Sam Harris “Why I Won’t Debate Critics of Israel” A note to the Making Sense Community
The continuation of:
パレスチナ・イスラエル友人関係の象徴：エドワード・サイードとダニエル・バレンボイムのウェスト＝イースタン・ディヴァン管弦楽団
Symbol of Palestinian-Israeli Friendship: Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
https://art-culture.world/politics/arab-israeli-orchestra/
I am a descendant of ROBERTO (Axis Roma-Berlin-Tokyo) . documenta15 should be closed down. Because there’s no weed. (lol)
私はROBERTO（枢軸国 ローマ・ベルリン・東京）の子孫である。ドクメンタ15は閉鎖されるべき。大麻草ないから。(笑）
https://art-culture.world/reviews/documenta15/
私は東京国立近代美術館小松弥生館長の即時解任を要求します！
I demand the Immediate Dismissal of the MOMAT Director KOMATSU Yayoi!
https://art-culture.world/art-world/momat-director-komatsu-yayoi-小松弥生館長/
Satomi Nakai from New York: The Situation Divides The Art World ナン・ゴールディンの政治的意見とアート
https://art-culture.world/reviews/nakai-nan-goldin/
なぜ、日本歴史・戦争博物館は存在しないのか？ Why doesn’t a Japanese History / War Museum exist?
https://art-culture.world/cultural-essays/japanese-history-war-museum/
ドイツファシストの真の危険性 The Real Danger of the German Fascists
https://art-culture.world/politics/deutsche-faschisten/
左翼の為。飯山由貴「ユダヤ人絶滅」の宣言。ファック・ユー。
For the Left. IIYAMA Yuki proclaims the “Extermination of Jews”. FUCK YOU.
https://art-culture.world/politics/iiyama-yuki/
反ユダヤ主義や「ドクメンタ15」という文脈で：昨日のメロン・メンデル氏 (フランクフルトのアンネ・フランク教育センター所長) のクネセト選挙に関する記事
In the Context of Antisemitism and documenta15: Yesterday’s Article by Meron Mendel (Director of the Anne Frank Educational Center in Frankfurt) regarding the Knesset Election
https://art-culture.world/politics/antisemitism/
「カッセルのユダヤ人雌豚」 “Die Judensau von Kassel”
https://art-culture.world/politics/documenta-15/
今日はドイツの緑の党、ロベルト・ハーベック副首相がパレスチナを訪問
German Green Party Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck visited Palestine today
https://art-culture.world/politics/green-party-robert-habeck/
What is this Japanese Woman thinking, actually? さて。
https://art-culture.world/jp-society/what-is-this-japanese-woman-thinking-actually/
抵抗運動に参加しなかった横山大観や藤田嗣治との関係：ギリシャのフォークヒーロー、ミキス・テオドラキスの日独伊ファシズム・レジスタンス
In The Context of Artists Like YOKOYAMA Taikan And FOUJITA Tsuguharu, Who Didn’t Join The Resistance Movements: Greece’s Folk Hero Mikis Theodorakis’ Japanese-German-Italian Fascist Resistance
https://art-culture.world/reviews/mikis-theodorakis-横山大観-藤田嗣治/
2021年5月8日の認知症予防。「ロベール・デスノス、藤田嗣治、藤田ユキ、藤田君代。レジスタンス 対 戦争犯罪人。」
Dementia Prevention on 8th of May 2021. “Robert Desnos, Tsuguharu Foujita, Youki Foujita, Kimiyo Foujita. Résistance vs War Criminal.”
https://art-culture.world/art-world/robert-desnos-tsuguharu-foujita-youki-foujita-kimiyo-foujita-resistance-vs-war-criminal/
退廃芸術のアーティストたちのドイツ記念切手 (過去サイト・アーカイブの再投稿、2017年5月13日)
Deutsche Post Gedenk-Briefmarken zu Künstlerinnen und Künstler der “Entarteten Kunst” (repost from the archive, 2017/5/13)
https://art-culture.world/art-world/entartete-kunst-退廃芸術-アーティスト-ドイツ記念切手/
Sam Harris (born 1967) is an American neuroscientist, philosopher, bestselling author, and podcast host. He is widely known for his critiques of religion and as one of the key figures of the “New Atheism” movement, alongside Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett.
His work explores human consciousness, rationality, morality, and meditation. Key aspects of his career and contributions include:
Academic Background: He holds a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA, where he studied the neural basis of belief using fMRI.
