Responding to Sam Harris and Yuval Noah Harari On Palestine
It's not just that they're wrong, they're deadly wrong.
Note: You can watch or listen to a video version of this article here.
The forcible staying of human uplift by barriers of law, and might, and tradition is the most wicked thing on earth. It is wrong, eternally wrong. It is wrong, by whatever name it is called, or in whatever guise it lurks, and whenever it appears. But it is especially heinous, black, and cruel when it masquerades in the robes of law and justice and patriotism.
— W.E.B. du Bois, “John Brown”
Recently someone said they would love to hear my thoughts about a recent episode of Sam Harris’ podcast where he interviewed the writer Yuval Noah Harari about the ongoing Israeli violence in Palestine. Listening to Sam Harris talk is frankly one of the most unpleasant experiences I can subject myself to. But, since I have been immersing myself in only leftwing discussions about the conflict, I figured that listening to and responding to what apologists for empire have to say would be a useful exercise. I could only listen to an hour long preview of the podcast episode because Sam Harris will never get a single cent of my money for the full version. But this was sufficient time for Harris and Harari to drop some statements that deserve pushback.
To his credit, Harari, an Israeli citizen, did acknowledge that Prime Minister Netanyahu is a divisive far-right figure who preferred to deal with the radical Hamas leadership over the moderate Palestinian Authority, that Israel has its own insane messianic figures who foil efforts at peace, and that history of past harms should not be used as justification for future harms. Besides those sentiments, however, there is much to argue with here. I will go through Harris’ and Harari’s specific statements in list form.
Harari:
At one and the same time, you have the anomalous situation of Israel which is one of the only countries in the world, which even though it’s internationally recognized, most of its neighbors never recognized its right to exist. Most countries take their existence for granted, Israel doesn’t. … The very right of this country to exist has been denied from the moment it was created by most of its neighbors.
Israel is an anomaly. The issue here is not if a state can exist. It is whether or not that state — violently imposed upon the land in 1948 — can be an avowed ethno/apartheid state built on both the historic and the continuing dispossession of Palestinians. As Marc Lamont Hill and Mitchell A. Plitnick put it in Except for Palestine:
When someone asks if one supports “Israel’s right to exist,” they are tacitly asking if one agrees that Israel’s elevation of Jewish rights above those of Palestinians in the land they all inhabit is acceptable. The question, in fact, is whether it was legitimate — after many centuries of Palestinians of numerous faiths, including Jews, living in the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River — for Jews from Europe (and later Jews from around the world) to emigrate there with the express purpose of creating a state in which Jewish people would be privileged above others, especially the indigenous inhabitants.
Putting aside the notion that no state has a “right” to exist because states aren’t people, any state that operated like Israel does would pose an immense problem for its neighbors. If Mexico decided that it would be a Catholic state made up only of citizens who can trace their lineage to colonizing Spaniards and then embarked on a campaign of ethnic cleansing against all non-Catholic indigenous Mexicans, violently driving those populations into neighboring states and besieged ghettos, enacted laws which forbade or suppressed citizenship status for non-European descendants, and regularly assassinated rebellious indigenous leaders, thus destabilizing the entire region, then Mexico’s neighbors would probably have a problem with Mexico existing as such a state. The question is not whether Israel can exist. The question is in what form can Israel, and indeed any state, exist. Any apartheid state such as Israel is an illegitimate state, regardless of if it is Jewish, Christian, Islamic, or Pastafarian.
Harari:
Most of the settlements [in the West Bank], they are very close to the pre-1967 border. So in a potential future peace treaty based on a two-state solution, they should not be an impossible barrier to peace.
Define “close to the pre-1967 border,” please. How would you like it if, living near an international border, settlers violently kicked you out of your house, threw your possessions onto the street, murdered your spouse, moved their whole family in under the protection of hostile soldiers, and destroyed your olive groves, leaving you nowhere to go? Would you just accept that your home is their home now and count it as a loss in a future peace agreement? Ridiculous. This is not old history. I’m not talking about the 1948 Nakba here, nasty as that was. There are videos of Israeli settlers doing precisely what I just described to Palestinians in the West Bank from just this last year. This dispossession has been ongoing for generations. And people act surprised when the Palestinians revolt and call it unprovoked. A peace treaty based on a two-state solution would have to address the immense amount of dispossession that the Palestinians have suffered — meaning that freedom of movement between the West Bank and Gaza, Palestine’s control over its own borders, and the right-of-return must be guaranteed.
