Rev Left Radio - Confronting Zionism: Exposing the Moral Bankruptcy of Liberal Intellectuals

Episode Date: October 25, 2023

Breht listens and responds to a conversation between liberal Zionist Sam Harris and pseudo-intellectual charlatan Eric Weinstein on Israel, Palestine, Islam, and more. In the process he deconstructs common Zionist talking points, highlights the colonialist framework that liberals and Zionists take for granted, shows how regular working people can intellectually confront ivy league PhDs, and offers up lines of argumentation that you, dear listener, can bring to conversations on these topics in your own life. Listen to the full episode here

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Rev. Left's Patreon. Okay, so today I am going to, well, I'm going to respond to some liberals on Israel-Palestine. And the liberals in question today are Sam Harris and Eric Weinstein. Sam Harris, of course, from New Atheist fame. He, you know, wrote a letter to a Christian nation. He wrote that book about Islam and the War on Terror. you know, he's been this new atheist sort of liberal figure, very firmly centrist to liberal. You know, his politics will shift left or shift right based on the issue at hand.

But you can 100% put him in the realm of a liberal commentator and thinker. And so I think what's useful about him is he's incredibly articulate. He's very informed. And when he gives expression to his views, you know, it's not like picking on some random idiot. This is somebody who presents himself as a public intellectual, who has a massive audience, and who has a lot of clout. And so I'm going to respond to him and sort of deconstruct his arguments in real time, show how they fucking suck, advance our arguments, our superior analysis, and just through this process show that our shit is superior. We understand this stuff at a much deeper level than even this IDW public intellectual type who has a, you know, Ph.D.D. neuroscience from, you know, UC Berkeley or Stanford or whatever the fuck. I can't remember.

I think it's Stanford. You know, so this is somebody who is like an upper echelon liberal elite. And so when we wrestle with his opinions, we're wrestling with the opinions of a faction of the ruling elite in this country. And Eric Weinstein, I mean, what do I even say about him? Some of you may be familiar with him through the Joe Rogan experience. He's been on there a few times. I think he's an absolute fucking charlatan. I think he's the quintessential, pseudo-intellectual. he will talk as if he's intelligent, but when you really start to, you know, for for dumb people, he'll come off as like, wow, you know, this guy is so smart. So like, Rogan has him on a bunch of times and falls prey to his pseudo intellectual charlatanism, you know, because he's, again,

this is one of those guys that sounds really smart to not very smart people. I'm going to just kind of deconstruct him as well. Now, this conversation they have on Israel, Palestine, is two hours. I'm not going anywhere near that. What I just want to do is kind of cover some of their opening remarks because they put on the table some of their basic views and some some basic arguments that I would like to to address. And hopefully this is a clarifying process. You know, it's one thing to just respond or to shit on some of these commentators. I don't just do it for that. I do it because I want to help people listening understand our arguments, understand liberals arguments, conservatives arguments, centrist arguments, the different array of arguments.

that they have and show that we don't need to be scared of these people. We don't need to cower and fear that they know more than we do or that because they have PhDs from Ivy League universities that they are somehow enormously much more informed than we could ever be. And, you know, like, no, no, these people are idiots. They're not nearly as smart as they want to present themselves as being. And some dumb ass like me from Omaha, Nebraska, who has a bachelor's in philosophy from a state school can be their intellectual equal. And if I can be their intellectual equal, you, my, my dear listener, can be their intellectual superior. So let's go ahead and get into some of these

arguments. I know some people don't love these sorts of, these sorts of episodes, and I get it. You know, there's different episodes that I do that people like more or less to differing degrees. But I do think enough of you find this stuff useful that it's worth doing. So let's go ahead and get into it. What's going to happen when I hit play, they're going to have a sort of like 30 second cold open where they just highlight one or two things that each person says and then they'll introduce the conversation and then they'll get into some of their bedrock arguments and I'll start responding to them. So let's get into it. This is Sam Harris and Eric Weinstein on Trigger, Triggerometry, some fucking douchey podcast. Let's go. We just have to acknowledge that

there is a subset of people in the Muslim world for whom it is true, as they say of themselves, that they love death more than we love life. You have groups of people who are offered a state who we are not listening to. They do not want the state that they're offered. They're offered a choice between a state and a chant. From the river to the sea is what they chose.

I'm just saying we have to recognize where ENA... All right. They're offered a stay versus chant. This is the pseudo-intellectual shit of Eric Weinstein. He says, these people talking about Palestinians, they have a choice. You can have this state or you can have the chant

from the river to the sea. And what these people have chosen is the chant. What are you talking about? What are you talking about? I mean, to put some, to meet on these bones, maybe to steal man his argument, maybe he's talking about like a two-state solution, but this idea that they're being offered a state and they're not taking it as insane. Israel throws out this rhetoric of a two-state solution. They're 100% against the two-state solution. And I've already talked about many times in my Palestine on fire series and on our Instagram, our new Instagram, RevLeft Radio official, that this two-state solution takes on board. I mean, of course, it's an improvement on current conditions because at least Palestinians would have a state, but it is fraught with issues.

