Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - One Year Since October 7th - with Sam Harris

Episode Date: September 16, 2024

WATCH THE FULL CONVERSATION ON YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNugi2XnhmI UPCOMING LIVE EVENTS: September 24 — Join us for the first major live recording of Call Me Back, held at the Streicker Center, featuring Amir Tibon. To register, please go to: https://streicker.nyc/events/tibon-senor  SPECIAL SERIES:As we approach the grim one-year anniversary of 10/07, we are featuring a dedicated series in which we take a longer horizon perspective, asking one guest each week to look back at this past year and the year ahead. If you are listening to this episode on a podcast app, please note that this series was filmed in a studio and is also available in video form on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNugi2XnhmIFor the second installment of this special series, we sat down with Sam Harris – philosopher, neuroscientist, bestselling author and podcaster.  Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 02:18 Sam’s experience of October 7th 05:44 Hamas’s use of civilians as human shields 09:07 Should Israel risk Israeli lives? 12:15 Response to sympathy towards Palestinians 19:43: Hamas knew exactly who they were targeting 22:00 Jihadist mentality 32:57 The hostage dilemma 38:29: American Anti-Israel protests 45:13 Antisemitism and anti zionism 01:01:28 Antisemitism on the left 01:04:47 Connection to Jewish identity post-October 7th Episodes of Sam Harris’s “Making Sense” podcast, as referenced in this conversation:“Why Don’t I Criticize Israel?”: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/2-why-dont-i-criticize-israel/id733163012?i=1000316926199"The Bright Line Between Good and Evil": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFBm8nQ2aBo To subscribe to Sam Harris’s podcast, Making Sense: https://www.samharris.org/podcastsTo register for Sam Harris’s substack: https://samharris.substack.com/

I mean, the clearest way to see the asymmetry is just to imagine reversing it. I mean, just imagine the Jews of Israel attempting to use their own women and children as human shields against Hamas on October 7th. Picture the attitudes of the Hamas fighters if they were confronted with that stratagem. Hamas would think it's like they've hit the jackpot. It would just be the most grotesque Monty Python skit you've ever seen. I mean, it's just like all the Jews would die. And the jihadists would look at one another like, can you believe? What were they thinking? The whole point was to kill as many of them as possible, right? But the strategy only works to

the degree that it does because of the heightened civilized sensitivities of a Western audience. What's amazingly cynical about this is the jihadists know that we care more about the lives of their children than they do. And they're consciously weaponizing that against us. And by us, I mean all of civilized humanity that is not part of a death cult that views it as a win to have people die in whatever numbers because they're going straight to paradise. And I'm pleased to welcome to this podcast for the first time, philosopher, neuroscientist, host of one of my favorite podcasts, Making Sense, and a best-selling author, Sam Harris. Sam, thanks for being here. Thank you.

It's a pleasure. Sam, as I mentioned to you when we were talking offline, We are trying as we approach the one-year anniversary of October 7th, which, as I repeatedly say, I cannot believe we are one year from that horrific day. I just imagine we wouldn't be a year later, Israel still in a war, Israelis and Americans still in the dungeons of Gaza, but here we are. And we're asking some of the thought leaders who have most influenced

our thinking from a big picture perspective in terms of how we got here, what it means, where we may be going, to just reflect with us. And so that's what I want to do with you today. So I just want to start by asking you where you were on October 7th, how you learned about the news of October 7th, and what you were thinking this meant. Yeah, you know, my memories of that are not as clear as I would think, given how much it's impacted me, because I feel like I learned of it in increments that were a little confusing, and it just sort of unfolded, you know, over the course of many hours. It wasn't kind of this punctate emergency that I immediately understood the shape of. I was home with my family and I really was not surprised by the character of the violence. I mean, there was

nothing about it because I've focused on jihadism for so long, ever since September 11th, 2001. There's almost nothing about it that surprised me. What surprised me and from which I have yet to really remove my jaw from the floor is the response, the world's response to it on October 8th and beyond. so i've spent a lot of time in the middle east i've been following events in israel for decades so i i think nothing would shock me and yet i still felt shocked i mean the use of sexual violence as a tool in this massacre yeah i i have very low expectations of israel enemies, but this exceeded those in their depths. Yeah.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the Islamic State and paying attention to what they were bragging about doing and hoping to accomplish and and seeing how attractive all of that psychopathic material was to a larger subset of the you know the islamist and jihadist or aspiring jihadist world right so just to see that you could recruit people to literally drop out of medical school in the UK to fly to Syria, the pleasure of trying to die in the caliphate, right? And taking Yazidi sex slaves. I mean, so like there was nothing sufficiently depraved in that of that sort so as to really- So you just saw this as another, as a version of that or an extension of that.

Yeah, and that's something that is, I think probably we'll get into it, but this is an angle at which I come at this problem that is a little different from, from many of the people you've spoken with on the podcast. Cause I really do see what Israel has been going through, not just since October 7th, but, you know, really since the founding as a species of a collision between the modern world and jihadist, the strain of jihadist triumphalism within Islam. And it's a much, you know, it's a much, in my view, larger story of the clash between the West and, you know, Islamic triumphalism and fanaticism. Okay, so I want to get to that. Before we do, you write and speak a lot about navigating moral dilemmas, moral conundrums. This war, this defensive war that Israel's fighting is chock full of moral dilemmas. So I want to break a few of them down and have you help us navigate them based on how you've been. I know you've been thinking about these. So let's start with the battlefield that Hamas designed. Unlike most battlefields, most warfare,

modern warfare situations, unlike most urban warfare situations, you have a situation where Israel is fighting an enemy that has this labyrinth of tunnels, hundreds of miles of tunnels, an underground tunnel system, that system is basically used to protect Israel's enemy in this war, protect their munitions and their supplies. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Israel's in this situation where it is fighting an enemy who seems to have less care for its own civilian population, meaning the enemy seems to have less concern for the Palestinian civilian population

than Israel does. So this presents like a real moral dilemma for Israel. How do you think about it? Well, I think it's important to actually do the moral arithmetic on that situation because it's such a perverse and cynical and nihilistic asymmetry. And really, it is diagnostic of the general moral asymmetry between the two sides that runs through every aspect of this conflict. It's not to say that the Israelis don't have things to apologize for, but it's a shocking disparity in the value that's placed on human life, not just the enemy's human life, but as you point out, their own non-combatant human life and their own women and children. I mean, the clearest way to see the asymmetry is just to imagine reversing it. I mean, just imagine the Jews of Israel attempting to use their own women and children as human shields against Hamas on October 7th.

