Making Sense - Sam Harris - October 06, 2025


#437 — Two Years Since 10⧸7


Episode Stats


Length

20 minutes

Words per minute

178.65097

Word count

3,663

Sentence count

184

Harmful content

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

17

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Dan Sinor joins me to discuss the Yom Kippur Massacre and the lessons he's learned about anti-Semitism since the events of October 7th, 2019. We also discuss the growing problem of antisemitism around the world.

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 .
00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're
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00:00:36.620 Dan Sinor, good to see you.
00:00:38.560 Good to be with you, Sam.
00:00:39.680 We're doing a simulcast here, which I've been on your podcast, you've never been on mine,
00:00:43.960 so apologies to your listeners, but I think we need to start this simulcast with you giving
00:00:48.740 a potted bio. How do you explain yourself? How do you have strong opinions on the topics
00:00:53.860 we're about to touch?
00:00:54.700 I spent a number of years in and out of U.S. government foreign policy positions, and I've
00:01:01.480 spent a lot of time in the Middle East in those positions, and also a lot of time in Israel
00:01:05.660 studying and writing about Israel, written a couple books about Israel. And since October
00:01:10.840 7th, my podcast has been all but exclusively focused on what has been happening in Israel,
00:01:17.420 the Middle East, and in the West's reaction to events of October 7th. So in a nutshell, that's
00:01:24.520 how I found my voice.
00:01:25.520 Yeah. Well, I'll just tell my listeners that that podcast is Call Me Back, and I have found
00:01:30.520 it indispensable these last two years. It's really just been fantastic. So thanks for doing
00:01:36.280 it, and I highly recommend that people listen to you directly over there.
00:01:40.340 Thank you. Well, I think most of my listeners are already listeners of yours, but if they're
00:01:45.520 not, they should be and should be subscribers because your voice, while you come in and out
00:01:50.380 of this issue, I think a number of the issues you address on your podcasts are actually like
00:01:55.680 the surround sound of what has been going on in the issue that I've been covering. So your
00:02:00.160 voice and your clarity have been extremely important, and I'm glad we're able to have this conversation.
00:02:05.360 Yeah. Well, so Dan, there's a lot we could talk about. I don't really have much of an
00:02:10.780 agenda except that there are two things that I feel like we really should touch in addition
00:02:15.120 to anything else we might touch. I mean, one is I want to learn from you just the state
00:02:20.400 of the landscape out there. I want to get your impression as to how bad things are on at
00:02:27.360 least two fronts. I mean, the anti-Semitism globally and specifically the degree to which
00:02:34.740 Israel has lost this information war with the entire world and the consequences of all 0.92
00:02:40.760 that. So I just want to learn from you in this conversation. But also, I think it might
00:02:44.920 be interesting to explore how we come to these topics from different angles, because I think
00:02:52.240 you are much more comfortable in just arguing for and in defense of Jewish identity. And
00:02:59.920 that's not really how I come to these same problems and seem to make the same noises. I'm
00:03:05.480 much more in the business of getting out of the business of identity. And so we can talk
00:03:11.180 about that. But beyond those two fronts, I want to talk about anything that interests you.
00:03:16.280 Yeah. Well, let me start with, and I'll respond to both of those questions. But I guess last
00:03:23.360 time we spoke, Sam, at least on a podcast, was a year ago, which was on the one-year anniversary
00:03:29.080 of October 7th. And I remember in that conversation you and I had, I asked you what surprised you
00:03:34.780 most in the year since October 7th, 2023. And you said the explosion of anti-Semitism is what
00:03:43.340 surprised you the most. And I guess my question now, on the second anniversary of October 7th,
00:03:49.700 what, if anything, has surprised you in this second year of the war, the second year since
00:03:56.140 October 7th? What surprised you in year October 7th, 24 to 25?
