Scratch Sam Harris, Find a Rabbi
To argue for Israel at this moment is to stand against your own eyes, ears, reason, conscience, international law, and the hard-won values and lessons of human civilization itself. It is to vandalize the very idea of human wisdom, all to launder the reputation of an ethnocratic state engaged in genocide. Few embody this act of intellectual and moral betrayal more than the American author Sam Harris. For years, Harris maintained a kind of “moderate” defense of the indefensible, arguing that Israel is an occupier, but a good one since most Israelis are secular, but as the pressure mounted, his mask slipped and his inner Rabbi bursted forth. And that, precisely, is what makes his case especially pathetic. Among his fellow New Atheists, only Harris staked his academic and intellectual career on unpacking the neural mechanics of belief, spending decades lecturing on how religion shapes behavior and drives people to commit unimaginable atrocities. Yet, when his expertise is most needed—to explain a genocide draped in biblical rhetoric—his neuroscience evaporated into the ether.
I have never accepted Harris’s proposal that abstract thought has any real bearing on human behavior. But I did expect him to at least be consistent with his own claims. My epistemic and moral bars for Harris were not that he be right, but that he be wrong with some measure of integrity. At the very least, I expected him to be consistently wrong, and not only when Islam is the case study. If Christopher Hitchens were alive today—yet another figure with whom I disagreed—I believe he would have recognized that Israel is engaged in a religious genocide, He might still mischaracterize its nature, but at least he wouldn’t hesitate to name the obvious. Harris, by contrast, cannot even rise to the low bar set by his closest friend.
In his podcast “5 Myths about Israel and the War in Gaza,” Harris claims to confront the charge of genocide. But when you actually look at the section, his “defense” amounts to little more than a footnote—barely a few lines long. The bulk of his energy is spent dredging up stories of Iranian children sent to the frontlines during the Iran–Iraq war. That, apparently, is his argument: Israel cannot be committing genocide in Gaza because, decades ago, Iran sacrificed its youth in a different war. In a feat of clownish contortionism, he takes what Iran did then and twists it an “explanation” of how all those “Muslim” babies were killed in Gaza.
The logic runs like this: Iranians and Palestinians are both Muslims, so if some Iranians sent teenagers to die forty years ago, it must mean all Muslims secretly want their children dead for “paradise points.” By that reasoning, the thousands of Palestinian babies incinerated in their tents weren’t victims of Israeli bombs at all, but volunteer “little soldiers,” lovingly dispatched by their parents. Harris can hardly conceal how badly he longs for Gaza to hand him an Iranian-style baby battalion to parade as proof. Instead, all he has is a half-century-old anecdote from Iran—and the pathetic hope that nobody notices just how grotesque the stretch really is.
Harris argue that Muslims must be shown to desire their children’s deaths as tickets to paradise. That, dear reader, is the explanation for the +20,000 plus Palestinian children slaughtered in Gaza. Not the conscious Israeli pilot, cocooned in an American jet, who pressed a button and turned sleeping kids in tents into unrecognizable flesh. No—the story goes that Palestinians themselves longed for their children’s destruction, and Israel, ever helpful, simply answered their prayers with bombs and fire.
To swallow Harris’s fantasy about Palestinian parents, you must first declare war on your own eyes and ears. You must strangle your senses as they register the inconsolable screams of mothers and fathers collapsing over the charred flesh of their babies burnt by Israeli bombs. You must gouge out eyes sight and convince yourself that these parents are not shattered human beings but Oscar-level actors, outshining DiCaprio in their grief faking skills. And then you must also believe that behind the tears and broken voices lies secret joy—that they are celebrating, not mourning, because paradise has claimed their babies.
In Harris’s world, it is a Palestinian mother’s faith in a reunion with her baby in the afterlife that killed the baby in the first place—not the cowardly Israeli sniper who fired the shot. The soldier vanishes; the blame safely rests on the parents’ desire to reunite with their children to paradise, even if that desire is nothing more than a post-hoc expression meant to console a shattered heart. By the same flipped logic, Jewish people were responsible for their own holocaust, how else could they have justified the need to establish their promised land of Israel?
to swallow Harris’s claim, you would further need to wage war against your own capacity for basic reasoning, consider, for instance, that in Islam there are countless, far simpler paths to paradise: praying five times a day, fasting in Ramadan, giving to the poor, building a mosque, living with good character, making the pilgrimage — even something as effortless as saying “peace be upon you” to others. As their Prophet Muhammad taught: “O people: Spread peace, feed the hungry, and pray at night while others are asleep — and you will enter Paradise in peace”. In fact, according to Islam, as long as you are a Muslim, you need to do nothing; you are going to paradise as long as you believe in one God and his Prophet Mohammed.