Picture the attitudes of the Hamas fighters if they were confronted with that stratagem. I mean, it's impossible from either side. There's no way Hamas fighters would expect it to happen. There's no way the Israelis could do it if they did it. Hamas would think it's like they've hit the jackpot. It would just be the most grotesque Monty Python skit you've ever seen. I mean, it's just, it is a masterpiece of moral surrealism. I mean, it's just like all the Jews would die and the jihadists would look at one another like, can you believe? What were they thinking? Like they thought that was

going to stop, but the whole point was to kill as many of them as possible, right? But the strategy only works to the degree that it does because there's this moral asymmetry in the value placed on innocent human life. And that asymmetry should matter to everyone, to all of Israel's critics, knowing that it works only because of the heightened civilized and civilizing sensitivities of a Western audience. What's amazingly cynical about this is the jihadists know that we care more about the lives of their children than they do. And they're consciously weaponizing that against us. And by us, I mean all of civilized humanity that is not part of a death cult that views it as a win to have people die in whatever numbers because they're going straight to paradise.

I've spoken to some in the Israeli government and in the IDF who say, we subject our soldiers, our military to additional risk because of the lengths we go to, to try, can't always be successful, but to try to minimize casualties of civilians in Gaza. Morally, could you argue to Israel, you shouldn't risk a single Israeli's life to fight this war more morally than Hamas is? Yeah. Well, the generic answer is I think we need to be better than our enemies, right? I mean, we need to be more civilized than the jihadists in this case. And yet that imperative has some failure point, right? I don't know when the Israelis would reach it, you know, under what conditions,

but if you compare how we fought World War II, right? I mean, like in hindsight, much of what we did might in fact not be justifiable, right? It might've been effective. Flattening Dresden. Yeah. Firebombing Tokyo. Yes, or Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When you look at what we were up against, especially I think if you look in the Pacific theater, right, if you look at just what the character of the Japanese commitment to total war at that point, it's very easy to argue that we did not have the luxury

of caring about civilian casualties. The crucial thing to realize about the difference between ourselves and our enemies at that point was that it was all revealed in how we behaved once we had secured a total victory, right? I mean, we rebuilt those societies. Like, we didn't go in and start raping people and killing everybody

and celebrating the destruction of our enemies. We actually collaborated with them to rebuild their society so that we could eventually find friends in them, right? And which we have. I mean, it looks actually like a double miracle, what we've achieved, you know, in the aftermath of World War II.

I mean, how, given that they were so complete in the attempted destruction of one another, the fact that we are friends and collaborators should give some hope to even this impossible situation. I mean, I think there are reasons to worry that it's not a perfect analogy to what Israel faces with the Palestinians. But given the way the deck of just moral analysis is stacked against them, Israel should want to be more scrupulous than any, you know, any fighting force has ever been under, under analogous circumstances. And I think, you know, barring things I'm not aware of,

I think they have been. I mean, I think, I think that's the testimony I've seen from our own military analysts is that the IDF has been more careful than America was in analogous situations. And the truth is there has been no analogous situation, as you just pointed out. I mean, no American force has had to confront a terrorist regime using its own population at this density as human shields in a tunnel system that is longer than the London metro. I mean, it's just, it makes, there's no analogy to draw to any other combat here. Those who are sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians, some will say, yes, what happened on October 7th. And you even heard these exact words I'm about to say. Yes, what Hamas did on October 7th was awful. The rape, the slaughtering, the slaughtering of

children, the beheading, whatever. I mean, I don't need to rehash all the gory details. You hear the yes, and then you hear but. But these are desperate people living in a desperate situation, and desperate people in a desperate situation lash out. And this is obviously an awful and brutal and inappropriate way to express their outrage, but people are outraged, and outraged people do outrageous things. And they're ultimately fighting for their own future, their own independence, their own freedom, their own dignity. What do you expect?

Your response to those people is what? Well, I mean, so one thing to concede is that the destruction in Gaza has been horrific and endless number of appropriate targets of compassion among the Palestinians for all of that. A Palestinian child is blameless for what they are suffering right now in Gaza. There are certain moral illusions that we have to be alert to at the bottom of this kind of criticism, which is one, and this is a point that Paul Berman made in a book, Terror and Liberalism,

about 20 years ago. It was soon after 9-11. Yeah, and it's a brilliant point. And he made it, I believe he made it with respect to specifically the suicidal terrorism that Israel was facing in the Second Intifada. Most people look at a situation like this and they assume that people everywhere are more or less the same. They more or less want the same things. They want good schools for their kids. They want jobs. They want safety. They want to live ordinary lives of human flourishing. And

people look at this and they think, well, okay, what would it take to turn my family into this kind of strange death cult phenomenon, to rape and dismember peaceful people at a music festival, and to celebrate it, and to chant, you know, and to call out to God in apparent rapture. And the assumption, if you run it through to the end, delivers this kind of pseudo insight, which is, okay, these people clearly have been pushed beyond the brink of madness so as to behave this way. And who's done that to them? Well, it's the Israelis, right? So the more you turn up the dial of destructiveness of the suicidal terrorism, the more the onus for these atrocities seems to fall on the victims. The Jews did that. The Israelis did that. Here we have what seems to be some psychological experiment run amok where these people have been put under

conditions that are so appalling, having to go through checkpoints and just not having their own state and the humiliation of it all, it's all so terrible that that's what explains the character of this violence. Now, what is true is that we have an ideology here that could justify someone with no political grievances. I'm thinking of one case in particular where the guy drops out of medical school in London, right? And what follows is the same kind of psychopathic behavior of jihadism and an urge toward martyrdom, right? I mean, when you look at the 19 hijackers, which is the first moment where I really started paying attention to this. 9-11. 9-11, yeah.