00:04:01.860 I think, unfortunately, I have the same answer. It's just, I mean, now I am even further surprised
00:04:08.700 about the size and depth of the crater. It's a bigger problem than I imagined, and it's a bigger
00:04:16.600 problem than I imagined a year ago. It's just, it seems to be getting worse, not better. And I keep
00:04:23.340 finding new details that shock me. I mean, so you and I are talking in the immediate aftermath of this,
00:04:30.320 the murders of Jews in Manchester on Yom Kippur. And, you know, that's horrible enough. But then to
00:04:39.560 know that there were celebrations in the streets of London in the immediate aftermath, you know,
00:04:46.060 just unabashed celebrations of the murder of Jews in the UK, it's shocking. And our tacit toleration of
00:04:54.880 it is shocking. I mean, just the fact that we have backed ourselves into a corner, I mean, you know,
00:04:59.880 we now is not everybody. Obviously, there are people who would resist this as stridently as
00:05:05.260 they can at this point. But left of center, where I spend, you know, most of my time intellectually and
00:05:11.560 politically, there's so much moral confusion about what is rational to want and to do in the current
00:05:19.420 circumstance. And it just seems, you know, especially in Western Europe, the writing is on
00:05:25.400 the wall. You know, it is totally rational to worry that Western Europe is completely unraveling
00:05:32.880 culturally in a way that not just Jews, but really anyone who cares about the defense of open societies
00:05:40.240 needs to worry about. And, you know, I don't often find myself agreeing with President Trump, as you know,
00:05:46.020 but when he stands up in front of the UN, you know, in addition to anything else he might have said,
00:05:50.380 which I would find indefensible, when he tells them that your, you know, your societies are going
00:05:54.420 to hell. And what he means is you have completely failed in this project to integrate the millions
00:06:00.380 of Muslims you've brought into your society. And you have, you know, ghettos filled with religious 1.00
00:06:04.960 maniacs who have no inclination to assimilate into your culture. In fact, they want, they're explicit in 0.85
00:06:12.500 wanting to overthrow your culture and replace it with their own. The situation is totally untenable 1.00
00:06:18.280 and it is as bad as Trump or J.D. Vance or anyone else who I would otherwise not want to be aligned
00:06:24.960 with say it is. Yeah. I guess I'm surprised by what happened and I shouldn't be in the UK. I mean,
00:06:32.480 because it is a natural extension. It's like a logical extension of what we had been witnessing
00:06:37.520 during the first year after October 7th and then well into the second year, the chief rabbi of the
00:06:43.340 UK, Mervis, Rabbi Mervis, put out this statement after the Manchester attack saying something along
00:06:49.340 the lines of, we're shocked by what happened and yet we all knew this day would come. And when I read
00:06:54.200 that line, it was like, right, like we knew this day would come, which is if we spend two years,
00:07:01.200 as you said, tolerating this rhetoric in the media and social media and college campuses that Israel
00:07:08.000 is a genocidal state and Israel is an apartheid state. And you're just indoctrinating, you know, 0.77
00:07:14.720 lots of people, young people especially, but not only young people across Europe and elsewhere,
00:07:20.640 that this is a genocide and that these people, these Jews living in your midst, living in your
00:07:26.860 society are supporting this country and have a love for this country, Israel, then they are
00:07:32.040 complicit in the genocide. Then why wouldn't people start trying to kill the supporters of the 0.64
00:07:38.120 genocide? I mean, I hate to talk in such clinical terms, but it's actually quite logical that this
00:07:43.300 would happen. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, for me, the problem goes back much further than October 7th.
00:07:49.460 And again, it escapes the frame of anti-Semitism or hatred of Israel. And it just, again, you know,
00:07:57.740 my focus is more on the defense of open society. So when I think of the Manchester attack, I think
00:08:04.340 of the previous Manchester attack at the Ariana Grande concert, you know, they killed, I think,
00:08:08.920 22 people. And that had nothing to do with Israel or Jews, but it was the same genius of jihadism 0.95