But in Harris’s “Arabian Nights” caricature of Muslims, you won’t find the slightest mention of the far easier, far more ordinary, and far more practical ways of entering paradise — ways that allow a Muslim to live a normal life and still plan to wake up in Jannah after death. Read Harris, and you’ll come convinced that paradise was designed exclusively for those willing to blow themselves up, or worse, their own children. In his narrative, no other doors exist to paradise except those of explosive belts.
This is exactly where Harris exposes himself as a carefully disguised racist. He insists that Muslims — Palestinians, in this case — possess some peculiar trait that drives them toward the most excruciating paths to paradise, crawling over thorns and thistles, while conveniently ignoring the far easier routes. Implied by him, these Arabs must be forged from some unnatural material, impervious to suffering, impervious even to basic human pain. Otherwise, how are we supposed to make sense of their willingness to burn their own children to go to paradise?
As for Harris’s detour into Iranian children during the Iran–Iraq war 45 years ago—an act now illegal even in Iran—only someone drunk on his own narrative could imagine that child soldiers are some exotic “Muslim pathology,” instead of what they actually are: a recurring stain across nearly every civilization in history, including Harris’s own secular one. Japan sent child suicide Kamikazes to martyr against American forces in World War II, while Nazi Germany mobilized millions of youth, many of whom martyred for Hitler—none of the two imagined they were headed for paradise. Along similar lines, Jewish European children, some barely ten, formed partisan cells across occupied Europe, fighting the Nazis with rifles far too heavy for their shoulders. Those very Jewish child partisans, whose small hands once gripped weapons in the French forests and fought German soldiers to death, are today celebrated in Israel as heroic symbols of resistance, and as the immortal martyrs of the Jewish people.
What’s most telling about Harris is not what he says, but what he refuses to say. possessed by the subject of martyrdom in Islam, Harris turns a blind eye to its far older origin in Judaism—a tradition that begins not in the battlefields of the Middle East but in the chilling scene where Abraham raises the knife to his son’s throat because Jehovah demanded it. If you want the first historical blueprint for “holy terror,” look no further than the Sicarii, Jewish zealots whose campaign of stabbings and assassinations turned Jerusalem’s markets into killing grounds during the Great Revolt against Rome. And let’s be clear: this wasn’t some one-off aberration buried in dusty history. Whenever Jews found themselves cornered by oppression, the same tactics resurfaced—knives in Roman markets, bombs in Nazi Germany, shootings in French Forests, and Molotov cocktails in Polish Ghettos. Strip away the labels, and you’ll find the very playbook Palestinians are condemned for today already inked in Jewish history centuries ago. The only difference is that when Jews did it, it was “heroic resistance”; when Palestinians do it, Harris calls it Jihad.
But Harris, ever the well-read apologist for Israel, clings to a single, tired argument when confronted with these facts, which goes as follows: most of Israeli society is secular, and therefore immune to the extremism he attributes to Muslim societies. This, of course, relies entirely on his narrow insistence that terrorism is only ever religious, conveniently ignoring the secularized violence actively practiced—and widely celebrated—within Israeli society. Ironically, some of the most devout Jewish groups in Israel, the Ultra-Orthodox Haredim who cling to the most literal and extreme interpretations of Judaism, are the least eager to take up arms for the Jewish state. For them, “ultra-orthodoxy” seems to mean studying the Torah obsessively while doing very little else. Meanwhile, the supposedly secular majority is the one executing the religiously sanctioned atrocities, ensuring that Israel’s enemies are treated like Amalek—a task carried out with bureaucratic efficiency and public approval. This irony is enough to render Harris’s entire “neuroscientific” thesis of belief into pure horseshit.
Setting aside his detours into Iranian teenagers and Islamic martyrdom, Harris does manage to squeeze in exactly four and a half lines on the accusation of genocide against Israel, before promptly retreating back to discussing Hamas. In the four lines against the charge of genocide, his argument goes like this:
Of course, it is true that the Israeli Defense Forces have killed a lot of people in Gaza. However, it is also true that if the IDF wanted to kill every person in Gaza next week—that is, actually commit genocide—it could.