Some had families and some had PhDs. And they had access to the West. They had access to the United States and Europe. Yeah, yeah. So it is an illusion that the only thing that can explain this kind of shattering psychopathic violence is some commensurate level of real-world grievance that has been imposed on this population or these people. Again, I'm not saying that Israel has been perfect. I'm not saying the Palestinians don't have rational grievances. But if the Palestinians would just be peaceful, right,

if they would just put down their weapons, if they had some political movement focused around an MLK or a Gandhi-like character, right, if it became nonviolent, there would have been a two-state solution decades ago, right? If the Israelis put down their weapons, there would be a genocide. And the reason why we know that's not an exaggeration is that's been not only in the original charter of Hamas and their explicit aspiration for decades, and they reasserted it in the aftermath of October 7th, we would do this again endlessly, right? That has been the character

of just anti-Semitic conversation in the wider region for as long as any of us have been alive, right? So the Israelis are not being paranoid to think that they could, it's inconceivable for them to put down their weapons. Whereas the Palestinians, I mean, again, barring some rounding error of right-wing extremists in the, you know, in Israeli society, the Jews really do want peace with their neighbors. If we could reboot Palestinian culture overnight and confront the Jews with people who just wanted to build resorts on the Mediterranean and software companies and figure out how to get wealthy together and make it the Singapore of the region, they would find more than 90% of Israeli society would be ready to

collaborate with that. And this, so the only coda I would add to this, you know, diatribe that sounds one-sided is that Israel really has to figure out how to marginalize its own religious maniacs, right? And again, they're around in error compared to what they face on the other side. But they make it seem, every time some messianic, addled person says, let's just turn it into a parking lot, right? You just get one of those people seeming to express the same genocidal and scripturally backed certainties. Someone raving about the Amalekites, right? You get one of those people, that seems to completely reset the conversation to, okay, if you're going to talk about the role that religious fanaticism plays here, it's on both sides. Obviously, Israel should try to solve for what you're describing, but i don't think it solves the problem in fact on october 7th the weekend of october 7th most of the israelis who were slaughtered overwhelming majority were

secular far left far left peace nicks people the kids attending the nova music festival the people who live in those kibbutzim in the south many of those people were the ones who were volunteering to work with palestinians get them health care and all the rest. In Gaza, they were, in the 2014 Israel-Gaza war, they were the ones who were protesting the Israeli government to end the war. I mean, the exact people who were slaughtered are the opposite of that extreme right-wing religious character that you're describing. Yeah. Again, we just have to be sober and honest about the difference in the worldviews here. The hope from the secular left is that if only Hamas and the other Palestinians who came across the border on October 7th to rape and kill, if only they understood the character of the people they were victimizing, they wouldn't have wanted to do any of that.

There's a misapprehension of the other here at the bottom here. If only they knew how loving and filled with compassion the kids at the Nova Music Festival really were, they would recognize. If you just held that mirror, that moral mirror up to them, they would recognize, oh my God, what are we doing? This is the wrong targets of our hatred, right? No, right? That's just not the case. They understand exactly who they were targeting and it doesn't matter. That's not the level at which this animus is formed.

There's a belief system about spreading the one true faith to the ends of the earth, waging holy war, and dying in the process of killing infidels and Jews and apostates, and having your children die under those circumstances. That is the best thing that can possibly happen to you. It's the only certain way to get straight into paradise without any math to be done on your account on the day of judgment. I mean, you just go straight past the velvet rope into rivers of milk and honey. And the thing that secular people have to get over is their initial doubt, and it can take people, this can be an insuperable obstacle for people, that anyone really believes this stuff. I have met anthropologists who are absolutely sure

that nobody believes in paradise and that it's all just posturing. It's all just politics and economics. And it doesn't matter how many people, when you hear the person's reasons, when they state their reasons, when you have their martyrdom video, when you've bugged their mosque and you know what they were saying in private about paradise and about 72 virgins, when the people who are telling us that we love death more than you infidels, you Jews, you Israelis, you Americans love life, right? They're being honest. Now, yes, I'm sure you can find the one case of the person who was forced to say it or the one case of the person who was posturing. But the idea that most jihadists most of the time aren't being honest in their view of paradise and their expectation of paradise is just – it's disconfirmed by an endless number of examples.

And what's amazing is that they can do no wrong with respect to the rest of world opinion, or so much of world opinion, right? That's the thing that is diagnostic of this whole moral delusion. Again, it does sort of follow Paul Berman's brilliant insight that, okay, you make the violence against the Jews as extreme as you want. The more extreme you make it, I'm going to blame the Jews more and more for whatever they did to inspire that violence, right? Like that's the math going on in the background. And that calculation started running on October 8th in our most enlightened institutions, apparently. And it's just, it's based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what Israel has faced and what the West faces. And honestly, what the Muslim world faces with a subset of its population.

I mean, the end game here is not that America and Israel finally kill enough jihadists, though I honestly think near- term that has to happen. I just think, I think military victory without apology over groups like Hamas has to be the near term goal. And any negotiation with Hamas of the sort you just described or any other, you have to recognize is always them just buying time for the genocide that they are going to try to commit when they are strong enough to try to commit it.

And by the way, they don't even, they don't even pretend. I mean, Khaled, Khaled Mashal, who's, who's one of the two leaders of, or was one of the two leaders of, of Hamas internationally, he was interviewed soon after October 7th by one of the Arab satellite channel journalists. And she asked him what, I mean, what's the solution? Is there a way, could they give you something where you would say, okay, we're done. They have a state, we've, and he said, one state, a caliphate, not just from the river to the sea. So basically not just from east to west, but from Russia, Nicaragua, down to a lot, meaning from all the way from the north, all the way to south, meaning it's all ours. It's all ours.

