Making Sense - Sam Harris - #351 — 5 Myths about Israel and the War in Gaza

00:00:00.000 welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris okay this is another psa

00:00:28.240 normally these podcasts are in part behind a paywall as always if you appreciate what we're

00:00:35.520 doing here the way to support the podcast is to subscribe at sam harris.org

00:00:41.440 there are five myths about israel and the war in gaza that i would like to address however there

00:00:50.040 are two things i should say at the outset that are important and easy to lose sight of with the

00:00:55.760 various pseudo-moral hallucinations being spread everywhere in particular on social media the

00:01:02.560 first point is that the problem that israel faces with hamas and eventually hezbollah and ultimately

00:01:08.900 iran while it is existential for israel and dangerous and difficult in many specific ways

00:01:15.340 is a variant of a larger problem that has nothing in principle to do with israel or jews or american

00:01:22.280 foreign policy this is a larger clash of cultures i hesitate to follow samuel huntington and calling

00:01:28.520 it a clash of civilizations because i think real civilization what we mean by civilization at this

00:01:34.480 point in the 21st century exists on only one side of this divide and this clash is happening in varying

00:01:42.340 degrees in a hundred countries in most places it can be described as a conflict between islamic

00:01:48.240 extremists more appropriately called jihadists and ordinary human beings struggling to maintain the

00:01:54.200 norms of open societies so while it might sound like i'm narrowly defending israel here against

00:02:01.400 propagandists for hamas i would more or less have the same things to say about any civilized society

00:02:07.320 fighting jihadists i said the same things about american efforts to eradicate the islamic state

00:02:12.360 for instance in which case i was defending the yazidis who were being starved en masse on the side of a

00:02:18.620 mountain whose men were being crucified and decapitated and whose women and girls were being

00:02:24.020 taken by the thousands as sex slaves by jihadists who had come from all over the world to join the

00:02:30.880 so-called caliphate and to bask in the false dawn of islamic prophecy seemingly on the brink of

00:02:37.100 fulfillment and i said the same things after 9 11 when the united states was the target you can read

00:02:43.740 my book the end of faith on the subject and you will find that there's very little mention of israel

00:02:49.220 there i think the word appears on maybe a dozen pages and i'll have the same thing to say the next

00:02:55.740 time so-called terrorists murder innocent people in london or paris again this problem has nothing in

00:03:04.140 principle to do with israel or jews and i fully expect that civilized people throughout the world

00:03:11.280 non-muslim and muslim will be fighting jihadists for decades to come if i live to be a hundred i do not

00:03:19.480 expect to live to see the end of this problem needless to say i hope i'm wrong the second point

00:03:26.620 and i fear this will be forgotten almost immediately the moment i begin defending israel is that there is no

00:03:33.300 ethical or political argument that makes sense of the sight of lifeless children being pulled from

00:03:39.940 rubble with just a glimpse of the imagery coming out of gaza it's only natural to think that any action

00:03:47.540 that could produce such carnage must be evil it is absolutely natural to feel that since urban warfare

00:03:55.820 guarantees that innocent children will die violence cannot be the answer right so israel should just

00:04:03.080 stop fighting but this is an illusion however horrific even unthinkable sometimes war is necessary

00:04:12.520 of course many of these strategic and tactical decisions israel has made and how it wages this war

00:04:19.320 are debatable but there is no way of waging it without a massive loss of innocent life as i will discuss

00:04:26.200 if you doubt that what is the alternative to violence for israel in its current conflict with hamas

00:04:34.540 given what hamas did on october 7th and given what it has vowed to do again at any opportunity

00:04:41.580 pacifism pacifism pacifism only works against a morally sane adversary it worked against the british

00:04:50.700 in india but pacifism would not have worked against the nazis had the allies decided that war is just

00:04:57.680 too awful and they just couldn't stomach killing any more german children we would all be living in the

00:05:03.220 thousand-year reich and if the israelis practiced pacifism hamas and hezbollah and a fair number of

00:05:10.060 ordinary palestinians would simply murder them this is not an opinion this is what these groups have

00:05:16.760 claimed openly for decades and if there were any doubt and there never was any doubt october 7th has

00:05:25.360 made it obscene to doubt this now what more do you need hamas has said that it will repeat the