It maintains British partition of 1947. It maintains settler colonialism. You would have a much more advanced U.S.-backed nuclear Israel state intermeshed geographically with a much weaker emerging Palestinian state, which would be immediately attacked through an imperialist, process by Israel and the U.S. to undermine it as we've seen these countries due to other countries all across the world. So, you know, what ideally we would want, and of course the liberation struggle is going to ultimately decide, and I'll support whatever the Palestinian Liberation movement gets or asks for or maintains. But ideally, you would decolonize the entire state of Palestine. Palestine would become a singular, multi-ethnic, democratic state with full

constitutional and civil rights for all members of that society, Jews, Muslims, Christians, and the secular alike. And that would require full decolonization of Palestine. There would be no more Israel. That would address these problems and this ongoing conflict at the root. But you'll never, ever hear anything like that uttered by these two people or anybody in their class. They still want to dangle out this idea of a two-state solution that even the U.S. and Israel are against it would never allow to to occur but here again i just want to point out the fucking this is what they lead with so there's a two-hour discussion here and they said you know this clip by eric weinstein is as our cold open this really shows that he has something to say here and his his argument is

well the Palestinians have been given it have been given an offer you can have a state or you can have this chant and they chose the chant dip shit dip shit and that's what i mean when this guy fucking talks he doesn't say shit and i think it's really incredible and it's almost sad that these people have to treat him as if he's saying anything meaningful or as if he's an intellectual with insight he is not let's get back to it in a hot war i think this is the same problem that you're having with trump and other things which is you're being invited into the abyss gentlemen welcome both the reason our show works is neither francis or i pretend to be experts and we ask the questions that are on the minds of most people or at least we try uh

I think the questions that are on the minds of most people now is that we are in a moral quandary because we simultaneously believe many things about Israel and Palestine that are incompatible. And I'll give you a list. I don't want innocent civilians to die. And Israel has to destroy Hamas. These two are already internally contradictory. All right. All right.

there. I'm going to give a full throw to defense of Hamas. I don't give a fuck. Everybody wants to make it out as if Hamas is this terrorist group and there's this clean split between, you know, the worthwhile Palestinian civilians, if they'll go that far and these terrible, you know, terrible terrorists, right? That word terrorist does so much work. And we've fucking been beaten over our heads with this term since 9-11. It's just a term deployed by hegemony. It is a term deployed by hegemony to dehumanize. and make people objects of complete annihilation with no grievances whatsoever, right, to get them off the map of the concern of other human beings.

So I put this out on our Instagram recently, and I'm just going to read it here because I'm humanized. I refuse, I'm not only not going to condemn Hamas, I'm going to actively humanize them. So this is what I wrote. Imagine being a young Palestinian teenage boy growing up in Gaza, right? As you come of age, you know countless families. and friends who have been attacked, brutalized, disabled, and outright murdered by an occupying military force. And your life opportunities are incredibly limited, as are the life opportunities of everyone

you know and love by this occupying military power who fucking hate you. So imagine put yourself in these shoes. Growing up in Gaza, watching everybody that you love be murdered, attacked, in prison, tortured, et cetera, no life opportunities or whatever opportunities you might have. have are completely hemmed in by Israel, right? So what do you do as a young man growing up in this situation? Let's say you've lost a baby sister. Let's say you've lost your mother or an aunt or a father or a mentor or a brother or whoever. Maybe you yourself have been descended upon and attacked by the IDF in its forces or just smothered in Gaza with your entire life prospects being

utterly annihilated compared to most people around the world, right? So what do you do? You join the main fighting force available to you, right? In this case, Hamas, to fight. fight for your land and your people, to avenge your dead family and your friends, and to regain importantly, a sense of self-worth, direction, and control over your own life, right? And for this, for this terrible act of humanity, right? You are deemed a terrorist by the entire Western world. You are systematically dehumanized into something worth less than an animal and are allowed to be slaughtered at will, juxtaposed to the slightly more innocent and semi-humanized Palestinian civilians. And this is the rhetoric you hear all the time. You know, from all

quarters, even the left. Hamas is disgusting. Hamas are terrorists. You know, fucking, of course, annihilate them, destroy them, cut their heads off, fucking brutalize them, torture them, throw them into the ocean, shoot them into space. They're not even humans. But as a good person, you got to care about the civilians at least. That's like the liberal line. That's like the social democratic line. That's like the furthest left that you can get in the mainstream discourse. So, okay, so Hamas are these terrible, disgusting animals that must die. But then, you know, maybe there's some feign concern for the civilians, right?

But what is Hamas? You know, where does Hamas come from? It comes from these rotten conditions imposed on Palestinians. Hamas are the fighting force of the people, right? They might have ideas or views that I don't agree with, of course, right? But even those views and those ideologies are products of the context in which they live, the regional context in which they live. And Islamism and using Islam as a fighting force and this whole idea of quote-unquote terrorism,

does that not come from centuries of imperialism and colonialism in the Middle East, right? So imagine like you're a young boy growing up in this context. You join the main fighting force available to you. It's not like, who knows all these people in Hamas? Like, what exactly do they believe? They're individuals. Sit them down and talk to them. You would never hear that, right?

You'll never see CNN or MSNBC or any of these reporters sit down with the Hamas fighter, right? And actually ask them, why are you fighting? You're just, you're just immediately expected to believe that these are animalistic savages, colonialist language, right? They're subhuman, colonialist language. They're terrorists, colonialist language, and they need to die. But really, there are people who grow up under these conditions who are sick of just living on their knees, right, to bowing down and being subordinated to a military power that hates them and kills them no matter what they do. And so they pick up the gun.

And if I was in their position, I would hope to be as brave as they are. I would hope that I would have the courage to also pick up that gun, to put on that green bandana and to fight for my people. people and my land and the family and friends and the neighbors that I have that I have watched be slaughtered by this occupying European colonial military force you know so so far from condemning them these are human beings right these are human beings and I refuse to dehumanize even them I refuse to condemn Hamas or to dehumanize the fighters of Hamas fuck you right now all that stuff I just told you you know from the perspective of of a Palestinian young man growing up Now imagine someone in the West, millions of people, tens of millions of people in the West, sitting in luxury and relative comfort, never having faced a fraction of a fraction of the hardship faced by you and your loved ones in Gaza, calling for your death and the death of all your comrades who are fighting next to you, and justifying the slaughter of all your family and friends as a means to kill you, right?

