(((Sam Harris))) is an atheist and anti-religion crusader who’s about as secular a Jew as you could even find. He’s made his claim to fame as a crusader against the Muslim religion. Jewish identity dies hard even when it’s as obscured as his is. Just to demonstrate this, let us look at the endless list of falsehoods that (((Sam))) dredges out in support of the Genocide Jews in Israel against the “jihadists” of Hamas.
Lie: First of all, he notes that Hezbollah is also “jihadist.” This moron who claims to be an expert on the Muslim religion actually knows nothing about at at all and he comes off as just as ignorant as any (((Israel))) shill out there. Hezbollah, whatever it is, is not “jihadist.” I’m not even sure what jihadist even means but he seems to be interpreting it to mean radical Sunni Islam that wants a global Caliphate, otherwise known as the Global Jihad crowd. Hezbollah has nothing to do with these people and in fact they hate them.
I believe Jocko Willink suggested something like this on his podcast (as many of you know Jocko is a Navy Seal who led the Seals in the battle of Ramadi. So he knows a lot about urban warfare and counterinsurgency).
One of Harris’ heroes is some maniac who fought the Iraqi people in Ramadi in the insane Iraq War which this crazy crusader Harris obviously supported. Apparently the Iraq War was a war against “jihadism” because Saddam was a “jihadist.” It wasn’t and neither was he, but it sure did a great job of jumpstarting the Global Jihad that Harris hates so much. Harris can’t see his own anti-Muslim jihad’s role in creating the very beast he rails against.
similar idea was recently described in an article by Bret Stephens in the New York Times, recommending that Israel provide humanitarian corridors for civilians to leave northern Gaza and safe zones in the South and perhaps in Israel itself where people can be protected.
(((Bret Stephens))) is a lousy rightwing neocon Jew who writes for the (((New York Slimes))). I guess this rightwing jerk is another of Harris’ heroes? Anti-jihadism makes the worst bedfellows. Also Israel obviously will not do anything of these things, so why petition them?
It would certainly take a long time, because Hamas has spent most of Gaza’s resources – billions of dollars in humanitarian aid meant for the Palestinians – building hundreds of miles of tunnels and fortifying them with food, water, and fuel so that they could wage jihad, all while the world holds Israel responsible for the deprivations of the Palestinian people.
This is apparently completely untrue. There are two separate budgets, one of the state and one for the army. They have different funding mechanisms.
The Palestinians of Gaza have been deprived of food, water, and fuel – and most other good things – by Hamas.
No it’s the deliberate sadism of the Genocide Jews in Israel who are responsible for all of this.
So, I can’t say whether this siege idea really is a good one. But if a siege of this sort were possible, it would have obvious advantages. It would signal a clear commitment to not harming innocent civilians –
Israel’s not doing this. They’ve opted for their specialty – genocide. Why ask them to be nice? They’re not going to.
because Hamas is using their entire society as human shields…
This doesn’t appear to be true either.
My friend Christopher Hitchens was extremely critical of Israel and openly supportive of Palestinian statehood. But he wasn’t even slightly confused about the problem of jihad.
Here we run into this endless problem that the Palestinian armed groups, in particular, Hamas, are “jihadists.” Notice elsewhere he discusses jihadists as Al Qaeda, ISIS, and their ilk. Every time Muslims take up arms to fight injustice, it’s an Islamic jihad or jihad. The conflict in Palestine is primarily nationalist in character. Hamas and Islamic Jihad are Islamists, but they are moderating all the time, especially Hamas.
Both are closely allied with Hezbollah and Iran, both Shia Islamic entities. Shia Muslims simply do not engage in the sort of Islamic jihad a la Al Qaeda and ISIS that he keeps referring to here. Shia Islam does not try to establish a caliphate. Shia Islam in all of these cases is nationalist and jihadism like Al Qaeda, ISIS, and the rest is never nationalist. In fact, they hate nationalism as they think it divides the umma.
And the Shia Islam of Iran and Hezbollah is remarkably moderate as far as Islam goes. Shia Islam feels that Islam must be updated to keep up with the times, like with the Catholic Church. Sunni Islam always has back to basics tendencies like Protestantism and there are always Sunnis who wish to dial back the clock and live in the year 700. You can go into the Hezbollah area in South Lebanon and order a drink in a bar. Jihadists?
