Making Sense - Sam Harris - January 30, 2024


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

Hosted by
Sam Harris
Mentioned
Samuel Huntington
#350 — Sharing Reality #352 — Hubris & Chaos

Episode Stats


Length

42 minutes

Words per minute

144.12

Word count

6,196

Sentence count

—

Harmful content

Toxicity

16

sentences flagged

Hate speech

62

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

There are 5 myths about the war in Gaza that I would like to address. 1. The problem that Israel faces is a variant of a larger problem that has nothing in principle to do with israel or jews or American foreign policy 2. The problem is a larger clash of cultures 3. What is the alternative to violence for Israel in its current conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah? 4. Is there a better solution to the problem than pacifism? 5. What does it mean to be a good soldier? 6. Is it possible to be moral in the face of so much carnage? 7. What would you do if you were a terrorist? 8. Why is it important to have a moral compass? 9. Why does it matter what you do? 10. What do you need to do to make sense of the problem? 11. What are the best ways to deal with it? 12. Why do we have to be kinder to our enemies? 13. How can we deal with them? 14. What can we do about it if they are dangerous? 15. What should we do in the future? 16. How do we know what to do in response to the threat they pose to us? 17. Why should we be a better option than violence? 18. What role do we need to be in the fight against terrorism? 19. Are they more dangerous than nazis? And so on and dangerous than jihadi terrorists? 21. Is is there a solution to this problem than they are supposed to be? or are they really? 22. Why are they are they not? Is there any better than the problem we can be a threat to us in the first place? Or are they better than we can learn from the problem they are here? 23. What will we can we learn from it, or can we be taught to be better than us, or are we better than they can be taught? ? 24. 25. Is this better than that? 26. Is the problem really a problem that can be solved by us, and can we really be taught or can be understood? 27. Do they have a better than this, or is there any other way to learn from us, or can they be taught about it, or is it really, really Is it really?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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 0.75
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 0.93
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 0.78
00:02:30.880 so-called caliphate and to bask in the false dawn of islamic prophecy seemingly on the brink of 0.98
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 1.00
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 0.98
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 0.60
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 0.99
00:06:29.920 they absolutely believe that dying while attempting to kill infidels or apostates or jews leads directly 0.85
00:06:38.660 to paradise i understand that this sounds like dehumanizing wartime propaganda but it isn't this 0.85
00:06:47.640 is fundamentalist religion in its worst form we are dealing with religious fanatics who have had most 0.88
00:06:54.500 rational human goals and considerations scraped from their minds by a lunatic ideology and while 0.82
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 0.75
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 0.60
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 0.82
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 0.51
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 1.00
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 0.99
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 0.99
00:17:16.640 muslim world outgrows it anathematizes it vomits over it can't believe it ever indulged it the potential for the 1.00
00:17:26.000 most insane violence will never go away and this is why nuclear weapons in the hands of jihadists 0.94
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 0.68
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 0.55
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 1.00
00:18:25.520 that jihadism is the one ism that can no longer be tolerated as for genocide the intentions of hamas 0.95
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 0.58
00:19:02.080 chant we love death more than the jews or the infidels or the americans love life 0.99
00:19:07.360 and while this might sound like posturing and it may be posturing for any specific person who lacks 0.98
00:19:14.160 real faith in general it is an honest expression of their religious worldview they are a death cult 0.99
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 0.60
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 0.83
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 0.93
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 0.98
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 0.94
00:22:06.960 anyone calling for a ceasefire at this point needs to ask themselves why aren't you calling for hamas to 0.98
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 1.00
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 0.94
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 0.92
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 0.82
00:25:53.760 of tunnels under a civilian population for the purpose of maximizing the loss of innocent life 0.99
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 0.99
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 0.98
00:27:39.040 palestinian children and they are committed to murdering israeli children whenever they can 1.00
00:27:45.200 that is why they have to be destroyed there are only terrible and more terrible options here and again the 0.86
00:27:52.080 problem is deeper than israel and the palestinians eventually muslim societies need to understand that 0.98
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 0.99
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 0.96
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 0.94
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 0.99
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 0.90
00:31:39.280 no there are countries like north korea that has turned its entire society into a prison camp 0.96
00:31:46.240 there are countries like sudan that have perpetrated actual genocides there are countries like egypt 0.91
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 0.97
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 1.00
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 1.00
00:34:15.120 for many decades and yet they have never committed atrocities against chinese civilians when the jews of 1.00
00:34:21.680 germany were herded into ghettos by the nazis those who escaped didn't rape and mutilate german teenagers 0.74
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 1.00
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 0.79
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 0.98
00:37:01.040 fully embraces them there is a difference between religious fanatics who care only about paradise 0.95
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 1.00
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 1.00
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 0.99
00:38:04.720 hamas deserve to die i am saying however that we shouldn't lie to ourselves about the state of 1.00
00:38:11.600 public opinion throughout the muslim world we should understand what people believe and how these beliefs 0.99
00:38:19.040 affect behavior and we have to figure out how to get two billion muslims to truly moderate the religious 1.00
00:38:27.520 extremism and tribalism we see throughout the muslim world it's an enormous problem 1.00
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 1.00
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 0.61
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