Yeah. The endgame can't just be the successful promulgation of an endless war against jihadism. I don't think that's avoidable, but I think the real success will be something like 2 billion Muslims recognizing that they want no part of jihadism, right? And that they anathematize it and coordinate off and collaborate in its destruction, right? Like they have to view jihadism the way non-Muslims who are the victims of jihadism view jihadism. Because the truth is the most common victim of jihadist atrocities are Muslims themselves, right? I mean, if you just look at it as a global phenomenon, there's nobody suffering the consequences of jihadism more than the Muslim community worldwide. So the thing that is so toxic and so destabilizing is this reflexive and tribal solidarity we see throughout the Muslim world

simply because these people are Muslims in conflict with non-Muslims, with Israelis, with Jews, with Westerners who can have a lot to apologize for, for colonialism and imperialism, et cetera, et cetera. There's some story that aligns them by default with, again, people who are behaving like total psychopaths who don't, if you actually look closely at what they want, they don't want what most Muslims worldwide want. I mean, most Muslims worldwide do not want to live in anything like the caliphate as envisioned by the Islamic State or Hamas, right? Now, an uncomfortable number actually do, right? I mean, this is the larger sociological and political problem that we have to face. some considerable number of secular Muslims, liberal Muslims, moderate Muslims,

merely conservative Muslims who still want no part of Islamism or jihadism. I mean, you can divide this into an increasingly complicated Venn diagram, but we have to win a war of ideas with the Muslim world in 100 countries to draw a bright line around this species of religious fanaticism, which is, again, it only exists within Islam. It's only within Islam that you're facing this kind of death cult behavior. It's only in Islam where you take your life in your hands to criticize the faith as a member of the faith or as someone outside the faith. I mean, just look at the experience of Salman Rushdie.

He spent 30 years dodging theocrats and eventually got stabbed on stage in the center of the center of the center of secular, tolerant, American, peace-loving politics. And the meme that is preventing an honest conversation about the scope of this problem is this notion of Islamophobia. It gets trotted out immediately the moment anyone starts making noises of the sort I've just made on this podcast. And it has to be seen for what it is. It is a conscious effort to conflate any criticism of specific doctrines within Islam, doctrines that are leading to a kind of violence we see nowhere else, doctrines around martyrdom and jihad especially and apostasy, right? And it's trying to draw a specific analogy to anti-Semitism, right? So you have anti-Semitism on the one hand. Or racism.

Right. It's just not real, right? So explain that. Why isn't it real? Well, for a number of reasons. One is you just have to look at the differences between the two religions. So anti-Semitism, hatred of Jews, is a real phenomenon because the Jews, generally speaking, both conceive of themselves as an ethnicity and a race, right? And there's some conversion into the faith but not much.

And they're conceived by their enemies, by the people who hate them, as an ethnicity and a race. It was certainly racialized by the Nazis. And a lot of that thinking has been plowed back into the Muslim world. So there's been a lot of import from Nazism into the anti-Semitism that exists in the Muslim world. So it is true to say that most anti-Semites most of the time are people who hate what they imagine the Jews to be as a race, as a people. It's not that they're worried about specific doctrines within Judaism and what those doctrines are translating into into politics and to the behavior of extremist Jews. No one's getting on a plane worried about whether there's a suicidal extremist Jew who might blow the plane up.

It's just not – that's just not what's happening, right? The concern about Islam and the specific ideas within Islam that are producing this death cult behavior under the aegis of jihadism and producing the increasingly bullying behavior that's at odds with modern secular pluralistic values under the aegis of Islamism, that is a concern about the specific ideas and what they're getting people in a hundred countries to do. And here the difference between a missionary and a non-missionary faith is crucial because Islam is an aggressively missionary faith.

It's probably the fastest growing religion on earth. To say that someone is Muslim is to say absolutely nothing about their race or their ethnicity. It's like you and I could become Muslim in five seconds by converting right on this podcast, right? Which would be a first for the Call Me Back podcast. Surprising as that would be a first for the Call Me Back podcast. Yes, yes.

Surprising as that would be, we could do it. Islam is a set of ideas. It's not a race. It's not an ethnicity. It has nothing to do with a person's nationality. Everything I say about Islam that is derogatory applies just as much to a Western convert from Marin County, like John Walker Lind, who fought with the Taliban. And it has absolutely no application to people who just happen to come from countries like Pakistan or Somalia or who don't share these ideas, right? So to call it racism is a complete logical non-starter. And when I talk about Islam being of unique concern as a religion and a set

of ideas, right? What I get hit with from the apologists for Islam, whatever their actual other commitments happen to be, is he's just an Islamophobe and a bigot and a racist, right? I mean, this is why I got hit by, you know, with Ben Affleck. Ben Affleck, I watched it. I mean, your ability to trigger people knows no bounds. We've since buried the hatchet yeah that's that's what happened uh 10 years ago yeah so what the thing we have to realize is we don't want more jihadists and islamists in our society and what does that mean it means we don't want people who are coming into our society with no intention at all of sharing the values of our society, but in fact are coming in with the conscious project of using the values

of tolerance and pluralism to subvert those very values, right? So like to come in and say, you have to tolerate my religious intolerance to the breaking point, right? You have to – and that's what – to a remarkable degree, that has happened in Western Europe in a way that is clearly unsustainable, right? And it's clearly producing a backlash of right-wing bigotry and intolerance. This is a line from David Frum, and I think it's true. If liberals won't police borders, fascists will. And eventually, left-wing secular confusion about the character of these failures of assimilation, bringing in jihadists and Islamists into countries like the UK, those failures will produce a right-wing backlash,

which will create support for genuine fascists on the other side, right? One other, and then I'll move off from these sets of moral dilemmas. And I don't think this is one you've talked about on your podcast. It's much more of an intra-Israel dilemma, which is Israel, at least initially, set two major goals for the war, which was to defeat Hamas in Gaza and prevent them from ever being a threat to Israel again. And the other goal was to get the Israeli hostages back from Gaza. And there are some, and I say this as someone who I know a number of the families who have had or continue to have loved ones in Gaza and they're being held hostage. I know families who've lost loved ones who were held hostage in Gaza. And much of their anger is directed at the Israeli government. Obviously, that's the

only government they can actually pressure. They have any agency over in their demand for Israel to just do whatever it needs to do to get them home and effectively seize the war fighting for now and get the hostages home. And obviously, there are others in Israel who are arguing that that's not realistic, that any kind of near-term, medium-term accommodation that results in the hostages coming home will ultimately prolong the threat to Israel. I mean, I'm oversimplifying in a very crude way just for purpose of this conversation what the debate is about. But just to give you a sense, Israel throughout its history has taken, made extraordinary concessions to get hostages back. Gilad Shalit deal. Gilad Shalit, 2011. For one Israeli hostage, Israel released 1,027 Palestinians from prison, including Yechia Sinwar, the architect of October 7th.