00:08:14.600 being expressed there. And I, you know, I think of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris and the
00:08:19.400 Bataclan massacre. I mean, all of these moments where the stark fact that Western Europe has imported 0.92
00:08:26.740 a death cult into its midst and has failed to acknowledge the gravity of this fact, I mean,
00:08:32.840 has just bent over backwards in the most masochistic way to imagine that something more benign is
00:08:41.700 happening where, you know, on any given day, you can see people with placards saying, you know, 0.82
00:08:46.920 behead those who insult the prophet. I mean, it's just the character of these protests, the density of
00:08:52.800 these protests, the fact that you can get this number of people in the streets who are clearly
00:08:57.540 calling for Sharia law. And, you know, in this case, the UK just can't figure out what to do about
00:09:04.400 it. And this is of a piece with the grooming gang scandal that no one wanted to talk about for
00:09:10.220 more than a decade. And, you know, because of no one wanted to be called racist, right? As though
00:09:14.800 that made any sense. It's just the masochism and delusion, you know, it has now been turned up to
00:09:22.100 11. And honestly, I don't, I don't know what the, the next step is. I mean, my concern has always been
00:09:28.700 that if left of center or centrist or even just normal conservatives can't get their arms around this
00:09:35.940 problem, fascists will. I mean, I think if we see a rise of the real right wing in, in Europe,
00:09:41.840 it will be because of this. And, you know, that's not to be hoped for, but Mrs. You know, David Frum's
00:09:47.580 line, which distills it, you know, if liberals won't enforce borders, fascists will. But, you know,
00:09:52.960 honestly, this is even a deeper problem than the problem of unregulated immigration. It's the fact
00:09:58.720 that ideas spread and become contagious. It's, I mean, you know, this, this recent jihadist was a,
00:10:05.260 um, British citizen, right? He was an immigrant, but he was not, you know, he was not an immigrant 0.75
00:10:09.440 yesterday. He was somebody who grew up in the UK. Yeah. But if you look at, I don't know if you've
00:10:14.400 been following this, the Facebook, there were like Facebook posts of his father that have just been
00:10:18.840 being examined in the British Christ. No, I haven't seen that. Where he was celebrating on October 7th,
00:10:24.100 he was celebrating the massacre of October 7th. So this is the home, this is where, you know,
00:10:30.140 this is where this young man was being, this is the, the water he was swimming in, you know? And so,
00:10:35.880 I mean, this was not something that, oh, the war got really bad, the quote unquote genocide.
00:10:40.760 These were the ideas that were being incubated with these people in the days after October 7th.
00:10:45.840 Yeah. I would also just add to that. I do think we're going to see a big right wing swing
00:10:53.160 in European politics from the UK through France, through, you know, Germany, through elsewhere
00:10:58.600 for the reasons we're talking about here. But what's so incredible to me is I think these politicians
00:11:06.260 in Europe, Starmer, Macron, they knew they had this problem that you're describing and they have
00:11:14.560 wanted to try to keep the temperature, you know, from spiraling out of country, you know, from just
00:11:20.300 keep it at like a relative level from spiraling, completely unraveling society. And the approach
00:11:26.040 they took was we can kind of feed the beast by criticizing Israel, by attacking Israel, by 0.92
00:11:32.720 criticizing the Jews. I mean, I was just in France a few weeks ago and I was meeting with leaders of
00:11:37.740 the Jewish community and they said, Macron after October 7th was fantastic. They said, first of all,
00:11:43.480 he was one of the first leaders in the West to travel to Israel. He glued Israel to show solidarity
00:11:49.220 with Israel. And he even was proposing a response to October 7th that is actually unimaginable now,
00:11:56.840 which is he said, we need an international, a global response to October 7th, like we did to
00:12:02.040 ISIS. We need to treat Hamas like ISIS. And then there was this, you know, 50 nation plus coalition that 0.96
00:12:07.340 responded that took on ISIS. We need to do the same thing to Hamas. That's what he was talking. 0.93
