Sam Harris, Revisited

Reading the podcaster and once-author of "The End of Faith"

Back in the early 2010s, when the so-called War on Terror was still a primary focus of American political life, I accidentally found myself in a public feud with the popular "New Atheist" author Sam Harris. The drama began after I picked up a copy of Harris's book, The End of Faith. I was in my early twenties at the time, still forming my own beliefs, and curious to sample different worldviews.

Based on the title, and Harris’s advertised background as a neuroscientist, I expected the book to be a critical analysis of religion through the lens of scientific positivism. To my surprise, The End of Faith instead turned out to be mostly a rehashing of extreme neoconservative tropes about Islam and Muslims from the War on Terror era, packaged in the familiar style of pro-Israel polemics written after the Second Intifada.

Disturbed by Harris’s arguments, I wrote a review of The End of Faith, referencing not only the book but also some of his other public statements, including calls for blanket racial profiling of "Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim," and his musings about preemptively using nuclear weapons against a hypothetical Muslim country to prevent it from attaining a nuclear deterrent.

To my surprise, the review, which was basically just my opinion as young person, generated a tidal wave of outrage from Harris and his devoted followers, who spent weeks publicly raging and even threatening me over it. Others eventually jumped into the fray on my side, including pre-Edward Snowden era Glenn Greenwald, who wrote an article about Harris for The Guardian. Believe it or not, the online fracas that began with a book review dragged on for years, spawning accusations of bigotry, intellectual dishonesty, Islamic extremism, and threats of defamation lawsuits by Harris against his critics.

Like all works of man, the controversy eventually did come to an end. Much has changed in the years since Harris wrote The End of Faith, and, though I haven’t followed him too closely, I gather that he has pivoted to becoming a kind of therapeutic centrist pundit. Notwithstanding my earlier critical comments about his work, and the fact that he probably still dislikes me for that, I’ve actually come to respect certain political stances Harris has taken in the years since our argument.

Unlike many in what was once called the “Intellectual Dark Web,” in recent years Harris has refused to kowtow to Elon Musk or Donald Trump, instead becoming a vocal critic of both. He has criticized Musk for dumbing down public discourse on Twitter, and Trump for his general attacks on the political culture of the United States. As a result, Harris has become somewhat isolated from his former allies in the alt-liberal movement. Despite facing significant personal backlash, he has stood firm, even at the cost of making enemies of powerful figures who would have gladly rewarded his loyalty. Whatever one thinks of his views, this consistency deserves credit.

Unfortunately, on the core issues where we originally disagreed, little seems to have changed. Recently, Harris dipped his toes back into geopolitical analysis following the October 7 attacks and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza. The results have not been good. As such I feel compelled, once again, to respond.

Sunday School

Last week, while scrolling through SubStack, I noticed Harris had published a new article entitled, “Islam, Israel, and the Tragedy of Gaza.” The title pretty much gives away his argument, and is emblematic of most of Harris’ post-October 7 commentary.

According to Harris, the details and history of the Israel-Palestine conflict—of which he freely admits to being unfamiliar and uninterested—are actually irrelevant. In case you think I’m exaggerating at one point in his article he literally just states, "The history of the Middle East is of no relevance to me."

The core issue as he sees it are not the actual events that have underpinned the conflict, but the fact that many Palestinians are observant Muslims, and by extension, dangerous jihadists. As a result of their Muslim religious affiliation, Israel, which is Jewish, must engage in a perpetual war of self-defense against them in which no quarter can be given. Any form of political reasoning other than brute force is unrealistic for Israel, given its religiously brainwashed and deranged neighbors.

Like much of his political analysis, Harris’ argument then unfolds as a thought experiment, divorced from real-world details. He even says that if the conflict were occurring "in some doomed colony on Mars" (a revealing metaphor), his views would remain the same. Since, according to Harris, Palestinians want nothing else but to kill and die for religious reasons, issues like land dispossession, family deaths, starvation, and military occupation can be waved away as irrelevant and woke details.