After curing his cancer. After curing his cancer while he was in the midst of serving four life sentences. And of course, their takeaway, one would think, among other things from that exchange was Israelis value human life more than we do. So it is an extremely powerful and valuable tool in warfare for us to take Israelis hostage. And look what they gave us for one Israeli hostage imagine if we get hundreds and sure enough they got hundreds and this question is tearing Israeli society apart and there are some who are saying enough we can't keep doing this because all we're doing is incentivizing more of it that October 7th has got to change the way Israelis think about you know negotiating with terrorists over hostages it It's the quintessential moral dilemma.

How do you think about it? First, there's nothing I can say here that I would imagine would make any sense to somebody who has a child or a loved one who's hostage. So I could well appreciate that much, if not most, of Israeli society might want the Israeli government to negotiate now, to make concessions now, to bring back hostages now. Especially if a concession seems minor or can be framed as minor, like giving up the Philadelphia corridor. Right? Like, just let's make that concession, get some hostages back, and we can always go back in. Right.

End of argument. I would bet, I don't know if there's any polling done on this, but I would imagine that much, if not most, of Israeli society looks back at the Gilad Shalit deal and thinks that was a mistake. That was too much. of what you're willing to sacrifice, however rationally or rationally, because there's a case that's especially salient of one person or 10 people or 100 people that you just have to get back whatever they're asking. So the only way to get to just step off this continuum of imponderables and impossibles is to say, the game has changed. You have no more leverage over us, right? We're going to destroy Hamas. We're going to fight this battle differently. And I think it's totally understandable and perhaps ethically wise to worry that there's something brutalizing about that. I mean, you're being made more brutal. You're being made more brutal with respect to the sacrifice of your

own innocent life and to the innocent life on the other side and to resist that slide, right? But I do think that this particular issue of how valuable hostages are, it's so destabilizing that I honestly have no answer to that. I just know that ultimately, if you want this to stop happening, jihadism has to lose in every way that it can lose. It has to be discredited militarily, which is to say that the moment you raise your hand and say, yeah, I too am a jihadist, the clock starts ticking and your life is actually just noticeably shorter, right? And this has to be true everywhere. Again, it should be true for Boko Haram, right?

Where, again, there's no Jews involved. Israel isn't implicated. America's not there. This is something that the Nigerians have to worry about. And yeah, but they're stealing kids and turning them into bombs, right? So who's going to solve that problem? Someone who realizes they have to kill jihadists, right? Teaching kids in UN-funded schools in Gaza to grow up to be, there's nothing better than to grow up to be martyrs, right? That has to stop, or that indoctrination of another generation has to stop. I want to talk about the protest movement back here against Israel, which you've,

which you talked about a little earlier, and you've spoken a lot about on your own podcast. Were you surprised that this kind of moral confusion was happening, not just like this place among others, but the elite academic institutions were really like the pointy end of the spear in the immediate vilification of the Jews after October 7th. Yeah, yeah.

So when I said I wasn't surprised by October 7th and the horror of it, though as shocking as it was, yeah, I was not surprised by that. So I, as an American Jew, without thinking much about it, I had tacitly assumed that anti-Semitism was a problem that was almost entirely in the rearview mirror, especially in America.

I mean, it's just like, it's nothing that I have ever had to take seriously. I mean, I, you know, I get some number of anti-Semitic, you know, threats and, I mean, that stuff happens as a public figure, but it just seems like a, an echo of an echo of a problem that, you know, our parents and grandparents. That it was over. Seriously, yes. And I say this as a student of, you know, the Holocaust and I say this as a student of the Holocaust, someone who every five years just gets completely obsessed about the Holocaust again and watches Shoah and reads a dozen books.

And then you look back at those moments in history and you think, how was any of that possible? How did they not see it coming? How was anyone surprised by it? I mean, look at the character of the conversation in Germany even in the late 19th century. And you think this is, you can sort of see this wave coming a mile out. And then on October 8th, I realized, wait a minute,

I have been completely asleep to the reality of anti-Semitism worldwide. I mean, again, leaving aside on the fringes where I knew it always existed and within the Muslim world where I knew it existed. So I was, to see a level of disorder and bullying and even violence tolerated on an Ivy League campus when it was directed at the Jews, explicitly directed at the Jews, and to know at a glance that nothing like that would have been tolerated had it been directed at African Americans or the trans community or anyone else, there's no way to squint your eyes

and not see what that double standard meant, right, in terms of how the Jews are viewed in American society by so many people in elite institutions, right? I mean, that was what was so intolerable about the testimony of the college presidents at Congress, right? It was not, I mean, I was actually sympathetic to their mealy-mouthed, overly-lawyered efforts to say, well, it depends on the context. Calling for genocide, is that against our policy? Well, okay, I'm willing to grant them. You should be able to talk about any ideas in a college seminar.

In a philosophy seminar, you need to be able to have a conversation like that. The thing that was so intolerable was just the obvious hypocrisy that was going unacknowledged, which is if this were targeted, if black students were being targeted in this way, if black students were hiding in a library, unable to come out because they didn't feel safe, because people were shouting anti-black slogans at them in the immediate aftermath of an atrocity against black people. And just imagine if, you know, Dylan Roof murders, you know, nine black- Churchgoers in South Carolina.

In South Carolina. And if in the immediate aftermath, if in Harvard Yard or in the quad at Columbia, you had KKK supporting demonstrations, making black students unsafe and not letting black students enter a building, right? Coordinating them off as identifiably black. The idea that Claudine Gay or anyone else would have tolerated that for 15 minutes, right, in the name of free speech or anything. It's completely unthinkable. That was obvious to everybody. And that double standard just performed social surgery on our society, revealing a level of anti-Semitism that I really didn't know was there. So what if those students said, what's distinctive from your example, the Dylann Roof example, okay, but Israel is committing a genocide.

We've been taught that Israel is committing a genocide. We, the students, we've been taught that by some of our professors. That's what we see on TikTok. The American media, the British media kind of nods to that criticism. Right. The British media kind of nods to that criticism. Right. And a number of American politicians actually use that language. Members of Congress use that language in describing Israel.