00:12:10.940 I mean, just imagine that now. It's like, it really is unimaginable. And that's how he was
00:12:15.480 talking. And then a couple of weeks later, after that, there was a solidarity, the Jewish community
00:12:21.160 in France held the solidarity march or solidarity event, similar to the one in November of 23 that
00:12:27.520 was held in Washington where, you know, in the US, something like 300,000 plus people came to the
00:12:31.580 mall. And so France had its own version of that and they just assumed Macron would participate.
00:12:36.080 And then he was a no-show. And they were like, wait a minute, how did he swing from showing up
00:12:41.320 in Israel, talking about this robust response, and then just a couple of weeks later, nowhere to be
00:12:45.940 found. And when leaders in the Jewish community went to his advisors, he said, well, we need to
00:12:50.440 show some balance. We're concerned about showing balance. Now, what balance is he's talking about?
00:12:54.840 The balance he was talking about was not between Israel and Hamas. The balance he was talking about
00:12:58.640 was the seven and a half plus million Muslims that live in France and that represent something like
00:13:04.880 10% of France's population. Yeah. I think it's 8%, yeah.
00:13:10.460 Yeah, 8%. So it's just this idea that, oh, we'll pull back on support for Israel. We'll pull back
00:13:17.660 on showing solidarity with Israel. No, we'll actually go farther than that. We'll participate in calling
00:13:22.160 what Israel's doing a genocide. And we'll cut off arms supplies to Israel. And we'll go ahead and 0.94
00:13:27.420 recognize a Palestinian state with no conditions or calls on anything for Hamas. So there was this
00:13:32.800 hope, I think, that they could just continue to pander to their local population, and that would
00:13:39.100 kind of keep things quiet. And of course, the opposite happens, right? It's not like the people
00:13:45.040 who are on the front lines of these attacks against the Jews are going to be mollified by these foreign 1.00
00:13:51.980 policy positions that their leaders are taking. Yeah, this is what is often referred to as feeding the
00:13:55.640 crocodile, right? Right. In the hopes that it's not going to eat you. Well, here's my question,
00:14:01.900 though. So what happens now? I mean, so clearly, Starmer in the UK is rattled. And I've got to
00:14:07.580 believe Macron is rattled, because he knows that this kind of thing could have easily happened in
00:14:11.680 France. These things like this, as you just said, have happened in France. So what do they do now?
00:14:16.980 I mean, you know, because to truly deal with the issue means to confront big political
00:14:23.420 constituencies and their own governing coalitions? Well, what's amazing is it's not that big. I mean,
00:14:29.400 so we just said that France is 8% Muslim. The UK is 6% Muslim, last I looked. So the depth of this 0.97
00:14:37.280 problem, the fact that you can get hundreds of thousands of people in the streets exerting what
00:14:42.000 seems scarcely tolerable pressure on the political system and the need to pander to it. All of this
00:14:47.920 mayhem is the result of 6% of the population making itself noisy, right? I mean, can you imagine what
00:14:56.140 it would look like with 30% of the population? I mean, it's just, it's completely untenable to not
00:15:02.560 confront it at this stage, right? I mean, honestly, there's no, and this is, this is going to sound like
00:15:08.820 bigotry to anyone who's not actually doing the moral algebra here. I mean, so first, everything
00:15:14.740 I'm saying is addressing the consequences of certain deeply held ideas, right? This is nothing that I'm
00:15:21.400 not talking in principle about any race or ethnicity, or I mean, the color of a person's skin is completely
00:15:26.480 irrelevant for this conversation. But left of center, all of this gets coded as xenophobia and racism and,
00:15:33.740 you know, white supremacy, the moment you begin making noises like this. But you have to think about
00:15:38.740 Islam as a set of ideas that is analogous to any other set of ideas like, you know, communism,
00:15:46.240 right? I mean, so to criticize communists, to worry about having more communists in your country,
00:15:50.880 to not want more of them, to want to be able to point out that certain fundamental ideas within