00:05:33.160 atrocities of october 7th again and again and recent polls indicate that 80 percent of palestinians

00:05:40.040 approve of what they did you might worry that palestinians can't afford to answer such polls

00:05:46.700 honestly for fear of hamas but support for hamas is around 40 percent in recent polls support for

00:05:55.060 what hamas did on october 7th is double that so many of those who had the courage to say they don't

00:06:01.820 support hamas still approve of what hamas did on october 7th the problem for israel and for the whole

00:06:09.760 world is that jihadism is more dangerous than nazism jihadists are like nazis who are certain

00:06:17.360 of paradise they are nazis who are eager to die and have their children die because they actually

00:06:23.840 believe in martyrdom they don't just sort of believe in it they don't merely hope that it's true

00:06:29.920 they absolutely believe that dying while attempting to kill infidels or apostates or jews leads directly

00:06:38.660 to paradise i understand that this sounds like dehumanizing wartime propaganda but it isn't this

00:06:47.640 is fundamentalist religion in its worst form we are dealing with religious fanatics who have had most

00:06:54.500 rational human goals and considerations scraped from their minds by a lunatic ideology and while

00:07:01.920 there are differences among jihadist groups and they can sometimes be found murdering one another

00:07:06.500 they're all part of the same death cult of course i'm not saying that ordinary nationalism and tribalism

00:07:14.340 aren't also part of the problem they are there are many contributors to every conflict i'm talking

00:07:21.860 about what makes these particular conflicts worse than those born of ordinary nationalism or tribalism

00:07:28.640 or competition for resources or any other earthly motive the aims of jihadists really are antithetical

00:07:36.780 to everything that civilized people value and are right to value in the 21st century and the fact

00:07:43.360 that we have on our own side rich educated people who are concerned about gay rights and trans rights and

00:07:50.480 women's rights who want to fight climate change and save the whales taking the side of hamas in the

00:07:57.480 aftermath of the atrocities they committed on october 7th just reveals how confused and decadent and morally

00:08:05.460 vulnerable our civilization has become we have to confront the facts that are staring us in the face

00:08:12.680 and most importantly the majority of muslims everywhere need to face these facts and be honest about what

00:08:20.900 jihadism actually is and where a sincere belief in martyrdom actually leads and there are some hopeful

00:08:28.240 signs that this is happening at least among the rulers of the gulf states but a disavowal of jihadism

00:08:34.880 needs to become the majority opinion among 2 billion muslims worldwide until this happens there will be no exit

00:08:42.940 from these sorts of conflicts myth number one israel is guilty of genocide in gaza

00:08:51.340 well the term genocide has a clear meaning it's the destruction or attempted destruction of a whole people

00:08:58.220 according to the 1948 international genocide convention genocide constitutes acts committed

00:09:05.280 with the intent to destroy in whole or in part a national ethnic racial or religious group

00:09:11.240 to claim that israel has perpetrated a genocide in gaza or that it has attempted genocide anywhere

00:09:18.240 is patently false there were around 250 000 people in gaza in 1948 there are now more than 2 million

00:09:27.240 this rate of growth is triple the world average so if israel has perpetrated a genocide in gaza it is

00:09:35.500 the most inept genocide in history and yet this false charge has been made against israel for years

00:09:42.440 it's telling that the most recent allegations of genocide could be heard before israel had dropped

00:09:48.120 a single bomb in response to october 7th really people were shrieking genocide on october 8th what does that

00:09:56.000 tell you this is just a new blood libel of course it's true that the israeli defense forces have killed a

00:10:03.680 lot of innocent people in gaza however it's also true that if the idf wanted to kill every person in gaza

00:10:11.040 next week that is actually commit genocide it could but of course it doesn't want to do that and has never

00:10:18.560 wanted to do that in fact the israeli army routinely drops leaflets and broadcasts on the radio and calls

00:10:25.360 cell phones to alert palestinian civilians when specific areas will be bombed they did this for

00:10:30.960 weeks in advance of their most recent invasion of gaza conversely hamas is using its own population

00:10:37.520 as human shields it built its headquarters under a hospital and built hundreds of miles of tunnels

00:10:43.280 under civilian apartments and schools and mosques and it fires its rockets from populated areas and

