About Israel-Palestine, Islam, antisemitism and the value of debate
JVL Introduction
I’d never heard of Sam Harris until now but it turns out he is quite illustrious, the author of five New York Times best sellers, an expert on meditation with a doctorate in neuroscience.
He’s also currently making waves in the States with a post entitled Why I Won’t Debate Critics of Israel.
He’s not your usual hasbarist. He clearly has huge criticisms of Israel. But he makes two underlying assumptions which trump everything: that the ethical difference between Israel and its enemies remains vast (and in Israel’s favour) and that “the global preoccupation with the Jewish state… is contemptible, being the product of perennial lies and delusions”.
These truths are so self-evident to Harris that he thinks it a waste of his time to bother to engage with anyone who might question him.
Peter Beinart is undeterred. He provides an entertaining and insightful critique of some of the underlying dogma and false assumptions as well as numerous counter-examples to skewer Harris’s argument.
Definitely worth listening to!
This article was originally published by The Beinart Notebook on Mon 8 Jun 2026. Read the original here.
A Reply to Sam Harris
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Sam Harris is one of a group of militant, crude, post 9/11 atheists, who include Richard Dawkins, the late Chris Hitchens and the late Daniel Dennett. The alleged grounds for their atheism was that they saw religion as the central cause of the world’s social and political.problems. However, this very soon morphed into Islamophobia. Ignoring the fact that there are a considerable number of secular and Christian Palestinians is entirely consistent with their views. So is ignoring the religious fundamentalist views that are expressed by some of the most rabid Zionists. It’s a very selective form of atheism.
The ‘crude atheism’ to which Philip Ward refers is probably better characterised as scientism, itself a quasi-religious belief that meaning only resides in scientific knowledge. Though the dogmas of scientism were around long before the arrival of the Dawkins crew, they were first brilliantly defined as a worldview in a scathing critique “The New Universal Church” in 1971 by the radical French thinker Alexandre Grothendieck, a holocaust survivor considered by many to have been the greatest mathematician of the second half of the 20th century, as well as being one of the first to warn in detail more than half a century ago of the environmental catastrophe humanity was facing.
Sam Harris provides an outstanding example that adherence to the worldview of scientism (whether or not in exact accord with Grothendieck’s definition) is no bar to adherence to a fanatic and idolatrous political cult.
That Harris has for years been lauded as a serious intellectual by the US elite when commenting on politics or political philosophy is testament to
the consensual arrogance of imperial political culture, which has inexorably developed into the openly genocidal depravity of our time.
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“The New Universal Church”. https://publish.uwo.ca/~jbell/univ.pdf
Grothendieck’s 1972 address to CERN physicists on the catastrophic ecological and human consequences of then current scientific research.
https://github.com/Lapin0t/grothendieck-cern
“don’t confuse me with facts,my mind is made up!” says Sam?
People who go on about Muslim fundamentalism, in essence its Wahabi manifestation, forget that first the British then the Americans sponsored this fundamentalism because we saw it, correctly, as oppressing its own people and hence sponsored them in Afghanistan against a liberal bourgeois regime that was allied to the Soviet Union. Well we know how that turned out. And then the Americans helped create ISIS in Iraq in order to divide opposition to their war.
More importantly they ignore Christian fundamentalism. The holocaust happened in Europe not Arabia. The most avid supporters of exterminating Jews were the ‘Christian’ ethno-nationalist states of Eastern Europe. Slovakia, the first country to deports its Jews was led by a Catholic priest, Josef Tiso. Croatia, the only only Nazi occupied state to have its own extermination camp, Jasenovac or Romania which slaughtered half its Jewish citizens, 300,000+ without any help from the Nazis.
Is antisemitism intrinsic to Christianity? No. Is it inherent in Islam? also no
Tony rightly points out the dangers of Christian fundamentalism. This is something the crude “militant atheists”, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Chris Hitchens and Daniel Dennett quickly learned to ignore. Initially, following the publication of The God Delusion (Dawkins, 2006), they were presented as intellectual critics of religion in general, but soon embraced Islamophobia and this became the main focus of their political activities. I’m not surprised that Sam Harris ignores the Jewish fundamentalism that some Zionist use to justify their support of genocide abd ethnic cleansing. So much for an informed critique of religion in geberal….