I
hope Sam Harris approves of my publishing his article here. If by any
means I hear he doesn´t I will delete it immediately and apologize. My
admiration for Sam Harris´s books and ideas and the realization that he
is so clear (and right in my view) about Gaza war made me share this in
my substack, but again, any problem let me know.
This is a very important podcast by Sam Harris
https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/351-5-myths-about-israel-and-the-war-in-gaza
Read, or listen and think.
January 30, 2024
This is a transcript of a recorded podcast.
* * *
There
are five myths about Israel and the war in Gaza that I would like to
address. However, there are two things I should say at the outset that
are important and easy to lose sight of with the various pseudo-moral
hallucinations being spread everywhere, in particular on social media.
The
first point is that the problem that Israel faces with Hamas, and
eventually Hezbollah, and ultimately Iran, while it is existential for
Israel, and dangerous and difficult in many specific ways, is a variant
of a larger problem that has nothing, in principle, to do with Israel or
Jews or American foreign policy. This is a larger clash of cultures—I
hesitate to follow Samuel Huntington in calling it a clash of
civilizations, because I think real civilization—what we mean by
“civilization” at this point in the 21st century—exists on only one side
of this divide. And this clash is happening, in varying degrees, in a
hundred countries. In most places, it can be described as a conflict
between Islamic extremists—more appropriately called jihadists—and
ordinary human beings struggling to maintain the norms of open
societies. So, while it might sound like I’m narrowly defending Israel
here against propagandists for Hamas, I would have more or less the same
things to say about any civilized society fighting jihadists. I said
the same things about American efforts to eradicate the Islamic State,
for instance, in which case I was defending the Yazidis, who were being
starved en masse on the side of a mountain, whose men were being
crucified and decapitated and whose women and girls were being taken by
the thousands as sex slaves by jihadists who had come from all over the
world to join the so-called Caliphate, and to bask in the false dawn of
Islamic prophecy, seemingly on the brink of fulfillment. And I said the
same things after 9/11, when the United States was the target. You can
read my book, The End of Faith, on this subject,
and you will find that there is very little mention of Israel there.
I’ll have the same thing to say the next time a so-called “terrorist”
murders innocent people in Paris or London. Again, this problem has
nothing, in principle, to do with Israel or Jews. And I fully expect
that civilized people throughout the world—non-Muslim and Muslim—will be
fighting jihadists for decades to come. If I live to be 100, I do not
expect to live to see the end of this problem. Needless to say, I hope
I’m wrong.
The second point, and I fear that this
will be forgotten almost immediately, the moment I begin defending
Israel, is that there is no ethical or political argument that makes
sense of the sight of lifeless children being pulled from rubble. With
just a glimpse of the imagery coming out of Gaza, it is only natural to
think that any action that could produce such carnage must be evil. It
is absolutely natural to feel that, since urban warfare guarantees that
innocent children will die, violence cannot be the answer. So Israel
should just stop fighting. But this is an illusion. However horrific,
even unthinkable, sometimes war is necessary.
Now, many of the decisions Israel has made in how it wages this war are
certainly debatable. But there is no way of waging it without a massive
loss of innocent life, as I will discuss.
What is
the alternative to violence for Israel in its current conflict with
Hamas, given what Hamas did on October 7th, and given what it has vowed
to do again at any opportunity? Pacifism? Pacifism only works against a
morally sane adversary. It worked against the British in India. But
pacifism would not have worked against the Nazis. Had the Allies decided
that war is just too awful, and they just couldn’t stomach killing any
more German children, we would all be living in the 1000-year Reich. And
if the Israelis practiced pacifism, Hamas and Hezbollah and a fair
number of ordinary Palestinians would simply murder them. This is not an
opinion. This is what these groups have claimed openly
for decades. And if there were any doubt—and there was never any
doubt—October 7th has made it obscene to doubt this now. What more do
you need? Hamas has said that it will repeat the atrocities of October
7th again and again. And recent polls indicate that 80 percent of
Palestinians approve of what they did. You might worry that Palestinians
can’t afford to answer such polls honestly, for fear of Hamas, but
support for Hamas is around 40 percent in recent polls. Support for what
Hamas did on October 7th is double that. So many those who had the
courage to say they don’t support Hamas still approve of what happened
on October 7th.