00:10:49.920 often prevents people from evacuating all in a conscious attempt to maximize the loss of innocent life

00:10:56.320 these are war crimes of course the idf makes terrible mistakes and this is inevitable in war the idf

00:11:05.040 recently killed israeli hostages who were mere moments away from being rescued there are tragic accidents and

00:11:12.960 errors of judgment in every war however any conflict with jihadists is made immeasurably worse by the

00:11:20.320 tactics they use why can't israeli soldiers simply trust people who appear unarmed and want to surrender

00:11:26.880 or move to safety because they are confronting a culture of religious fanatics that has produced an

00:11:33.040 endless supply of suicide bombers over the last 50 years just take a moment to contemplate how the tactic of

00:11:39.920 suicide bombing changes everything nothing and no one can be taken at face value i mean normally if

00:11:47.680 someone is driving a car or a truck you can be confident that he hasn't rigged it to explode most

00:11:54.720 people aren't eager to die okay we rely on the near universality of that attitude in all kinds of

00:12:01.680 ways but here we are talking about people who have literally rigged children to explode this has happened in

00:12:09.600 a dozen different conflicts with jihadists across the world many of which had nothing to do with israel

00:12:15.440 or the west or even non-muslims how do you expect an army or a police force or any other organization

00:12:23.840 to deal with this possibility in a compassionate and civilized way one that is recognized to be

00:12:29.840 compassionate and civilized by all the innocent people who are subjected to it day after day and year after

00:12:36.400 year at checkpoints and in other places where they have to be treated like they too might be suicide

00:12:42.960 bombers just imagine what it is like to have to wonder whether a child is actually a bomb and just think

00:12:54.000 for a moment about a culture that has normalized this nihilistic behavior a culture that literally

00:13:00.560 teaches the love of martyrdom to six-year-olds in school this has nothing to do with israel or jews

00:13:08.880 or the palestinians even this is just jihadism for instance boko haram routinely uses children as

00:13:16.560 suicide bombers in nigeria and elsewhere in africa most members of boko haram have never met anyone who has

00:13:24.480 ever met anyone who has met a jew this nihilism falls directly out of the doctrines around martyrdom

00:13:31.120 and jihad which are unique to islam again i'm not saying that nationalism and ordinary grievances

00:13:37.600 never play a role they do i'm talking about the religious layer of these conflicts that make them

00:13:43.840 so much worse than other types of conflict i'm going to take a little detour here just to hammer this

00:13:50.480 point home because in my experience secular people find it impossible to understand what's going on

00:13:55.920 here this is from the new york times on february 12th 1984 almost exactly 40 years ago it's reported

00:14:04.640 by terence smith who was at the time a former foreign correspondent and the chief white house

00:14:09.760 correspondent for the new york times i'm going to read from the start of an article about the war between

00:14:15.520 iran and iraq this article was being reported from the iranian side and it's about their routine use

00:14:21.360 of children on suicide missions again this is from the new york times 40 years ago their ticket to

00:14:28.960 paradise is the blood red headband and the small metal key that they wear into battle sar ala warriors of

00:14:36.160 god some of the headbands read in farsi script identifying the wearers as divinely designated martyrs who will use

00:14:44.000 their keys to go directly to heaven if killed in the holy war against iraq declared by their leader

00:14:50.320 the ayatollah ruhola khomeini the headbands and the keys are worn by young boys aged 12 to 17 i should

00:14:58.240 note that younger ages have been reported elsewhere i've read about children as young as nine used this

00:15:03.600 way the headbands and the keys are worn by young boys who are recruited by local clergy or simply rounded

00:15:10.000 up in the villages of iran given an intensive indoctrination into the shiite tradition of

00:15:14.800 martyrdom and then sent weaponless into battle against iraqi armor often bound together in groups

00:15:22.240 of 20 by ropes to prevent the faint-hearted from deserting they hurl themselves on barbed wire or

00:15:29.120 march into iraqi minefields in the face of withering machine gun fire to clear the way for iranian tanks

00:15:36.080 again another interjection from me here just picture this from the iraqi side you're an iraqi

00:15:43.280 tank commander and you see groups of children coming at you across a minefield tied together

00:15:51.440 with rope clearing the mines and barbed wire with their lives back to the text across the back of

