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Sam Harris: Rational Man

December 30, 2023

In Substack

Sam Harris prides himself on his exquisite, cool rationality.  It is “obvious,” he says, that Muslim society is “powerfully deranged.”  It produces a prodigious number of suicide bombers.  Even Muslim children are “rigged to explode.”   It is thus “obvious” that this “powerfully deranged” culture poses a lethal threat to Western civilization.  What is to be done?  Israel has found one answer that Harris has embraced: do unto them as was done unto Amalek–i.e., kill every man, woman, and child.  It happens that Harris’s coolly rational Nazi precursors faced a comparable dilemma.  Jews exerted a “disintegrating effect” on Aryan civilization.  For all I know, that’s as true as the postulate that every time a Muslim student steps into my class, I should be on the alert that he might explode.  What was to be done?  Isn’t it  “obvious” that the only solution was to kill all the Jews.  Himmler, who was a smart fellow (obviously not as smart as Harris, who is Jewish), famously elocuted that “we had the moral right, we had the duty to our people, to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us.”  It’s such a rational argument–how could Harris disagree?  But even the children?  Yes, said Himmler.  Isn’t it obvious that, once we murder their parents, the offspring will eventually want to kill us: “We, as Germans, however deeply we may feel in our hearts, are not entitled to allow a generation of avengers filled with hatred to grow up with whom our children and grandchildren will have to deal because we, too weak and cowardly, left it to them.”  Now, isn’t that obvious, isn’t that logical?