The problem for Israel, and for the whole
world, is that Jihadism is more dangerous than Nazism. Jihadists are
Nazis who are certain of paradise. They are Nazis who are eager to die
and have their children die because they actually believe in martyrdom.
They don’t just sort of believe in it. They don’t merely hope that it’s
true. They absolutely believe that dying while attempting to kill
infidels, or apostates, or Jews leads directly to Paradise. I understand
that this sounds like dehumanizing wartime propaganda. But it isn’t.
This is fundamentalist religion in its worst form. We are dealing with
religious fanatics who have had most rational human goals and
considerations scraped from their minds by a lunatic ideology. And while
there are differences among jihadist groups—and they can be sometimes
found murdering one another—they are all part of the same death cult.
I’m not saying that ordinary nationalism and tribalism aren’t also part
of the problem. They are. There are many contributors to every conflict.
I’m talking about what makes these particular conflicts worse than
those born of ordinary nationalism, or tribalism, or competition for
resources, or any other earthly motive.
The aims of jihadists
really are antithetical to everything that civilized people value, and
are right to value, in the 21st century. And the fact that we have on
our own side rich, educated people, who are concerned about gay rights
and trans rights and women’s rights, who want to fight climate change
and save the whales, taking the side of Hamas in the aftermath of their
atrocities on October 7th, just reveals how confused and decadent and
morally vulnerable our civilization has become. We have to face the
facts that are staring us in the face. And, most important, the majority
of Muslims everywhere need to face these facts and be honest about what
jihadism is, and where a sincere belief in martyrdom leads. They have
to moderate Islam in ways that other religions have been moderated. And
there are some hopeful signs that this is happening—at least among the
rulers of the gulf states. But a disavowal of jihadism needs to become
the majority opinion among 2 billion Muslims worldwide. Until this
happens, there will be no exit from these sorts of conflicts.
Myth #1: Israel is guilty of “genocide” in Gaza.
The
term “genocide” has a clear meaning—it’s the destruction or attempted
destruction of a whole people. According to the 1948 international
genocide convention, genocide constitutes “acts committed with intent to
destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious
group.” To claim that Israel has perpetrated a genocide in Gaza, or that
it has attempted genocide anywhere, is patently false. 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. So if Israel
has perpetrated a genocide in Gaza, it is the most inept genocide in
history. And yet this false charge has been made against Israel for
years. It’s telling that the most recent allegations of genocide could
be heard before Israel had dropped a single bomb in response to the
atrocities of October 7th. Really, people were shrieking “genocide” on
October 8th. What does that tell you? This is just a new blood libel.
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. But, of course, it doesn’t want to do that and has never wanted
to do that. In fact, the Israeli army routinely drops leaflets, and
broadcasts on the radio, and calls cellphones to alert Palestinian
civilians when specific areas will be bombed. They did this for weeks in
advance of their most recent invasion of Gaza. Conversely, Hamas is
using its own population as human shields. It built its headquarters
under a hospital, and built hundreds of miles of tunnels under civilian
apartments and schools and mosques, and fires its rockets from populated
areas, and often prevents families from evacuating in a conscious
attempt to maximize the loss of innocent life. These are war crimes.
Of
course, the IDF makes terrible mistakes, and this is inevitable in war.
The IDF recently killed Israeli hostages who were mere moments away
from being rescued. There are tragic accidents and errors of judgment in
every war. However, any conflict with jihadists is made immeasurably
worse by the tactics they use. Why can’t Israeli soldiers simply trust
people who appear unarmed and want to surrender or move to safety?
Because they are confronting a culture of religious fanatics that has
produced an endless supply of suicide bombers over the last 50 years.
Just take a moment to contemplate how the tactic of suicide bombing
changes everything. Nothing and no one can be taken at face value.
