Making Sense - Sam Harris - October 06, 2025


#437 — Two Years Since 10⧸7


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Length

20 minutes

Words per minute

178.65097

Word count

3,663

Sentence count

184

Harmful content

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).
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
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 0.59
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,
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
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
00:18:05.700 Christian identitarian lunatics and proper Nazis. And then the guilt by association police come out of
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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