We're going to bomb Gaza to shit so we can go in and kill Hamas. And then what do they say about human shields? What is meant by human shields? Sorry, I'm going off on a tangent here. We have to get to these dumbasses here in a second. But what do they mean a human shield? They're just saying that Hamas is using the civilian Palestinians as a shield because they operate out of schools and hospitals and apartment buildings.

And so, well, basically what they're doing is they're holding up the Ghazan people in front of them and letting them be slaughtered. You know, they're the human shields. No, no, no, no. no. Hamas is not fundamentally alienated from the masses in Palestine. Hamas comes from the people, swim amongst the people like fish in a sea, have general support from the people because they're the ones actually picking up the gun and fighting back with their whole hearts, sacrificing themselves. And they can't escape Gaza. So to say that they're using human shields is such a fucking ideological torture chamber and distorted logic. Because they're in palace, they're in Gaza, right? Fight. They're They're Ghazans, fighting for their family and friends in their land, in a concentration camp that they cannot leave, nor can anybody else. What are you supposed to do? I watched an interview.

Actually, Vice did a very interesting interview with a Hamas fighter. And down in the tunnels, right? In the tunnels. And this was back in 2021, I believe, in the last big flare up that caught global headlines. And this guy is the sweetest fucking guy. He's a full Hamas fighter. He's part of the Al Qasang Brigades. the sweetest soft-spoken guy

and he's like you know she's like the interviewer you're trying to be a hard interviewer she's like you know you fired missiles out of Gaza rockets and so Israel responds you know are you denying that you started this conflict

and he's like well who told you that who told you that he's like we might have fired rockets this one time but this is in the context of 75 plus years of struggle and that struggle was initiated when this colonial entity came to our land, killed our people, took over our towns, did the Nakhba, the catastrophe, the

disaster, right? Displaced all of my great-grandparents, took over our homes out of nowhere, put us in concentration camps, attack and beat us. And so all this violence and us firing rockets is a product of this Israeli occupation. All they have to do is go home, leave us alone, give us back our land, give us back our homes. And there would be no violence. And that's the crucial point. Israel is the main decider of violence happening. Israel is the

inaugurator of the violence. And then just to take a little snapshot of Gaza, of rockets coming out of Gaza, and pretending that the conflict starts there is fucking disgusting and disingenuous. And this guy is incredibly articulate. He has a heart. She says, well, don't you care about the people

Palestinians that are dying? Don't you care that you fire rockets and then Israel pummels all these people? And he's like, of course we care. These are our friends and our family. These are our neighbors. We fucking hate it. But we're going to be killed no matter what. We're going to be strangled no matter what. We're going to be occupied no matter what. So what do we do? Do we put our heads down and watch our family and friends get killed? Or do we fight back and watch our family and friends get killed? Right? And it's the moral clarity is so fucking obvious. And this is a Hamas fighter

who we are supposed to hate, who we even on the left are supposed to condemn his terrorist before we can even get to the point of granting Palestinians in general humanity, we first have to kowt and subordinate ourselves to their ideological demand that we condemn Hamas. Fuck you. No way am I condemning Hamas. No way. And if I was in those shoes, if I grew up in those conditions, I watched my fans and family be fucking slaughtered at will with the full power of the quote unquote democratic free West supporting the slaughter of everybody I loved? You're goddamn right I would put that green bandana on. You're goddamn right I would pick that gun up. And you're goddamn right, I would find some

meaning in my fucking life by fighting back. You're goddamn right. So no, I will not dehumanize them. And if you tell me to condemn Hamas or call them a terrorist, I'll tell you to fuck yourself. Condem Israel. Israel is the terrorist state. Straight up. Straight up. You want to talk about terrorism? The Israeli genocidal, settler, colonial, apartheid state is the terrorist state. The U.S. backing it is a terrorist state. Those are the terrorists, and I'm not backing down from that claim. And I'm not going to go through this whole post-9-11 war on terror bullshit where we completely dehumanize these quote-unquote, you know, Islamic Arabic savages. This is pure colonial rhetoric. Go back and study the wars against Native Americans. This is how

they talked. The North American indigenous population, Native Americans, fought. back brutally, did the exact same stuff that Hamas is being condemned as terrorists for. They were called all names in the book, right? It was used to justify their slaughter. Again, the settlers acting as if they're the victims, right? They have a right to defend themselves from these heinous, barbaric attacks. It's the same shit. Don't fall for it. Don't fall for it. So many people fell for it after 9-11. Don't fall for it again. Come on. What do they say? You're failing an open no test. You're failing an open test. You're failing an open. book test. Come on. Don't fall for it again. No way. Let's get back to these guys. And we can keep going further and further into exploring that. But what I see is that the thing that is right to say on social media to look smart and sophisticated and balanced and nuanced is impractical. It puts you in a position where you don't know what to do. That's the liberal idea. To find the position that makes you look like a moderate, that makes you look like you're taking a sober look at things, right? That's the liberal position. It doesn't come out of like deeply held principles and

values. It comes out of sort of orienting themselves to the different opinions that exist and trying to find that middle ground. That's not an ideology of dignity or of real principles or values. It's a relativistic sort of positioning to try to present your fundamentally narcissistic, like I'm trying to present myself as this moderate. So here's the left wing position. Here's the right wing position. Where can I find the middle ground here? Right?