After a long dirge going through the Freedom House rankings of Muslim countries, LGBT rights, apostasy, and various other general issues not related to the Israel-Palestine conflict, Harris says that he considers Israel, “a frontline state in the larger conflict between open societies and militant Islam,” adding that he supports it not for sectarian reasons but because it protects, “free speech, women’s and LGBT rights, and scientific progress.” (The free speech rights, womens rights, and LGBT rights of Palestinians being killed and detained by a seven decade-long military dictatorship are left unmentioned in his analysis.)

These are really extreme views. Its not even clear that most Israelis believe these things, even if they are committed to the conflict for other reasons. As such, it would be interesting to know how Harris developed such a worldview.

The problem seems to be partly that rather than any empirical experience or study, Harris’ views are ultimately based on self-constructed thought experiments (“a colony on Mars”), whose inputs are either derived from vulgar cliches he heard growing up, or incorrect information about present events.

As Harris writes in one unintentionally revealing passage:

The current war in Gaza is one of the most tragic episodes in the larger struggle between jihadism and open societies, and the suffering of Palestinians is as horrific as it is undeniable. But the proximate cause of this suffering is not merely Israeli bombs—it is the millenarian nihilism of Hamas. The war could end tomorrow if Hamas released the remaining hostages and ceased attacking Israel. This fact is consistently ignored by those who blame Israel for the devastation in Gaza.

The primary reason that people “consistently ignore” this claim about the current war in Gaza is probably that its not true. The Israeli government, which had already killed thousands of people in Gaza before the October 7 attacks, has never claimed that the war will end if the hostages are released. From the earliest weeks of the conflict, Hamas has offered to release all of the hostages in exchange for a peace agreement. But the reason this has never happened is because the Israeli government does not want the war to end. This is partly for Netanyahu’s own political reasons, but also because the publicly stated war aim of the Israeli government is not returning the hostages, but enforcing the “voluntary emigration” of the population of the Gaza Strip under threat of violence and starvation.

Addressing the Israeli Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee earlier this year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that Israeli forces are “destroying more and more homes,” so that, “the only inevitable outcome will be the wish of Gazans to emigrate outside of the Gaza Strip.” Less-polished members of his government have described their motives in even more extreme terms. These are things that anyone who actually follows this subject professionally should be aware of.

A lot of Harris’ analysis almost makes you feel bad for him, as he is clearly trying to do damage control. In response to horrifying footage of women and children in the Gaza Strip being murdered or starved to death by the Israeli military, whose soldiers are now telling the Israeli press that they had been directly ordered to kill civilians, he weakly offers that, “Whether or not Israel has done enough to mitigate the loss of innocent life in Gaza is debatable, and I won’t be surprised if some members of the IDF are found guilty of war crimes.”

But even that is too much. Harris then pivots back to defending the honor of the Israeli government, immediately clarifying that even in the case of these regrettable, obviously accidental incidents, “much of the onus rests with Hamas, whose members dress in civilian clothing and use crowds of noncombatants as cover for their attacks.”

Harris’ arguments often sound like Golda Meir quotes he must have heard in Sunday school growing up, and never bothered interrogating later in life. Again, notwithstanding his professed disdain for all religions, it seems like some of his own readers have even been interrogating him about whether his Jewish background is making it impossible for him to judge this situation impartially (For the record, this is not an argument I would make) as in the footnotes to his article he feels forced to clarify that, “My support for Israel is not tribal; it is ethical.”

At one point, Harris says that he still believes the familiar Israeli aphorism: “If the Palestinians put down their weapons, there would be peace. If the Israelis put down their weapons, there would be a genocide.”

But in 2025 believing this cliche requires ignoring the fact that Palestinians are currently the ones offering to put down their weapons, and that Palestinian leaders in the West Bank as well as the entire Arab League have offered to accept a two-state solution in exchange for full normalization for over two decades, while Israel has refused any peace agreement because it would interfere with its own stated goal of ethnic cleansing.