Normally, if someone is driving a car or truck, you can be confident
that he hasn’t rigged it to explode. Most people aren’t eager to die. We
rely on the near universality of that attitude in all kinds of ways.
But here we are talking about people who have literally rigged children
to explode—this has happened in a dozen different conflicts with
jihadists across the world—many of which had nothing to do with Israel
or the West or even non-Muslims. How do you expect an army, or a police
force, or any other organization, to deal with this possibility in a
compassionate and civilized way—one that is recognized to be
compassionate and civilized by all the innocent people who are subjected
to it, day after day and year after year, at check points, and in other
places where they have to be treated like they too might be suicide
bombers? Just imagine what it is like to have to wonder whether a child
is actually a bomb? And just think for a moment about a culture that has
normalized this nihilistic behavior—a culture that literally teaches
the love of martyrdom to 6 year-olds in school. This has nothing to do
with Israel or Jews—or the Palestinians even. This is just jihadism. For
instance, Boko Haram routinely uses children as suicide bombers in
Nigeria, and elsewhere in Africa. This insane behavior has nothing to do
with Israel. Most members of Boko Haram have never met anyone who has
ever met anyone who has met a Jew. This nihilism falls directly out of
the doctrines around martyrdom and jihad, which are unique to Islam.
Again, I’m not saying nationalism and ordinary grievances never play a
role. They do. I’m talking about the religious layer of these conflicts
that make them worse than other types of conflict.
I’m
going to take a little detour here, just to hammer this point
home—because in my experience, secular people find it impossible to
understand what’s going on here. This from The New York Times on
February 12, 1984… Almost exactly 40 years ago. Reported by Terence
Smith, who at the time was a former foreign correspondent and chief
White House correspondent for The New York Times. Reading from the start
of the article, about the war between Iran and Iraq. This is being
reported from the Iranian side, about their routine use of child
soldiers on suicide missions. Again, this is from The New York Times 40
years ago:
“THEIR TICKET TO PARADISE IS the blood-red headband and
the small metal key that they wear into battle. ''Sar Allah,''
(''Warriors of God''), some of the headbands read in Farsi script,
identifying the wearers as divinely designated martyrs who will use
their keys to go directly to heaven if killed in the holy war against
Iraq declared by their leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The
headbands and the keys are worn by young boys, aged 12 to 17, [I should
note that younger ages have been reported elsewhere, I’ve read about
children as young as 9 used in this way] who are recruited by local
clergy or simply rounded up in the villages of Iran, given an intensive
indoctrination in the Shiite tradition of martyrdom, and then sent
weaponless into battle against Iraqi armor. Often bound together in
groups of 20 by ropes to prevent the fainthearted from deserting, they
hurl themselves on barbed wire or march into Iraqi mine fields in the
face of withering machine-gun fire to clear the way for Iranian tanks.
[Just picture this from the Iraqi side: You’re an Iraqi tank commander,
and you see groups of children coming at you across a minefield, tied
together with rope, clearing the mines and barbed wire with their
lives.] Across the back of their khaki-colored shirts is stenciled the
slogan: '’I have the special permission of the Imam [that’s the maniac
Khomeini] to enter heaven.’
“In dozens of interviews conducted by
this reporter in recent weeks with Iranian exiles, academics and
government and intelligence officials in the United States and Europe,
the blind faith of these teen-age martyrs was frequently cited as
symbolic of the fanaticism that is part of life today in the Islamic
Republic of Iran. An East European journalist who witnessed one of these
human-wave assaults, in which tens of thousands of young Iranians have
gone willingly to their deaths, could hardly believe what he was seeing,
as first one boy, and then another, detonated a mine and was hurled
into the air by the explosion. ‘We have so few tanks,’ an Iranian
officer explained to the journalist, without apology.”
