45:21.160 need to be killed now hamas does not have a problem with that you mentioned hezbollah you

00:45:27.500 mentioned iran which supplied supplies hamas most of its military budget there's also syria syria is

00:45:34.060 run by a an alawite shia government and is a huge supporter of hamas hamas has no problem with this

00:45:43.240 i think that there's there's a lot of sunni jihadists who are deferred they they say in the

00:45:52.300 future we'll hash this out in the meantime we've got a shared enemy in the form of the jewish state

00:45:57.640 so isis one of the reasons it sped to popularity so fast was that it was uncompromising yeah anybody

00:46:06.820 could see that that it was not going to take any shortcuts and so if you were in this for islamic

00:46:13.800 purity isis was the one to go to go for because it started off with absolute theological certainty

00:46:23.560 and inflexibility and that appealed to a lot of people and hamas seems to be totally flexible

00:46:30.600 theologically to the point where it'll accept people who are basically just nationalists you know

00:46:36.480 if you're waving the palestinian flag and you're okay with hamas being in charge then hamas is okay

00:46:42.080 with you whereas isis would want to kill you because you're a nationalist and god does not split up

00:46:48.520 humanity by nations only by islam and not islam so this is a this is a huge difference the other view

00:46:56.120 that that isis has of the palestinian israeli conflict is that in isis's timeline is way down the

00:47:04.140 road israel is not going to be vanquished the jews are not going to be vanquished until pretty late

00:47:10.660 like 11 59 p.m in the on the timeline of of of humanity so they say if you're trying to do that

00:47:17.820 right now you've got things out of order what you want want to do now is purify your faith and then

00:47:24.880 once that's done then jesus will come back the fight with the jews will be won and so forth and so

00:47:32.020 they say that hamas is single-minded focus on creating an estate in palestine is borderline

00:47:40.080 idolatrous because you shouldn't be thinking so intensely about that when when there's still a

00:47:46.960 lot of theological matters to be cleaned up so i guess i have a further question about hezbollah and

00:47:54.600 iran i don't know if this is the angle your reporting has taken at all but looking at this from the vast

00:48:01.220 distance of just being a consumer of news here in america it's hard for me to see how israel doesn't

00:48:10.340 decide and probably in concert with with american support that hezbollah currently constitutes a kind

00:48:20.140 of existential threat and just needs to be preemptively destroyed right i don't see how they just sit with

00:48:26.920 hezbollah on their northern border with 150 000 rockets as has been reported and a much larger

00:48:32.960 force than they just encountered coming from gaza so while they have to deal with gaza and they have

00:48:40.440 to deal with hamas they it sounds like they would have to deal with hezbollah and maybe iran too so

00:48:48.740 what's your sense of the looming specter of a much wider conflict being sort of inevitable at this

00:48:56.840 point however things play out in gaza yeah so in the the early days after this attack one of the

00:49:04.600 things that i i know was on lots of israelis minds was is there a next step where hezbollah steps in

00:49:11.560 that changes everything if there's a northern front with as you say 150 000 rockets being aimed at

00:49:17.060 israel and a extremely battle-hardened force in hezbollah so that that would as i say change

00:49:25.880 everything to have two fronts open at the same time i think it's it's it's simply a matter of priority

00:49:32.540 where and and capability where israel thinks that it can obliterate hamas as an operational entity

00:49:42.000 and hezbollah to do that would initiate a war that is not nearly so obviously winnable

00:49:50.920 so they would much prefer to take care of what they can now and then figure out how to deal with

00:49:57.680 with hezbollah from there what i think you're not hearing anyone speculate that israel would

00:50:04.940 actually preemptively attack hezbollah but in the absence of that front opening up

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - November 03, 2023

#339 — The Infernal Logic of Jihad

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