Harris:
Is there another case of a country [besides Israel] that was attacked on all sides and won a defensive war, in fact two defensive wars, and the security buffer claimed in those successful acts of self-defense was then perpetually denied them? Where they were treated as aggressors even when they were fighting defensively and victoriously? Is there another historical example of that? If [Israelis] simply give back the West Bank and Gaza and return to pre-67 borders, it’s almost like they’re not allowed to win a war of self-defense.
What? Defensive? Israel does not steal land in self-defense. It is a terrorist state. I asked Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University to respond to Harris’ characterization of the 1948 and 1967 wars as “defensive.” Khalidi said, “In 1948, by the time 4 Arab armies entered Palestine on May 15,” approximately “300,000 Palestinians had already been driven from their homes in the ethnic cleansing of Jaffa, Haifa, West Jerusalem, Beisan, Tiberias and scores of towns and villages.” Simply put, fighting to maintain a campaign of ethnic cleansing is not self-defense.
In regards to the later Six-Day War, Khalidi said, “Israel attacked Egypt, Syria and Jordan in 1967, knowing it would have defeated the Arabs even if they attacked.” This was preemptive warfare, a war crime. The territory captured by Israel, and the West Bank and Gaza being under military occupation ever since, violates the U.N. Charter which forebays the “acquisition of territory by war.”
Israel is a regularly belligerent nation that bombed Egypt, bombed Jordan, bombed Tunisia, and is currently bombing Syria. It invaded, occupied, and subjected Lebanon to state terror and mass torture throughout the 1980s and ‘90s. It regularly assassinates Iranian civilians. It explicitly targets civilians in Lebanon as a way to punish Hezbollah. Israeli Major General Gadi Eizenkot admitted as such when he said, “Every village from which they fire from Israel, we will deploy disproportional force, and cause massive damage and destruction. As far as we are concerned, these are military bases.” Israel just carried out an illegal cross-border drone attack in Beirut. Apparently, all of these actions by Israel are legitimate means of self-defense, according to Western elites, whereas every rock thrown by a Palestinian child at an Israeli armored vehicle is an act of international terrorism. A vote for Hamas is a vote for terror, while a vote for the genocidal right-wing Israeli party currently in power is a vote for democracy. All ethno-states must devolve into murderous apartheid to protect their ethnic supremacy. Their claims of self-defense are illegitimate because the state itself is illegitimate.
Harari:
Anyone who is interested in peace should also be in favor of disarming Hamas.
So says the occupier and besieger. Justice is the precondition of peace. The Vietnamese National Liberation Front could not be expected to disarm in the face of violent American and French occupations of their country and neither can Hamas. Occupiers get out, then disarmament.
Harris:
There are Palestinian civilians of Israel. Presumably most of them, nearly all of them, are integrated into the society such that you can see a possibility where the Jews and the Palestinians live in peace in the same region.
That last part about possibility is indeed true. The first part is wildly incorrect. Palestinians in Israel are not integrated civilians. Palestinians are subject to unequal policing, surveillance, and brutality. Israel is a horrifically racist society that rivals the Jim Crow South in animosity for its anti-Arab prejudice. Recently, the Israeli Ministry of Education pulled funding from an annual cultural event in Israel because one of the hosts was an Arab-Israeli who, in their words, “cannot represent Jewish culture.” Such examples are litany.
And it is not merely the de facto racism against the Palestinians that endures, but de jure oppression. Apartheid in Israel is enshrined in its laws. The Palestinians of Israel do not have equal rights. The Adalah organization maintains a list of over 65 such discriminatory laws. The Nation-State Bill passed by the Israeli Knesset in 2018 expressly states that only Jews have the right to national self-determination within Israel. Palestinians in the occupied West Bank do not have freedom of movement between there and Gaza or inside Israel proper. Palestinians can be legally barred from living in Israeli villages. It is illegal for Palestinians to collect rainwater. “Palestinians cannot get permits to build necessary extensions on existing homes in areas under Israeli military control,” writes Hill and Plitnick in Except for Palestine, “forcing them to build without them in order to meet basic demographic needs. This results in a steady stream of demolitions of so-called ‘illegal’ structures.” They do not have the same marriage rights as Jewish Israelis. Any person who marries a Palestinian, regardless of their nationality, has their movements restricted within Israel and may even be prohibited from reentering the region. A Palestinian who marries a Jewish Israeli cannot be naturalized as Israeli. Some Palestinians who have managed to leave Israel are disallowed from ever returning. The aim of these citizenship laws are clear: maintaining Jewish supremacy at the expense of Palestinian rights. Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid admitted as such, saying, “We shouldn’t hide the essence of the Citizenship Law. It’s one of the tools aimed at ensuring a Jewish majority in the State of Israel.”