Let’s first establish that Harris’s proposal isn’t some isolated fantasy. The idea of exterminating far greater numbers of Palestinians—even through nuclear annihilation—is neither alien nor fringe in Israel. The appetite for it runs deep in both society and politics. As one of the so-called “Two Jewish Boys” bluntly admitted on a widely viewed Israeli podcast, with nearly a million views inside Israel:
If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza, every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow, I would press it in a second…I would press it right now… give me the button, I’ll press it right now… (laughs) and I think most Israeli would… they wouldn’t talk about it like I am, they wouldn’t say I pressed it, (his friend echoes): they don’t have the balls of steel like you, but they would press it, right? (laughs), if they were in a closet, they wouldn’t even hesitate, someone came to them in the darkness and said “no one will know”
No infernal imagination could script Israel’s desire for Gaza more vividly than Israelis themselves. The only brake is the flimsy necessity of keeping up appearances before the international community—a thin cosmetic of “civilization” smeared over a rotting core. But the mask slips with ease: in stadiums across Israel and Europe, mobs chant “Death to Arabs”, and young Israel adults, guys and girls, dance gleefully to music singing “No babies left in Gaza” in discos in Tel Aviv and across Israel; on TikTok, hordes of Israelies mock and mimic dead children and mourning mothers. This isn’t fringe—it’s the core of a long rotten society finally revealing itself to the rest of us.
The evidence is hardly ambiguous. Israeli officials have spilled more than a thousand genocidal or ethnic cleansing statements into the public record—an avalanche of unfiltered malice. Minister Amichai Eliyahu mused aloud about nuking Gaza, and across the Atlantic, Harris’s very own American representatives, Tim Walberg and Randy Fine, echoed the same nuclear fantasy, calling for Gaza to be flattened like Nagasaki. When genocidal intent is shouted from rooftops by ministers, MPs, and mobs alike, the picture couldn’t be clearer. Yet somehow, Harris still manages to furrow his brow and “wonder” why Israel hasn’t already done so.
The Israeli public and political establishment have long been united in their desire to see Gaza erased, a fantasy voiced as far back as 1992 by none other than the so-called “moderate” and “peacemaker” Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who confessed, “I wish I could wake up one day and find that Gaza has sunk into the sea.” When this is what passes for moderation in Israel, one hardly needs to imagine what the extremists dream of.
The consensus over erasing Gaza has shown itself not only in the words of Israel’s politicians and public figures, but also in the seamless alignment between rhetoric and reality — between what is openly wished for and what is being carried out on the ground. By November 2024, Israel had already managed to “nuke” Gaza—but in installments. In less than a year, it has dropped more than 85,000 tons of explosives, while at the same time starving the population and blocking baby formula and basic medicine. Each of these crimes, taken separately, is several magnitudes worse than a nuclear bomb: slower, more agonizing, and deliberately cruel. Five months ago, Bradford Emeritus Professor Paul Rogers concluded that what has been dropped on Gaza is already equivalent to six Hiroshimas. By this logic, had Israel simply vaporized Gaza with three or four nukes on October 8th, the enclave might actually be slightly better off today, and eventually even nuking Gaza wouldn’t count as a genocidal act by Harris’s criterion.
So why hasn’t Israel nuked Gaza, if that’s what it truly wanted? The answer: it already has—six times over, and more is yet to come. The real question is why it hasn’t gone even further, given the military means at its disposal. There are two main reasons. First, Israel still cares for its international image. Unlike North Korea or Iran, Israel’s survival depends on Western approval. Severed from that lifeline—a very real risk given the rising anti-Zionism among younger Western voters—Israel would wither within years, its existence precariously tethered to external support rather than internal resilience.
The second reason is brutally practical: Israel itself would suffer from any nuclear strike. Many forget that Gaza is literally a stone’s throw away from Israel. Nuking even a single village with the smallest Israeli nuclear device would inevitably devastate tens of surrounding Israeli villages for decades. Layer onto this the undisguised, unwavering plan to annex Gaza—a plan utterly impossible if Gaza were reduced to radioactive rubble—and the calculus becomes chillingly clear.
Hence, once again, if the defense against the charge of genocide is that Israel could have done worse than the equivalent of six Hiroshima-scale strikes already delivered to Gaza, the blunt truth is this: Israel cannot escalate beyond its current campaign without paying existential costs that it simply cannot bear. That is the only reason Gaza has not been utterly vaporized— but if only the world’s eyes were closed and Israelis were safely hiding in a closet where nobody can watch, if only.
