Molly Alter

Listen to Sam Harris skillfully eviscerate the “both sides” argument in the Israel-Hamas war: “The boundary between antisemitism and generic moral stupidity is a little hard to discern, and I’m not sure it’s always important to find it. I’m not sure it matters why a person can’t distinguish between collateral damage in a neccessary war and conscious acts of genocidal sadism that are celebrated as religious sacrament by a death cult. Our streets have been filled with people 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. And who are committed to doing this again at any opportunity, and are using their own innocent non-combatants as human shields. If you’re bothsidesing this situation, or worse, if you’re supporting the wrong side, if you’re waving the flag of people who murder non-combatants 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, and decapitating others and dragging their dismembered bodies through the streets — all to shouts of ‘God is Great.’ If you’re recognizing the humanity of actual barbarians, while demonizing the people who worry about war crimes, and who drop leaflets and call cell phones for days, in an effort to get non-combatants to leave specific buildings before they are bombed, because those buildings sit on top of tunnels filled with genocidal lunatics, who again have just sedulously tortured and murdered families as though it were a religious sacrament, because for them it is a religious sacrament. If you have landed, proudly and sanctimoniously on the wrong side of this asymmetry, this vast gulf between savagery and civilization, while marching through the quad of an Ivy League university, wearing yoga pants. I’m not sure it matters that your moral confusion is due to the fact that you just happen to hate Jews — whether you’re an antisemite or just an apologist for atrocity is probably immaterial. The crucial point is that you are dangerously confused about the moral norms and political sympathies that make life in this world worth living. What is more, you don’t even care about what you think you care about, because you have failed to see that Hamas and Jihadists generally are the principal cause of all the misery and dysfunction we see, not just in Gaza but throughout the Muslim world.” youtu.be/oFBm8nQ2aBo