The religious leader of Hezbollah issued a ruling allowing for female masturbation. It might seem silly, but I believe Islam even opposes that. The idea was that women need to satisfy themselves somehow if they are unmarried. In Iran prostitution is basically legal and allowed under the rubric of “temporary marriage.” The leadership is thinking of fully legalizing it under the same rubric mostly to protect the women. Jihadists?
Women actually have a good deal of rights in Shia Islam, more than they do in many Sunni countries. The hijab has been moving further and further back on women’s heads for a long time now, and many women don’t even wear one in Tehran. The last I heard was that nothing much is done about this.
Iran is extremely nationalist in its outlook as is Hezbollah, the pro-Iranian militias in the Iraqi military, Ansar Allah, and the Syrian and Lebanese governments.
There’s the pressing question of how America and our allies can support Israel while avoiding WW3. I certainly wonder whether a war with Iran is now more or less inevitable – and, of course, Iran is directly allied with Russia.
So he’s advocating war with Iran. Note that like all liberals, he hates antifascist Russia and instead sides with Nazi Ukraine.
There have been nearly 50,000 acts of Islamic terrorism in the last 40 years—and the French group that maintains a database of these attacks [https://www.fondapol.org/en/study/islamist-terrorist-attacks-in-the-world-1979-2021/] considers that to be an undercount. Ninety percent of them have occurred in Muslim countries. Most have nothing to do with Israel or the Jews.
He’s conflating the legitimate resistance against occupation in the West Bank and Gaza that Hamas and the rest are fighting against with “Islamic terrorism.” It’s nonsense.
and there is no question that some not-so-innocent civilians would arrive at humanitarian checkpoints as suicide bombers, and there would an infuriating loss of civilian life there even as Israel took great pains to protect it. But an approach like this would have denied Hamas a long series of propaganda victories based on the terrible imagery that has been coming out of Gaza.
Since when is Israel going to great pains to protect innocents? They’re waging a genocide, dammit.
And they totally discount the role that religious beliefs play in inspiring groups like Hamas and al-Qaeda, or even the Islamic State – to the point where it would be impossible for a jihadist to prove that he was doing anything for religious reasons.
Once again, conflating Hamas with Al Qaeda and ISIS. Hamas has been moderating for some time now. They cut ties with the Muslim Brotherhood recently. They rewrote their Charter to take out all the antisemitism and said their beef is with Zionist colonizers in Israel, not with Jews.
Everything I’m saying about the problem of jihadism is about the problem of jihadism – the triumphal belief by some percentage of the world’s Muslims that they must conquer the world for the one true faith through force, and that Paradise awaits anyone who would sacrifice his or her life to that end.
Once again, conflating Hamas with global jihad. Hamas is not part of the global jihad movement. They’re not out to conquer the world. They’re only concerned with Palestine.
In 2014, six jihadis affiliated with the Pakistani Taliban attacked a school in Peshawar. These jihadis came from outside of Pakistan – there was a Chechen, two Afghans, and three Arabs. They murdered 145 people, 132 of whom were children. They burned a teacher alive in front of her students, and then killed all the children they could get their hands on.
They didn’t take any hostages. They had no list of demands. They intended to die to achieve martyrdom. And they did die, so they got at least half of what they wanted. It is very difficult for secular people to understand how this behavior could be possible. They assume only madmen would do this sort of thing.
Conflating Hamas with the jihadist nutjobs in the Pakistani Taliban.
Human life only has value among you worldly materialist thinkers. For us, this human life is only a tiny, meaningless fragment of our existence. Our real destination is the Hereafter. We don’t just believe it exists, we know it does.
Death is not the end of life. It is the beginning of existence in a world much more beautiful than this. As you know, the [Urdu] word for death is “intiqaal.” It means “transfer,” not “end.”
Paradise is for those of pure hearts. All children have pure hearts. They have not sinned yet… They have not yet been corrupted by [their kafir parents]. We did not end their lives. We gave them new ones in Paradise where they will be loved more than you can imagine.