Ok, a few
things should be clear. Again, this madness has nothing to do with
Israel. Here, we’re talking about the war between Iran and Iraq, 40
years ago. These were Muslims fighting other Muslims. And it was a
zombie movie. This belief in martyrdom is cancer for the mind. Until the
Muslim world outgrows it—anathematizes it, vomits over it, can’t
believe it ever indulged it—the potential for the most insane violence
will never go away. And this is why nuclear weapons in the hands of
jihadists cannot be tolerated. As bad as nuclear proliferation is in
every other context—just think of how bonkers things are with North
Korea. North Korea has nuclear weapons. And they have also built ICBMs.
Though their accuracy is still debatable. And they have threatened to
bomb the United States. As bad as that is, one thing makes it tolerable:
We don’t believe that Kim Jong Un is eager to die. The guy loves
basketball. He has 100 cars and a harem and a private island. If a
fanatical belief in martyrdom were endemic to North Korea and its
leaders, that would make the situation incalculably worse. The entire
world, and the Muslim world in particular, needs to recognize that
jihadism is the one ism that can no longer be tolerated.
As
for genocide, the intentions of Hamas, as declared in their founding
charter, and as they have reiterated numerous times since October 7th,
are explicit: They aspire to commit an actual genocide.
This is something they proudly claim to want to do. And the worst part
is that they don’t ultimately care about their own survival. Members of
Hamas, like jihadists everywhere, routinely chant, “We love death more
than the Jews, or the infidels, or the Americans, love life.” While this
might sound like posturing, and it may be posturing for any specific
person who lacks real faith, in general, it is an honest expression of
their religious worldview. They are a death cult. And Hamas is a death
cult that happens to be very popular among Palestinians. Even though
Hamas has engineered a situation in which to fight them effectively
requires that Palestinian civilians also die.
Again, they
are consciously using their own population as human shields. They have
built hundreds of miles of tunnels under Gaza, more extensive than the
London underground, with thousands of entrances that use hospitals,
mosques, schools, apartment buildings, and other civilian infrastructure
as cover. Hamas fighters are hiding in these tunnels right now, and
using the innocent civilians they kidnapped from Israel as an additional
layer of human shields. Crucially, these tunnels are not being used as
bomb shelters for the civilian population. On the contrary, the civilian
population is being sacrificed to protect the tunnels. Again, that was
the whole plan. They have spent billions of dollars, over the course of
17 years, building these tunnels. The Palestinians in Gaza have received
more international aid than almost any community on earth. They could
have built a Singapore on the Mediterranean. In fact, if they were
pacifists, they would already have a state. Pacifism would actually work
if practiced by the Palestinians against Israel. There is no way that
Israel could resist a Gandhian-style campaign of nonviolence in support
of a 2-state solution. The Palestinians would absolutely win a moral
contest like that, and could have won it 50 years ago. But, generally
speaking, they are a culture of religious fanatics, ruled by absolute
fanatics, who are willing to sacrifice everything for martyrdom. As a
top Hamas official said in response to all the destruction in Gaza, “We
are called a nation of martyrs. And we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.”
That is the problem that Israel is dealing with. What Hamas is doing is
not, in any sense, normal human behavior in a time of a war. But it is
normal for jihadists. What Israel is doing, in a desperate attempt to
eradicate Hamas, while minimizing civilian death, is not in any sense an
act of genocide.
Again, nothing that I just said, even while
true, makes sense when you see the bodies of dead children being pulled
out of rubble. The only thing that provides moral clarity here is the
recognition that this whole catastrophe is Hamas’s fault. And that there
can be no peaceful response to jihadism. Anyone calling for a cease
fire at this point needs to ask themselves, why aren’t you calling for
Hamas to release the hostages? And why don’t you remember that there was
a ceasefire on October 6th? The truth that we cannot lose sight of is
that Hamas has deliberately engineered the chaos on both sides of the
Gaza border.
Myth #2: International Humanitarian Law Requires that Israel’s response to Palestinian aggression be “proportional.”