This is, plainly, not a democratic state. To argue that Israel has a right to be a Jewish state is just as insane as arguing that the U.S. has a right to be a Christian state. The whole notion of demographic purity is inherently undemocratic and a tenant of fascism. Laws which enshrine such demographic supremacy are part of the textbook definition of apartheid. The violence that follows is predictable.
Harris:
What we’re all acceding to here is a picture of the Muslim community worldwide that is so combustible, and it’s so provoke-able on the basis of pure religious symbolism, they don’t care when Assad kills hundreds of thousands of their fellow Muslims, there’s not a single protest over that. They don’t care when the Saudis kill over a hundred thousand people in Yemen. They really do care when the Jews start killing Muslims as we see in Gaza, but they care even more about religious symbols. They care about the cartoons of the prophet Mohammed. That’s what causes embassies to burn in a dozen cities. … That is a completely insane and untenable status quo. My view is that the Muslim world has to figure out how to perform an exorcism on itself such that that is not the level of religious fanaticism generally speaking in the Muslim community in a hundred countries. We’re dealing with the Christians of the 14th Century. There’s no other community that is combustible like this.
So all the plane hijackings by militants, the suicide bombings of Western embassies, and the shootings at night clubs and military bases were because of Muhammad cartoons, not because of Western military occupation of the Middle East and our support for Arab autocrats, got it.
Combustible? America’s secular symbols of finance and military were destroyed on 9/11 and then we killed a million people. As I have written before, the Western powers were happy to aid and abet murderous right-wing Islamist groups throughout the world so long as those zealots were fighting against the dreaded communists, many of whom were Muslim. Thus, leftwing secular movements for justice in the Muslim world were effectively quashed by a partnership between the West and fundamentalist Islam. The U.S. never stopped to think that maybe their own support of Islamists would someday come back to bite them in the ass. This fateful dynamic does not seem to cross Harris’ mind in his critiques of Islam.
The West does not decry terrorism and insurgency on principle. Western states have constantly given material support to militant groups that it can use to destabilize its enemy states. The West only decries terrorism and insurgency that it cannot direct for its own purposes. The anti-Islamic pronouncements constantly made by Harris fall strictly in line with this naked Western hypocrisy. Hypocrisy isn’t even the right word for it. It is evil.
As Palestinian-American writer Rami Khouri points out, the West consistently demonstrates its capriciousness in regards to Middle Eastern affairs:
The difficulty, additionally, with the Israelis and the American government, especially the State Department…is they don’t really have any ethical or legal point of moral reference. They don’t really have anything to measure by. Whatever they say goes. That’s their feeling. This is what colonialism is all about. International law, UN resolutions, treaties, conventions, genocide conventions, whatever, these things don’t mean anything to the American government or to the Israeli government in this situation in the Middle East. They might mean something to them with the Rohingya or with somebody else but here in our situation, these rules of law are not applicable.
To further demonstrate this point: why do Western neoliberals and neoconservatives always feel bad for the Kurds but not the Palestinians? Because Kurdish resistance forces have been cynically used as pawns against states that the West doesn’t like at one time or another such as Iraq, Iran, and Syria. But the militant Turkish Kurds are a problem because Turkey is a NATO ally. Why did the West support the Islamist, acid-throwing mujahedeen in Afghanistan but not the comparatively moderate PLO in Palestine? Because the mujahedeen could be used to destabilize the dreaded Soviet Union. There are no useful Palestinians to the West. The PLO and Hamas were seen as mortal enemies of Israel, a useful Western proxy state in the region. “Were there not an Israel, the United States would have to invent an Israel,” Joe Biden said as Senator and as President. Since Israel, a nuclear-armed state, is an essential cudgel for the whims of the Western world, it must be given unequivocal support in all that it does, including wanton murder and torture.