They will be rewarded for their martyrdom. After all, we also martyr ourselves with them. The last words they heard were the slogan of Takbeer [“Allah u Akbar”].
Allah Almighty says Himself in Surhah Al-Imran [3:169-170] that they are not dead.
You will never understand this. If your faith is pure, you will not mourn them, but celebrate their birth into Paradise.
Well this is how Muslims think, but it has nothing to do with “jihadism.”
Given the history of genocidal anti-Semitism, which persists even now, mostly in the Muslim world, given that the Jews have been run out of every other country in the Middle East and North Africa where they lived for centuries, if any people deserve a state of their own, organized on any premise they want, it’s the Jews.
In 1939, the SS St. Louis, a ship carrying over 900 Jews seeking to escape the Holocaust was denied entry into Cuba, and the United States, and Canada, and then forced to return to Europe, where many of those Jews ended up in the ovens of Auschwitz. In my view, that’s all the justification for Israel one needs. Never again should Jews have to beg to stand on some dry patch of earth, only to be denied one, and then be systematically murdered.
Jews still live in a number of Middle Eastern and North African states in significant numbers, especially in Iran, Tunisia, and Morocco.
I understand this argument for a Jewish state, and I don’t know what to say about it. The Jewish state doesn’t seem to protecting Jews very well these days though. I don’t think that any huge genocide of Jews is on the horizon in this world. The last go-round was a doozy, and I honestly think that most of the world simply doesn’t have the stomach for another huge massacre of Jews of any size. And no, 725 Jewish civilians killed on 10-7 was not another Holocaust or genocide, sorry. 725 Jews died. In the Holocaust, 6 million Jews died. Numbers matter.
If anyone has any answers about how we can assuage Jewish fears of another genocide, I’m all ears.
…literally tripping over themselves in their eagerness to demonstrate that they cannot distinguish between those who intentionally kill babies and those who inadvertently kill them, having taken great pains to avoid killing them, while defending themselves against the very people who have just intentionally tortured and killed innocent men, women, and yes…babies…
Hamas didn’t kill any babies, and Israel seems to be deliberately killing a lot of babies or at least engaging in acts that they know will kill a lot of them. And again, Hamas didn’t kill any babies.
If you are waving the flag of people who murder noncombatants intentionally, killing parents in front of their children and children in front of their parents, burning people alive at a music festival devoted to “peace”, decapitating others, and dragging their dismembered bodies through the streets, all to shouts of “God is Great.”
Palestinians didn’t burn anyone alive at a music festival. Israel did. I’m not aware of any dismembered body being dragged through the streets. Israel has been doing a lot of killing parents in front of children and vice versa in Gaza.
If you are recognizing the humanity of actual barbarians while demonizing the people who actually worry about war crimes and who drop leaflets and call cell phones for days in an effort to get noncombatants to leave specific buildings before they are bombed because those buildings sit on top of tunnels filled with genocidal lunatics…
Israel doesn’t worry about civilian casualties. They don’t drop those leaflets or do those cell calls anymore. They bomb without any warnings at all. That’s why they’re murdering so many people in this war. You aren’t going to hit a tunnel deep underground by bombing a building on top of the ground. At best you will collapse the building. There are tunnels under every building in Gaza. Hamas are genocidal lunatics? I don’t believe that the Palestinians have ever tried to genocide the Jews.
Gaza is only an “open air prison” because its democratically elected government is a jihadist organization that is eager to martyr all Palestinians for the pleasure of killing Jews. A rational government in Gaza that cared about the fate of its citizens could have made something beautiful out of that strip of land on the Mediterranean – or at least not awful. But Hamas has spent billions of dollars on terrorism.
No all of the underdevelopment in Gaza lies at the feet of Israel.
The line you keep hearing from defenders of Israel – that “if the Palestinians put down their weapons, there would be peace; if the Israelis put down their weapons, there would be a genocide” – happens to be true.
I doubt if it’s true. I read radical resistance sites all the time, and all they ever say about Israeli Jews is that they all have to leave. Iran has specifically stated that they have no intention of throwing the Jews into the sea. They only want a plebiscite on the future of the region.