All of this is why 86% of the 500 members of the International Association of Genocide Scholars—the largest body of its kind in the world—declared, just a few hours before this section was written, that what is happening in Gaza meets the legal definition of genocide. A reality long recognized by scores of genocide scholars and intellectuals, yet ignored or denied by Harris and his ilk, whose inaction has allowed this atrocity to continue unchecked.
Israel’s apologists will never stop their holy war against truth. They’ll lash out at the United Nations, the ICC, the ICJ (when it finally dares to speak), the International Association of Genocide Scholars, the babies and their mothers (they are lying too), and anyone with the audacity to call out their crimes, branding them as anti-Semites or simply stupid, and the more people they attack, the more the world splits cleanly into two species: human beings on one side, Israel on the other.
The second section in Harris written podcast is titled “Myth #2: International Humanitarian Law Requires that Israel’s response to Palestinian aggression be “proportional”. As the title already suggests, Harris’s main point in this section is that Israel isn’t and shouldn’t be fettered by some measure of proportionality in its war against ultimate evil, because, well, you know the rest of the story. His argument being as follows:
In fact, the concept of “proportionality” doesn’t refer to the numbers of casualties on either side of a conflict, much less insist that they be equal. It simply asks that we weigh the military importance of an action against the resulting destruction of civilian life and property. International law allows Israel to utterly destroy Hamas, given what happened on October 7th, and given the fact that they continue to fire rockets into Israeli cities, intentionally targeting civilians. As I’ve said, there is no way for Israel to fight Hamas without a massive loss of innocent life because, again, Hamas has embedded itself in the civilian population, on purpose, to cause as much civilian death as possible.
Harris, of course, lies yet again—this time by distorting what “proportionality” means in international law. In his warped logic, if Israel declares that some goal—chosen by Israel itself—is an “existential necessity,” then no matter how catastrophic the human toll, it is justified to march towards that goal. The goal, by definition, always outweighs the lives destroyed. And since the alternative, in Harris’s telling, is nothing less than Israel’s annihilation, everything becomes permissible, including the destruction of Gaza, and by that calculation, the equivalent destruction of Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Yemen, since they all impose threat to Israel, according to Israel. By that logic, not only does the military goal justify the genocide in Gaza, it can further justify four more genocides in four different countries in the Middle East, or to stretch that argument to its final ends, it can justify the destruction of the whole middle east, or as many countries as it takes, if it means securing the existence of Israel against a remote possibility that it be destroyed by some much weaker antagonist one day in the future. Between the claim that is Israel has the right to secure its existence regardless of any human cost, and the claim that the destruction of the entire planet is further justified for that same objective, lies only a short leap of logic. But before even engaging with the Machiavellian cynicism of this reasoning, a more elementary question must be asked: does Israel, as an occupying power, have any right at all to “respond” to October 7th—let alone claim a right to “proportionality”?
Just two years ago, such a depiction of Israel might have sounded like dystopian science fiction. But anyone who has watched its behavior over the past year knows better: a manic war machine pounding civilian infrastructure across Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, and the West Bank—now openly gearing up for a final showdown with Turkey. All of it flows seamlessly from the same twisted logic: that destruction, no matter how grotesque the human toll, is both necessary and inevitable for Israel to feel reassured about how others “truly” regard it.
Many people tiptoe and pirouette around this question as if it were radioactive, so let’s cut the nonsense: No, Israel does not have the right to self-defense against the people it occupies. Yes, that includes October 7th. International law is clear: the “right of self-defense” applies when a state is attacked by another state. That means Israel can invoke self-defense if France, Mozambique, or Iceland bombs Tel Aviv—not when it’s Palestinians resisting in Gaza or the West Bank, or Syrians and Lebanese still under the boot of occupation. In those cases, Israel is not the victim; it is the aggressor. And in Gaza’s case, where the territory isn’t even legally a state, the argument collapses into absurdity—it doesn’t apply even in the flimsiest, most desperate sense.
Believe it or not, the dumbest version of “self-defense” has always been the favorite pretext of empire and expansion—even for the most brazen aggressors in history. The Nazis themselves cloaked their wars of conquest in the same shabby excuse: claiming “defense” against communist expansion to justify the invasion of Poland, inventing Jewish conspiracies against German sovereignty, or framing their offensives as “preemptive defense” against the Allies. The excuses were as absurd then as they are now. And Israel parrots the exact same script today in Gaza, in Lebanon, in the Golan Heights. It isn’t survival Israel craves—it’s perpetual enemies to sanctify its expansion.
