Humboldt County Jail Reports: Daily Booking Sheet – February 2, 2024

(I don’t think so, sounds like your cup of tea, but not mine…)

…”Yet on questions of foreign policy, Harris’s thinking can become nearly as dogmatic and blinkered as that of the religious zealots he’s dedicated himself to discrediting.

This was especially apparent on a recent episode of his podcast titled “The Bright Line Between Good and Evil.” Over the course of an hour, Harris laid out his views on Israel and why its present war with Hamas must be understood as a battle between “savagery and civilization.”

The core contention of his audio essay was that neither the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, nor the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, is at all relevant for understanding why Hamas perpetrated atrocities on October 7. In Harris’s account, the terrorist group’s decision to launch an unprecedented attack against Israel didn’t derive from any earthly motivation, let alone from specific political grievances or national ambitions. Rather, Hamas is simply a jihadist organization, comprising individuals who wish to secure entry to eternal paradise by killing infidels. “…

…”Nevertheless, insisting that Hamas’s actions were caused exclusively by jihadism is at least as mindless as claiming that they were entirely determined by Palestinian subjugation.

Harris’s theory of Hamas’s terrorism makes sense if you know nothing about Hamas.
Harris’s case for why we can safely conclude that Hamas’s 30,000 members are entirely (and uniformly) motivated by a metaphysical desire for martyrdom, rather than concrete political grievances, is built on a single argument: Hamas is a self-described jihadist group, and jihadist groups frequently commit atrocities that have no coherent political aim. As Harris writes, “There have been nearly 50,000 acts of Islamic terrorism in the last 40 years … 90 percent of them have occurred in Muslim countries. Most have nothing to do with Israel or the Jews.” He notes that in 2014, “six jihadis affiliated with the Pakistani Taliban attacked a school in Peshawar,” murdering 132 children and burning a teacher alive in front of her students. They committed these horrors in the name of no earthly cause, and issued no set of demands. Their rationale for the atrocities was entirely religious.

For Harris, the fact that some self-described jihadists have committed atrocities for purely metaphysical reasons means that no self-described jihadist could possibly be motivated primarily by political grievances. The fallacy here is so obvious that it’s hard to see how someone as intelligent as Harris could fail to recognize it. His logic is scarcely distinguishable from the statement “Stalin was an atheist, and committed violence in the name of socialism. Therefore, all atheists who commit violence are exclusively motivated by socialist ideology.” Clearly, it is possible for groups to share a broad worldview without having identical motives or commitments.

There is another obvious logical problem with Harris’s insistence that Hamas’s actions are explained by bad theology, and only bad theology: This stance cannot explain why these vile religious ideas acquire currency in one context but not in others. The Quran was not introduced to Palestine in 1987, the year Hamas was founded. So how can we explain why an extremist interpretation of that book came to prominence in a given region at a given time without reference to history or politics? Even if we stipulate (falsely) that Hamas’s ideology is as apolitical as Harris suggests, that would not prove that its outlook’s popularity in Palestine was unrelated to that nation’s political subjugation.

The primary problem with Harris’s monologue, however, isn’t logical but empirical. His rant betrays a total lack of interest in testing his theory of Hamas’s motives against actual evidence. He makes no reference to Hamas’s history — which is convenient, since it is very difficult to reconcile that history with the theory that the organization isn’t motivated by political grievances. Hamas took shape during the First Intifada, in response to the killing of four Palestinian day workers at a Gaza checkpoint. During its first year of existence, it submitted a request for negotiations to then–Israeli defense minister Yitzhak Rabin, and demanded an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands and the right of refugees from the 1948 war to return to their ancestral homes within Israel. The latter issue was of special importance to Hamas’s founder, Ahmed Yassin, who had been uprooted by Israel during the Nakba. After Israel rebuffed these demands, and killed more than 142 Gazans in the course of suppressing the Palestinian uprising, Hamas commenced its campaign to destroy Israel through terrorism.”…

…”Harris is as willfully ignorant of Hamas’s present as he is with its past. He suggests that western academics who refuse to recognize that religious fanaticism (not vengeful nationalism) drives Hamas’s violence have their fingers in their ears.”…