It may be argued by Harris in response that, though the West has certainly played a cynical role in stoking fundamentalist Islam, this doesn’t change the fact that Islam remains a uniquely dangerous threat to civilization in the world today, if not the supreme one. To which I say, get off the crack pipe. Fundamentalism in any society is always a minority phenomenon. What matters is how powerful those fundamentalists are and to what extent we ourselves contribute to stoking that fundamentalism.
If we are going to speak of the dangers of religion and religious communities, right-wing evangelical Christians and the more odious Christian Fascists have far more access to global military power than any Muslim. Christians that have fantasies of paradise, as Harris so often levies against Muslims, have a vested interest in the murderous Zionist project. They believe that the total imposition of the Zionist state over the land will bring about the second apocalyptic coming of Jesus Christ. They really believe this. They hate Muslims. And most importantly, they have the power to kill Muslims in mass with their vaunted Western militaries. The American military and its police forces, to say nothing of its political apparatus, is infected stem to stern with white supremacists and Christian fascists. And Israel, the chief beneficiary of American foreign aid, has murdered approximately 25,000 Palestinians in just three months since October 7th. This rate of killing is higher and faster than any other conflict of this century. Netanyahu is referencing blood thirsty Bible verses to spur on the war crime factory that is the Israeli Defense Forces. Please tell me which “combustible” Islamist group like Hamas has done anything remotely comparable to the scale of what we and our allies have done to millions of people in just these past twenty years of the War on Terror, let alone the last century. To quote Harris’ own dead friend Christopher Hitchens: Hezbollah and “Palestinian suicide-murderers” would “have to work day and night for years to equal the total of civilians killed in [the Israeli bombing and invasion of] Lebanon alone, or by [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon alone.”
Don’t talk to me about combustible communities. The Western liberal world, constantly sacralized by Harris, is the most combustible and dangerous society for all life on the planet today. This is not conjecture. It is borne out by the simple body count. While the nature of Sharia Law, a consistent bogeyman for those such as Harris, is indeed anathema to much of liberalism’s ideal of a free and open society, it comes nowhere near the immediate threat of U.S. liberals and conservatives joining arm-in-arm to support the gutting of our civil liberties, the militarization of our police, the repressive surveillance exerted by the marriage of our intelligence agencies and multinational corporations, and the ongoing genocide of Palestinians all in service of “anti-terror.”
For Harris to say that Muslims don’t care about the murder of hundreds of thousands of their kith by authoritarian Arab governments is breathtaking in its stupidity and callousness. What was the Arab Spring if not widespread unrest against murderous authoritarians? The very reason that the Houthis exist in Yemen is because they are fighting against the mass murdering U.S.-backed Saudis. Some of the express reasons that we were attacked on 9/11 are because we support the monarchical Saudi regime and because we murdered half a million Iraqi children. Our support for strongmen in places like Egypt and Syria and Saudi Arabia are precisely why we are so hated. This has nothing to do with religious symbolism. It has everything to do with the desire for self-determination. For someone who fancies himself as a capital “R” Rationalist on a higher plane than the rest of us, Harris makes intensely stupid, chauvinistic, and bitch-slap worthy comments like these on a regular basis. He is a Good German. I cannot stand his smarmy-ass tone. His voice is like nails on a chalk board. I swear I am going to throttle the next person who tells me I should listen to Harris’ daily meditation recordings. How in the world anyone can effectively meditate under the guidance of guru Harris whispering in their ears is beyond me.
For the record, there was a time a few years ago where I was smitten with the work of Christopher Hitchens, a New Atheist fellow of Harris. So I am not starting from some place of reflexive animosity towards New Atheists without being both familiar and admiring of their work. I, in fact, engaged whole-heartedly with the New Atheist project and was generally on board with their critiques. And then I gained some proper nuance. Writers such as Glenn Greenwald, Noam Chomsky, Vijay Prashad, and Chris Hedges aptly demonstrated that you can have a correct critique of religion like the New Atheists without devolving into apologetics for the unforgivable crimes of empire under the guise of defending “civilization,” such as Harris and Hitchens constantly do and did. The so-called “Four Horsemen” conversation between Hitchens, Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins is where I was first introduced to Harris. And even in my state of unalloyed admiration for Hitchens’ work at that time, Harris annoyed the shit out of me in that conversation. Every time he spoke I wanted him to shut his mouth to let the others talk. He was and remains the least of those four thinkers.