We have LGBTQ activists supporting Hamas – when they wouldn’t survive a day in Gaza because Hamas throws anyone suspected of being gay off of rooftops. They’re directly supported by Iran, where gay people are regularly hanged.
I’m not aware that Hamas has ever thrown a gay person off of a roof. The only people who did that were ISIS. Iran did kill many gays in the early days, but they stopped in 2009. In recent years, two young men were hanged for raping teenage boys.
We’ve got feminist organizations like CodePink going all in for Hamas and accusing the Israelis of genocide. Do they understand how Hamas treats women? Did CodePink support the women of Iran who were thrown in prison and even killed for daring to show their hair in public? Do they realize that women are treated like property throughout the Muslim world and that this is not an accident?
How do Hamas treat women. Hamas has not implemented Sharia law in Gaza. They refuse to do so. No woman was thrown into prison or killed in Iran for showing her hair. That’s just a lie.
Hamas put its headquarters in Gaza under a hospital. Let me say that again: Hamas put its headquarters in Gaza under a hospital.
This isn’t true at all. This has been proven to be an Israeli lie.
Hamas is telling people to stay in Gaza and has even physically prevented them from leaving, so that they will be killed by Israeli bombs.
Hamas hasn’t prevented anyone from leaving Gaza. Israel and Egypt are preventing that.
No one cares less about Palestinian women and children than Hamas does.
This most certainly is not the case.
Of course, Israel should hold itself to the highest ethical standards for waging war. For two reasons: One, because it should. It is right for the IDF to do whatever it can to minimize the loss of innocent life. And, two, they should hold themselves to the highest ethical standards because the rest of the world will hold them to impossible ones.
Well, they are failing grotesquely on both grounds and they are waging an out and out genocide in Gaza.
But Assad has killed hundreds of thousands of his fellow Muslims in Syria.
“Assad” has not killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Syria. There’s a civil war which has resulted in 500,000 dead. “Assad” didn’t kill all those people.
However long it takes, members of Hamas, Hezbollah, al Qaeda, the Islamic State, al Shehab, Boko Haram, Pakistani Taliban, and every other jihadist organization on Earth should be made to understand every day of their lives that the martyrdom they seek will be granted to them.
See, once again, he lumped in nationalists Hezbollah and Hamas with Sunni global jihadists Al Qaeda, ISIS, Al-Shehab, Boko Haram, and the Pakistani Taliban. It’s ridiculous.
Jihadism has to be destroyed in every way it can be destroyed – logistically, economically, informationally, but also in the most material sense, which means killing a lot of jihadists.
The Palestinian resistance, Iran, and Hezbollah are not “jihadists.”
Back in 2016, I released an episode of this podcast titled What Do Jihadists Really Want?, based on an issue of the magazine Dabiq, put out by the Islamic State.
Conflation of ISIS with Hezbollah and Hamas.
Now, jihadists themselves are not a unified front. There is a very deep schism between Sunni and Shia – despite the fact that some groups will collaborate across it, as we see with Hamas and the Iranian regime.
There are no Shia jihadists and Hamas are not “jihadists” either.
If you want a totally painless way to do this, watch Hotel Mumbai – it’s a great film that depicts the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008, by the Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Taiba. If you’ve forgotten, around a dozen jihadists killed over 160 people in Mumbai, many at the Taj Hotel…
Those are LET Sunni global jihadists.
In any case, the Jews in Israel are “indigenous people.”
Not at all. The Zionists came with the explicit intention of colonizing that whole land to create a Jewish state and it was their intention throw all of the Arabs out from the very start.
There has been a continuous presence of Jews in what is now Israel for thousands of years.
So what? There have been continuous presences of all sorts of people all over the world as minorities for a very long time. It doesn’t give that minority a right to immigrate en masse to the place for the purpose of colonizing it, forming an ethnic state, and throwing out the natives.
Most of the recent immigrants – Jews from Iraq, and Syria, and Yemen, and Libya, and other Muslim-majority countries were driven from their homes by their Muslim neighbors after 1948 in collective punishment for the founding of Israel. Is anyone talking about their right of return?
They do have a right to return, at least in Iraq and Syria and most other places. Bottom line is none of them want to go back.