Notable Books: He has written several best-selling books, including The End of Faith (which won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction), Letter to a Christian Nation, and The Moral Landscape.
Media & Platforms: He hosts the popular Making Sense podcast (formerly Waking Up) and is the creator of the Waking Up app, which teaches meditation from a secular and scientific perspective.
Core Themes: Beyond atheism and neuroscience, his writings and public discussions frequently address free will, ethics, politics, and artificial intelligence.
Critiques of Sam Harris from philosophers, scientists, and political commentators generally focus on his approach to philosophy, his views on religion, and his handling of complex social issues.
Philosophical and Scientific Criticism
Bypassing Academic Rigor: Academic philosophers often criticize Harris for publishing complex philosophical arguments—such as his views on free will or metaethics—directly for a popular audience rather than through peer-reviewed academic channels. Critics argue this allows him to bypass rigorous academic vetting and ignore extensive existing literature on these subjects.
Dismissal of the Is–Ought Problem: In his book The Moral Landscape, Harris argues that science can objectively determine human values by maximizing the well-being of conscious creatures. Philosophers widely criticize this for attempting to bridge David Hume’s famous “is–ought” problem (the idea that you cannot derive what should be from factual statements about what is) by simply redefining morality as a branch of science.
Simplistic View of Free Will: Critics argue that his outright rejection of free will relies on a narrow, reductionist view of human agency. They point out that he largely ignores “compatibilism”—the mainstream philosophical view that free will can coexist with a deterministic universe.
Geopolitical and Sociological Criticism
Reductionist View of Religion: Critics, including prominent figures like Noam Chomsky, argue that Harris focuses almost exclusively on religious texts while ignoring the complex historical, economic, and geopolitical factors that drive religious extremism and terrorism.
Accusations of Islamophobia: His sharp focus on Islam as a uniquely dangerous religion has led to intense public backlash and accusations of bigotry, notably during a highly publicized debate with actor Ben Affleck on Real Time with Bill Maher. Harris firmly rejects these labels, arguing that criticizing bad ideas is entirely distinct from bigotry against a group of people.
Public Intellectual Controversies
Platforming Controversial Figures: Harris has drawn severe criticism for hosting figures like Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, on his podcast. Critics argued that by engaging with Murray’s highly controversial theories linking race and intelligence, Harris lent mainstream credibility to discredited scientific racism.
Over-Reliance on Thought Experiments: Opponents argue that his use of extreme hypothetical scenarios—such as considering the ethics of a pre-emptive nuclear strike against a fictional state or the theoretical justification of torture—can be detached from real-world nuances and easily misinterpreted.
11th of June 2026, Paul Kopeikin, quoting Sam Harris:
“My views about the conflict in the Middle East will not fundamentally change unless my critics produce evidence that Israel has become as evil as her enemies.”
Why I Won’t Debate Critics of Israel
A note to the Making Sense Community
SAM HARRIS, JUN 06, 2026
Many readers and podcast listeners have been dismayed by my enduring support for Israel and now urge me to debate someone—really anyone—drawn from a growing cast of scholars, grifters, and moral lunatics who have made that beleaguered country their professional or psychiatric obsession. The Making Sense Community seems to have inherited this infatuation, leading to some heated exchanges in recent days. I’ve explained my position on Israel across several podcasts and in my public talks, but it might help to summarize it here.
First, my general attitude: I’m not interested in exploring all the ways that Israel has missed the mark—from Prime Minister Netanyahu’s corrupt alliance with the far right, to the many crimes committed by settlers in the West Bank, to the deaths of innocent noncombatants in several wars—because none of these failings, however grave, will alter my sense that (1) the ethical difference between Israel and her enemies remains vast, and (2) the global preoccupation with the Jewish state, as though it were the worst villain among nations, is contemptible, being the product of perennial lies and delusions.
Next, a simple heuristic: As I suggested in at least one Community thread already, if my intransigence on these matters mystifies you, it might help to understand that, for whatever reason, I think militant Islam is ten times worse than you think it is. When I talk about “jihadists” and their various groups—Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the IRGC, etc.—I’m talking about people who I consider to be worse than Nazis (jihadists being, essentially, Nazis who are certain of Paradise). My views about the conflict in the Middle East will not fundamentally change unless my critics produce evidence that Israel has become as evil as her enemies.