Harris:
There are nearly miraculous examples of profound injustice rectified through violence that lead to a peace and reconciliation and even friendship that would have seemed impossible. I mean just look at the aftermath of WWII. We the Allies dealt with the Nazis and the Japanese in the harshest conceivable way, I mean killing civilians by the hundreds of thousands, the necessity of that can certainly be debated, but we dropped two atomic bombs on Japan and rebuilt those societies and found in them enduring friendships. And even the Israelis and the Jews of Israel and the Jews elsewhere view Germany now as a totally benign or better than benign influence in the world. That kind of future seems impossible with respect to Israel and the Palestinians and really it shouldn’t be, but the one wrinkle that…I focus on a lot is the role that Islamic extremism, specifically jihadism and the doctrines of martyrdom play here. … It is a kind of final turn to that diabolical machinery which strikes me as worse than basically anything else that the human mind has produced. Once you get a true otherworldliness, a true expectation of paradise, it seems to me that all rational negotiation about the state of the world and any terrestrial demand that any group might make upon it, all of that goes out the window and you just have a death cult.
This is where the unhinged mind of Harris truly shines. He rides right on the line of wondering why firebombing civilians in mass and giving Gaza the old Hiroshima treatment wouldn’t miraculously turn Palestinians into our friends, while failing to acknowledge that the relatively brief 20th Century conflicts between warring nation-states are fundamentally different from an apartheid state engaging in generations-long counterinsurgency efforts against a woefully disempowered populace. He then goes even further by suggesting that the Palestinians are controlled by an innately irrational death cult so, really, what other option do we have here besides sending them to the oblivion they are obviously braying for? Harris’ thinking here matches perfectly with Netanyahu’s genocidal rhetoric when the Prime Minister said: “This is a battle not only of Israel against these barbarians, it’s a battle of civilization against barbarism.” When your enemy is evil incarnate, there is no limit to what you will do to them.
Apartheid states and their apologists have a mortal fear of those they oppress and so they find any excuse to treat them as irrational monsters. If we give them their rights, the oppressors say, they will slaughter us, and why wouldn’t they? This is the relationship between a master and a slave. The slaver never stops to think that the oppression they mete out is in fact the very source of the danger they fear. “The only penetrable point of a tyrant is the Fear of Death,” said Frederick Douglass. “The outcry that they make as to the danger of having their throats cut, is because they know they deserve to have them cut.” In this way, the slaver enslaves themselves, and the beautiful hate of the oppressed will never go away so long as they are oppressed. But, having finally achieved some modicum of rights through either peaceful or forceful means, historically speaking, the slaves rarely engage in an orgy of bloodletting. It didn’t happen in the American South, it didn’t happen in South Africa, it didn’t happen in Ireland, and it won’t happen in Palestine.
The notion that Muslims and Jews cannot coexist with each other in a single state because of some innate, irrational religious hatred is refuted by the fact that, prior to the violent imposition of the state of Israel onto Palestine, Muslims and Jews lived together as neighbors on the land largely peacefully for generations.
Harris does not recognize that the violence we give to the Muslim world is the very thing which exacerbates extremism, fundamentalism, and bloodlust. He always points the finger at somebody else. Harris emphasizes that Islam “only works as a pretext for political violence” because people actually believe in it. It would seem that Harris thinks if you get rid of fundamentalist Islam, then all this pesky anti-Western violence will cease, as if a bombed and beleaguered people require religion to act on their understandable bloodlust. Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by the Bosnian Black Hand anarchists because they really believed that he needed to die. No religion was required. Timothy McVeigh blew up hundreds of innocent people in Oklahoma City as a reaction against our creeping police state because he really believed that our militarized law enforcement was at war with the American people. Five million Vietnamese people and hundreds of thousands of Cambodians and Laotians were murdered by the U.S. because we really believed that Southeast Asian countries choosing Communism would mean global annihilation.
Whatever ideological or religious finery a person chooses to dress up their violence with, it does not change the fact that a people menaced by injustice will be more likely to menace others in return. A terrorist’s reactionary violence can be justified with religious belief, nationalism, racial identity, class background, or any other various ideology. The shortest solution to such violence is not to focus on eradicating any one of these justifications for it — a new justification will be found —but to remove the forces and structures of the original injustice. In other words, fine, Harris, let’s magically get rid of religion. You’re still going to have lots of people in the Middle East who want to blow us up in the same way that their wife and kids are blown up by U.S. bombs. When a person is faced with such world-ending darkness, revenge is often all they have left. They don’t need religion to justify their actions that follow. The radical and highly influential Jordanian cleric, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, a man who has spurred many an Islamist to pick up a gun, once explained the attraction of jihadism: “This movement will not end because people are still looking for solutions to the problems of the dictatorial regimes and the conflict with Israel. Leftist, socialist, and Muslim Brotherhood groups have all tried and failed to address these problems. But the youth are still looking for new models to create change.”
