When Babies Don’t Count: Harris’s Moral Blind Spot on Gaza

Pose any question to Sam Harris about Muslim behavior, past or present, and watch him play his favorite parlor trick: producing a Qur’anic verse or Hadith like the smart boy acing a word-for-picture exercise. For Harris, every protest, bombing, vote, or side-eye from a Muslim has its origin in Islam. A factory strike? Qur’an. A family feud? Hadith. A shoe thrown at Bush? Definitely Jihad. In his universe, Muslims are incapable of acting from anger, humiliation, or history—only theology. Their rage isn’t born of drones flattening villages, it’s Islam. Their October 7th isn’t about decades of blockade and occupation, it’s Jihad. The shoe thrown at Bush? Forget the bombs over Iraqi children’s heads; no, Harris assures us, it all comes down to some dust-covered Hadith no one outside his debating circle has ever cracked open.

I’m perfectly content to indulge Harris in his little word-for-picture circus, mostly because I’m a retired militant atheist myself who haad spent years running the same game, often delivered with superior finesse, if my Arabic background gets any credit. The difference is,I would actually expect an atheist—of all people—to stick with that word-for-picture tautology across religions, including Judaism and Christianity. If you’re going to pin every act of violence by religious people on their scriptures, at least be consistent about it and justify every
act of violence by referring to the perpetrator’s religion.

Keep in mind, the religious explanation of terrorism would still be wrong and scientifically
worthless, but at least you’d be playing fair. Harris, however, can’t even manage that. He isn’t merely mistaken in his theoretical diagnosis of Palestinian violence—he’s a hypocrite of the purest rot.
In the days following October 7th, Harris wasted no time leaping on the tragedy, as if the massacre were a long-awaited footnote to his intellectual argument. One could almost imagine his grim satisfaction: at last, fresh evidence that Muslims loathe and murder Jews—not for politics, not for history, but simply because Islam tells them to. The real purpose of his
November 7th article wasn’t to mourn the dead or condemn the carnage; no, it was to lecture us on why the 7 th of October unfolded, as he so obligingly explains:

These are religious beliefs, sincerely held. They are beliefs about the moral structure of the universe. And they explain how normal people—even good ones—can commit horrific acts of violence against innocent civilians—on purpose, not as collateral damage—and still consider themselves good. When you believe that life in this world has no value, apart from deciding who goes to hell and who goes to Paradise, it becomes possible to feel perfectly at ease killing noncombatants, or even using your own women and children as human shields, because you know that any Muslims who get killed will go to Paradise
for eternity.

Harris’s statements are wrong—of that, there is no doubt—but I won’t bother unpacking why
his beliefs about the effects of religious faith are catastrophically flawed; I’ve done that elsewhere, and the work is on its way to publication. Instead, the bar for Sam Harris is much lower: I don’t expect him to defend his thesis or even be right about the effects of Islam on the behavior of its adherents, but all I ask is that he be consistently wrong, that is wrong across the board, assigning every act of religious violence to religion, including Israeli violence to Judaism. In short, I expect him not to be correct, but only to be consistently full of shit, and thereby avoid the glaring hypocrisy that currently defines his work.

In The End of Faith, Harris proclaims, “your beliefs define your vision of the world; they dictate your behavior; they determine your emotional responses to other human beings.”
Grand words—if only he meant them. In practice, however, his neurocognitive musings function more like a one-way mirror: Christianity is conveniently dismissed as a reformed religion hence irrelevant for Harris, Judaism is dismissed with a shrug for no stated reasons, and Islam is subjected to relentless, obsessive scrutiny as if it alone embodies all religious
folly. Throughout his work, Harris doesn’t study belief—he stages a lifelong autopsy on Islam, treating it as the universal cipher for human error, violence, and moral decay. Everything in The End of Faith and his subsequent “scientific” articles to map the neural roots of faith were merely warm-ups for a singular, unrelenting assault on Islam.

As a devout atheist myself, I could almost excuse—or even respect—the obsessive scrutiny of Islam if it were, by any measurable standard, the world’s most threatening or destructive faith.
But to single out Muslims while a proudly Christian nation like the United States has hardly missed a single chance to wage every major and minor war since World War II is nothing short of diabolical hypocrisy. By every metric—military reach, nuclear arsenal, sheer capacity for destruction—the Christian West, led by America, remains the planet’s most dangerously armed faith community. No need for hypotheticals or “what ifs”: the U.S. has already dropped nukes, incinerated countless Japanese children and women, it has already killed millions across three several and flattened villages from Haiti to Iraq to Yemen with bombs of every
conceivable size.