It's like that's a relativistic position. It's not rooted in any firm principles or values or forms of analyses. It is relative to where everybody else is on the spectrum. And that's what this guy is sort of, you know, without really knowing that's what he's doing, is giving voice to. And this is just the host, of course. So how do we think about this? How do we think about this issue, Sam? Well, I'm not saying anything on social media.

That's one life hack that I would recommend. I've been looking at social media, and I've been seeing that it's, I just think it's poison for us. I mean, even the good parts are making it impossible to, I think it's making us ungovernable. Like in demand, I think it's, I think it's. Okay, social media sucks, really quick point. Social media sucks. It's corporate algorithmically inclined towards outrage and sensationalism, et cetera. But I don't care because one of the best things it allows us to do is to fight for our own narratives.

Imagine or just remember after 9-11, for those of you old enough to remember, what options do we have to learn about shit? We just had the fucking cable news networks, right? Early 2000, we didn't really have the Internet. I mean, the Internet was around and a certain subcultural part of Western societies were like online in the early days. But for them, I didn't get a computer or internet in my house until I was 16, 17, 18. And even then, it was one of these shitty, slow dial-ups, and you're still learning how to use the internet. And there aren't a lot of pages on there anyway, right? You don't even know how to find the information you really want to find.

It's all much more integrated and streamlined now. But back then, it was very hard. And so it was much more easy for the forces of hegemony to control the narrative, to use words like terrorists, to go completely unchallenged. I mean, we went 10 years during the War on Terror in which the architects of the War on Terror faced a little to no pushback. I mean, there were protests here and there, of course. I'm not trying to say there wasn't, but they could easily just hand wave and dismiss that. But their media outlets were just all consuming. There was no, like, debate.

You know, there was no debate. It's like the basic premises and assumptions are built in whether you're looking at CNN or MSNBC or Fox News. And then it's just a matter of like how do we execute this war on terror. And so what we have with the internet and the ubiquity of the internet and things like Twitter, as shitty as it is, is that we can push back. We can share our own videos, which is why Israel has to cut off electricity and fuel for their generators because they don't want these videos coming out. They want their cell phones to die. And pretty much we've seen like a drop off after two weeks, a sort of drop off of videos, if you haven't noticed. It's not that the bombing is slowed.

The bombing is, if anything, has escalated. But what you're seeing is less videos because in Gaza, they have they have, they have, they have. done this this this blockade the siege where you can't get food water electricity or fuel so you can't document as easily the things that are happening and so the western world doesn't get to see as much but stuff still leaks through in the first two weeks lots of stuff leaked through and we get to use it and we get to go into the comment sections of these fucking vampires and talk shit and ratio them and quote retweet them and can and correct the the fucking bullshit they're saying and spit in their face you know metaphorically and goddamn imagine if we didn't have that

Imagine if we didn't even have that, how much easier would be for the U.S. and Israel to control the narrative in the West. That ability to control the narrative is slipping in large part because of the Internet. Now, the Internet, like all technology is good, bad and ugly, right? You don't just get something that's pristine. And it's like, this is a holy good technological advancement. Of course not. Every big technological advancement in human history has come with positives, with negatives, and with weird, completely unpredictable, you know, consequences that nobody would have accounted for beforehand.

And as you're going into an era of new technology, you have the utopianism. Oh, the Internet's going to bring everybody together. Bigotry and small-mindedness is going to disappear. We're going to be globalized, you know, but you have to understand the context in which that technology is being introduced is one of global capitalism, imperialism. So it's not going to be a holy good, pristine, beautiful, kumbaya-ass technology. it's going to be immediately subordinated to the dictates of imperialism and capitalism and colonialism and Western narrative control and hegemony. But at the same time, it also opens up a bunch of doors for us to fight back in ways that we could not do on the information front, right? Which a lot of times, you know, go out, show solidarity, politically educate, organize all that stuff.

A lot of it also is the information war of not letting their propaganda go unchallenged. And this, this internet has given us the opportunity to do that. So again, good, bad and ugly. the basis of democracy. It's like even the true information, even the, the virtue of it is that it's giving some kind of transparency that you fear would not otherwise exist and that is, you know, good for error correcting on some level.

But even that in surplus is toxic, and then there's all the distortions of it. They're the things that are performative. This is Sam Harris, by the way, for people that don't know. He's going to talk for a while. So you're listening to Sam Harris. that wouldn't be happening in the real world but for the fact that it's going to be broadcast on social media. I just think it's, as I've said, many places before, I mean, I think it is

a kind of psychological experiment that is deranging us. Agreed. But let's come to Israel and Palestine because I think that's what people want to think about rationally. How do we think about that issue? Well, I think the most obvious error that people will make now is to imagine that body count is the only measure by which the moral balance swings. So if Israel goes into Gaza and inadvertently kills more people than were killed on their side, they've done too much by definition, right? I love this idea that it's inadvertent, right? All the civilians that Israel kills, it's just an accident.

They're just trying to go after Hamas, and these are collateral damage. That's all the Zionists talk about is like this collateral damage, you know, it's not intended. What are you talking about? They make hell rain down from the sky. They destroy entire apartment blocks. They bomb hospitals, schools, caravans of refugees fleeing, refugee camps. This idea that they're like, well, you know, Hamas, they target civilians. But Israel, we don't target civilians.

Billions. Yeah, we kill a fucking lot of them. But it's collateral. We're going after Hamas. So it sucks, but it's just something that we're not trying to do. But it just happens. Fuck you. You're trying to do it. You're trying to do it. Stop fucking acting so disingenuous. Do these motherfuckers even believe their own bullshit? That's wrong in all kinds of ways. But the obvious way that it's wrong is that it completely ignores. what people are actually attempting to achieve on both sides, what kind of world they're attempting to build, what their intentions actually are, what would they do if they had more power? If the asymmetric power in the region were reversed, how would Hamas behave vis-a-vis Israel, right?