So we are being told from all these different directions that this is what Israel is doing. And we want to engage in activism to protest the genocidal actions of a particular country. Yes, we can quibble with some of the ways that activism is performed, but the impulse is not an unhealthy one. How do you respond to those students? Well, so there are gradations of confusion here, obviously. So there are people who are sincerely confused and they believe things that are just not true. They couldn't define any of these important words if their lives depended on it. But anyone who thinks that the IDF is indistinguishable from Hamas or the Nazis in their behavior is so confused that it's worth dispelling that confusion if you can. But it's like, I don't hold them culpable for anything they do on the basis of that confusion because yeah, it's appropriate to treat that as a kind of moral

emergency. If we're supporting the Nazis by supporting Israel, well then yes, there's no level of criticism that's of your own government in that case that's too great. But I don't think most people are that confused, right? Most people understand that the word genocide actually means something. And if Israel wanted to commit a genocide, it could have on any day of the week at any point in the last 50 years, right? And they certainly could do that tomorrow if they wanted to last 50 years, right? And they certainly could do that tomorrow if they wanted to commit a genocide, right? So you know Israel doesn't want to commit a genocide because they haven't committed a genocide.

Among the criticisms you hear in response to charges of anti-Semitism is, I'm not anti-Semitic. I have nothing against Jews. I have nothing against the Jewish people as an organized religion. I have a problem with an ethno-religious, as they would put it, Jewish state. My criticisms are of the state. My criticisms are with Zionism, not with Judaism.

Yeah, well, I mean, that's a criticism that I would have been sympathetic toward on October 6th. You know, I released a podcast some years ago, I think 10 years ago, titled, Why Don't I Criticize Israel? 2014. So summer of 2014, you released that episode, which is really almost a decade, a little more than a decade from where we are today. And it came out shortly after Israel had

been fighting a war in Gaza, which at that time had been the most major engagement by Israel in Gaza. And so you asked this question. Yeah. And I think I'd had a debate with Andrew Sullivan around that time and- By the way, we'll post this episode in the show notes. It is quite extraordinary. I just, as you know, we were meeting earlier. I listened to it while just before we met. It's eerie listening to a lot of it

because so much of it could, the issues you're citing are the issues of today, but anyway. Yeah, yeah. But my thinking has changed in that, I mean, I think you know my criticism of organized religion more generally. I just think we have to get out

of the religion business ultimately. We have to- Society, Western society. Just all of us, the species. I mean, we just need a proper conception of human flourishing that transcends the accidents of culture and geography. And we have to realize that what is good in human life, even the really juicy spiritual

stuff, is attainable without believing anything on insufficient evidence and to say nothing of Iron Age mythology. So I have a larger argument against religious sectarianism, but from that secular atheist critique of organized religion, I'm the first to acknowledge the differences among religions and where they matter, right? Our religions are not all the same. They don't teach the same thing. And where they do teach the same thing, they don't teach it equally well necessarily. But so in that piece, I certainly gave more lip service than I would be tempted to now to the idea that having a state organized around a religion is just fundamentally

untenable to me, whether it's Jewish or Christian or Muslim, right? And the only thing that justifies, in my mind, the existence of a Jewish state is the ambient level of genocidal antisemitism we see the world over, right? Mostly in the Muslim world at this point, but historically, going back, it's been everywhere. Spain, England, Germany, most countries in the Arab Middle East. I mean, Jews have either been slaughtered or driven out with nowhere to go, not to mention the former Soviet Union. Yeah, throughout Europe, yeah, historically. So you look at the history of pogroms, you look at the history of expulsions from nations. It is – where I landed, I think, in that piece is that, and this is still my

view, is like, if we need a state organized around any religious minority, the last lingering justification for a religious ethnostate, let's give that to the Jews, given the history and given the current level of anti-Semitism. The difference between me now and pre-October 7th is now it's all too obvious that none of the eliminationist concerns, the existential concerns of Jews, the world over are truly in the rearview mirror of history. I mean, this is a current rational concern even for Americans in the aftermath

of October 7th. Now, I'm not walking around in a city like Los Angeles or New York, fearing for my life as a Jew, but comparisons to Weimar are not insane after October 7th. And they would have been insane on October 6th, right? Or at least they would have landed for me as just, you have to be paranoid to think like that, certainly as an American Jew. So that is all the justification I think we need for the state of Israel. But you've made the point that those who say, look, I'm not anti-Semitic, I'm anti-Zionist, that you made the analogy to Holocaust denialism, which I was struck by. Because you basically said that Holocaust deniers could argue that they are not anti-Semitic.

Right. But, you know, if you did a Venn diagram of anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers, you'd probably see a lot of overlap between the two. Yeah. And you sort of use that, that anti-Zionism today is a version of that. Right. Yeah. So they're logically separable. Yes, you, that anti-Zionism today is a version of that. Right, yeah. So they're logically separable.

Yes, you can be anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic. And you can be someone who, for whatever reason, is interested in anomalies in the history around the Holocaust and is wondering whether it's really 6 million or 4 million or maybe this is all up for review. So it's logically possible. But when you just look at the people who are captivated by those particular shiny objects, they tend to have other motives and other beliefs. And yeah, so I think if you wanted to find a lot of anti-Semites, you could just sort by the people who are calling themselves anti-Zionist right now, and you'll find that there's not much of an important difference. But on the other side, I think we have to stop talking about Zionism. I think Zionism is a noun we don't need. I mean, we needed

it maybe in 47, but I think we should just talk about the fact that Israel exists. Who is thinking that Pakistan, its actual existence is unwarranted given its origin in the callous drawing of lines on paper, right? That is a project for exactly no one. The fact that it is such a project for Israel or against Israel, it testifies to a level of anti-Semitism that we need to focus on. I was once in a conversation with Jeffrey Goldberg from the Atlantic, and he made the point, a version of what you're saying, which is, he said there's no other country that talks about its existence as an ism. It exists. Ism suggests it's just an idea. But Israel's the only country that moves from an idea to a practical country

but we still talk about it. We still debate it as though it's like an intellectual or philosophical idea rather than an existing thing. In the analogy of Hebrew, it's like parenthood. People who get married and they're thinking about having a child

and they say, how do you think about parenthood? Do, you know, do we want to be parents? You know, and they have conversations about parenthood. And then one day they have a kid and then they're done talking about parenthood as a concept. They have a kid. The debate's over. Like he said, it's sort of like, just let's be honest about what it means practically. If you say you're anti-Zionist, you are basically saying these nine plus million, 10 million people who live in Israel are to no longer exist or to go somewhere else. If you just imagine what would happen if you gave Hamas and the Palestinians everything that they wanted, right? Short of the death of all the Jews, you just moved all the Jews out of Israel. If the Jews just said, listen, this is just too much

trouble. We recognize this is untenable. We're never going to have a two-state or a one-state solution that is a solution. We're just going to move. We're going to move to, we've got the great invitation from North America. We're going to move to Canada and America and assimilate and do our thing. And there's going to be no Jewish state and we're done, right? Would that solve the problem of global jihadism? Again, I would bet everything that what you would see is just this jubilant eruption of Islamist and jihadist triumphalism. This is just yet another sign of the legitimacy and the soon- be achieved victory of our whole project, this would be profoundly energizing to the enemies of Western civilization, right?