The
term “proportional” is being widely misunderstood when talking about
the war in Gaza. To be truly “proportional,” in the way that many people
imagine this word is used, Israeli soldiers would need to rape,
torture, and murder the same number Palestinian noncombatants as Hamas
raped, tortured, and murdered in Israel on October 7th. But, of course,
no one believes that such reciprocal savagery would constitute a sane or
ethical response to Hamas’s violence.
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.
Jihadism aside, in
this age of social media, 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?
More recent wars are
no exception. Around 2,300 US soldiers died in the war in Afghanistan.
And yet we killed over 50,000 members of the Taliban and other opposing
forces, and around 50,000 Afghan civilians died too. So there was around
a 40 to 1 disparity in the number of deaths between the two sides. In
the War in Iraq, we suffered twice the fatalities, around 4,600, and we
caused something like 40,000 military deaths, so a 9 to 1 ratio, but
there were somewhere around 200,000 civilians killed. Of course, many of
those deaths were due to the sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shia
in Iraq, for which we also get blamed. Accepting that blame yields a
fatality ratio once again of over 40 to 1.
My point isn’t to
defend any of our tactics in past wars—or the wars themselves. My point
isn’t even to defend the specific choices that Israel has made in waging
this war. Frankly, I don’t consider myself informed enough to know what
they should be doing. My point is that Israel is being held to a level
of scrutiny in how it conducts this war that has never been applied to
the United States, or the UK, or France, or any other country in a time
of conflict. And unlike our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Israel’s war
against Hamas is genuinely existential. And again, they are fighting
jihadists, who have built hundreds of miles of tunnels under a civilian
population, for the purpose of maximizing the loss of civilian life.
It’s an impossible situation.
Of course, the loss of civilian life
in Gaza is absolutely tragic. And nothing I’m saying here is meant to
minimize the horror of it. I’m repeating myself on this point for a
reason, because it’s very difficult to maintain moral clarity in the
presence of dead and injured children. Our hearts tell us to rescue
children by whatever means possible, and it’s a good thing that we have
that response. But we can’t lose sight of the fact that all this tragedy
and horror has been consciously engineered by Hamas for reasons that
make perfect sense to jihadists, but which no normal army has ever
contemplated or would ever contemplate. Yes, this conflict has many of
the features of ordinary guerilla warfare. But guerilla warfare plus
certainty of Paradise is much worse.
There is simply no good way
to fight an enemy of this kind. When you are fighting jihadists, your
own scruples—the shame and horror you feel at killing
noncombatants—become another weapon in their hands. Jihadists are very
clever. They know that by our own moral code, the images of innocent
civilians being killed in Gaza are totally unacceptable. They know that
we can only tolerate so much of that, lest we become unrecognizable to
ourselves—lest we become monsters. But these people are already
monsters. Hamas simply does not care about Palestinian children, and
they are committed to murdering Israeli children whenever they can. That
is why they have to be destroyed. There are only terrible and more
terrible options here. And, again, the problem is deeper than Israel and
the Palestinians. Eventually Muslim societies need to understand that
their religious beliefs—specifically the doctrines about jihad and
martyrdom—make any conflict of this kind far more pointlessly horrible
than it needs to be. That is their fault. And it will remain their fault
no matter how many children die in Gaza.
Again, modern,
democratic, largely secular societies must wake up to the reality of the
situation: We have a sadistically insane terrorist organization,
raping, torturing and murdering noncombatants, and taking hostages,
including children, and then using their own children as human shields
so that they cannot be effectively fought by civilized people. They know
that eventually civilized people become a little less civilized in
situations like this, and can care only so much about collateral damage.
So Israel can be expected to slip off the moral high ground, by killing
enormous numbers of noncombatants, and even commit its own war crimes
eventually. And civilized people the world over, who imagine themselves
unimplicated in this conflict, will become hysterical and put pressure
on Israel to stop fighting—as they did even before Israel started
fighting.
The crucial distinction, which almost no one can keep in
view, is that there are now two types of people in this world: those
who intentionally torture and kill children and other noncombatants, to
maximize horror, and those who seek to avoid doing so, however
imperfectly, while defending themselves against the first sort of
people. The gulf between these two groups could not be wider, and
everything we care about—literally everything—exists on one side of it.