Harris lives in a magical world where, with the abolition of religion, Western states will be free to violently impose their will upon the peoples of the earth without fear of reactionary violence.
Harris:
So one anomaly I see here is that in dealing with a group like Hamas, which is arguably not as extreme as the Islamic State, but extreme enough to be a death cult, the logic that most people try to lay over this current conflict simply doesn’t work.
Hamas is not al-Qaeda. Hezbollah is not ISIS. The Houthis are not the next Caliphate. As Antony Loewenstein puts it in The Palestine Laboratory: “There is an interchangeability between terrorism experts who appear in the media to talk about the never-ending risk from insurgents big and small, deliberately conflating Hamas with Hizbollah, al-Qaeda with ISIS, and the Taliban with the Islamic Republic of Iran as if they were all the same irrational, Jew-Hating force to be defeated by military means alone.” These militant groups are chiefly concerned with their regional problems. They want national self-determination. They want Western meddling to cease. They want equal rights for Palestinians. They want Israeli occupation and aggression to end. They want America to stop supporting authoritarian governments in the region. These are all understandable and rational concerns that have little to do with the religion of Islam. Any oppressed person under similar circumstances, even a secular one, would feel similarly as these groups do and may even take up the gun in self-defense.
It is the poison of violence that distorts society and rends human bonds, exacerbating the cycle of brutalization. The PLO was formed only in response to the violent imposition of the state of Israel. Hamas was only formed in response to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, where Israel orchestrated the massacres of thousands of civilians and the kidnaping and torture of thousands more. Hamas only began targeting civilians after an Israeli settler murdered 29 worshippers in a mosque in Hebron. This violent dynamic operates whether it has a religious or a secular tenor. The more you destroy a society, the more it is ripe for fundamentalism.
So long as Western crimes are inflicted upon the peoples of the Middle East, religion or no, the West will remain a target. Our complicity in these immense crimes mortifies our souls in the same way we mortify the flesh of those we torture in nightmare dungeons such as Abu Ghraib and, to this day, Guantanamo Bay. Harris makes no mention of any contrition for his role in cheerleading the American Crusade against Islam with the devastating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite the fact that he was confronted early and often by those who warned us against the true nature of America’s War On Terror, a terror it itself birthed into existence and raised up to the global force it is today.
Harris, lacking a deep understanding of the complex political and cultural history of the Middle East, made the galling claim that the West — bruised as it was from the 9/11 attacks, a comparatively tame event to the horrors unleashed by the U.S. throughout the world since WWII — was ordained by virtue of its “values” to control the fates of millions of Muslims, millions who had tried again and again, whether through the leftwing nationalism of Mohammed Mossadegh or through the uprisings of the Arab Spring, to secure their own liberation but had been routed at every turn by Western imperialists and their puppet regimes. That some of these disillusioned people, apprehending the astounding moral hypocrisy, cultural vapidity, obscene decadence, and spiritual wasteland of the Western “democratic” powers, instead found meaning and purpose in the dangerous utopian illusions of radical Islam, abetted for decades by the West, is as understandable as it is frightening.
It is not sufficient to ignore those such as Harris (as much as I would like to). Their misguided ideas have much purchase in the West. They must be brought to feel ignominious for their imperialist apologetics and must remain silent on matters of grave importance which they know nothing about.
And, finally, Harari:
What the 20th century showed us is that not only paradise in some other world can lead to murderous extremism, paradise on earth as the one imagined by Marxists and Stalinists has equal dangerous potential. I never understood how Marxists think about what happens to you after you die and what’s the point of dying for the revolution if you’re dead and you can’t witness the revolution. So you would think they would be less extreme than the jihadists. But if you look at the history of the 20th century in places like the Soviet Union, they give them a hard fight to the jihadists in terms of what they are willing to do.
Marxists are worse than jihadists. Mmmmmmmmmmmkay. I’m gonna need a whole other article for that one.