And it's a political and moral illusion to suggest that the existence of Israel, their efforts to defend themselves, that this is really the sticking point, that if we could only get past it somehow, all our work would be done. You said something a moment ago. You said that it's not Weimar where the signs are there. And I highly recommend, if you haven't, this book called The Pity of It All about life in Germany for German Jews for two to three centuries leading up to, and it culminates right before 1933. Also, Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday. The World of Yesterday, yeah. What do

you mean by that? The signs are there. What signs are you looking at now? And again, I tend to agree with you. It doesn't jump into immediately like we're in a pre-Shoah, we're in a pre-Holocaust period, on the one hand. On the other hand, there are moments that give me chills. And there are more and more of those moments. The one that I keep coming back to, that I just think about all the time, on the New York subway, I don't know if you saw this image. We can play the video.

What do you have for me? Raise your hands if you're a Zionist! Raise your hands if you're a Zionist! Raise your hands if you're a Zionist! This is your chance to get out! This is your chance to get out! Okay, no Zionists, we're good. No Zionists here. I've watched this video so many times.

I've had my kids watch the video because I ask my kids, what would you do if you're on the subway? You're Jewish, you're a Zionist, and what would you do? My kids ride the New York City subways. What would you do if you're on the subway? You're Jewish. You're a Zionist. And what would you, my kids ride the New York City subways. What would you do if you're in that situation? What's the right thing to do? Is it to raise your hand and say, I'm a Zionist? And then what? I mean, I would hope in a sense that that would, that's what they'd say. On the other hand, I don't know if these people have weapons or are looking to really,

so is that the right thing to do? And then I think about all the other people who aren't sympathetic to the pro-Hamas activists, but they're not Jewish either. And they're just bystanders, wrong place, wrong time. And what are they doing? They don't have any skin in the game. They don't want to, they're not directly affected because they're not Jews. They're not Zionists. They're not looking for trouble. They just want to mind their own business and get on with it. And if there's any symbol to me that's illustrative of that Weimar period leading up to the rise of the Third Reich, it's that image. It's just because people forget, yes, there was the Nazi genocidal machine that slaughtered a lot of Jews. But there were also a lot of Jews that were just murdered during the 1930s and 1940s because of the indifference of regular citizens

of European countries who weren't government or military officials. Yeah, I mean, you know, situations like that I tend to be pretty forgiving of because I just know that people's, you know, frank terror around any possibility of interpersonal violence and this diffusion of responsibility is just, it all conspires to make people,

I mean, it makes cowardice really contagious. And in a society where either there are 400 million guns and you don't know who has one, it makes just getting out of the situation without being an idealist, even if you have skills, I mean, even if you yourself are armed, right? I mean, even more so if you're armed. I mean, one of the things that carrying a gun does or carrying any weapon does is that it makes you realize, okay, I can't afford to be a part of this situation because I'm going to wind

up, you know, however this goes down. If it escalates. If of this situation because I'm going to wind up, you know, however this goes down. If it escalates. If it escalates, I'm going to wind up in prison for the rest of my life because these morons got on a subway and told the Zionists to get off and I couldn't do anything but react, right? But all those situations tend to go sideways because people don't know how to think about violence. So if your master heuristic is when avoidance is possible, whatever the character of the violence or the ethical justification for fighting the good fight, I see what the cause is, but like I could see I could save a life right now, but not completely understanding what's going to happen now. I just know I'm going to go home to my kids and wife, right, if I just leave, right? It's very hard to argue with that.

And yet, if you look at the consequences of that at scale, they're appalling, right? What you actually want are courageous, well-intentioned people to just respond en masse in every one of these situations, every one of these situations gets nullified if you just solve the coordination problem of getting all the good people with or without skills to just mob the shooter, right? Even an active shooter situation gets nullified very, very quickly if everyone just runs toward the gunfire, right? Like now it's understandable that no one wants to be the first or the second or the third person to get shot. But even if it's a Navy SEAL with 1,000 rounds of ammunition,

he can't withstand 20 people suddenly converging on him from all sides and beating him to death, right? It's like there's no solution for that. But the thing to recognize is that we actually have figured it out without anyone even having a conversation about it on an airplane at 30,000 feet now post 9-11. Everyone understands now that when someone stands up and shouts anything, right? Like I'm the next crazy guy you have to worry about and rushes the cockpit. There is just zero tolerance. And we have figured this out, right? Like that person is going to get mobbed by everyone who can get a hand

on him and eventually duct tape to it, you know, in the fetal position on the floor. And that's the solution. So it's not that example that worries me the most, because I can understand that under a framing that has nothing to do with the apparent content of the anti-Semitism of what was said there. And you see there are endless numbers of videos of just some crazy person punching a girl in the face on a subway and no one does anything. worrying personally that I'm about to see the character of my whole society unravel to that degree where all of a sudden it's going to be Kristallnacht. But how many gradations are there between people protesting in front of a synagogue in Fairfax and not letting Jews enter the building and then getting into fistfights with them when they try to enter the building, just how many parsings are there between that and something like Kristallnacht? It's not that many. These are gradations of the same problem

that you go far enough left or far enough right and you run into anti-Semitism. It's on both sides. So for the far left, the Jews are extra white. They enjoy extra white privilege. But on the far right, they're not white. They're debasing the white race because of this great replacement that's being engineered by Jewish conspiracists. And out in Trumpistan, which doesn't quite align with this continuum, but it's equally extreme, you have people like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson more than dog whistling, blaming the Jews for the erosion of basically all Western values.