00:15:55.580 communism are inimical to how you want to organize your own society. All of that conversation could be
00:16:00.920 had without any sense that you are expressing bigotry toward people based on their indelible
00:16:08.760 characteristics acquired at birth, right? The same attitude has to be taken when discussing the
00:16:14.440 differences between our religions, especially religions that are religions of conversion,
00:16:18.880 right? That are, you know, aggressively missionary faiths that are spreading in a hundred countries,
00:16:23.220 right? I mean, so Christianity and Islam are unlike Judaism in this regard. When you're talking about 0.97
00:16:27.200 Jews and Judaism, you are almost by definition because Judaism is not a missionary faith and
00:16:33.800 because there are only 15 million Jews and virtually all of them are Jews by virtue of being born to a
00:16:39.380 woman who was herself born to a woman who was herself born to a woman who was Jewish. When you're 0.85
00:16:44.460 talking about Jews, you are talking at least implicitly about an ethnicity and a race. And it's not to say
00:16:52.200 people don't convert to Judaism, but it's just not that common and the Jews don't make it easy, 1.00
00:16:56.420 et cetera. So, and they don't seek it out. We don't seek it out. Right. And, and so it's,
00:17:01.080 there's a big difference here. And that's why you can't just swap the terms, you know, anti-Semitism
00:17:05.380 and Islamophobia into various sentences and, and pretend that they're functioning in the same way.
00:17:11.180 There's no such thing as Islamophobia. There's such a thing as racism. There's such a thing as
00:17:15.380 xenophobia. There's such a thing, but Islamophobia is a word that has been made up to prevent
00:17:20.960 criticism of Islam and, and to conflate it with bigotry. So any secularist who wants to argue
00:17:27.960 against creeping Islamic theocracy, or to even just argue for the, the human rights of women and girls
00:17:34.060 in the context of Islamic theocracy, that person gets painted as a bigot and as an, and as Islamophobe.
00:17:40.100 And it's just not true. It's just a rhetorical trick that has been foisted on the left half of our
00:17:45.380 society and everyone left of center has been taken in by it. And that's why they're uniquely unfit to
00:17:51.260 even participate in this conversation at the moment. Unfortunately, as you go right of center,
00:17:55.680 you begin to meet people who are, you know, rather eager to have this conversation for some bad
00:18:00.600 reasons, right? Then you begin to meet real racists and xenophobes and white supremacists and 0.65
00:18:05.700 Christian identitarian lunatics and proper Nazis. And then the guilt by association police come out of 0.99
00:18:13.520 the woodwork and you get, you know, defenestrated for having talked to somebody who talked to someone
00:18:18.380 who was himself, you know, untouchable. And so there's a problem here in just how we talk about
00:18:24.160 this, which is to say that, you know, so, I mean, there's a reason, for instance, why I haven't had
00:18:28.400 Tommy Robinson on my podcast. It's not because Tommy Robinson is wrong about most of what he says.
00:18:33.500 He's absolutely not wrong about most of what he says, but he's just rough enough around the edges
00:18:38.420 and just has enough of a colorful history that I'm uncomfortable being directly associated with
00:18:44.500 him. And frankly, I'm right to be uncomfortable given the consequences of being associated with
00:18:48.860 him. But I can talk to Douglas Murray and yet Douglas Murray for many people left of center is beyond,
00:18:55.320 considered beyond the pale. And, you know, because he'll talk to Pete, he'll talk to Tommy Robinson
00:18:59.120 without hesitation, right? So the landscape here is a mess, but what is, what is real is that we have
00:19:06.020 to deal with the reality of religious fanaticism and its consequences. And the problem here is
00:19:12.600 especially acute in the Muslim community, wherever it has anything like influence, right? The more 1.00
00:19:20.120 influence it gets, you know, even at the 6% level, you start hearing demands for, you know, not just
00:19:27.720 Sharia law being observed by Muslims, but everyone outside of the community bending the knee to their
00:19:34.600 religious strictures, right? None of us can draw a cartoon. If you'd like to continue listening to
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