00:16:00.480 their khaki colored shirts has stenciled the slogan i have the special permission of the imam that's

00:16:05.840 the maniac khomeini to enter heaven in dozens of interviews conducted by this reporter in recent

00:16:12.240 weeks with iranian exiles academics and government and intelligence officials in the united states and

00:16:17.600 europe the blind faith of these teenage martyrs was frequently cited as symbolic of the fanaticism

00:16:24.080 that is part of life today in the islamic republic of iran an east european journalist who witnessed one of

00:16:30.160 these human wave assaults in which tens of thousands of young iranians have gone willingly to their

00:16:36.880 deaths could hardly believe what he was seeing as first one boy and then another detonated a mine

00:16:44.400 and was hurled into the air by the explosion we have so few tanks an iranian officer explained to the

00:16:50.880 journalist without apology okay well a few things should be clear again this madness has nothing to do with

00:16:59.360 israel here we're talking about the war between iran and iraq 40 years ago these were muslims

00:17:06.320 fighting other muslims and it was a zombie movie this belief in martyrdom is cancer for the mind until the

00:17:16.640 muslim world outgrows it anathematizes it vomits over it can't believe it ever indulged it the potential for the

00:17:26.000 most insane violence will never go away and this is why nuclear weapons in the hands of jihadists

00:17:33.360 cannot be tolerated as bad as nuclear proliferation is in every other context

00:17:39.520 and just think how bonkers things are with north korea north korea has nuclear weapons and they've

00:17:45.280 also built icbms though their accuracy is still debatable and they have threatened to bomb the united

00:17:51.440 united states as bad as that is one thing makes it tolerable we don't believe that kim jong-un is eager

00:18:00.320 to die the guy loves basketball he has a hundred cars and a harem and a private island if a fanatical

00:18:09.760 belief in martyrdom were endemic to north korea and obvious among its leaders that would make the

00:18:16.960 situation incalculably worse the entire world and the muslim world in particular needs to recognize

00:18:25.520 that jihadism is the one ism that can no longer be tolerated as for genocide the intentions of hamas

00:18:34.560 as declared in their founding charter and as they have reiterated numerous times since october 7th

00:18:40.240 are explicit they aspire to commit an actual genocide this is something they proudly claim

00:18:47.920 to want to do and the worst part is that they don't ultimately care about their own survival

00:18:54.960 again a belief in martyrdom changes everything members of hamas like jihadists everywhere routinely

00:19:02.080 chant we love death more than the jews or the infidels or the americans love life

00:19:07.360 and while this might sound like posturing and it may be posturing for any specific person who lacks

00:19:14.160 real faith in general it is an honest expression of their religious worldview they are a death cult

00:19:22.640 and hamas is a death cult that happens to be very popular among palestinians

00:19:28.320 even though hamas has engineered a situation in which to fight them effectively requires that palestinian

00:19:34.080 civilians also die again they are consciously using their own population as human shields they have

00:19:41.840 built hundreds of miles of tunnels under gaza more extensive than the london underground with thousands

00:19:48.720 of entrances that use hospitals and mosques and schools and apartment buildings and other civilian

00:19:54.720 infrastructure as cover hamas fighters are hiding in these tunnels right now and using the innocent

00:20:02.080 civilians they kidnapped from israel as an additional layer of human shields crucially these tunnels are

00:20:09.600 not being used as bomb shelters for the civilian population on the contrary the civilian population is being

00:20:17.200 sacrificed to protect the tunnels again that was the whole plan they have spent billions of dollars

00:20:24.960 over the course of 17 years building these tunnels the palestinians in gaza have received more

00:20:31.360 international aid than almost any community on earth they could have built a singapore on the mediterranean

00:20:38.240 in fact if they were pacifists they would already have a state pacifism would actually work if practiced by

00:20:45.200 the palestinians against israel there is no way that israel could resist a gandian style campaign of

00:20:51.440 non-violence in support of a two-state solution the palestinians would absolutely win a moral contest

00:20:57.840 like that and could have won it 50 years ago but generally speaking they are a culture of religious

00:21:04.080 fanatics ruled by absolute fanatics who are willing to sacrifice everything for martyrdom as a top hamas

00:21:13.440 official said in response to all the destruction in gaza we are called a nation of martyrs and we are proud to