This self-proclaimed champion of democracy, United States, hasn’t merely marched into every major and minor conflict across the globe—it has also funneled decades of weapons, cash, and political cover to prop up a Jewish state explicitly designed to enshrine the dominance of one ethno-religious group over all others, as proudly codified in Israel’s constitution. Israel is house to the most fanatic religious groups and leaders in the world, many of whom are officials, public figures, and rabbis with hundreds of thousands of voters and followers, all proudly supported by Harris’s “scholarly” work.

Today, and after two relentless years of systematic slaughter, claiming more than 60,000 civilian lives—mostly children and women, many of them cooked alive by Israeli bombs,
suffocated under the rubble, or blown apart in ways that defy imagination—Gaza is barely recognizable as a city. Over two million people have been reduced to scavenging for aid,treated as nothing more than vermin by those controlling the rations, and there is almost nothing left standing to rebuild.

Yet for someone like Sam Harris “dead babies aren’t an argument” (Sam Harris) because“ one finds dead babies in many other circumstances” (ibid), ethical outrage must apparently be upgraded to his rarefied moral altitude just to register as a moral problem. Only at Harris’s
exalted level of abstraction can one even attempt to process the horror of Palestinian children being burned alive by Israel, but not as an actual calamity caused by Jewish soldiers, but as an instance found in “many other circumstances” (ibid).

This is precisely the point at which Harris’s cherished word-for-image game vanishes into thin air. After a career spent sermonizing about how belief dictates behavior—while treating
Islamic Jihad as his eternal petri dish—he suddenly loses all scientific nerve when confronted with Israel’s incessant biblical invocations of genocide. The instant the lens shifts away from Islam, the proud “objectivity” he parades so loudly evaporates without a trace. What follows
are but a few specimens of the genocidal rhetoric spewed by Israeli officials and Jewish leaders—calls for the wholesale erasure of Palestinians—that Sam Harris has, with conspicuous dexterity, managed to tiptoe around without a word. In Deuteronomy 20:16–17 —, we find almost an exact materialization of what Israel has done to tens of Palestinian villages in Beit Hanoon, Beit Lahia, Jabalia, Shujaiya, and much more:

In the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you This sanctified call to carnage has echoed through the corridors of Israeli power in statement after statement, from the highest official to the lowest-ranking soldier, a chorus of pious bloodlust. Chief among the chanters is Deputy Speaker of the Knesset Nissim Vaturi, who brandishes his God’s command like a butcher’s license when he called to: Erase Gaza. Nothing else will satisfy us […] Do not leave a child there [,] expel anyone who remains there when it ends, so that they won’t re-establish Such statements are far too numerous to catalogue, but the bottom line is brutally clear: the obliteration of Gaza isn’t collateral damage, it’s the objective. The logic is spelled out without shame—why hesitate when, as one Israeli lieutenant warned, Israelis should never “make the mistake of thinking for a moment that Arabs are human beings” 1 . In the same murderous register, the Jewish deity demands nothing less than the erasure of an entire people—“blot out the remembrance of Amalek” (the total liquidation of men, women, children, and even animals) in Deuteronomy 25:17–19 and 1 Samuel 15. And this is no dusty relic of scripture; the words march straight into the mouth of Israel’s highest political priest,

Benjamin Netanyahu, who solemnly assures his brethren: “the entire people, and the leadership of the people, embrace them and believe in them. ‘Remember what Amalek did to you’ (Deuteronomy 25:17). We remember and we fight.” In other words, divine genocide is not only cited—it is national policy, preached from the very pinnacle of power.” 2 Commanding a Facebook page of nearly 100,000 followers—and speaking to a much larger Jewish audience beyond the screen—Rabbi Ronen Shaulov did not merely repeat his God’s decree or his prime minister’s rallying cry; he embroidered them with his own venom, pressing the ancient script of extermination into the here and now with a fervor that brooks no doubt about his intent: All of Gaza and every child in Gaza should starve to death, regretting that the Israelis “didn’t learn from Amalek when we left a trace of them” An entire online Registry of Israeli Genocidal Statements on Gaza now exists, meticulously documenting and translating hundreds of calls for slaughter from top Israeli officials, military
commanders, rabbis, and public figures. The collection offers an unvarnished glimpse into the ethos and worldview of a nation that has occupied the same people for 78 years, leaving little doubt about how they perceive those under their control.