And the one thing is obvious. Israel for decades, if it had wanted to perpetrate a genocide against the Palestinians, could have done that on any given day. really quickly I just want to mention that a point like you hear this a lot I think you hear this from bill mar too this intentional quote unquote ethics where it's like you know what matters is the intention and the vision for the world that they're trying to have and what you'll often hear is this idea is like you know Israel is a superior a player because look at the world that they want they want like gay rights and feminism and veganism and a bunch of people on the beach hanging out and what Hamas wants is tyranny and theocracy and to throw gay people people off of buildings and so you know i take this out of israel because the world that they're trying to create and build is a world that i would want to live in this is nonsense first of all the world that israel is built as the world in israel look at it it's fucking sucks it's built on

occupation on slaughter on genocide on on dispossession on displacement right so this world that they want to build is one of blood and domination and oppression it's the world they're actually building you know don't tell me what they sit back and tell themselves about themselves you know, tell themselves about their vision of the ideal world, what do they actually do? They fucking kill people. They genocide people. They occupy other people's land. They displace those people.

So the world that they want to build and the world that they're actually building, let's look at what they're actually doing, not the fantasies and the sandcastles in their mind. And then go over to the Palestinians and Hamas. What sort of world do they want to build? Well, they want to convince you that the world that Hamas wants to build is this theocratic hellhole. But how do we know? they've never been given the opportunity to build a world they've never been able to to self-determine so their ideology and their actions and their behavior are completely conditioned and shaped and molded by the occupation they are resisting and you can't tell me what a people's vision for the world is when they are just fighting for their life get your boot off their fucking throat and maybe we can see what kind of world they would want to build give them self-determination let them be completely free from violence and poverty and a miseration and occupation, and then we can see what kind of world the Palestinian, give them democracy, what kind of world the Palestinians will build. And guess what

it won't be? It won't be one of occupation. It won't be one of dispossession. It won't be one of settler colonialism, right? These are the pathologies of the ideologies involved are a product of the violence of the occupation. So don't tell me you know the sort of world that Palestinians want to create. You don't even see them as human. You've never talked to one. How do you know what world they want to create? What you're doing is you're trying to take this cartoon caricature of what Hamas is, label it on all Palestinians as if this is the world that they would choose free of any coercion, free of any occupation. And we don't even know what that world is because Hamas can't even build a world.

They're just fighting back. Right? So again, this idea that you hear from figures like Bill Maher and Sam Harris, that it's like the vision of Israel's world. is so beautiful. The vision of Hamas is disgusting. It is just this colonialist logic. It's taking the worst factions of the most cartoonish caricatures of Islamism and trying to apply that to the entire Palestinian people and say, you know, in a free world where they could fully self-determine, they would choose a world where they're throwing gay people off buildings and, you know, whatever, all the other stuff that we hear all the fucking time. These motherfuckers don't know that.

They don't even, again, they don't even see them as human. So how could they really give full-throated articulation of the world that Palestinians want to build. You don't even see them as worthy of being able to build a world. Right. It would have been trivial. Tomorrow, they could kill everyone in Gaza if they wanted. They obviously haven't wanted that. They obviously don't want to do that.

Now, if you reverse that balance of power. They want to do it. They want to do it. I mean, you know, maybe not kill, but they want to displace. They want to get rid of the Palestinians. It's a fucking headache for the Israeli state. They would love nothing more. They would love nothing more.

than to snap their fingers and Palestinians just get raptured, just disappear. What holds them back from genocidally slaughtering them all is the fact that they would immediately be attacked by all the other Arab states, world opinion would turn against them, etc. That's the limiting factor here, right? It's not that out of the goodness of Israel's heart, they're showing restraint. And, you know, that's what Sam Harris is saying. If they wanted to, they could easily just fucking nuke Gaza and kill everybody.

No, they couldn't. They live in a world in which. anybody with a beating heart would be absolutely incensed. They would be descended upon by all powers in the region, attacked. It would be World War III times 10. Like, it would just be insane. So they're limited by that reality, not by the good intentions in their heart. Look at the Israeli right.

Are these people not, are these good, beautiful people who don't want to kill Palestinians? No, if they had the fucking slimest of opportunities, they would take it. They would annihilate it. And if they could, again, kill everything. single Palestinian without the rest of the world knowing and just get rid of them quietly and they could somehow do that without any blowback without any negative consequences you bet your fucking ass they would do that in a heartbeat Sam Harris and ask what would Hamas do what would jihadist organizations anywhere do they would kill all the Jews and

they've and they have told us that ad nauseum the founding charter of Hamas said that explicitly, it would look forward to a time where Quranic prophecy would be realized when the earth itself would cry out against the Jews, where the rocks and the trees would say, oh, Muslim, there's a Jew behind me, come kill him, right? Except for one tree. And just as zooming out a little bit, every religion has a political spectrum, okay? Every religion has a political spectrum. There are hardcore fascist, exterminationist, genocidal freaks in Judaism, in Christianity,

in Hinduism and in Islam pointing to the far right fascist part of a spectrum of any given religion and trying to paint the entirety of that religion with that hardcore far right position is already fallacious it is already fucked up and it does not take into account that all religions have these political spectrums right he's playing up this whole idea that like all of Islam is uniquely bloodthirsty in this way go go watch documentaries about the the the the the settlers in the West Bank. There's interviews all over YouTube right now. Abby Martin did the famous one, but you can go see a bunch of them where you just ask them questions. And they're like this genocidal fascist rhetoric comes out. You know, what the, what the settlers, the armed, violent,

conscious settlers and the occupied West Bank do to Palestinians in the area is straight up fascism. It's black shirt and brown shirt type shit, right? Terrorizing people with the full backing of the IDF. So this idea that Islam is, you know, is uniquely hateful of other religions, is uniquely exterminationists in their rhetoric, is absolutely insane. Every single religion has that element of their political spectrum. And every single religion has revolutionary parts of their political spectrum, right? There have always been revolutionary elements within Christianity, within Islam, within Judaism, right? And that is never, never addressed. Sam Harris will never talk about the full spectrum.