00:21:19.120 sacrifice martyrs that is the problem that israel is dealing with what hamas is doing is not in any sense

00:21:28.400 normal human behavior in a time of war but it is normal for jihadists what israel is doing in a

00:21:37.120 desperate attempt to eradicate hamas while minimizing civilian death is not in any sense an act of genocide

00:21:44.720 but again nothing that i just said even while true makes sense when you see the bodies of dead

00:21:51.920 children being pulled out of rubble the only thing that provides moral clarity here is the recognition

00:21:58.560 that this whole catastrophe is hamas's fault and that there can be no peaceful response to jihadism

00:22:06.960 anyone calling for a ceasefire at this point needs to ask themselves why aren't you calling for hamas to

00:22:13.760 release the hostages and why don't you remember that there was a ceasefire on october 6th the truth

00:22:21.280 that we cannot lose sight of is that hamas has deliberately engineered the chaos on both sides

00:22:28.720 of the gaza border myth number two international humanitarian law requires that israel's response

00:22:37.440 to palestinian aggression be quote proportional well the term proportional is being widely misunderstood

00:22:45.680 when talking about the war in gaza to be truly proportional in the way that many people imagine this

00:22:51.360 word is used israeli soldiers would need to rape torture and murder the same number of palestinian

00:22:57.680 non-combatants as hamas raped tortured and murdered in israel on october 7th but of course no one

00:23:05.120 believes that such reciprocal savagery would constitute a sane or ethical response to hamas's

00:23:11.520 violence in fact the concept of proportionality doesn't refer to the numbers of casualties on either

00:23:18.000 side of a conflict much less insist that they be equal it simply asks that we weigh the military

00:23:23.440 importance of an action against the resulting destruction of civilian life and property

00:23:28.960 international law allows israel to utterly destroy hamas given what happened on october 7th and given

00:23:36.880 the fact that they continue to fire rockets into israeli cities intentionally targeting civilians as i've said

00:23:44.000 there is no way for israel to fight hamas without a massive loss of innocent life because again hamas has

00:23:50.960 embedded itself in the civilian population on purpose to cause as much civilian death as possible

00:23:58.560 jihadism aside in this age of social media it seems that many people are discovering for the first time

00:24:05.040 what modern warfare is actually like quite independent of the rightness or the wrongness of any cause

00:24:12.080 enormous numbers of innocent people die the allies killed hundreds of thousands of german civilians

00:24:19.040 in world war ii and hundreds of thousands of japanese civilians along with them how would that have looked

00:24:25.360 on tiktok and more recent wars are no exception around 2300 u.s soldiers died in the war in afghanistan

00:24:33.520 and yet we killed over 50 000 members of the taliban and other opposing forces and around 50 000 afghan

00:24:39.680 civilians died too so there was around a 40 to 1 disparity in the number of deaths between the two sides

00:24:46.720 in the war in iraq we suffered twice the fatalities around 4600 and we caused something like 40 000

00:24:53.440 military deaths so a nine to one ratio but there were somewhere around 200 000 civilians killed in that

00:25:00.000 war of course many of those deaths were due to the sectarian conflict between the sunni and shia in iraq

00:25:05.760 for which we also get blamed accepting that blame yields a fatality ratio once again of over 40 to 1.

00:25:11.520 one my point isn't to defend any of our tactics in past wars or the wars themselves my point isn't even

00:25:19.600 to defend specific choices that israel has made in waging this war frankly i don't consider myself

00:25:25.040 informed enough to know what they should be doing my point is that israel is being held to a level of

00:25:30.800 scrutiny in how it conducts this war that has never been applied to the united states or the uk or france or

00:25:39.200 any other country in a time of conflict and unlike our wars in afghanistan and iraq israel's war against

00:25:46.480 hamas is genuinely existential and again they are fighting jihadists who have built hundreds of miles

00:25:53.760 of tunnels under a civilian population for the purpose of maximizing the loss of innocent life

00:26:00.800 it's an impossible situation of course the loss of civilian life in gaza is absolutely tragic

00:26:08.000 and nothing i'm saying here is meant to minimize the horror of it i'm repeating myself on this point

00:26:14.160 for a reason because it's very difficult to maintain moral clarity in the presence of dead and injured

