Sam Harris: The Idiot Who Thinks We Are All Idiots
Sam Harris consumed most of his intellectual career warning us about the potentials of a religious genocide, and when one finally unfolded before his eyes, he defended it like a seasoned rabbi. The guy, once a renowned neuroscientist, has withered into nothing more than a miserable “neuro-Zionist” in recent day. I do not lightly accuse a man of lying, but Harris, like the rest of Israel’s apologists, has made deceit his primary tool in the current debate over Gaza. And how could it be otherwise? What arsenal is left to a so-called intellectual who must justify the most meticulously documented genocide of our age? How can one argue against our very own senses, eyes and ears? My impression is that the louder one roots for Israel, the more he needs to lie. It’s less an argument than a pathology—a built-in reflex of every pro- genocide “scholar,” no matter his academic credentials.
In my previous article “When Babies Don’t Count: Harris’s Moral Blind Spot on Gaza – 22/08/2025”, I showed how the entire circus of Harris’s “scientific” work on the mobilizing effects of religion has entirely vanished into oblivion once Islamic Jihad is no longer his case study. Furthermore, religious fundamentalism in Israel—rooted deep in the fabric of its spirit—is not some harmless abstract belief but a nuclear-armed religious fanaticism that has already slaughtered over 62,000 in Gaza, and thousands more in Lebanon, the West Bank, Syria, Yemen, and Iran, with the promise of more blood yet to come. And Harris—the man who built an entire career arguing that religion is humanity’s deadliest poison—suddenly forgets his own neuroscience when the perpetrators are his own. His silence here is not oversight; it is betrayal of his own intellect, and a fraud upon his readers, an intentional complicity in the genocide.
But this article isn’t about Harris’s rotten hypocrisy; this time it’s about his lies, his second defensive reflex when slapped with crude facts about his beloved Jewish state. But before I get there, I would like to take less than ten minutes of my reader’s time to establish some context for the discussion.
In the span of the last two years, the mask has slipped. The world now sees Israel for what it is: a religious ethno-state sustained by violence and myth. The revulsion toward Israel is no longer confined to the Arab World; for the first time ever, it has reached the West as a major progressive social movement. For the first time ever, the American public is shifting—Palestine is emerging as the cause to stand with, Israel as the power to stand against. America is opening its eyes and realizing that the ally of yesterday is fast becoming the liability of tomorrow.
Only a few months ago, criticizing Israel could instantly exile a politician from American and European politics, as it did to Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and countless American figures in the US. Today, standing against Israel is on the verge of becoming a minimal requirement for any decent politician to prove themselves. Anti-apartheid politicians are even approaching positions as prominent as New York mayor. Zohran Mamdani is the prototype of the future American politician—someone who truly cares for the country and spares his taxpayers’ own money for his own people. Politicians like him are set to mushroom across the States, and
within years, one of them may very well reach the presidency.
This global moral awakening has not only bridged the great moral divide between Global North and South; it is even cutting through America’s own political fault lines. For the first time in American political history, Democrats and Republicans—so often at each other’s throats—find themselves converging on one sentiment: a mounting exhaustion with Israel. And Campuses have been no exception. From Harvard to Columbia, from the Ivy League to state universities, students have carried the torch of this moral awakening. Young, passionate, and relentless in their pursuit of truth, they have turned the academy into a frontline of moral clarity. To Sam Harris, these youngsters couldn’t have been more confused 1 :
it is pretty appalling that the largest student protest movement since the 1960s has distinguished itself by being this confused about what is really going on in the world, and is lending support to groups like Hamas, that represent the annihilation of everything these students should value.
Never mind that many of the people at the heart of this American movement have devoted longer than Harris’s entire lifetime to studying Israel-Palestine. Many are genocide scholars, courageous doctors who worked in Gaza, esteemed political scientists, Holocaust survivors, and seasoned intellectuals. None of it matters. In Harris’s worldview, they are either too swept up by Hamas’s propaganda, or downright anti-Semitic (ibid) “We now know that hundreds of professors at these schools support Hamas—which again, is a genocidal death cult”.
Yet what remains the most heart-warming aspect of this global awakening is that American Jews, many of whom are former Zionists, have been at the forefront of this global movement for Palestine and justice, giving Harris even harder task to process the whole scene. to the guy, American Jews who support Palestine, their left-wing comrades, their Republican counterparts, the millions of people on the Eastern side of the Atlantic, and virtually the entire world are all either idiots who have all fallen victim to the propaganda of Hamas—a political faction whose English-language spokesperson can barely form a coherent sentence— or simply anti-Semitic who know very well what they are doing.