of Islamic thought, and he will never connect radicalism and extremism to any sort of occupation, imperialism, you know, the stripping of self-determination, et cetera. And that will become incredibly clear. Because, and I want to make this point very clearly before Sam Harris continues to talk, this is idealism. When we as Marxists talk about materialism versus idealism, Sam Harris is the quintessential idealist, meaning what he will attribute radicalization and, Islamism in the Arab world, what he'll attribute those politics and that extremism to is ideas inherent in Islam. And he'll make this, he'll make this fucking case incredibly clear right here. It's the ideas uniquely within Islam that produces jihadism and Islamism and these terrorist movements, including Hamas. Never once will he say that this has anything to do. with geopolitics, with economics, with imperialism, with colonialism, with neo-colonialism. These terms are not in his fucking head. You can go a two-hour discussion on Israel and Palestine right here with four fucking white guy dipshits.

And you'll never hear the word settler colonialism. I'm sorry. If you talk for two hours about the Israel-Palestine conflict and the word settler colonialism doesn't tumble off your lips once, you have no fucking clue what you're talking about. Except the one tree, yes. Yeah, that's right. So the difference in intention, while people think intention is this abstraction, intention is the software that everyone is running. Intention is the best predictor of what people will do if they're given an opportunity to do it, right?

If they have the power to do it, if they have the technology to do it. So this is intentional ethics, that, you know, the consequences, the actual behavior, the actual impact of your choices are not as important as what you're intending to do, right? So Israel is intending in Sam's world in his fucked and weird mind. Israel is intending to build this beautiful democracy in the Middle East, et cetera. And so, you know, when they slaughter civilians and they bomb Gaza and they do these other things, they're all doing it with good intentions. They're doing it for good intentions. When Hamas fights back, they're not fighting for their land or their people or their own sense of dignity or for all their fallen comrades. They're fighting for this

terrible reactionary worldview in which they want to subordinate the entire world to Islamic jihad, right? So they're bad. So when they're fighting valiantly and bravely for their own people against the settler, colonial, occupying military force, their intentions

are bad. Therefore, they're terrorists. They're terrible. Right. Now, when Israel slaughter civilians, you know, by many more magnitudes of degrees higher than anything that Hamas could accomplish, that's okay because their intentions are pure.

This is the kindergarten-esque bullshit that passes off as public intellectualism. This is a Stanford PhD student who has written multiple books who is seen as a as a big public intellectual figure in American life and has been since 9-11. And these are the arguments that they turn out. Fascinating.

What will a jihadist organization do if it gets nuclear weapons? What will the jihadist organization do if it gets a, you know, a vizabeth? bio weapon, right? We know the answers to these questions. These people have been telling us this for as long as I've been alive and in isolated cases, absolutely proven to a moral certainty their commitment to nihilism and massacre. I mean, the Islamic State, if you couldn't, if you knew the details of what was happening in the Islamic State and couldn't understand that these

people mean what they say and believe what they say they believe, then you're living on another planet. So anyone who's surprised, the only surprise here is that there was an assumption and a historically understandable assumption that Hamas was not as extreme as Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. And it certainly seems that some among them are prepared to be that extreme.

So, but, I mean, we're splitting hairs. I mean, jihadism is a fairly unified concept, you know, whatever the methods, whatever the methods and the past behavior. And we just have to acknowledge that there is a subset of people in the Muslim world who, for whom it is true, as they say of themselves, that they love death more than we love life. we being free, secular people everywhere, Jews, Christians, moderate Muslims. There are people who actually want to be martyred and see their kids martyred. Right. They're not bluffing. They're perfectly willing to die.

This is also the colonialist framing of savages versus civilization, right? This is the, this goes back to European, the first steps of European colonialism. colonialism, and it culminates in stuff like race science, et cetera, but this idea fundamentally that, you know, European powers and European colonialism in particular is bringing civilization to debased savages. And actually, it's the white man's burden. It's the European white man's burden to bring civilization to these barbarians and these savages. That is pure colonialist rhetoric. And by tying Muslims, Palestinians, to the most extreme versions of jihadist Islam and painting everybody with that brush and talking about

the good intentions of Israel, right? He's playing directly into these tropes. And you think somebody with a little bit of historical knowledge and a little bit of self-awareness would at least try to change some of the terminology around or try to obscure the fact that this is the sort of logical framework that they're operating within. He doesn't have those things. He doesn't have the self-awareness or apparently the historical knowledge to even attempt to do that. So the stuff that he comes out and says like these intentional ethics like this idea that israel is has great intentions at heart and they want to build a beautiful civilized world and these Palestinians are these savages who have terrible terrible intentions and they want to destroy civilization i mean come on man you could have been on the fucking you could have been on the frontiers in the 1800s talking like that and everybody around you would have felt like you fit right the fuck in for the pleasure and and um opportunity of killing non-combatants, intentionally killing non-combatants. So the moral error that people are going to make now and they're already making it is to think that when Israel tells people to evacuate northern Gaza and they don't because Hamas is telling them not to do it, or it becomes practically impossible and Egypt doesn't let them out, et cetera, and they drop bombs targeting Hamas installations that have been purposefully put next to civilian areas that will call them.