However, you can rest assured that if the IDF morphs into a death cult that uses its own civilian population as human shields (and yet somehow remains widely popular), if ordinary Israelis begin to celebrate martyrdom above every earthly priority, producing generations of bright-eyed, suicidal fanatics, if the residents of Tel Aviv condone the taking of Palestinian infants, old women, and other noncombatants as hostages and then gather in crowds of thousands, baying for their blood—if, in other words, the Israelis begin to resemble the Palestinians, then I won’t care who wins this war. Short of this, there remains a world of difference between the two sides, and I believe that we should focus on how brutalizing it is for any free society to confront enemies that can sincerely claim to “love death” more than everyone else loves life—for this has been Israel’s predicament for the better part of a century.
The problem in the Middle East is not, and has never been, the existence of the state of Israel. The problem is jihadism, Islamism, Islamic extremism, Islamofascism, militant Islam—or whatever words you want to use to describe the belligerence and triumphal lunacy of those who take the most pernicious doctrines of Islam too seriously.
I won’t debate the history of the Middle East because it is irrelevant to resolving the conflict there. Of course, many people insist that we must disentangle and reconsider every strand of this history, going back at least a century. The reason I’m convinced that this is a fool’s errand is simple: Palestinians and Israelis have discrepant accounts of the past, and no amount of study or debate will reconcile them.
What’s far more important to understand—and I think it really is the only thing worth considering—is what the current inhabitants of Israel, the Palestinian territories, and the surrounding Arab states want out of life now. (Not what they pretend to want or what a handful of royal families want, while their populations want something quite different.) What do the Jews and Muslims in the region really yearn to accomplish? What are they willing to sacrifice for? What are they willing to die for? And what are they willing to let their children die for?
When we focus on the present this way, if we’re being honest, we must concede that there are two very different realities on either side of this conflict: culturally, psychologically, ethically, spiritually—in every way that matters. Yes, Israel has its religious fanatics too. But they aren’t the same sort of fanatics we find in Hamas or Hezbollah, and they’re far less representative of the surrounding culture. Notwithstanding everything that can be said against Prime Minister Netanyahu, the Israeli far right, and the settlers in the West Bank—and there is much to condemn—I believe the following remains true:
If the Palestinians laid down their arms, there would be peace. There could be a two-state solution; there could even be a one-state solution; it wouldn’t matter. If the Palestinians simply stopped killing Jews and stopped building a culture that celebrates pointless murder and martyrdom as its highest values, there could be a diverse, tolerant, and prosperous society between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. There could have been one eighty years ago. But if the Israelis laid down their weapons, there would be a genocide. This was obviously true on October 7th, 2023. And for anyone who has been paying attention, it has been true on every other day since the founding of the state of Israel.
The truth is, I have never known how Israel should have responded to the events of October 7th. I only know that they, along with every other free society, must ultimately defeat militant Islam. How we should do this is genuinely debatable. But that’s not the point of contention among Israel’s critics, especially on the left. To them, worrying about militant Islam—even in Israel, even in the aftermath of the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust—is just more “Islamophobia.” It’s just more “colonialism” and “racism” (as though that last charge made any sense in the Middle East).
If you want to understand my view of this conflict, simply ask the one question that clarifies everything in the present:
What would each side do if it had the power to do whatever it wanted?
Though many pretend otherwise, everyone knows the answer to this question to a moral certainty.
If Hamas had the power, it would perpetrate a real genocide in Israel. The group has affirmed its commitment to this project on countless occasions, both before and after October 7th. And while it is true that Jew-hatred throughout the Muslim world has been made immensely worse by a century-long fascination with Nazi propaganda and conspiracy theories, this animus isn’t merely a modern phenomenon. For instance, there is a famous hadith which predicts that the End Times will not come until the very stones and trees cry out “Oh Muslim, there is a Jew behind me, come kill him.” Unsurprisingly, Hamas cited this hadith in its founding charter.
Most Palestinians know this, and yet Hamas remains popular. For over a decade, Hamas diverted foreign aid that was meant to improve life in Gaza and used it to build the largest bomb shelter our species has ever constructed—hundreds of miles of tunnels—and yet no Palestinian civilians were allowed to shelter there during the war. Why not? Because Hamas was using these men, women, and children as human shields. And when Israel made phone calls and sent millions of text messages urging civilians to evacuate, the loudspeakers in the nearest mosques warned them to stay in place. And Hamas snipers murdered many who tried to move to safety. The Palestinians know all this, and yet Hamas remains popular. Even after all the devastation that Hamas has brought down on its own people, it remains the most popular Palestinian faction, well ahead of its rival, Fatah. This is why there is no peace in the Middle East.