00:26:20.800 children our hearts tell us to rescue children by whatever means possible and it's a good thing that we

00:26:29.440 have that response but we can't lose sight of the fact that all this tragedy and horror has been

00:26:35.440 unconsciously engineered by hamas for reasons that make perfect sense to jihadists but which no normal

00:26:44.800 army has ever contemplated or would ever contemplate yes this conflict has many of the features of

00:26:52.080 ordinary guerrilla warfare but guerrilla warfare plus certainty of paradise is much worse there is simply no

00:27:01.600 good way to fight an enemy of this kind when you are fighting jihadists your own scruples the shame and

00:27:08.880 horror you feel at killing non-combatants become another weapon in their hands jihadists are very

00:27:15.120 clever they know that by our own moral code the images of innocent civilians being killed in gaza are

00:27:23.360 totally unacceptable they know that we can only tolerate so much of that lest we become unrecognizable to

00:27:30.080 ourselves lest we become monsters but these people are already monsters hamas simply doesn't care about

00:27:39.040 palestinian children and they are committed to murdering israeli children whenever they can

00:27:45.200 that is why they have to be destroyed there are only terrible and more terrible options here and again the

00:27:52.080 problem is deeper than israel and the palestinians eventually muslim societies need to understand that

00:27:59.840 their religious beliefs specifically the doctrines about jihad and martyrdom make any conflict of this

00:28:06.160 kind far more pointlessly horrible than it needs to be that is their fault and it will remain their fault

00:28:13.920 no matter how many children die in gaza again modern democratic largely secular societies must wake up to the

00:28:24.160 reality of the reality of the situation we have a sadistically insane terrorist organization

00:28:31.760 raping torturing and murdering non-combatants and taking hostages including children and then using

00:28:41.040 their own children as human shields so that they cannot be effectively fought by civilized people

00:28:47.760 they know that eventually civilized people become a little less civilized in situations like this and

00:28:55.920 can care only so much about collateral damage so israel can be expected to slip off the moral high ground

00:29:03.280 by killing enormous numbers of non-combatants and even commit its own war crimes eventually and civilized

00:29:10.240 people the world over who imagine themselves unimplicated in this conflict will become hysterical and put

00:29:17.440 pressure on israel to stop fighting as they did even before israel started fighting the crucial distinction

00:29:25.120 which almost no one can keep in view is that there are now two types of people in this world those who

00:29:31.920 intentionally torture and kill children and other non-combatants to maximize horror and those who seek to avoid

00:29:39.920 doing so however imperfectly while defending themselves against the first sort of people

00:29:46.080 the gulf between these two groups could not be wider and everything we care about literally everything

00:29:53.680 exists on one side of it myth number three the jews are colonizers and the palestinians are indigenous people

00:30:04.080 there has been a continuous presence of jews in the land of israel for thousands of years

00:30:08.880 the jews therefore are among the indigenous people of the region they were also indigenous to egypt and

00:30:15.440 syria and yemen and turkey and iran and other muslim countries before being driven out of those

00:30:22.320 countries by muslims and curiously no one at the u.n is worried about the jews so-called right of return

00:30:30.640 is anyone pressuring muslim countries to give jews their homes back no

00:30:36.000 these are the sorts of asymmetries one should notice in any case israel is not unique among

00:30:43.200 states and having been created by outside powers just drawing lines on maps in the aftermath of world war ii

00:30:50.720 pakistan was born in the same year and in the same way and yet no one questions its right to exist

00:30:57.200 nearly every nation on earth has emerged from a chaotic history of conquest and the displacement of people

00:31:03.520 there are now 22 official muslim states and over 50 muslim majority countries this is the result of

00:31:11.040 centuries of muslim conquest there's exactly one jewish state and yet only israel must continually confront

00:31:18.880 charges of its illegitimacy only israel must continually advocate for its right to exist

00:31:26.160 there are nearly 200 member states of the u.n and israel has been sanctioned by that body

00:31:32.080 more than all the countries in the world combined does that mean that israel has behaved especially badly

00:31:39.280 no there are countries like north korea that has turned its entire society into a prison camp

00:31:46.240 there are countries like sudan that have perpetrated actual genocides there are countries like egypt

00:31:52.640 and somalia where nearly a hundred percent of girls are subjected to genital mutilation

