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Notes -
Not posting in the Gaza/Israel thread since this is more generic, IMO.
In the most recent Sam Harris podcast, he elevates the problem with Hamas to the more general problem of jihadi terrorism. The episode is here and there's also a transcript here.
In this, he paints a picture of Hamas being a jihadi terrorist organization that's beyond reasoning with in terms of any reasoning we'd consider compatible with liberal western civilized order. He reads this quote from a member of a different jihadi group that had just finished slaughtering young children:
He makes the point that atheists have a lot of trouble understanding how utterly fanatical and unreasonable jihadis can be. People of Christian or Jewish faith know, because they know how powerful their own faith is in their lives. But atheists are eager to attribute this kind of proclivity towards sadism and murder as a reflection of terrible conditions that they must be living under. That people living in a utopia would never succumb to such depravity. Sam argues that Muslims of faith are just as destructive outside of Israel and disputed Israeli territories.
For more concrete stats, I found this from Google generative results
The culmination of this episode is Sam practically condemning belief in Islam entirely. Almost bordering on saying that every Palestinian is a mope in the Muslim Matrix who could become inhabited by a jihadi Agent Smith at any time. He argues that unlike Jesus, or Buddha, the central most beloved figure in Islam is Muhammed, and he was not anything like a saint:
What I hear from this is that there are no "good" Muslims, or if they are good it's an aberration, or that they're Muslim in name only.
How does one operationalize such a belief? Is Sam arguing that accepting Muslim refugees is a mistake, full stop, and that the only way to deal with jihadis is the grant them their wish: death, because there's nothing else in the world we could offer them? Is that even enough to cure the problem?
There are two billion Muslims in the world. If bringing them capitalism and the pleasures of modernity (everyone gets Starlink, Steam deck, dirt cheap halal KFC and Chil Fil-A, etc as a poster recently suggested for pacifying the Palestinians) does not innoculate against jihadi mind viruses, what would?
It took Europe about 1000 years for their culture to develop antibodies to dogmatic below-the-sanity-waterline Christian crusader ideology, and Christianity's deck was not nearly as stacked against it (its central figure was still practically a hippie). Will we have to wait this long for Islam to do the same? Sam sounds like he's advocating a form of genocide by another name.
Sam Harris really is a demonstration of everything wrong with New Atheism, and he's finally mask off as a partisan for his preferred Yahweh cults. He wants to read the rhetoric of the Jihadi group, how about he reads the rhetoric of the intellectual Zionist figureheads and the leaders of "liberal western civilized order."
I remember when it was a scandal that George Bush reportedly told a Palestinian delegation that God told him to go to Iraq. I remember "New Atheists" being rightfully apoplectic. Reading that article about the Bush scandal again, there is one detail I never knew, which is that Bush's statement that God told him to invade Iraq was proceeded by another statement:
Maybe Sam Harris wants to read the apocalyptic and messianic prophesy that formulates the foundational core of Zionism. This conflict is eschatological, the Zionist claims are fundamentally and intrinsically based on bible stories of Yahweh giving them the land. Where is Sam Harris when Bibi is invoking the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy to moralize Israel's war against Hamas? Where are the New Atheists now that our brand new House Speaker is saying "God will bless the nation that blesses Israel." Or Mike Pompeo saying:
Where are the New Atheists now? Converting to "Judeo-Christianity"?
This conflict isn't about oil or about Islam, it's about the Bible. That's why we are here in this endless conflict over a small piece of desert land. We need a New New Atheist movement that takes all of Yahwehism to task because all strains of it are anti-civilizational. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, none of them are innocent in these inter-Abrahamic wars and it's time to move past worship of Yahweh if we actually care about Western civilization.
I mean without the reference to a verse I have no idea what Bibi is supposed to be claiming. The rest of the statement sounds like pretty much any politician during a war “we will win by working together”. I mean if you know what he’s quoting here, I’d be interested, but unless it’s actually talking about genocide I think it’s a bit inflammatory to use an article that talks about the genocide of the Palestinians without a direct quote of whatever the prophecy is supposed to be.
Netanyahu also invokes "Amalek":
The passage in question is 1 Samuel 15, where God commands Saul to "kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey", but Saul spares their king and some of the animals, and is punished by God for not killing them too.
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