The suffering in Gaza is terrible, and I’ve never pretended otherwise. But the suffering elsewhere—suffering you aren’t thinking about—is just as real. You should ask yourself why you don’t care more about it. This difference, emotionally and politically, is what it looks like to lose an information war.
We haven’t seen all the dead children in Yemen, Syria, or Sudan, where the numbers are far worse than in Gaza, but everyone has witnessed the pornography of misery and death that has been steadily manufactured by supporters of Hamas. You might think that your special concern over Israel is due to the fact that we (Americans) supply many of the weapons the IDF uses to kill Palestinians. But we supplied arms to Saudi Arabia and the UAE for a war in Yemen that has killed an estimated 377,000 people. Where were those protests? Where was the celebrity sanctimony over Yemeni dead? Why didn’t Zohran Mamdani trumpet his opposition to this evil while campaigning to become Mayor of New York? Yemen was the world’s worst humanitarian crisis for years, with American weaponry and logistical support fully implicated, and yet it never became the organizing moral obsession of universities, media institutions, activist networks, or leftwing politics the way Gaza has.
To point this out isn’t to commit the rhetorical sin of “whataboutism.” Rather, it exposes a glaring moral disparity: The world simply does not care when Muslims kill other Muslims—amazingly, it doesn’t much care when they kill Christians either—but it does care, enormously, when Jews do it. The General Assembly of the UN and its Human Rights Council have passed more resolutions against Israel than against all other nations combined, including North Korea, Iran, Russia, China, Syria, Sudan, and Yemen. A few of these countries have committed actual genocides. None of this makes sense. But this is the world we are living in.
Of the world’s 193 nations, two-thirds were created by map makers who merely imagined their frontiers into being, without much regard for the tribal interests of the people living within them. In fact, more than half were created since 1948, the year that Israel was founded. And yet there is only one whose legitimacy is still debated everywhere. There is only one nation on Earth that must continually argue for its right to exist, even when the very survival of its people is threatened by avowedly genocidal enemies.
This obsession with Israel, and the double standards to which its people are held, now forms the center of mass of that shapeshifting moral affliction widely known as “antisemitism.”
I’ve lived most of my life believing that dangerous antisemitism was behind us, at least in the West. Unfortunately, the response to October 7th has put that assumption very much in doubt. The atrocities committed by Hamas revealed a level of Jew hatred, globally, that shocked even those of us who have been students of antisemitism for much of our lives. Crucially, this hatred showed itself before Israel invaded Gaza. When the corpses of the young people mutilated and murdered at the Nova Music Festival were still being identified, we had students at Harvard and professors at Columbia—and demonstrators in New York, London, Sydney, and Toronto—celebrating their killers.
Why does antisemitism matter? Well, for the Jews, it’s obvious why it matters, but why should it matter to everyone else? It matters because when you look at what antisemites also hate, you find they hate everything that makes culturally rich, diverse, open societies possible. Real antisemites bring with them more than just their hatred of Jews: they bring censorship, political repression, conspiracy thinking, and the politics of dehumanization and scapegoating. So decrying antisemitism is not an act of special pleading. It is a defense of the moral and institutional architecture that free societies require.
Let me close with another general point to members of the Making Sense Community: Many of you have written to tell me that you’ve lost respect for me over this issue (or that you still value my work and are giving me “a pass” on Israel). I reject this framing, and you should too. No one should be a part of Community just because they agree with me. I’m not running a political party, and there is no line for me, or for anyone else, to toe. If I’ve fallen off a pedestal because I said something you don’t agree with, the pedestal was the problem, not the disagreement. Of course, if you think I am lying to you, or that I otherwise lack integrity, you should leave and never look back. But if you just think I happen to be wrong, even about something important—especially about something important—I encourage you to keep showing up with better evidence and arguments. This, after all, is what a real intellectual and moral community is for.
https://samharris.substack.com/p/why-i-wont-debate-critics-of-israel
https://www.facebook.com/kopeikingallery/posts/pfbid06pv2GQ314iVU3x8syxhP7Dhu8t93eZGPu4eKQxezy8tRv9BH4Skp4rFPVEsCccapl
All pictures and texts have to be understood in the context of “Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial-NoDerivative Works.” ここに載せた画像やテクストは、すべて「好意によりクリエーティブ・コモン・センス」の文脈で、日本美術史の記録の為に発表致します。 Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial-NoDerivative Works, screenshot: cccs courtesy creative common sense