Myth #3: The Jews Are Colonizers and the Palestinians are Indigenous People.
There
has been a 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. (Curiously, no one at the U.N. is worried about the Jews
so-called “right of return.” Is anyone pressuring Muslim countries to
give Jews their homes back? No. These are the sorts of asymmetries one
should notice.)
In any case, Israel is not unique among states in
having been created by outside powers, just drawing lines on maps in the
aftermath of WW2. Pakistan was born in the same year and in the same
way, and yet no one questions its right to exist. Nearly every nation on
Earth has emerged from a chaotic history of conquest and the
displacement of people. There are now 22 official Muslim States and over
50 Muslim-majority countries. This is the result of centuries of Muslim
conquest. There is exactly one Jewish state. And yet only Israel must
continuously confront charges of its illegitimacy. Only Israel must
continually advocate for its right to exist. There are nearly 200 member
states of the UN, and Israel has been sanctioned by that body more than
all the countries in the world combined. Does that mean that Israel has
behaved especially badly? No. There are countries like North Korea that
have turned its entire society into a prison camp. There are countries
like Sudan, that have perpetrated actual genocides. There are counties
like Egypt and Somalia, where nearly 100 percent of girls are subjected
to genital mutilation. There are countries, like Syria, that have killed
orders of magnitude more Muslim noncombatants. As I already pointed
out, there are countries like Iran that have used child soldiers, by the
tens of thousands, in suicide operations. And yet the 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. I know
the UN sounds like it still has some gravitas—it’s the United Nations,
afterall—but on this and several other points, it has become a morally
bankrupt organization. There are even reports that employees of UNRWA
(United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees) took
part in the massacre of October 7th—as insane as that sounds. And the
United States has now paused funding because of this. The US alone gives
UNRWA around $300M a year. And, as has been widely reported, UN funded
schools teach Palestinian kids to hate Jews and aspire to martyrdom. The
word “corruption” doesn’t even begin to encompass the problems here.
Myth
#4: The atrocities committed by Hamas (and over one thousand
Palestinian civilians) on October 7th were a legitimate response to
oppression.
Israel left Gaza in 2005—forcibly removing
thousands of its own citizens—and billions of dollars in international
aid have since been spent there. So the “oppression” of the Palestinians
in Gaza—by Israel—is at least debatable. While Israel has sought to
maintain a secure border with Gaza all those years, so has Egypt—and yet
no one blames Egypt for making Gaza an “open-air prison.” However, even
if we accept the charge of “oppression,” it must be said that not all
oppressed people respond by raping, and torturing, and murdering
noncombatants.
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. There are countless
historical examples of real oppression, and yet very few cultures have
produced a bottomless supply of suicidal terrorists. There might be many
societal factors that explain these differences, but one is surely the
Islamic doctrines around martyrdom and jihad. People’s religious beliefs
really are motivating. We can see this with fundamentalist Christianity
in the West. The fundamentals of religion matter when you’re a
fundamentalist. And it matters that the fundamentals of our various
religions are different. Mere religious tribalism is always a potential
source of intolerance and violence—it is much worse when there are
specific doctrines that advocate intolerance and violence. Again, we
need the world’s 2 billion Muslims to honestly acknowledge this problem
and find some way of moderating their faith, specifically around the
doctrines of martyrdom, jihad, apostasy, and blasphemy–which put their
faith in perpetual conflict with the modern world.
Myth #5: The two sides in this conflict are equally civilized, equally entitled to respect, and equally worth protecting.