Plenty of examples from other corners of the world immediately reveal the farce of Israel’s claim to “self-defense.” Did Russia have the right to self-defense against Ukraine? Did Nazi Germany have the right to defend itself from France, Poland, and Belgium? Of course not—occupiers don’t get to play the victim. Yet somehow Israel insists on being the lone exception, a colonizer with a “special” pass to flip international law upside down. For Israel, the deception is at least self-serving—it’s the aggressor covering its tracks. But what’s Sam Harris’s excuse? What drives an American intellectual to twist law beyond recognition, to conjure fictions that not even Nazi jurists dared defend, all in the service of whitewashing an alien occupying force?
Forget international law for a moment—let’s strip this down to its raw moral core. Imagine your house seized by strangers. Your family slaughtered—cousins burned alive, your old aunt raped before your eyes, your mother gunned down as she begged for mercy. You are not even allowed the dignity of death inside your own home; instead, you’re shoved into a cramped corner of the garden, forbidden from crossing the threshold. Every few years, the new “owners” come back to kill more of your family, each round more grotesque than the last.
From your sliver of space, you’ve tried everything—peaceful marches, protests, hunger strikes, even desperate hostage-taking—yet all have failed to win back even a fraction of your yard. You’re barred from visiting the old tree you planted with your grandfather without first begging permission from those who murdered him. And then, one day, fortune shifts: the chance arises to strike back, to kill a large number of your tormentors—still a fraction of how many they killed, but a number that, by your measure, matters. In that moment, would you really hesitate?
The 7th of October was the Palestinians’ once-in-a-century chance to serve Israel from the very dish they themselves had been force-fed for seventy-five years. It was atrocities yes, but just like those that have been happening to Palestinians before and after 7th of October. For decades, Gaza was less a city than a sealed volcano—millions of human beings caged, degraded below the level of cattle, cut off from the world. Year after year, the pressure built: massacres, humiliation, starvation, and despair packed tighter into that narrow strip until the ground itself seemed to tremble. What erupted that day was no mystery, no sudden madness—it was the natural lava of anger and vengeance, long-buried, finally breaking through the crust. Do you condemn volcanoes when they erupt? Do you curse global warming when your village is flooded? Or do you recognize the actual causes, and see if there is something you can do to not make it worse.
Then to justify the atrocities in Gaza, Israel’s apologists must resort to the grandest exercise in historical distortion, that is normalizing mass slaughter by comparing it to larger-scale wars of decades past. According to Harris:
it seems that many people are discovering for the first time what modern warfare is actually like. Independent of the rightness or wrongness of any cause, enormous numbers of innocent people die. The Allies killed hundreds of thousands of German civilians in World War II. And hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians along with them. How would that have looked on TikTok?
In another article, Harris stooped even lower, invoking the number of children killed annually in car accidents—a pathetic attempt to argue that Israel’s killing of Palestinian children is nothing unusual, since children die everywhere, for countless reasons. But the comparison is obscene: there’s a world of difference between dying in an accident and being deliberately bombed, shot, or crushed under rubble. Harris is betting on his readers being too blind—or too gullible—to notice that difference.
Along the same lines, Harris points to the Allies carpet bombing of German cities as proof of Israel’s supposed moral standing in Gaza. But even if we accept the grotesque premise that one atrocity legitimizes another, the analogy still collapses under its own weight. In this case, the Nazi role is not Gaza but Israel itself—a state expanding with manic fury, tearing through the Middle East. By Harris’s logic, it would be the Arabs who should be carpet-bombing Israel into rubble and then “liberating” the Jewish people from their own government, not the other way around.
Even if one concedes that Israel has some right to self-defense against Hamas, invoking events from 80 years ago—an era when the world was scarcely more advanced than the medieval age in terms of legal norms—as justification for today’s actions is a grotesque analogy. This is compounded by the fact that the Israeli army has deliberately targeted civilians, killing women and children with the most advanced weaponry at its disposal.
Even granting the vast gulf in legitimacy between Israel’s war and that of the Allies—along with the radically different moral and legal contexts in which they unfolded—Gaza remains worse, far worse, than Dresden. To date, more than 65,000 people are confirmed killed by Israel, a figure that represents only part of the actual toll. Multiple studies suggest the true number is closer to 40% higher. Whether we take the officially recognized figure or the more sobering estimate, the contrast is stark: Dresden’s 25,000 dead—many of them likely soldiers, given the size of the German army at the time—doesn’t even begin to compare.