carnage when Israel. Where are non-civilian areas in Gaza? Where are the non-civiliate? Where could Hamas launch its rockets from that would undermine this claim by Zionists? That they're cynically using human shields, using hospitals, schools, apartment buildings to coordinate their plans, to carry out their attack? Where else? Is there like a little designated zone within that hyper dense Gaza strip where Hamas could fight back from where they would not be accused immediately of using human shields

Jesus Christ and then the whole thing about Egypt not letting them in that's there's lots of reasons for that it's a complex issue any country taking in huge loads of refugees especially one that is struggling economically and politically and socially

to take in a huge amount that's one problem but also it's also the displacement. Of course, Israel wants Egypt to open up its border, even though fucking Israel bombed the fucking Rafah, in Rafah the border passing into Egypt, but they want them to leave because that's what the Nakabah did. They want to disperse the Arabs into the surrounding area so they can fully solidify their control of Israel. So Egypt knows this. And they know goddamn well, just like in the initial Nakaba, that if you push a million Gazans, right, through South Gaza, through the border crossing into

Egypt, Israel's not going to let them back in. That's the whole point. So you're being obtuse if you are blaming Egypt for not wanting to do this on some level because Egypt understands that this is, you're trying to displace them. You're trying to push them all into our shit. We don't have the full capacity to deal with a million fucking refugees, right? That aside, you're trying to displace them into other surrounding Arab states so that you can solidify your control of Israel.

It's very obvious what you're trying to do. So, no, we're not going to let you do that. And also he says, oh, you know, Israel told Palestinians in northern Gaza to flee southward. And then Hamas said, don't do it. And that's why people stay and are getting killed. What are you talking about? Where in South Gaza can people go? If you're in your home, at least you have a home in North Gaza, in Gaza City or something.

And then you're told, no, go down to South Gaza. There's no room for you. There's no house for you. There's no job for you. of course. You're going to be sleeping on the streets or in refugee camps that we also bomb or you can go to the border crossing that we also bomb. Or you can be completely

displaced from your homeland entirely and go live in terrible refugee camps in Egypt if Egypt lets you do that. And this is the good intentioned Israel trying to do this. They bombed the caravans. They dropped those leaflets telling Ghazans to move south and then they bombed their

caravans when some of the Ghazans tried to do precisely that and move south. You know? So this is so disingenuous as if Israel's like Hey guys go ahead and just move south We're gonna bomb the fuck at all this shit But go ahead and move south And you'll be completely saved

You'll be taken care of You'll have a place to sleep You'll have food and no they're bombing the entire Gaza Strip by the way They're mostly bombing the north But they're also bombing the south So fleeing southward is not Some guarantee of fucking safety

Not to mention They're being bombed on their way to get there With no services there either They don't have electricity or fuel or food or water either, right, because of Israel's policies. So look how disingenuous this motherfucker is. And this is not an outlier. I'm not just

picking on some particularly insane Zionists. This is Zionism. It takes many different forms. It manifests in different ways. Sam Harris fancies himself as somebody on the center left. So this is a liberal, and he'll admit to this, he's a liberal through and through in the American context and in the

philosophical context. This is a liberal giving voice to his liberal Zionist opinion. wow bombs them like hospitals and schools and mosques when Israel bombs those targets and kids die which is obviously horrible that is the same thing as Hamas jihadists coming in under cover of rocket fire at dawn and murdering babies in their cribs it's not the same thing and body count doesn't in the Haitian revolution in North America when they fought back against the settlers. It's always this idea. The first thing you do is leverage women and children.

These conflicts are disgusting. Of course, there would be no violence in Palestine if the Israeli occupation wasn't there. There would be no children and women needlessly dying on either side if the occupation wasn't there. So all of those deaths can ultimately be attributed to the violence

inaugurated by the occupation itself. But importantly, with the beheaded babies and these hordes of brown men raping women with no evidence, again, plays into these colonialists. tropes. It's a way to dehumanize them to to reassert their savagery, right? And to reassert the innocence of the of the Euro-Israeli to consecrate this this move to innocence on behalf of Israel. Israel doesn't want to kill people. It just has to because Hamas is fucking

unreasonable. Hamas, though, they really want to kill people. And so you can't make a moral equivalency. What? That's a spirit. Agreed. Agreed. So we'll come to you in sec, Eric. But what... As are we all. But what does that mean, Sam? Let me ask you this, right?

The United States dropped a nuclear bomb on Japan, two of them. And after Hiroshima, I think it was Hiroshima, not Nagasaki, the U.S. Army went in, and they measured the blast impact. Not the release of energy from the nuclear bombs, but the actual destructive impact. and then they measured that and said how much conventional munitions would we have to use to achieve the same destructive impact. In the last year and a half of World War II, the Allies, the British and the Soviets and the Americans,

dropped 50 Hiroshima's a month on Germany. We flattened it, right? Because it was a death cult that took over that country and Hitler said, we're going to make a last stand. We don't care about civilian casualties. we're going to stand to the death. What you are saying is Gaza is in the grips of a death cult of the same nature, or worse. What does that mean?