Well,
again, if we’re talking about children dying on either side of this
conflict—then yes, a human life is a human life. But Jihadist
organizations like Hamas, and the wider cultures that support them,
don’t value human life the way we do. Again, while this might sound like
wartime propaganda, it is a simple statement of fact about how
religious beliefs motivate people and constrain their thinking. There is
a difference between religious fanatics who punish women with beatings
(or worse) for showing their hair in public, or commit honor killings
against them for the crime of getting raped, or throw acid in their
faces for a perceived slight, or even, in a place like Afghanistan for
the crime of going to school—there is a difference between this vicious
lunacy and a modern society that treats women as equals to men. There is
a difference between a society that murders gays, that literally has a
policy of throwing them off of rooftops head first, and one that fully
embraces them. There is a difference between religious fanatics who care
only about Paradise, and most other people who take their religious
beliefs much less seriously—or who have different beliefs that allow
them to appropriately value life in this world.
Have you seen the
crowds that cheered the capture of Israeli hostages and the mutilation
of Jewish dead? Have you watched those videos? Did these people look
like they have the slightest interest in avoiding war crimes? These are
the types of behaviors we see all around the world in an Islamic
context, even when the fighting has nothing to do with Jews or the US.
Is it only Islamic? No. But Islam has more than its fair share of this
kind of barbarity. We have to be honest about that. To be clear, I’m not
advocating collective punishment against the Palestinians for being
backward. I’m not saying that Palestinian civilians who support Hamas
deserve to die. I am saying, however, that we shouldn’t lie to ourselves
about the state of public opinion throughout the Muslim world. We
should understand what people believe and how these beliefs affect
behavior. And we have to figure out how to get 2 billion Muslims to
truly moderate the religious extremism and tribalism we see throughout
the Muslim world. It’s an enormous problem.
Recent polling among
Palestinians, by the Palestinian Center for Policy Survey and Research,
shows widespread support for Hamas, and more support for the attacks of
October 7th. As I said, many of those who don’t like Hamas, for one
reason or another, still like what Hamas did on October 7th. This recent
poll shows that while only around 40 percent of Palestinians support
Hamas, double that support these atrocities of October 7th—the
deliberate torture and murder of noncombatants, the taking of children
(and even infants) as hostages. And the 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. Of course, the Palestinian community and the Muslim world
generally is so riddled with lies and conspiracy theories, that we might
reasonably wonder what percentage of ordinary Muslims believe that any
Jewish civilians were killed on October 7th. Many believe the Holocaust
never happened. After September 11th, we had the impossible spectacle of
Muslims alleging that it was Jewish plot, because 4000 Jews supposedly
didn’t show up to work on 9/11, while simultaneously celebrating it as a
great jihadist victory by al-Qaeda. There is no reconciling these
beliefs. In general, we are not talking about people who are part of the
reality-based community. But if we are going to maintain basic moral
sanity at this moment in history, we have to acknowledge that there is a
difference between those who intentionally kill noncombatants—often in
the most gruesome ways possible—and those who inadvertently kill them
when dropping bombs, having taken considerable pains to avoid killing
them. There is a difference between a society that parades tortured
hostages before jeering crowds and one that gives even its most
dangerous prisoners life-saving medical care. Most people don’t realize
that the current head of Hamas, Sinwar, was cured of brain cancer, while
in an Israeli prison. The actual mastermind behind the October 7th
attacks was someone whose life had been saved by Jewish oncologist. It’s
pretty hard to overstate the disparity here. Do you understand how much
this difference matters? And how it touches everything? There simply is
a difference between those who are attempting to spread a cult of death
to the ends of the Earth and those who are struggling to prevent this
from happening, while also struggling to maintain the norms of an open
society. And it is impossible to understand these differences if one
merely counts the number of dead and wounded in this or any other
conflict.
And this is why intentions matter. Actions matter, of
course, but the reasons behind the actions also matter. What sort of
world are we trying to build? What would any given person or group do if
they had the power to do it? There are vast differences in what various
groups are aspiring to accomplish at this moment in history. And the
future of civilization depends on our being able to minimize these
differences—and where they remain significant to minimize them further,
through diplomacy, and economic incentives, and other forms of pressure
short of violence. But there are certain groups of people that have
kicked themselves loose of the Earth—and they can’t be reasoned with or
incentivized. And this is where the use of force becomes necessary.
Let’s hope that becomes less and less true in the years to come…
Thanks for listening.
