“October 7th CHAPTER 1: Work in Progress”
We live amid the tides of history but rarely know it. To know it is to see a familiar landscape suddenly inundated and to recognize that anything can happen at any time. On October 7th, 2023, history came flooding in, and we lost our footing. We have yet to regain it.
In many ways, the atrocities committed by Hamas in southern Israel were worse than the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. To grasp the relative magnitude of these events, Americans were encouraged to imagine Al-Qaeda killing over 40,000 innocent civilians in New York and taking more than 8000 hostages. But this comparison fails to capture the greater proximity of all Israelis to the violence of October 7th, the resulting depth of their anguish, or the legitimacy of their existential fears. Al-Qaeda was never a real threat to America, much less to all her inhabitants. The combined menace of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Republic of Iran puts the lives of all Israelis in peril.
Once reports and images of Hamas’s savagery began appearing online—and long before Israel retaliated in Gaza—we witnessed a great fracturing of public opinion, engineered and amplified on social media. Thereafter, it would be hard to overstate how confused much of the world seemed about the nature of good and evil. This confusion shows no sign of abating.
The lessons of October 7th should have been clear, and they will persist however the war in Gaza ends. Absorbing these lessons does not require that we untangle the wretched history of the region or reconcile the discrepant memories of its peoples. Rather, the moral order of the present can be understood by reference to the present, and by honestly acknowledging what both sides to this conflict actually want. When considering the ethics of any group or population, we should never hesitate to ask: What would these people do if they had the power to do it?
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When I clicked on the link to Sam Harris’ full Substack article, a prompt immediately appeared that said the article was recommended by former Daily Clout commentator Ora Nadrich. That’s strange. Ora would do well to explore Sam Harris’ very public role in pressuring the American people, through all manner of psychological intimidation, to get injected with the deadly mRNA shots. His primary intellectual targets during Covid “vaccine” campaign were two heroes of our time, Dr. Bret Weinstein and Dr. Heather Heying. They were both subjected to relentless attacks from Harris, who not only characterized the dissenting doctors, such as Dr. Peter McCullough and Dr. Harvey Risch, as crackpots and cranks, but even went so far as to suggest they literally had schizophrenia for their doubts and concerns about vaccine.
Indeed, it is Sam Harris who is the O.G. Crackpot here. While Sam Harris may not have an actual medical diagnosis of schizophrenia, he certainly has a case of extreme moral schizophrenia.
Sam Harris is Jewish man, comfortably sitting in America at his keyboard, using his influence to gin up the Israeli government’s war machine, arguing that the only Jewish state is fighting an existential battle with Hamas. His Jewish brothers have died by the hundreds in this battle, and yet Sam is perfectly content to type, type, type away. No IDF training camp for Sam. His brain must be too darn precious, too darn insightful, to darn penetrating, to be wasted on the Gaza battlefield. What an egomaniacal psycho pussy.
Make no mistake about it, the real crackpot and snake oil salesman here is Sam Harris, who cares as much about the lives and safety of his Jewish brothers and sisters as he cares about the thousands, perhaps millions, of people who have been killed and maimed by the Covid shots. Which is to say, literally not a damn.
Don’t listen to a word this egomaniac says.