Add to this the difference in population between the two cities: Dresden in 1945 had roughly one million inhabitants—twice the number living in Gaza City before October 7. Dresden was also far more densely populated, yet the Allies’ carpet bombing still claimed fewer lives than Israel has taken in Gaza. By any measure, Gaza is worse than Dresden—and invoking Dresden as an analogy is a double insult: first to the victims of both wars, and then to the reader’s intelligence.
Through his podcast, Sam Harris seems particularly irked by this generation’s “over-sensitivity” to the killing of children, blaming social media and TikTok—speaking like every rotting generation of grandpas as they lament the worldviews of their grandchildren. He fails to see that such outrage is a rare force for good, rallying global attention of our species against atrocities and pushing back against indifference to genocide. Instead, Harris bristles, because this very empathy refuses to acknowledge what he calls “the reality and necessity of war”, according to the author of The Moral Landscape.
In the third section of his article, titled “Myth #3: The Jews Are Colonizers and the Palestinians Are Indigenous People,” Sam Harris manages—in barely two paragraphs—to deliver one of the most pitiful displays of Whataboutism imaginable. He dredges up everything from the Syrian civil war to female genital mutilation in Egypt, grasping at irrelevancies in a desperate bid to launder some legitimacy for his cherished Jewish state. If Israel isn’t uniquely guilty, he seems to reason, and then perhaps he can sleep a little easier. But I will address the topic of the title, and which he avoided almost entirely in his section.
Yes, some Jews were indigenous to Palestine—a tiny minority before the state of Israel was conjured into existence. So what? To leap from “some Jews are indigenous” to “all Jews are indigenous” is not just sloppy reasoning; it’s intellectual malpractice. By that logic, I could pack my bags tomorrow and claim a plot in California on the grounds that I, too, am a green liberal indigenous to California—just like my supposedly “indigenous brethren” there. By the same logic, should the Uyghurs then descend on Morocco because both are Muslims, and persecution in China gives them a license to resettle wherever they please? The absurdity speaks for itself.
Yes, Jews were persecuted in many Muslim countries—though never on the apocalyptic scale Harris likes to peddle—and that is indeed tragic. But if his second argument for Israel is that such persecution grants Jews the right to migrate to Palestine and dispossess its people, then the grotesque implications speak for themselves. By that logic, every oppressed group on Earth could storm another people’s homeland under the flimsiest cultural or religious pretext, seize their houses, displace or kill them, and then sanctify the theft as “justice” simply because they once suffered elsewhere. Following Harris’s reasoning to its logical end, hundreds of persecuted groups—let’s say liberal exiles for good measure—ought to march straight into California, surround Harris’s home, pitch tents in his neighborhood, and kick him to the curb. Should he resist, they could simply brand him a terrorist, kill him, and wipe out his family as the “human shields” he dared to live with.
In the fourth section, “Myth #4: The atrocities committed by Hamas (and over one thousand Palestinian civilians) on October 7th were a legitimate response to oppression,” Harris kicks things off with yet another lie: that “Israel left Gaza in 2005.” Everyone knows this is nonsense. Under international law, Gaza remains occupied—hemmed in by land, sea, and air, with Israel micromanaging everything from what enters and exits to how many calories Palestinians are permitted to consume, to whether a father can visit his family in the West Bank or even seek medical treatment. To put this in a blunt analogy, it’s as if those foreign liberals who settled California and stole Harris’s house finally left the house but installed a military checkpoint in his backyard, dictating every aspect of his life—when he can visit a hospital or see his dying mother two blocks away, and even what food crosses his doorstep.
Of course, the analogy barely scratches the surface, since Gaza’s reality is orders of magnitude worse. Between 2018 and 2019 alone, thousands of Palestinians in Gaza protested Israel’s blockade, demanding a return to homes from which they had been forcibly expelled decades earlier. Israel responded with overwhelming lethal force, killing 223 people—including 46 children—and injuring 9,204, many of whom were left with permanent disabilities. Among the victims were handicapped protesters, teenage children, and female paramedics. The total number of Palestinians killed in Gaza between 2005 and October 7, 2023, is estimated at around 5,000—most of them civilians—along with tens of thousands more left with life-altering injuries. Yet, according to Harris, none of this should have sparked the October 7 explosion, Palestinians should have remain silent and continue to hand their neck to the butcher. Meanwhile, the killing of a far smaller number of Israelis on that single day is apparently enough to justify the retaliatory slaughter of over 65,000 people in Gaza, and for more killings if necessary. Harris further adds in the same section:
The Tibetans have been truly oppressed by the Chinese for many decades, and yet they have never committed atrocities against Chinese civilians. When the Jews of Germany were herded into ghettos by the Nazis, those who escaped didn’t rape and mutilate German teenagers or burn German babies alive in reprisal.
