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Sam Harris - 5 Myths

Sam Harris | 5 Myths about Israel and the War in Gaza

  • jihadists vs 21st century civilization, open societies
  • Sometimes war is necessary. Civilians will die. The sight of it is terrible, but thats not a reason for pacifism. Pacifism only works against a morally sane adversary.
  • Jihadis are worst than Nazis, as they believe in certain paradise
  • Myth #1: Israel is guilty of “genocide” in Gaza.
    • There were around 250,000 people in Gaza in 1948. There are now more than 2 million. This rate of growth is triple the world average.
    • Claimed genocide on Oct 8th before a single bomb dropped
    • Jihadist tactics make war worse and cause war crimes to occur
    • How the tactic of suicide bombing changes everything; you can’t believe anything you see. Is it just a regular car or a car bomb. Is it a baby or a bomb? Stroller or a bomb?
    • 40 years ago, Iran vs Iraq, routine use of a child suicide bombers
    • Hamas has engineered a situation in which to fight them effectively requires that Palestinian civilians also die.
    • The Palestinians in Gaza have received more international aid than almost any community on earth.
  • Myth #2: International Humanitarian Law Requires that Israel’s response to Palestinian aggression be “proportional.”
    • Israel gets more scrutiny than any other nation
    • 40 to 1 disparity
    • Jihadists use the Wests morality against it as a weapon
  • Myth #3: The Jews Are Colonizers and the Palestinians are Indigenous People. ^4f330f
    • continuous presence of Jews in the land of Israel for thousands of years. The Jews, therefore, are an indigenous people of the region. They were also indigenous to Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Turkey, Iran, and other Muslim countries—before being driven out of those countries by Muslims
      • UN doesnt care about this ‘right of return’
    • Pakistan was born same year as Israel and simply drawn on a map—no one questions its right to exist
    • every nation on Earth has emerged from a chaotic history of conquest and the displacement of people
    • Israel sanctioned the most yet;
      • North Korea literal prison country
      • Sudan—actual genocide
      • Egypt , Somalia — genital mutilation
      • Syria — much more enemy noncombatants killed
      • Iran — child suicide bombers
    • UN sits in perpetual judgment of the one embattled democracy in the Middle East that is fighting for its actual survival—against a death cult that revels in atrocities and in the martyrdom of its own civilians.
  • Myth #4: The atrocities committed by Hamas (and over one thousand Palestinian civilians) on October 7th were a legitimate response to oppression. ^bcd137
    • Debatable
    • Still get billions in support
    • Doesn’t mean they need to kill civilians, examples:
      • Tibet
      • Jews in Germany
  • Myth #5: The two sides in this conflict are equally civilized, equally entitled to respect, and equally worth protecting.
    • Difference how religious fanatic societies and modern societies
    • 80% of P. liked the attacks (poll)
      • justification, in their minds, is explicitly religious—it was in defense of the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, which they imagine has been desecrated by the Netanyahu government
    • Muslim world riddled with lies and conspiracy theories

Podcast 362

https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/362-six-months-of-war

  • hostages

  • comprising with Jihadists?

  • How so many intelligent people can’t discern the moral hierarchy

    • People that use own children as human shields or worse bombs
    • Kill their own daughters for the crime of getting raped
    • Care about violence done to a book instead of whole societies

  • Jihadists worse than the Nazi’s

    • Ideology is worst
    • Nazism + Expectation of Paradise
    • Didn’t use their children as human shields
    • Didn’t give guards in Aushwitz a belief system that made them feel religious ecstasy herding people into gas chambers

  • Civilization vs. its enemies

    • Support for Israel born from:
      • Connection to Civilization
      • Norms of open societies
      • Individual Rights
      • Freedom of thought
      • Secularism
      • Rationality
      • Basic decency

  • Lost of innocent lives in Gaza

    • There was a ceasefire on Oct 6 and Gaza was getting more humanitarian aid than most other countries
    • Could of returned hostages

  • Everyone has forgotten the hostages

  • No condemnation for Hamas, focused on Israel

  • Everyone thinks they know the solution to IP

  • IP conflict is like catnip to people; don’t care about other conflicts

  • In the oppressor vs oppressed lens; IP conflict is the bottom and America is at the top; its a conflict that excites people to have opinions about

  • Argument that why Americas are so fascinated about the IP conflict is that Americans sell weapons to them

  • Murray talks about having “skin in the game”

    • This idea makes sense, you’re opinion change when you have rockets aimed at your home and you have to run into bomb shelters daily
    • The idea of giving up the West Bank as an outsider as so simple and not understanding the fear
    • The reality that you live in a country that is constantly under attack

  • Triple standard of Israel

    • Wanting plans for after instead of destroying the terrorist state
    • “Moral probity”

  • Moral disparity of the two sides — glaring sin of omission from whole world

  • This is not resistance, this is barbarism

  • Parsing the history of IP is a fools game

  • More important to see what each group will do if they had the power to do

    • Hamas has said they want to repeat Oct 7th again and again

  • Hezbollah has caused 10,000s of Israel’s to be displaced due to rocket attacks

  • Was the Iron Dome a mistake?