Incidentally, if a history of land theft and oppression were sufficient to produce genocidal terrorism, where are the Native American suicide bombers? Where are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers?
The Tibetans didn’t get their land stolen. There was no genocide of Tibetans. The Native Americans laid down their arms in 1890. Anyway, Palestinians are not genocidal.
…jihadism is real; its intentions toward the Jews, infidels, and apostates are genocidal…
Perhaps, but Hezbollah, Iran, Hamas and the Palestinians are not part of the global jihad.
Because if the future is going to be remotely tolerable, the vast majority of Muslims have to disavow jihadism and unite with non-Muslims in fighting it.
Once again, there is no jihadism with Iran, Hezbollah, the Palestinians, or the Houthis.
It will also entail that the religious lunatics on the Jewish side get sidelined. As I said, the building of settlements has been a continuous provocation.
Yes, but Israel will never stop building settlements. Israel has been getting increasingly rightwing for 15-20 years now and the trend is accelerating. The pro-settlement faction of Israeli society has been growing for all this time and is now completely dominant. It is projected to get even more extreme with time. Furthermore, Jewish religious nationalism has also been growing in Israel for all this time. This trend is also increasing. So neither of these things he wants are going to happen. So what’s the point of advocating for them?
Just think about what happened at the Supernova music festival: At least 260 people were murdered in the most sadistically gruesome ways possible. Decapitated, burned alive, blown up with grenades…
No one at the music festival was decapitated or burned alive and I doubt if many or even any were killed with grenades. Israel made all this up. Also most people killed at that festival were killed by Israel.
Please absorb this fact: for the jihadist, all of this sadism – the torture and murder of helpless, terrified people – is an act of worship. This is the sacrament. This isn’t some nauseating departure from the path to God. This isn’t stalled spiritual progress, much less sin. This is what you do for the glory of God. This is what Muhammad himself did.
Yes there’s a problem with Islam in that whenever Muslims go to war, they tend to act like this. But that’s not global jihad. It’s just the way that Muslims naturally fight wars.
It’s too late for all of this “Why doesn’t Israel act nice?” stuff.
Well, can we ask them not to commit genocides?
But you have to understand that the people who butchered over 1,400 innocent men, women, and children in Israel on October 7th were practicing their religion, sincerely.
The fight is nationalist, not religious. Only 1,150 were killed and 450 of them were security forces. 725 civilians were killed, 475 by Israel and 250 by the Palestinians. So the Palestinians killed 250 innocent men, women, and children, not 1,400.
From here.
I’m absolutely fascinated by the Jewish Question and especially antisemitism. Why the Jews? Why do people seem to hate them all down through space and time? What’s it all about? What do they do that makes people mad? What do the antisemites charge them with? Are the charges valid? How on Earth do they accumulate all that money and power and for what purposes? I’m especially interested in whether what the antisemites charge Jews with is true. I’ve been studying this for decades and what you see are my conclusions!
Before my mid-40’s, I didn’t even think Jews were different, and I’d known quite a few as my parents were Judeophiles. These highly assimilated Jews didn’t act much different from any of the rest of us.
Looking back on it though, there were a few things like hyperethnocentrism which I didn’t notice until much later. I just thought it was a bit of an oddity or curiosity. They were also a bit aggressive, though I did not realize it at the time.
Some of them could even be mean at times, but I didn’t connect this to his being Jewish. This was a friend of my father’s and I believe he thought I was screwing up in life, and I have a feeling that Jews really hate that. They really want you to get your shit together and it makes them pretty angry when they see you screwing up.
But definitely meanness was not their main characteristic. We had a great time with one of these Jewish men when I was a boy. We got together with both fathers and our kids and their kids and did stuff like climb mountains. The Jewish guy was making a big joke out of all of it, but it was not in a mean way. It was just sort of funny!
I went on a trip to Mexico with my father, brother, and another of these Jewish men. He was a pretty interesting guy.
I remember I was catching fish after fish (surfperch) and no one else was catching anything. He was curious and came up to me and noted that I was the only one catching fish and he asked me why. I gave him some mystical answer that I put my mind into it and put out a vibe to the whole area that I’m going to catch fish and then I seem to catch them. It sounds like bullshit but he thought it was very interesting. He had a very curious mind like that.