In all this, Harris plays his part to perfection—the tired performance of a rotten elite, clutching at the last straws of legitimacy while the ground beneath it crumbles. Like every decaying establishment confronted by the rising fire of a younger generation, he cannot respond with vision or truth, only with the stale reflexes of fear, distortion, and retreat. Had he been born 2,400 years ago, Harris would have been shoulder to shoulder with the decrepit Athenian elders, condemning Socrates for the crime of teaching young men to think. Had he lived through the French Revolution, he would have been Edmund Burke, clutching his pearls and weeping at the death of a world that was already rotting (Edmund Burke: 1790) 2 .
- 1 https://www.samharris.org/blog/campus-protests-antisemitism-and-western-values
2 Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
The age of chivalry is gone. — That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever Much like Harris, Burke mistook the collapse of a decrepit medieval order for the loss of some golden age. He wept not for liberty or equality, but for the privileges of a medieval system whose passing history had already decreed. He could not fathom that time moves forward, and those who cannot move with it are simply left in its ashes.
But Harris delivers more than miserable cries and pearl clutching in his attempt to restore the universe to order, as he tries his best to reclaim a moral battle he already lost. His other tactics? Whataboutism. Like an upset child caught in the wrongdoing, Harris can’t help but wonder “Why isn’t anyone outraged for the Uyghurs?”, but Harris should learn that Israel is not any other dictatorship—hear me clearly—it is a Western dictatorship, a Western- fortified engine of oppression. Western citizens are complicit; their taxes, votes, and silence nurture and sustain it. Protesting Israel is not symbolic moral posturing for some empty- spirited college students; it is citizens taking responsibility, wielding their power to pressure governments that enable massacres.
What about China? As much as I would welcome this global movement for Palestine evolving into a movement for all oppressed nations—a generational struggle against China and every other dictatorship—let us not, for a moment, pretend that China is comparable. China receives no Western arms, no funding, no protection, and hence no protests in the West. If Israel ever relinquished its parasitic stranglehold on the American economy and spirit, then American citizens can be freed from the moral imperative to protest Israel. Until that glorious moment arrives, the movement will endure, spread, and ultimately prevail. When Sam Harris isn’t being hypocritical, pearl clutching, or throwing a cheap round of Whataboutism, you’ll catch him lying through his teeth, this time about Hamas. Let me reiterate again, although I doubt it will make a difference in Harris’s universe, that I do not defend Hamas, and given I am a devout infidel myself, I certainly wouldn’t want to live under their rule, or that of any other Islamic regime, but opposing Hamas’s political vision is one thing, and lying is another. One can oppose Hamas without resorting to cheap lies and Israeli propaganda that Harris has been so eagerly peddling. Consider the lie (Sam Harris) 3 :
That’s not my opinion; that is how Hamas describes itself. They want to kill all the Jews on Earth and to die as martyrs. That is the recipe for being an antisemitic, genocidal death cult. Any professor who supports Hamas should be fired—as you would fire any professor who openly supported the Nazis in the immediate aftermath of a Nazi atrocity. This is not a first amendment issue. No one has a constitutional right to be at Harvard, in any capacity.
Hamas has two charters: the original, highly religious 1988 charter—which I consider an extremist document—and the more moderate 2017 charter. Neither of the two calls for the killing of all Jews on earth. I specifically challenged Harris on the older, 1988 charter, and even it does not advocate for exterminating all Jews worldwide. Don’t take my word for
- 3 https://www.samharris.org/blog/campus-protests-antisemitism-and-western-values
it—read the full charter in English yourself on the Avalon Project 4 . For those who prefer a quick summary, you can see ChatGPT’s response to the question I asked: Does the following text call for the killing of “all jews on earth”? And after pasting the whole original text in four chunks, the answer of the robot was:
The text does not contain an explicit call to kill all Jews on earth.
But even the backward 1988 charter of Hamas says the following about the Jews in Palestine (ibid):
The Islamic Resistance Movement is a humanistic movement. It takes care of human rights and is guided by Islamic tolerance when dealing with the followers of other religions. It does not antagonize anyone of them except if it is antagonized by it or stands in its way to hamper its moves and waste its efforts. Under the wing of Islam, it is possible for the followers of the three religions – Islam, Christianity and Judaism – to coexist in peace and quiet with each other. Peace and quiet would not be possible except under the wing of Islam. Past and present history are the best witness to that.
Clearly, if the 1988 Hamas were to rule, Jews, Christians, and I myself would be subject to Islamic law—whether we like it or not—which is exactly what makes this charter medieval and regressive. But that is one thing, and calling for the killing of all Jews on earth is another, and between the two lies an ocean, one that can only be crossed on a vessel of lies and fabrications. Keep in mind that Hamas has revised its beliefs almost a decade ago, under the leadership of Yahiya Sinwar, and here is its current position on the Jews in article 16 of the 2017 charter:
Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.