    • Got used to running to a bomb shelter and living with rocket attacks
    • Why to be clever ways to hide?
    • How is this a way to live?
    • After giving up land for peace
    • No other nation would put up with this

  • The way counter-protestors at Palestinian protests get assaulted and then arrested by police

    • “Hamas are terrorists”
    • “How many gay bars are in Gaza?”
    • “There was a ceasefire on Oct 6th”

  • How on Oct 7th, Hamas killed Israeli Muslims the same

  • UK Parliament are literally scared of Jihadis

Sam Harris.base (file not included in this release)

Podcast 367

  • Campus Protests
    • Shouting Jews to go back to Poland
    • Argument - Flipping the Script
    • Globalize the Intifada isn’t a call for peace
    • These kids don’t know it support the deliberate killing of non-combatants
    • Qatar
      • Education money to US
      • Muslim Brotherhood
        • Fusion of Islamism and Nazism
        • Genocidal in intent
      • Funds American Muslims for Palestine
      • Funds Students for Justice in Palestine
      • Funds Jewish Voices for Peace
      • PsyOp on the West
    • Malicious exercise of soft power
  • Uncomfortable with religious ethno-state but now a Zionist
    • 2 billion Muslims and Evangelical Christians against Jews
  • Narrow focus on anti-semitism is mistaken
    • They hate the West
    • Western power
    • Whiteness
    • Sin of racism
    • Jews white, Palestinians black
      • Half Jews in Israel are Middle Eastern or North African in descent
  • Left would consider Harvey Weinstein the worst person to ever live, but whole societies in the Muslim world would consider Weinstein well adjusted
  • Tucker Carlsen
    • Great replacement cult
  • Evangelical Christians will support Israel and philosemetic but only up until the point Jesus comes back
  • Disproportionate amount of hate crimes against Jews in U.S. ^7aae2e
    • Not blacks
    • Not Muslims
      • Islamist front group: Despite what Council of American Islamic Relations says
    • Jews are 2% of the pop. and get 50% of hate
    • More hate against Jews after 9/11 than Muslims
    • Oct 7th: Incidents have soared
  • Jews should not compete in the oppression olympics
    • Not to convince worse than blacks or muslims
    • Get past politics of identity and defend Western values
    • Need the NYT and BBC to become sane again
    • People to defend Western values > Stop anti-semitism
  • No politics analysis make sense when looking at dead photos of children

  • Islam ^5dda6d

    • World is divided into two realms
      • Belief
      • Unbelief
    • Islam is meant to total subsume a persons life and governance of society
    • Intrinsically political
    • Muhammad wasn’t the Muslim Jesus
      • Warlord
      • Ideal man for Muslims
      • Imagine if Jesus routinely had his enemies killed and wives taken as slaves, less like a hippy and more like Tony Soprano
    • Tasted political power from very beginning, wasn’t oppressed
    • Created an Empire immediately
    • Crushed everyone for 500 years
    • Wants followers to spread the faith
    • Islam from the first moment was a religion of power
      • Unlike Christianity and Judaism
    • Ruling over Muslims or even have equivalent power along side them has always been anathema
      • Its an error to be rectified
    • Because Islam has failed to achieve domination has been a perennial source of humiliation
      • Makes no sense by the light of the doctrine
      • Sacrilege
      • Status quo is intolerable
    • Peace process hopeless because mere presence of Jewish state in the holy land is totally unacceptable
      • Totally unacceptable
      • Perversion of a sacred history
      • Abject failure of the history of Islam which is to conquer the world for the glory of Islam
    • Not a religion of peace; Religion of conquest and submission
    • Doctrine of holy war and a love of martyrdom and an utter intolerance of blasphemy and apostasy are central to Islam in a way they are not central to other religions
  • Hospital in Gaza Is a Scene of Pain, Despair and Defiance - The New York Times
  • If all you care about are the Palestinians, you’d want them to be free from this lunatic ideology.
  • Palestinians support of suicide bombers - 70%
  • Islam at its core teaches what Hamas does
  • Majority of Muslims need to reframe, ignoring or relinquishing the core tenants of Islam as its against the goal of building open and pluralistic societies

Urban Warfare 2.0