00:31:58.240 there are countries like syria that have killed orders of magnitude more muslim non-combatants as i

00:32:05.360 already pointed out there are countries like iran that have used child soldiers by the tens of thousands

00:32:11.600 in suicide operations and yet the u.n sits in perpetual judgment of the one democracy in the middle east

00:32:20.000 that is fighting for its actual survival against a death cult that revels in atrocities and in the

00:32:27.040 martyrdom of its own civilians i know the u.n sounds like it still has some gravitas it's the united nations

00:32:36.480 after all but on this and several other points it has become a morally bankrupt institution there are even

00:32:44.720 reports that employees of unra the united nations relief and works agency for palestinian refugees

00:32:50.880 took part in the massacre of october 7th as insane as that sounds and the united states has actually

00:32:57.600 paused funding to this organization because of this the u.s alone gives unra around 300 million dollars a

00:33:05.600 year and has been widely reported un-funded schools teach palestinian kids to hate jews and aspire to

00:33:12.480 martyrdom the word corruption doesn't quite encompass the problems here myth number four the atrocities

00:33:22.080 committed by hamas along with over 1 000 palestinian civilians on october 7th were a legitimate response

00:33:29.280 to oppression well israel left gaza in 2005 forcibly removing thousands of his own citizens and billions of

00:33:38.240 dollars in international aid have since been spent there so the quote oppression of the palestinians

00:33:44.960 in gaza by israel is at least debatable while israel has sought to maintain a secure border with gaza

00:33:53.200 all those years so has egypt and yet no one blames egypt for making gaza a quote open air prison

00:34:00.720 however even if we accept the charge of oppression it must be said that not all oppressed people respond

00:34:07.280 by raping and torturing and murdering non-combatants the tibetans have been truly oppressed by the chinese

00:34:15.120 for many decades and yet they have never committed atrocities against chinese civilians when the jews of

00:34:21.680 germany were herded into ghettos by the nazis those who escaped didn't rape and mutilate german teenagers

00:34:29.760 or burn german babies alive in reprisal there are countless historical examples of real oppression

00:34:37.520 and yet very few cultures have produced a bottomless supply of suicidal terrorists

00:34:43.920 of course there may be many societal factors that explain these differences but one is surely

00:34:50.000 the islamic doctrines around martyrdom and jihad people's religious beliefs really are motivating

00:34:57.040 we can see this with fundamentalist christianity in the west the fundamentals of religion matter when

00:35:03.600 you're a fundamentalist and it matters that the fundamentals of our various religions are

00:35:08.000 different mere religious tribalism is always a potential source of intolerance and violence

00:35:14.720 but it is much worse when there are specific doctrines that advocate intolerance and violence

00:35:21.360 again we need the world's two billion muslims to honestly acknowledge this problem and find some way of

00:35:27.920 moderating their faith specifically around the doctrines of martyrdom and jihad and apostasy and blasphemy

00:35:36.080 which put their faith in perpetual conflict with the modern world myth number five the two sides in this

00:35:44.480 conflict are equally civilized equally entitled to respect and equally worth protecting well again if we're

00:35:53.200 talking about children dying on either side of this conflict then yes a human life is a human life

00:35:59.760 but jihadist organizations like hamas and the wider cultures that support them don't value human life

00:36:06.800 the way we do again while this might sound like wartime propaganda it's a simple statement of fact about

00:36:13.520 how religious beliefs motivate people and constrain their thinking there is a difference between religious

00:36:21.760 fanatics who punish women with beatings or worse for showing their hair in public or who commit honor

00:36:29.680 killings against them for the crime of getting raped or who throw acid in their faces for a perceived slight

00:36:37.920 or even in a place like afghanistan for the crime of going to school there is a difference between this

00:36:45.200 vicious lunacy and a modern society that treats women as equals to men there's a difference between a

00:36:52.480 society that murders gays that literally has a policy of throwing them off of rooftops head first and one that

00:37:01.040 fully embraces them there is a difference between religious fanatics who care only about paradise

00:37:08.400 and most other people who take their religious beliefs much less seriously or who have different

00:37:14.560 beliefs that allow them to appropriately value life in this world have you seen the crowds in gaza that

00:37:22.320 cheered the capture of israeli hostages and the mutilation of jewish dead have you watched those videos