World War Z

I’m not aware that Harris has ever actually actually lived, extensively traveled, or reported anywhere in the Middle East, aside from Israel. In all his writings he never makes references to any actual experience with Palestinians or Muslims that has led to him to adopt his analysis, so its not clear where his own confidence in his extreme views is coming from. Throughout his entire career he has simply deemed the entire Israel-Palestine conflict a war between civilized and reasonable Israelis on one side, and an indistinguishable mass of World War Z-esque brainwashed Muslim zombies on the other.

The root cause of the conflict, according to Harris, is simply the fact that Palestinians take their religion too seriously. But this argument doesn’t even make sense on its own terms. In the Middle East, the countries today that are more closely aligned with Israel, particularly the Gulf Arab states, have far more conservative Islamic cultures than the Palestinians, whose own society is probably about as religious as churchgoing Americans were before the 1968 cultural revolution. So if the war is all about religion and who is the most conservative Muslim, and, thus, in Harris’ view, the most “jihadist”, why is it that Saudi Arabia is more accommodating of Israel? Could the fact that comparably liberal Palestinian and Lebanese societies have been the ones fighting Israel have something to do with the fact that Israel has been occupying and dispossessing their countries, rather than what Harris claims is their jihadist brainwashing?

The history to which Harris proudly admits his indifference might actually be helpful for him to know. For most of the 20th century, the Palestinian armed resistance against Israel was led not by Islamists but by secular nationalists, leftists, and even Orthodox Christians, many of whom engaged in more extreme violence than political Islamist groups like Hamas. After the destruction of these groups, Hamas emerged as what you could call a right-wing anticolonial movement that appealed to traditional conservative values, including religion, as a way to hold together the torn fabric of Palestinian society under military occupation.

But even that dynamic is changing. Today in the West Bank many of the new generation of militias fighting against the Israeli occupation are secular nationalist in ideology, a development that again contradicts Harris’ views, and for which he offers no comment or explanation.

Danger!

Reading his Israel-Palestine analysis, it seems that Harris has not changed that much over the years. But despite his own intellectual stalling, my previous negative views about him have still softened a bit. Back when I first read The End of Faith and came across what I saw as his vulgar and false characterizations of the non-Israeli people of the Middle East, I had assumed that Harris must be driven by some kind of malice. But upon further reflection and analysis of his work, I think its clear now that he is not mainly driven by hatred, but by fear.

Harris often expresses his political views with palpable anxiety, whether demanding the profiling of people who “look Muslim,” or saying things like, “Hunter Biden could have had the corpses of children in his basement, I would not have cared… That’s how dangerous I think Donald Trump is.” He’s also very vocal about his neuroses over his personal safety anytime someone criticizes him online. After October 7, Harris said he embraced a more explicitly pro-Israel stance because of “a deluge of antisemitism, Holocaust denial, and moral perversity” which he says he mainly witnessed on the internet.

Harris’ fears may lead him to evil places. But it is still important to understand where he is coming from. I too oppose antisemitism and am no fan of Trump, who, after all, made a “Muslim Ban” a centerpiece of his politics, and, arguably, has a generalized hostility towards minorities and immigrants like myself. But I try to analyze these issues calmly and professionally rather than letting base emotional sentiments overwhelm me, or convince me to support things that are objectively monstrous, including the mass murder of innocent men, women, and children. That is probably something that Harris should also try and reflect upon since he considers himself a professional public intellectual.

Regardless of ones perspective about his views, no one can deny that Harris has a soothing podcast voice, and that his writing is also crisp and expressive. He also deserves credit for standing up for his beliefs even when its been personally difficult. But after revisiting his work more than a decade after I first read The End of Faith, I have to say that on our core issues of serious disagreement, I do not see much evolution.

This makes me wonder whether we even need this generation of pundits any longer, and what purpose they serve. It might be better for society if Harris just focused on his guided meditation courses rather than attempting to become a geopolitical analyst, or, even better, redevelops an interest in neuroscience. ChatGPT today is also capable of rolling out political cliches in a similarly calming prose style if directed by its user. And unlike Harris’ analysis of the Middle East, the quality of its outputs also seem to be improving in complexity over time.