In brief, Sam Harris lied through his teeth. But for those who prey on the accusation of anti- Semitism, discovering that your enemy isn’t anti-Semitic is a tragedy of epic proportions. When Hamas released its 2017 charter clarifying that it harbors no hatred for Jews simply because of their religion, the Israeli prime minister Netanyahu couldn’t endure it— in a video, he snatched up the paper, crushed it into a tight ball, and flung it into the trash, as if acknowledging that Hamas’s disinterest in its occupier’s religion was personal affront, “how dare you not be an anti-Semite?”. I remain genuinely perplexed about Harris. Is he aware that he’s peddling lies, or has he truly convinced himself that Hamas aims to annihilate every Jew on earth? Has the passage of time eroded his reasoning, or is he simply beyond reason? I can’t tell.
- 4 https://avalon.law.yale.edu/21st_century/hamas.asp
If I were to entertain this infinitely absurd claim for a bit longer, I would still have to ask: on what Islamic grounds does Hamas supposedly seek to “kill every Jew on earth”? Even the ISIS-extremist readings of the Qur’an—which represent the most Barbarian edge of Islamist thought—never went that far. Their theology still allows Jews to exist within Islamic territory, degraded as second-class citizens yes, but never exterminated wholesale. No version, no interpretation, not even from the blood-soaked imagination of ISIS, ever conjured up this fantasy of global Jewish annihilation. And if that’s true of ISIS, how much more so for the far more moderate Muslim Brotherhood—whom ISIS itself derides as “secular.”
The plain truth is this: even under the most extreme Islamic interpretations, Jews are still classified as “People of the Book.” If ISIS—not Hamas—were to seize Israel tomorrow and enforce classical Sharia to the letter, Jews would be degraded, stripped of rights, and pushed into humiliating subjugation. But extermination? Never. That has no place in Islamic jurisprudence, no matter how extreme the interpretation. And Hamas—whose rescinded charter never actually called for extermination—stands miles away from such a claim. So why would someone thoroughly versed in the Sharia concept of Dhimmis—protected though second-class citizens—declare the exact opposite of historical and textual fact? The only plausible explanation is an instinctive defensive reflex not untypical of genocide apologists: a convenient lie to terrify his audience. He could have argued, truthfully, that Jews under Hamas rule would suffer the loss of civil rights—already a horrifying prospect—but instead he reached straight for fabrication.
The second of his fabrications comes as an attribution fallacy. He claims to read people’s minds, again, not untypical of his “neuroscientific” hobby, and this time he asserts “I will grant that most people who claim to be anti-Zionist at this point are probably also anti- Semitic” 5 . I will try to not talk much about the fact the word “Semitism”, much like Palestine, is a stolen property, most evident in the fact that Harris, a White Atheist from California dares to accuse Palestinians and Arabs, the largest Semitic group in the world, of being anti their own race (Semites being anti Semites). Like Palestine, the term “Semite” was once a spacious domain that hosted Assyrians, Hebrews, Arabs, Canaanites, Arameans, and more, but Zionism expelled the rest and seized the word for the exclusive privilege of a group composed largely of Eastern Europeans with fake Hebrew names.
Anti-Semitism is a problem, much like Islamophobia, or any other brand of xenophobia, whereby potentially innocent people get attacked for who they are. But two things need to be emphasized here. First, the problem of anti-Semitism is hundreds of times less important than that of an ongoing genocide; hence by the pure moral metric of human suffering, it is hundreds of times less worthy of our attention. No Jews wake up burning in their tents or starving on streets, unless one sees Jewish people as inherently more valuable or precious than other groups of people, the amount of attention we invest in anti-Semitism should be guided strictly by the actual size of the problem, which in turn should be strictly measured by the actual amount of suffering experienced by one or more human beings. This is especially the
- 5 https://www.samharris.org/blog/campus-protests-antisemitism-and-western-values
case for the problem of anti-Semitism because no other state except Israel has exploited the victim card to occupy and kill; Israel wants anti-Semitism to be on the rise so it can go “there you have it, so give us more bombs”.
Second, most so-called incidents of anti-Semitism are fueled not by irrational hatred of Jews, but by legitimate outrage at Israel and its cowardly slaughter of children 6 . Unlike Harris, the rest of us actually think babies matter, and when we see them killed en masse, yes—we get angry, sometimes furiously so. That anger may erupt in ways appropriate or not, but its source remains the same: Israel’s own actions. Dress it up however you like, the problem doesn’t begin with the protester’s outburst—it begins with Israel pulling the trigger. The spike in reported anti-Semitism began the moment the genocide in Gaza did. End the genocide first—if curbing anti-Semitism is truly the goal.