In Israel’s case, every accusation functions as a confession. Each claim is either a cheap, long-exposed lie—like the infamous “burning babies” story, now universally debunked, or with allegations of rape which remain unverified and controversial. On the first, the world knows Israel has repeatedly lied and continues to do so; on the second, suspicion is natural, not denial, precisely because of Israel’s long track record of fabrications. Anything Israel says has, time and again, proven to be either a lie or a distortion. I have no business defending a rapist on either side, whether a Palestinian or Israeli, but Israeli’s mass campaign of lies and distortions on what truly happened on that day is precisely what prevents many of us from believing anything Israel has to say about the topic, and why should we believe a state that claim babies were cooked in an oven?
If rapes truly occurred on October 7, it would be horrific—beyond tragic—and any perpetrator should face the full weight of justice, even if it were my own son. But does Harris have the courage—we know he doesn’t—to demand the same accountability for the horrifying, well-documented rapes carried out by Israeli soldiers against Palestinian prisoners on camera? Videos show soldiers forcing hard objects into a man’s anus, causing severe internal injuries; the main perpetrator never denied it, he came on TV and justified it, and hundreds of Israelis surround the prison in anger and defended his right to rape. Does Harris call for the prosecution—or execution—of these perpetrators and their onlookers? Of course not. Because when a Palestinian is accused of rape—no matter how undocumented, unverified, or disputed—it becomes the gravest evil imaginable. Yet when the same crime is committed in far more brutal ways, painfully documented dozens of times over, by Israeli perpetrators, it is met with nothing but deafening silence from Harris, which is but another way of licensing rape.
In addition to turning a blind eye to the rape of Palestinian prisoners and the cheerful attitude of Israeli society for that, Harris further muddied his own reputation by regurgitating the long-debunked myth of burned Israeli babies. This farce, now formally labeled the “Hamas baby beheading hoax,” on Wikipedia, has been thoroughly dissected on tens of Western news outlets, some of which initially endorsed it. The man who built a career exposing religious hoaxes is now peddling his own, with barely a flicker of shame. Meanwhile, the only babies actually burned in this conflict are Palestinian—incinerated in every imaginable way—and while no tally of Palestinian deaths ever counts for Harris, only a single unconfirmed claim on the Israeli side is enough to set his moral compass ablaze.
Within the same paragraph, Harris claims that Tibetan resistance has “never committed atrocities against civilians,” yet another fiction he both produces and consumes. I am not sure if burning girls alive and stabbing them inside shops qualifies as an atrocity in his vocabulary, but Tibetans certainly did so during the 2008 Tibetan unrest. Some monks also carried out forms of suicide far more grotesque than anything Hamas has done—self-immolation of ordinary civilians, setting examples and encouraging their child monks who followed in the same path, supposedly to become the Buddha. And when they gained access to explosives, Tibetans too carried out bombings in Chinese civilian areas, as in the 2002 Chengdu bombing.
The scale of Tibetan attacks on Chinese civilians has indeed been smaller compared to Tibetan guerrilla operations against the Chinese army between 1956 and 1974, and certainly less than the violence carried out by some Palestinian factions against Israeli settlers. But Harris’s argument rests on a deeper claim: that Tibetans refrained from civilian violence because Buddhism, unlike Islam, is a pacifist tradition that prohibits such acts. Framed this way, his point collapses immediately, since it runs straight into the overwhelming evidence of Buddhist terrorism elsewhere, and that’s if we choose to ignore the larger problem of the Tibetan society of religious slavery that Harris chooses to act as if it doesn’t exist.
Buddhist terrorist groups have made it abundantly clear that Ahimsa and pacifist slogans mean little when set against people of other religions. In Sri Lanka, outfits like the so-called Buddhist Power Army routinely targeted ordinary Muslim civilians, beating and killing them with impunity. In Myanmar, the 969 Movement demonstrated the same savagery, burning Muslim children alive on more than one occasion—proof that Buddhist extremism is no less capable of atrocities than the movements Harris loves to denounce. When comparing Palestinian Islamic factions with Buddhist militant groups in terms of the numbers attacks on civilians of other faiths, the so-called peace-loving Buddhist terrorists far surpass their Palestinian counterparts by a wide margin.