When confronted with such statements, Sam Harris falls back on his familiar, well-worn routine: he condemns them in words, then dismisses them as exceptions to the “civilized and secular” Israeli society, insisting that “their views do not reflect the aims of Israel as a nation or the aims of most Jews.” 3 That, of course, is either a bald-faced lie or staggering ignorance. The reality is impossible to ignore: Israeli youth flood the internet with viral videos celebrating and mocking the deaths of Palestinian children and women; they chant “death to the Arabs,” on European streets, dance in “secular” discos to the grim chant “there are no children left in Gaza,” and openly express these same murderous sentiments in surveys—the very evidence Harris wields to indict Muslims.

The fact is that the biblical calls for the extermination of Palestinian children, echoed in hundreds of genocidal statements by top Israeli officials, align seamlessly with the broader
Israeli public sentiment toward Gaza. According to a survey by the Hebrew University center, “some 64% of Israelis believe that ‘there are no innocents’ in Gaza,” and a comparable number see the near-total lack of coverage of Gaza’s humanitarian crisis as entirely sufficient. It takes only a handful of twisted calculations to leap from “there are no innocents in Gaza” to the grotesque logic of “starve all the children,” doesn’t it?
But when confronted with actual numbers, there’s no need for speculation. Asked about the citizens of Gaza, 82% of Israeli respondents supported expelling the population from their homeland 4 —mirroring the mass displacement carried out 76 years ago to make way for Israel.

• 2 https://www.gov.il/en/pages/statement-by-pm-netanyahu-28-oct-2023
• 3 https://www.samharris.org/blog/making-sense-of-gaza

• When posed the question, “Do you support the idea that the IDF [Israeli army], when conquering an enemy city, should act as the Israelites did under Joshua in Jericho — by killing all of its inhabitants?” 47% said yes (ibid). And for those skeptical about what the Israelites actually did under Joshua, the record is clear: it followed divine instruction to annihilate every man, woman, and animal.
  It’s obvious that much of the so-called secular Israeli nation is about as secular as a sword in a bloodbath—or if, by some miracle, they genuinely are, it hasn’t saved them from being a herd of pathetic, infant-murdering cowards, cheerfully complicit in atrocities and morally bankrupt beyond measure. One can almost admire the consistency of their cruelty, had it not been so
  gut-wrenchingly vile.

  When asked about even a tiny fraction of these lethal opinions circulating in Israeli society, the author of The Moral Landscape replied with characteristic moral naivety: “if given a
  magic button to push that would annihilate the Palestinians—not just Hamas but all men, women, and children—what percentage of Jews do you think would push it?”, insisting that Israelis wouldn’t. Yet the answer—supported by hard numbers, countless statements, and the actual destruction already wrought—was delivered unflinchingly on an Israeli podcast, Two Nice Jewish Boys:
  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” he clutches
  his teeth as he says it and adds, “I think most Israelis would. They wouldn’t say I pressed it, but they would press it. If they were in a closet alone, they wouldn’t even hesitate”

  Unlike the Islamic Jihad that Harris is trying to save us world from, and unlike the impotent cries of Muslim villagers that are armed with nothing more than a worn-out Kalashnikov,— the genocidal calls coming out from Israeli people are the cry of nuclear-armed leviathans,
  propelled by the darkest passages of their scripture, capable of annihilating billions with a single command. And yet, when confronted with this apocalyptic reality, Harris shows not a flicker of alarm, not a shred of the panic he lavishes on hapless jihadists. The selective outrage is staggering: a morality measured not by the scale of destruction, but by the ethnicity
  and religion of the victims.

  It becomes clear that the more one sympathizes with Israel, the more one becomes capable of tolerating the killing of children. Burning a starving baby alive in her tent, chaining and burying them alive, horrors repeated like clockwork in Gaza, become mere footnotes in apliable conscience. Only Harris’s grotesque moral elasticity explains how a man who spent decades pontificating about a morality beyond religion could shrug and declare that killed “babies aren’t an argument” (Sam Harris). The casualness of such detachment is not merely shocking—it is a stain on the very idea of moral reasoning, a microscope into a mind that can
  justify human agony and still pretend to scholarship.