Despite what way too many people who really ought to know better are saying these days.

I screencapped this one rather than embed it like I ordinarily would because for some reason Twitter/X wanted to chop it off after the first few lines and insert one of those obnoxious “Show more” clickbait-links of theirs. Hopefully the text isn’t too small for some of the older eyes out there to make out; it’s really good stuff, and IMHO a very important read. If it is, maybe try this link instead, it might work better for y’all decrepit old fossils. More along similar lines from Harris, with whom I feel like I should be more familiar than I actually am, and likewise-important reading.

In the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack, it’s important to keep in view the bright line that exists between good and a very specific form of evil. It is the evil of bad ideas—ideas so bad that they can make even ordinary human beings impossible to live with. 

There’s a piece of audio from October 7 that many people have commented on. It’s a recording of a cell phone call that a member of Hamas made to his family, while he was in the process of massacring innocent men, women, and children. The man is ecstatic, telling his father and mother, and I think brother, that he has just killed ten Jews with his own hands. He had just murdered a husband and wife and was now calling his family from the dead woman’s phone.

Of course, all of this horror is compounded by the irony that the Jews who were killed on October 7 were, for the most part, committed liberals and peace activists. Hamas killed the sorts of people who volunteer to drive sick Palestinians into Israel for medical treatments. They murdered the most idealistic people in Israel. They raped, tortured, and killed young people at a trance dance music festival devoted to peace, half of whom were probably on MDMA feeling nothing but love for all humanity when the jihadists arrived. In terms of a cultural and moral distance, it’s like the fucking Vikings showed up at Burning Man and butchered everyone in sight. 

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…and from the jihadist side, this wasn’t an error. It’s not that if they could have known what was in the hearts of those beautiful young people, they would have thought, “Oh my God, we’re killing the wrong people. These people aren’t our enemies. These people are filled with love and compassion and want nothing more than to live in peace with us.” No, the true horror is that, given what jihadists believe, those were precisely the sorts of people any good Muslim should kill and send to hell where they can be tortured in fire for eternity. From the jihadist point of view, there is no mistake here. And there is no basis for remorse. 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 Muhammed himself did. 

There is no substitute for understanding what our enemies actually want and believe. I’m pretty sure that many of you reading this aren’t even comfortable with my use of the term enemy, because you don’t want to believe that you have any. I understand that. But you have to understand that the people who butchered over 1,400 innocent men, women, and children in Israel on October 7 were practicing their religion, sincerely. They were being every bit as spiritual, from their point of view, as the trance dancers at the Supernova festival were being from theirs. They were equally devoted to their highest values. Equally uplifted. Ecstatic. Amazed at their good fortune. They wouldn’t want to trade places with anyone. Let this image land in your brain: they were shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) all day long, as they murdered women and children. And these people are now being celebrated the world over by those who understand exactly what they did. Yes, many of those college kids at Harvard and Stanford and Cornell are just idiots who have a lot to learn about the world. But in the Muslim community, and that includes the crowds in London and Sydney and Brooklyn, Hamas is being celebrated by people who understand exactly what motivates them. 

S’truth. It’s beyond dismaying how, in such a relatively short span of time after the 9/11 atrocities, so many Americans could have forgotten so much already—especially seeing as how the jihadist filth have carried right on with their 1500-year campaign of bloodcurdling horror and brutality, committing numerous, if less spectacular, crimes against humanity across the civilized world since 2001. Can the Leftist Enemy really be as adept at propagandizing, brainwashing, and desensitization as that? Are American college students really so incapable of learning, of thinking for themselves, that they’d be susceptible to such Satanic blandishments? Will entire generations of our historically-illiterate young people have to be written off as irretrievably lost to pure evil?

The above excerpt is from a partial transcript of a longer audio interview with Harris, which is available at the link also. Like I said before, I’m minimally aware of Sam Harris as some kind of controversial New Right figure, and…well, and that’s about it, really. Never have read any of his stuff before; I do know he’s one of those gadfly pundits that routinely catches a crapton of condemnation from just about every side. Beyond what you just read, I can’t honestly say I know a thing about his views on other topics—as insightful and incisive as the above items are, he could still be full of shit as a Christmas turkey on everything else for all I know. I should probably try to do a little self-edjumacation on him, I reckon.

(Both via KT)

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