You've talked about three strands of antisemitism, Muslim antisemitism, left-wing antisemitism, and right-wing antisemitism. If we view antisemitism as not just a threat to a beleaguered minority, but it's a lens through which to see breakdown in our society and threat to our society more generally. So what begins with the Jews doesn't always end with the Jews. You've said what's been worrisome to you is right now, at least, what's happening on the extreme left rather than the extreme right. They're both worrisome,

but the practical implication of what we're seeing around us is more disconcerting to you on the extreme left. I mean, it's more annoying to me in that it affects institutions that I care about, right? So when I wake up in the morning and notice that over at the New York Times or over at Harvard or over at the Lancet or in Hollywood. I mean, just pick your high status cultural institution that you care about in journalism or in science or the nonprofit space or media. The corruption there ideologically is a story of what wokeism and this social justice, moral panic, and there's an anti-Semitic component to all of that.

But when I think of the real danger to our society of violence and of a Timothy McVeigh style domestic terrorism threat or civil war, the possibility of civil war in America, right? Insofar as that's a thing, that's much more a story of what could happen coming from the right. There's something more galling to me about the derangement of the left because these people really should know better. Like, I mean, like, I don't expect a member of the KKK

or, you know, some neo-Nazi, you know, white supremacist organization to be anything other than what he or she is. It's like this is, a grizzly bear is a grizzly bear. Yes, it's not safe. It's out of the zoo. Yes, it's a problem, and I'm worried about it. But the fact that I can be certain that reading the New York Times,

I would see obvious efforts of obfuscation when they're talking about the nature of jihadist violence, right? Like there was a guy, you know, who just mowed down 12 people on the sidewalk shouting Allahu Akbar, but we don't understand the motive for the crime, right? It's like, it's a big mystery, right? That is amplifying the risk of a resurgent far right worldwide. That's what's going to give us a real, a demagogue far scarier than Donald Trump, who understands everything and can really, who's not just a creature of his own narcissism, but actually understands how to subvert a democracy even as strong as America's, that is what a populist demagogue will successfully appeal to.

And there's not that many more acts of terrorism that would have to be accomplished to make our society really go nuts in that direction. My last question for you is about you and your faith or lack of faith in your Jewish identity. You, as we've discussed and have discussed offline, you are an atheist, a big believer in atheism, and yet you are Jewish. Can you just talk a little bit about how October 7th has changed or shaped your thinking about your own Jewish identity? Well, it's just made it ethically salient for me in a way that it wasn't. I mean, I just, it's like this is a, I mean, I've always loved,

I've only, I've been to Israel a few times, but I've always loved the country, and I've just loved, I've only, I've been to Israel a few times, but I've always loved the country and I've just had wonderful, wonderful experiences there. And I've always been, I've always felt of myself as Jewish just culturally because, you know, I get all the jokes in a Woody Allen movie and that's proof, right? So, and I know an inordinate number of Jews. I mean, we're like 2% of the population, but probably 50% of my friends are Jewish, right? So it's the culture in which, to some considerable degree, I've been swimming, but it now just feels ethically important to both be aware of anti-Semitism in a way that I wasn't before October 7th and to lose your patience with it, right? Like, I just think we have to be at the end of our patience with putting the existence of Israel in question in a way that we're not for other countries that have similarly peculiar histories, right?

I mean, just again, Pakistan is a perfect example. We just have to defend these values without apology, right? And I do think there's much more leverage to be gained in seeing this as a defense of Western values writ large than to be narrowly focused on the problem of antisemitism. But wherever antisemitism is the obvious problem, I think we have to be absolutely at the end of our patience with it, right? So there's a bit of a high wire act there for me because I am leery.

I see the fellow Jews who are just as concerned about all of this as I am, for whom the call is really to focus on the Jews and Judaism as this yet another vulnerable minority group that now has to be fully and successfully protected, right? So if you ask yourself, what could the college campuses do now, right? What is the end game for Harvard? For me, it's not for them to say, okay, we're going to take our whole social justice DEI apparatus that we've built so sedulously to protect the rights of Afro-Caribbean, Latina, transgender students, and we're going to wrap this around the Jews just as carefully. I don't want any part of that. We have to be thick-skinned and

tolerant of almost any kind of conversation. And the bright lines have to be at the level of how you demonstrate, right? Like there is no such thing as a heckler's veto. You don't get to stop events. You don't get to cancel speakers with your shouts. You don't get to block people from entering and exiting buildings. These are very practical limitations on what you can do on a college campus. And this applies to everybody at all times. It doesn't matter how much you hate them. Here's how you can protest over there. We're going to give you a way to get your voice heard, but it's going to be a way that's going to allow the university to function perfectly as an institution where anything can be talked about, right?

So it's not that we need to cancel the speaker who, when we looked 12 years ago, had that anti-Semitic tweet, who now we're another victim group on campus who's going to object to that platforming, right? No, let Candace Owens show up at whatever college that'll have her and then demolish her bad ideas in real time. So anyway, I think I depart from my fellow Jews on certain points in terms of how we should practically respond, because I really do view it, the biggest problem as being one where Western civilization has lost track of what its core values are and how to defend them. And an intolerance of anti-Semitism would fall right out of that moral epiphany should we have it at scale. All right, Sam.

We will leave it there. Thank you. This was an illuminating and rich and marathon conversation. I encourage our listeners to subscribe to Sam's podcast, Making Sense, which we'll link to in the show notes. It's been a source of wisdom for me, not only, and sanity. I'm sure you hear that a lot since October 7th, but even before, but since October 7th, especially. So we'll link to it in the show notes. Let me just say, I'm a huge fan of your podcast and you have been just almost a college level education for all the relevant journalism and history there. I don't think I've, if I've missed any episodes since October 7th,

I could probably count them on one hand. So thank you for everything you've done there. It's been fantastic. Thank you. And calling it college level these days. The real college. The college we wish we had. It's like, what kind of college do you mean? The college I dimly remember. The college I dimly remember. Thank you for that. And this series is about reflecting on one year with people who are thinking deeply and more broadly about it. So hope to have you on again at some point. But until then, thank you.

Nice. Thank you.