Within the same paragraph Harris further argues that “when the Jews of Germany were herded into ghettos by the Nazis, those who escaped didn’t rape and mutilate German teenagers or burn German babies alive in reprisal”. The claim that there was no Jewish terrorism against German and European civilians is not an interpretation of history but a denial of it. To engage with it as though it were a serious proposition—by compiling examples and citations—is to confuse scholarship with indulgence. But I will indulge Harris’s historical myopia once more, if only because it issues from the lips of an “intellectual,” a “professor,” and a “scientist” who is teaches his own fans how to lie with a straight face.
I will limit my discussion of Jewish terrorism to incidents committed during and after World War II against civilians of other populations, setting aside older forms of Jewish violence during the Roman occupation. The story of one of the most sinister episodes of Jewish terrorism intended against German civilians began shortly after the second World War, when a group of about sixty Jewish militants vowed to avenge the deaths of six million Jews by killing six million Germans—an effort to honor their martyrs and teach a historical lesson to the enemies of the Jewish people. From this objective came their name: Nakam in Hebrew, or “Avengers” in English. Recognizing that a small band of sixty poorly armed combatants could not realistically orchestrate a mass holocaust of six million Germans of the type they fantasized, they devised a plan to poison the water systems of Four major German cities, Frankfurt and Munich included, intending to inflict maximum suffering on as many German civilians as possible—babies, women, men, and the elderly alike. The group also attempted other schemes, including poisoning bread loaves intended for German prisoners of war using arsenic. While plan A completely failed due to inability to secure the poison, the second plan achieved limited success, sending around 2,000 prisoners to the hospital, but it fell far short of the mass fatalities they had envisioned.
Although ultimately foiled, these incidents of Jewish terrorism stand among the most ambitious attacks ever conceived in human history. But Jewish terrorism did not stop with German civilians. After having failed against the far more powerful German state, other Jewish militants turned their violence against the far weaker Palestinian villagers and farmers who had nothing to do with the Holocaust — a form of terrorism even more reprehensible than the vengeance planned by Nakam against millions of Germans. The Zionist terrorists of the 1930s and 1940s spared us the trouble of debating whether they qualified as terrorists since they openly embraced the label themselves, forming the embryonic units that would later evolve into the modern IDF. At a time when neither Hamas nor Islamic Jihad existed, Zionist militant groups — Irgun, Haganah, and Stern — were running a flourishing campaign of terrorism against Palestinians, the British, and even Jews who opposed the Zionist project. Maher Charif documented some of these attacks in The Root of Zionist Terrorism (Maher Charif:2023) .
- On March 17, 1937, an Irgun operative threw a hand grenade into a café in Jerusalem frequented by Palestinians, marking the first such attack and resulting in multiple casualties.
- On July 6, 1938, Irgun members planted time bombs in a bustling Haifa market, killing 21 Palestinians and injuring 52 others.
- In June 1939, a Haganah unit raided the village of Balad al-Shaykh in Haifa province, abducting and subsequently killing five villagers.
The question of Jewish terrorism is not one of historical documentation, which is extensive, but of its acknowledgement and recognition. Why, then, does Sam Harris dismiss acts of violence directed at millions of Germans and millions of Palestinians and Arabs, insisting they never occurred? To attribute this to a lack of historical knowledge is unconvincing, particularly given his frequent excursions into the minutiae of abstruse Islamic concepts such as different types of Islamic Jihad and Dhimmis, often sourced from obscure medieval texts. His refusal to engage with the documented record of Jewish terrorism appears less a matter of ignorance than of deliberate avoidance, a selective historical myopia that shields the history of violence committed in the name of the Zionist project.
Had the revenge plans of Nakam succeeded, the scale of death would have eclipsed 9/11 a thousand times over, surpassing every Islamic act of terrorism combined. For someone who built an academic career by studying the neuroscience of intention, Harris’s indifference the intentions of Jewish Avengers is telling. He shows no concern for the catastrophic potential of these planned assaults on Germans, nor does this “neuroscientist” sound the alarm over the possibility that such apocalyptic intentions might resurface in a nuclear-armed Jewish state, as he often panics over the potentials of a Muslim-nuclear attack against the West.
The fifth and final section of Harris’s podcast is titled “Myth #5: The two sides in this conflict are equally civilized, equally entitled to respect, and equally worth protecting.” It doesn’t take more than a glance to see where Harris is going: his argument reduces to a crude hierarchy of worth, essentially, “we are more civilized than they are—they kill gays, and we don’t”. How else does one get to justify a mass campaign of slaughter against an entire population if not by arguing they are less humane and civilized?