He had an avocado orchard and used to ask for me Spanish words to speak to his field workers. He was very smart. He taught Botany at a local community college and I think he had a Master’s Degree. He was basically an ok guy all around and he mellowed out as he got older. I never thought much about this guy being Jewish to tell the truth.
I think I noticed the aggressiveness, but I never put it together that the aggressiveness might have been rooted in their being Jewish. On the other hand a lot of them weren’t that aggressive, and they could also be kind. One of the younger guys was a very good friend to me, loyal and understanding and even feeling sorry for me when I was down. He wasn’t really a bad person. I never thought about this guy being Jewish. He had a lot of Gentile friends and his Jewishness never meant anything to me.
There was a couple who were friends of my parents. I knew them for 30 years before I found out they were Jewish. It simply never occurred to me that they might be Jewish. They didn’t act different. In addition, I didn’t go around wondering who was Jewish and who wasn’t. It didn’t seem like an important question.
I did think Jews were rude, loud, and obnoxious though. Even my family thought that. But I mostly thought that was funny. And the Jewish friends we and I knew were not particularly like that.
I had a Jewish girlfriend for 5 1/2 years. I was even going to convert to Judaism for her. But I wanted to be one of those self-haters like Chomsky. She agreed with everything I ever said about Jews. You should hear how Jews talk about themselves! They’re all antisemites!
Anyway, she was just a regular White person, almost Christianized really. She was always talking about “paying it forward,” which is a very Christian concept. She was also extremely well-mannered, frankly too mannered for my tastes, especially about not wanting to invade people’s privacy. She was almost a “White person on steroids” in that sense.
I’d struggle to see how she was different than any of my White Gentile friends.
She was rather domineering though, but I’m not sure if that’s a Jewish woman thing. She was extremely nurturing too, and a very stand by your man type like in that country music song. Old fashioned in that sense.
The theory that Jews took over the newspaper and movie industries from 1880-1920 because they were afraid of the media becoming antisemitic comes from David Duke of all people! That’s his analysis. I don’t think David Duke would be making up lies to make Jews look good, but some of the things he has said about Jews were quite fair. For one he noted that while Jews ran the banks at one time, they didn’t really run them anymore, so it was a fake charge. There’s a streak of honesty about him.
In the late 1800’s, newspapers were quite racist. I’ve read a lot of California newspapers from the 1850’s-1860’s, and the racism was just off the charts! After 1880, according to Duke, the Jews were getting alarmed at the racism of American newspapers because they feared it was going to blow back on them. This was when the Ochs and Sulzbergers took over the New York Times, etc.
About Jews taking over the media to use them for their own ends, I never noticed that other than in their coverage of Israel, which seems to be the only thing US Jews care about. That and antisemitism.
Thing is, I’ve noticed newspapers and TV news stations that went from Jewish to Gentile controlled and the message didn’t change one iota! Not even on Israel-Palestine! That’s when I started getting dubious about the whole “Jewish media is brainwashing us” bit.
This is when I started thinking that there is a basic “US media” way of thinking that journalists, editors, etc. share. This cuts across Jews, Gentiles, etc. Their mostly secular liberals but they share views on the Israel-Palestine conflict because they are members of an elite. They’re basically “corporate Democrats” and “shitlibs.”
I’m starting to think that if all the Jews took off tomorrow not much would be different. The Woke movement would keep going full steam along with the degeneration of society. Porn? The Jewish porn companies would simply be taken over by Gentiles. A lot of this stuff may well have been kicked off by Jews, but right now, it’s on autopilot so much that if the Jews left, nothing would change. Our policy on Israel would change though.
I believe that Duke also said that the Jews went after the movies after Birth of a Nation because they feared that White racism would blow back on them. Unz has challenged that, noting that Jews helped distribute that movie, and the head of Metro Goldwyn Meyer got his start with profits from the movie.
I also don’t have any evidence that taking over the movies was a conspiracy. I do know that five Jews from a 50 mile radius from each other in Galicia took over the movie industry from 1910-1920. I always assumed it was plotted, but I don’t have any evidence of that at the moment, and Unz has challenged that.