00:37:30.160 did these people look like they have the slightest interest in avoiding war crimes these are the types of

00:37:35.280 behaviors we see all around the world in an islamic context even when the fighting has nothing to do

00:37:41.920 with jews or the u.s is it only islamic no but islam has more than its fair share of this kind of

00:37:50.960 barbarity we have to be honest about that to be clear i'm not advocating collective punishment against

00:37:59.040 the palestinians for being backward i'm not saying that palestinian civilians who support

00:38:04.720 hamas deserve to die i am saying however that we shouldn't lie to ourselves about the state of

00:38:11.600 public opinion throughout the muslim world we should understand what people believe and how these beliefs

00:38:19.040 affect behavior and we have to figure out how to get two billion muslims to truly moderate the religious

00:38:27.520 extremism and tribalism we see throughout the muslim world it's an enormous problem

00:38:35.680 recent polling among palestinians this was done by the palestinian center for policy survey and research

00:38:41.760 shows widespread support for hamas and more support for the attacks of october 7th as i said many of

00:38:48.080 those who don't like hamas for one reason or another still like what hamas did on october 7th this recent

00:38:56.400 poll shows that while only 40 percent of palestinians support hamas double that support the atrocities of

00:39:03.200 october 7th the deliberate torture and murder of non-combatants the taking of children and even infants

00:39:10.960 as hostages and the justification in their minds is explicitly religious it was in defense of the al-aqsa

00:39:18.720 mosque in jerusalem which they imagine has been desecrated by the netanyahu government of course

00:39:25.680 the palestinian community and the muslim world generally is so riddled with lies and conspiracy

00:39:32.000 theories we might reasonably wonder what percentage of ordinary muslims even believe that any jewish civilians

00:39:39.120 were killed on october 7th many believe the holocaust never happened after september 11th we had the

00:39:45.760 impossible spectacle of muslims alleging that it was a jewish plot because supposedly 4 000 jews didn't

00:39:52.320 show up to work on 9 11 while simultaneously celebrating it as a great jihadist victory by al-qaeda there is no

00:40:00.880 reconciling these beliefs okay in general we are not talking about people who are part of the reality-based

00:40:08.400 community but if we're going to maintain basic moral sanity at this moment in history we have

00:40:15.440 to acknowledge that there is a difference between those who intentionally kill non-combatants often in

00:40:22.560 the most gruesome way as possible and those who inadvertently kill them when dropping bombs having

00:40:29.360 taken considerable pains to avoid killing them there is a difference between a society that parades

00:40:36.560 tortured hostages before jeering crowds and one that gives even its most dangerous prisoners

00:40:43.520 life-saving medical care i mean most people don't realize that the current head of hamas senwar was

00:40:50.000 cured of brain cancer while in an israeli prison the actual mastermind behind the october 7th attacks

00:40:58.000 was someone whose life had been saved by a jewish oncologist it's pretty hard to overstate the disparity

00:41:05.680 here do you understand how much this difference matters and how it touches everything there simply

00:41:14.160 is a difference between people who are attempting to spread a cult of death to the ends of the earth

00:41:20.720 and those who are struggling to prevent this from happening while also struggling to maintain the norms of

00:41:27.040 an open society and it is impossible to understand these differences if one merely counts the number

00:41:33.840 of dead and wounded in this or any other conflict and this is why intentions matter actions matter of

00:41:42.320 course but the reasons behind the actions also matter what sort of world are we trying to build what

00:41:50.960 what would any given person or group do if they had the power to do it there are vast differences

00:41:57.760 in what various groups are aspiring to accomplish at this moment in history and the future of

00:42:04.000 civilization depends on our being able to minimize these differences and where they've remained

00:42:09.600 significant to minimize them further through diplomacy and economic incentives and other forms of pressure

00:42:16.720 short of violence but there are certain groups of people that have kicked themselves loose of the earth

00:42:23.680 and they cannot be reasoned with or incentivized and this is where the use of force becomes necessary

00:42:31.280 let's hope that becomes less and less true in the years to come thanks for listening

00:42:37.520 to me

00:42:39.840 is

00:42:59.200 is

Making Sense - Sam Harris - January 30, 2024

#351 — 5 Myths about Israel and the War in Gaza

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