Within the Sam article, Sam Harris moves from lies, cries, and victim cards and finally starts to make a logical case for Israeli’s right to self-defense. Harris argues that because the Jews have been persecuted everywhere they went, they certainly need (Sam Harris: ibid):
But given the murderous antisemitism of so much of the world, given that almost every country that has had a population of Jews has at some point actively persecuted them and driven them out—literally, almost any country you can name in Europe or North Africa or the Middle East had done this at some point. Given the tolerance of this reality by billions of onlookers—well, then the Jews clearly need their own state, and it should defend itself without apology.
There’s no denying that Jews have endured vile harassment and persecution at the hands of nearly every nation they’ve lived among. Some blame the Jews themselves, but here I’ll side with reason: the real indictment belongs to humanity as a whole—a cowardly, pathetic species that seems unable to resist tormenting its minorities. After all, persecuting the weaker and the different is practically our crowning achievement as a species.
In principle, I hold that any ethnic or religious group deserves its own state if it so chooses—persecution or not, just as anyone can demand an immediate divorce with or without domestic violence. As my friend used to joke, the smaller the state, the better, and less territory means less trouble.
But believing that Jews have the right to create a Jewish state to escape persecution is one thing, and believing they have the right to do that on someone’s else land, displace millions, and slaughter hundreds of thousands is an entirely different thing. Harris seems to have overlooked the small detail that in order to establish a state, one actually needs land of one’s own. Naturally, the land in question is the one they are already living on and being persecuted on, wherever that may be—because real ownership comes from actually being there. You don’t get to point at a map and pluck a random patch of earth as “yours,” ignoring the lives
- 6 https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/spotlights/2025/anti-defamation-league-says-anger-at-israel-is-now-the- driving-force-behind-antisemitism-in-the-us/
already rooted in it. When Kurds got persecuted, they didn’t pick a map and to search for a spot elsewhere to establish a state, they fought on their own homeland, same applied to every persecuted nation sine 1945, with the exception of Jews.
This is doubly true when picking another piece of land doesn’t solve the problem but merely transfers it elsewhere, how did the creation of Israel solve the problems of Jewish people or bring peace to the world? The total toll of deaths, injuries, and displacement caused by Israel’s wars with Arabs and Palestinians runs into the millions—mostly Arabs and Palestinians, but also Israelis. So one should ask, did carving out a state on someone else’s land actually fix the original problem, or just transfer it? It’s likely that the death and suffering inflicted upon the Jews as the price to establish Israel could have been entirely avoided if the Jews didn’t go anywhere after Hitler lost. Germany became a democratic country, with a deep regret and responsibility toward its Jews; does one really doubt that post-WWII Germany is more dangerous to the Jews than the current Middle East? If you are unsure, then remember the 7 th of October.
If one still insists—against all evidence—that Jews are safer today than they were in Europe eighty years ago, then let them confront the present reality: Israel now holds the honor of being the most despised state on earth, surpassing even the pariah regimes of North Korea and Russia. The world is wounded and enraged; millions cannot sit to a meal or rest their heads at night without being haunted by Gaza’s devastation. No amount of post-war spin or glossy PR campaigns can undo the damage. The damage is permanent, the stain indelible. If Israel was meant as a refuge, a bulwark against anti-Semitism, then it has achieved the opposite: not a resolution, but a multiplication of Anti-Semitism. What was once a European problem has metastasized into a global hostility—no longer Europe against the Jews, but the world against the Jews.
The migration of Jews into Palestine was a historic blunder, to put it mildly, but that’s water under the bridge—the Jews are there now, and history doesn’t offer an undo button. Just as with the White conquest of North America or Australia, the original sin stands: it cannot be scrubbed from history. The Jewish people living in Palestine today are entitled to stay as human beings with equal rights as everyone else, but that is a far cry from granting legitimacy to a state built on terrorism and theft. And here lies the rhetorical sleight of hand: no Zionist ever dares ask whether Jews as people have the right to exist—because everyone with half a brain will say yes. Instead, they endlessly harp on whether Israel, as a Jewish state, has the right to exist. The answer to that is not complicated, not nuanced, not debatable—it’s a resounding, uncompromising, absolute fucking no.
International law—and more importantly, basic human morality—recognizes rights for human beings, not for armies or militarized state machinery, especially if, among all possible states, that state is one like Israel. On that piece of land, no less than a state, or two, where equal rights are secured to everyone, will be accepted; and Sam Harris, along with all those who cannot bear to live with equal rights, can go and find a spot in the Arctic, the Moon, or even further in Uranus .