Transcription
Hey folks, it's D Kov here, and I wanted to show you a clip of Sam Harris on Piers Morgan discussing how Islam fits into the Israel-Hamas war and what role it plays. Check out what he has to say.
In terms of why you actually came on tonight, we had an interesting debate last night involving several people. One was Masab Hamyeh, he's the son of one of the Hamas co-founders who then renounced Hamas and moved away. You said this about what's going on at the moment in the Israel-Gaza war. Take a listen.
"Any person who puts their religious identity above the highest interest of humanity, I have no respect for this people. The majority of the Muslim people identified with Hamas supported Hamas. Show me how many Muslims out there condemned Hamas genocide."
What was interesting about that is that he was really suggesting that the motivating factor behind what Hamas did and why people are supporting them in such big numbers in the Muslim community is because they're Muslims. It's religion-driven. Now, you're an atheist, but what do you think of this idea that it's actually really about religion?
Well, I'm going to agree with him. I think it's interesting to note that many of your listeners will doubt my ability to make the statements I'm now going to make, but they can't doubt that of him. I mean, he obviously knows whereof he speaks. You can't play the identity politics game with him and say that he doesn't understand the culture, he's the wrong skin color, he doesn't speak the language, etc.
So let's just flag that particular qualm with what I'm going to say. What I'm going to say should just be obvious to everyone, which is that we have a vast number of people in the Muslim community worldwide, not just in the occupied territories or in Gaza, who are powerfully deranged by religious symbols and their religious identity. This is to say it is the most important thing to them, even more important than the deaths of their own children.
We're talking about a culture—again, I'm not talking about just Palestinians; I'm talking about the Muslim community worldwide, in dozens of countries—that has produced a seemingly unending supply of suicide bombers over the last 50 years. We're talking about societies where phenomena that should be impossible are simply to be expected. I mean, literally rigging children to explode. Just think of how deranging that is for an army, or a police force, or an NGO, or anyone to have to imagine that a child isn't simply a child, but a child might, in fact, under certain circumstances, be a bomb.
I mean, that is the situation we're in. We're talking about a society—and now I'm talking about Gaza and the West Bank in particular—where in their schools they teach six-year-olds the love of martyrdom, the literal aspiration to die as a martyr, and the hatred of Jews. Many of these schools are unfunded.
So this is a terrifying situation which the world has simply acquiesced to. I mean, the world on some level has simply accepted that there is a different standard held to the Muslim community. We all understand that you can stage a play making fun of Mormonism on Broadway, and it can become the biggest musical in the United States, "The Book of Mormon."
But to stage such a play about Islam would be unthinkable. It would be unthinkable not because the First Amendment doesn't protect the freedom of speech with respect to Islam—it does—but that protection has been forfeited. It was forfeited long ago because of the tendency in the Muslim community to erupt with just psychopathic rage in response to what it perceives to be the desecration of religious symbols.
And that should be intolerable to us, but we have acquiesced to it. The new norm is that there are certain things you can't say about Islam, certain symbols you can't traduce. It's because we know that tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people will march into the streets, even in the capitals of Europe.
Could you flip the argument the other way too? Some people would say that the scale, the disproportionate, as many see it, scale of Israel's response is motivated in part by a religious motivation. That some of the more hardline, ultra-religious members of Netanyahu's cabinet really do want to have some kind of genocidal war with the Muslim Palestinians. I mean, does it work both ways?
Well, it does work both ways when you're talking about a tiny minority of Jews in Israel. I mean, the ultra-Orthodox, the settlers—who are a minority of settlers—who are motivated by their religious fanaticism. Yeah, I think those religious claims upon real estate in the Middle East are not justified, and they are, in fact, part of the problem.
So yes, the settlements in the West Bank are certainly provocative, and they should be disallowed. If we were ever going to get to a two-state solution, part of the remedy there is to disenfranchise the religious maniacs on the Israeli side.
But in terms of the scale of the problem, it is orders of magnitude smaller—not just for that particular region, but for the whole world. We're talking about 15 million Jews on Earth; most of them are impressively secular. Most believe very little that would motivate a person to want to die for their religious identity.
The real justification—yeah, I just wonder whether you think that what is going on now in Gaza, the kind of obliteration of a lot of Gaza, the mass killing of civilians and so on—which Israel will justify by saying they're trying to get rid of a terror group. I understand the thinking, but the execution has been so increasingly indiscriminate. Is there not a danger that it actually massively increases the radicalization problem rather than removes it?
Well, two pieces to that answer. One is that the real problem of radicalization—I do want to interrupt him with regard to the settlements and his term of radicalized Jews and settlers as being not good. It's just the opposite. They're the only entity that the Islamists respect. They're the only opposing force to the Islamists because the Islamists look at the rest of the Jews as very weak, easily subjugated, easily put in their place.
Then you have these other Jews that are like, you know, these Jews that aren't going to bend the knee, that aren't going to go with the flow, and aren't going to bend to Islam. Those are the Jews that are actually combating this Islamist expansionism and this Islamist mindset that is just taking over the world.
I would say is not connected in any kind of rational way to real-world grievances. I mean, the real problem of radicalization is the level of ideas—ideas around martyrdom and jihad that easily cross borders and, as we saw with the Islamic State, can easily win recruits from a hundred countries.
I mean, you literally have people who have no discernible grievance against anyone. I mean, you're somebody dropping out of medical school in London, going to fight with the Islamic State purely on the power of certain ideas. So that's a larger problem of jihadism and specific religious beliefs that are endemic to Islam and that it is taboo to criticize.
If you're certainly a Muslim, you risk your life and charges of apostasy and blasphemy if you criticize these ideas. But specifically with Gaza, the killing of innocents in Gaza is an absolute tragedy, and it's very easy to understand why people seeing that imagery think that Israel is in the wrong for producing so many casualties.
But they are fighting a terrorist organization, a jihadist organization, that is using its own civilian population as human shields. It has strategically embedded itself among civilians. It wears civilian clothing. It puts its headquarters under a hospital. It prevents civilians from leaving to safer areas because it wants to produce carnage, because carnage is an advantage in this PR war against Israel.
And frankly, these people sincerely believe in paradise. They think that good Muslims are going to go to paradise wherever they die, however they die. So there is, in fact, no problem with this carnage. And that's the thing that is very difficult for secular people to get their heads around—that people actually believe these things.
When members of Hamas chant, "We love death more than the Jews love life," that is a sincere expression of their worldview. It's not propaganda; it's not posturing. It is a confession of a psychological state of mind and of a worldview. We doubt that at our peril.
I mean, this is the issue we're dealing with: a suicidal death cult that doesn't care about its own civilian casualties. In fact, its own civilian casualties are an additional advantage for it somehow. When they tell you who they are, you should believe them.
Brilliant analysis by Sam Harris with regard to Islam. It's particularly important to understand with the death of Salwan Momika—I forgot the name—but there was a man that burned the Quran. I'm not endorsing that at all, but he was killed in Europe for doing just that.
Again, like Sam Harris says, in other religions, these things are not accepted, not loved, but tolerated to the point where if you burn a Bible, you're not going to get killed. If you spit on a Torah, you're not going to get trampled on. You're not going to have physical ramifications against you.
But with Islam, there are people that are radicalized, like in New Orleans, where the guy blew himself up, and all these other places where these Islamists—you would think that they have normal lives. You think whatever, but they believe in paradise, and they believe that doing these actions is actually the most moral thing that they can do.
That's a big problem for more. You can subscribe to the channel if you want to help us make more of these videos. You can go to buymeacoffee.com/JewishUncensored. Thank you, and have a good one.