I don't want a million children in Gaza to die and be burnt in bomb shelters like the Germans. I don't want that. And I wouldn't defend. Right there's an interesting little move they do trying to tie Palestinians and Hamas to Nazis. Palestinians and Hamas are fighting back an occupation in which they did not go out into the world seeking to destroy or eliminate anybody but were imposed upon an apartheid occupational brutal, brutal state, military power, police state, pushing them into pens and they're fighting back desperately from a position of extreme weakness. The fucking German Nazi movement was one of modernity, hyper-industrialized, deep fighting force on par with, at that time, the or one of the great powers. in the world going on the offensive because of fascist ideology

this idea of the Third Reich of the need to eliminate all Jews and take over Europe for the Aryan race so to compare those two is so sickening so disgusting but that moral equivalence is constantly constantly tossed around as if the

the Israeli apartheid does not have more in common with the Nazi state what Nazis did to Jews disgustingly horrific tragic right they're not doing it on that level but very similar things are being done a a stronger state power brutalizing and trying to eliminate a non-state people a people without an army without a state to defend themselves from so the analogy works much better if you compare

Israel with nazi germany and the comparison falls apart into incoherence when you try to say that Hamas and the Palestinians are the Nazis in this conflict. Our aerial bombing of German cities and, you know, our drop in the bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. I mean, I think there there was a calculation that, and again, I'm, I don't consider myself an expert on recent scholarship on this. I mean, I know that, we know you're not an expert. But 20 years ago, A.C. Granlin, the British philosopher wrote a book about the, the, specifically the Allied bombing of German cities

and concluded that it really was ethically unjustifiable, right? It's just, we told herself a story about how this was necessary to win the war and it was not a compelling story even at the time.

I'm not so sure what analysis is true there, but what I think I think Israel is held to a higher standard than certainly we were 70 years ago and even than we, you know, the British and the Americans are now. I think they should hold themselves to the highest possible standard. I mean, they certainly should be alert to the difference between committing war crimes and

following the international law that governs how you wage war. I think they should be as reluctant as they can practically be to kill innocent people and knowing that it's impossible not to kill some innocent people when you're trying to fight militants in a crowded city especially when those militants

based on their own completely deranged moral worldview are committed to using their own people as human shields. There's the human shield argument. There it is. That, that disparity is as far as the moral, you know, algebra that can give you insight into the difference between the two sides, that disparity says everything to me. It's like, you know, this is something I've recently said on my own podcast, but if you just imagine the Israelis attempting to use their own non-combatants as human shields, right, in any conflict against jihadists, you know, let's say Hezbollah comes across the northern border, and the Israelis line up with their own women and kids, you know,

putting the barrels of their weapons on the shoulders of their children, thinking that Hezbollah is going to be reluctant to shoot through the bodies of their children to kill IDF? That's also the obscuring of the reality with the human shield rhetoric. When somebody says human shield, the picture that pops in in most people's head is this idea of a soldier, like literally holding a human body in front of them, shooting around them, like in an action movie or some shit. when you know somebody's shooting at you you grab an innocent person you hold them up in front of you and you shoot around them so they can get littered with bullets but you can you can have some protection

right but this is this is the sort of bait and switch because that idea is not what's really happening it's not like Hamas comes out with like Palestinians you know right in front of them and they're shooting over their shoulders they're talking just about when they say human shield again what I was talking about earlier they're just talking about that Hamas is so integrated with Palestinians in this concentration camp of Gaza that um you know for them to do anything is for them to use a human shield. For them to launch any attack out of Gaza is for them, by definition, to use

a human shield because of the civilian density of Gaza and the ability for, the disability for anybody to leave that area. They're penned in. They literally can't do anything else. And that's what they talk about when they use the human shield. But they like to obscure it a little bit. And here Sam Harris is using

that trope, that caricature of a human shield, as if Hamas fighters are literally holding up their own family and friends in front of them as they go to shoot Israelis? Again, savages for civilization. This is the ideas in their head from 500 plus years of European colonialism. Olders, it is a completely surreal, you know, Monty Python sketch where all the Jews die. It is not, it is laughable, it is unthinkable, it's unthinkable at every level of it. It's unthinkable that the Jews would treat their own children

and non-combatants that way, given what they believe. Also notice how he says the Jews instead of Israelis, right? There's the distinction. Jews and Israelis are two separate things. Jewish people and the Jewish traditions exist and flourish and always have outside the conceptual or material confines of Zionism in the Israeli state. Many Jews around the world are harsh critics of Israel, not in my name. We hear chanted all over the planet by brave Jewish people who are against this.

shit and instead of saying Israelis or settlers or whatever he says the jews about everything and it's unthinkable that they would think that their enemies would be deterred by that behavior right but when you reverse it as it is the case in in the real world we have had to we al we westerners and the Israelis have had to confront this behavior on multiple fronts in every conflict against jihadists, they routinely use non-combatants as human shields, and Hamas is doing that now. I think Israel has to figure out how to navigate around that and eradicate jihadists, you know, eradicate Hamas. We're confounded to some degree by our terminology here. We keep talking about terrorists, and we had a war on terror for, you know, a quarter of a century now.

Terrorism is a tactic. Terrorism is not the thing we're fighting. We're fighting jihad. What's the difference, Sam? Explain to people, what's the difference? He's calling national liberation struggles jihad, right? We're fighting jihad as if it's like, Israel just exists. And then there's these jihadists who just hate Israel because they're Jewish.

And so because they're Muslims and they have this savage ideology, they just want to kill all the Jewish people. It's like, no, this is a liberation struggle. They're fighting for their land to end the occupation so they can have freedom, so they can have self-determination. And you're framing it as if this is just like jihad in a vacuum, that just because of their ideas inherent in Islam, they're carrying out a jihad against Jewish people in the region. It's a national liberation struggle. This is not fucking ISIS. And even ISIS itself, a product of U.S. led imperialism in the region, right? To listen to the rest of this episode, please join the Rev. Left Radio Patreon linked in the show notes.

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