Sam Harris speaks with Dan Senor about the state of the world two years after the October 7th attacks. They discuss the rise of global antisemitism, immigration and the failure of Western nations to contend with the spread of Islam, the dramatic reshaping of the Middle East, the ongoing war in Gaza, Trump's proposed peace plan, criticism of Prime Minister Netanyahu, Israel’s biggest military and public relations mistakes during the war, President Trump’s surprising reliability as an ally to Israel, antisemitism on the Left and the Right, Tucker Carlson, Zohran Mamdani, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.
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Dancy Noor, good to see you.
Good to be with you, Sam.
We're doing a simulcast here, which um I've been on your podcast.
You've never been on mine, so apologies to your listeners, but I think we need to start this simulcast with you giving a potted bio.
How do you explain yourself?
How how do you have strong opinions of uh on the topics we're about to touch?
I spent a number of years in and out of U.S. government foreign policy positions, and I've spent a lot of time in the Middle East in those positions, and also a lot of time in Israel studying and writing about Israel, written a couple books about Israel.
And since October 7th, my podcast has been all but exclusively focused on what has been happening in Israel, the Middle East, and in the West's reaction to events of October 7th.
So in a nutshell, that's how I found my voice.
Yeah.
Well, I'll just tell my listeners that your that podcast is call me back, and I have found it indispensable uh these last two years.
It's really just been fantastic.
So thanks for doing it, and uh I I highly recommend that people listen to you directly over there.
Thank you.
Well, my my I think most of my listeners are already listeners of yours, but if they're not, they should be and should be subscribers because your voice, while you come in and out of this issue, I think a number of the issues you address on your podcasts are actually like the surround sound of what what has been going on than the issue that I've been covering.
So your your voice and your clarity have been extremely important.
And um I'm glad we're able to have this conversation.
Yeah.
Well, so Dan, I there's a lot we could talk about.
Yeah, I I don't really have much of an agenda except that there are two things that I I feel like we we really should touch, in addition to anything else we might touch.
I mean, one is I want to learn from you just the state of the landscape out there.
I mean, just how you I want to get your impression as to how um bad things are on uh at least two fronts.
I mean, the the anti-Semitism globally and specifically the the degree to which uh Israel has lost this uh information war with the entire world and the consequences of all that.
So I just want to learn from you in this conversation, but also I think it might be interesting to explore how we come to this these topics from different angles, because yeah, I think you're much more comfortable in just um uh you know, argue arguing for yeah, and in defense of Jewish identity, and that's not really how I come to these same problems and seem to make the same noises.
I'm much more um I uh i in the business of get you know getting out of the business of identity, and uh so we can talk about that.
But that you know, uh uh uh uh beyond those two fronts, uh I want to talk about anything that interests you.
So Yeah.
Well, let me start with and and I I'll respond to both of those questions.
But I guess I've last time we spoke, Sam, at least on a podcast, was a year ago, which was on the one-year anniversary of October 7th.
And I remember in that conversation you and I had, I asked you what surprised you most in the year since October 7th, 2023, and you said the explosion of anti-Semitism is what surprised you the most.
Yeah.
And I guess my question now, on the second anniversary of October 7th, what if anything has surprised you in this second year of the war, the second year since October 7th, 2018?
What what surprised you of in you know year October 7th, 24 to 25?
I think uh unfortunately I have have the same answer.
It's just I mean, now I am even further surprised about the the size and depth of the crater.
You know, it's it's a bigger problem than I imagined, and it's a bigger problem than I imagined a year ago.
Uh it's just it seems to be getting worse, not better.
And I I keep finding um, you know, new details that shock me.
I mean, so you, you know, you and I are talking in the immediate aftermath of This the murders of uh Jews in in Manchester on uh Yom Kippur, and um that's horrible enough.
But then to know that there were celebrations in the streets of London in the immediate aftermath, you know, just unabashed celebrations of the murder of Jews in um the UK, it's shocking, and our tacit toleration of it is shocking.
I mean, just the fact that we have backed ourselves into a corner.
I mean, you know, we now is not everybody, obviously there are people who would resist this as stridently as they can at this point.
But left of center, where I spend most of my time intellectually and politically, there's so much moral confusion about what is rational to want and uh and to do in in the current circumstance.
And um, it just seems you know, especially in Western Europe, the writing is is on the wall.
You know, it it is totally rational to worry that Western Europe is completely unraveling culturally in a way that not just Jews, but really anyone who's uh who cares about the defense of open societies needs to worry about.
And you know, I don't often find myself agreeing with uh President Trump, as you know, but when he stands up in front of the UN, you know, in addition to anything else he might have said, which I would find indefensible when he tells them that you're, you know, your societies are going to hell, and what he means is you have completely failed in this project to integrate the millions of Muslims you've brought into your society, and you have you know, ghettos filled with religious maniacs uh who have no inclination to assimilate into your culture.
In fact, they want the they're they're explicit in wanting to overthrow your culture and replace it with their own.
The situation is totally untenable, and it is as bad as Trump or J.D. Vance or anyone else who I uh would otherwise uh not want to be aligned with uh say it is.
Yeah.
I guess I'm surprised by what happened, and I shouldn't be in the UK.
I mean, because it is a natural extension.
It's like a logical extension of what we had been witnessing during the first year after October 7th, and then well into the second year, the chief rabbi of the UK, uh Mervis, Rabbi Mervis, put out this statement after the Manchester attacks, saying something along the lines of, we're shocked by what happened, and yet we all knew this day would come.
But when I read that line, it was like right.
Like we knew this day would come, which is if we spend two years, as you said, tolerating this rhetoric in the media and social media and college campuses that Israel is a genocidal state, and Israel's an apartheid state.
And you're just indoctrinating, you know, lots of people, young people especially, but not only young people across Europe and elsewhere, that this is a genocide and that these people, these Jews living in your midst, living in your society are supporting this country and have a love for this country, Israel, then they are complicit in the genocide.
Then why wouldn't people start trying to kill the supporters of the genocide?
I mean, it I hate to talk in such clinical terms, but it's actually quite logical that this would happen.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, for me, the problem goes back much further than October 7th.
And again, it it escapes the frame of anti-Semitism or hatred of Israel.
Uh, and it just, again, you know, my focus is more on the defense of open society.
So when I when I think of the Manchester attack, I think of the previous Manchester attack at the Ariana Grande concert, you know, they killed, I think, 22 people, and that had nothing to do with Israel or Jews, but it was the same genius of jihadism being expressed there.
And I, you know, I think of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris and the Bataclan massacre, I mean, uh all of these moments where the stark fact that Western Europe has imported a death cult into its midst and has failed to acknowledge the gravity of this fact.
I mean, it's just bent over backwards in the most masochistic way to imagine that uh something more benign is happening where you you know, on any given day you can see people with placards saying, you know, behead those who insult the prophet.
I mean, it's just the the the character of these protests, the density of these protests, the the fact that you can get this number of people in the streets who are clearly calling for Sharia law, and uh, you know, in the in this case, the UK just can't figure out what to do about it.
And you this is of a piece with the grooming gang scandal that no one wanted to talk about for more than a decade, and you know, because no one wanted to be called racist, right?
As though that made any sense.
It's just the masochism and delusion, you know, it has now been turned up to eleven.
And honestly, I don't I don't know what the the next step is.
I mean, my my concern has always been that if left of center uh or centrist or even just normal conservatives can't get their arms around this problem, fascists will.
I mean, I think if we see a r a rise of the real right wing in in Europe, it will be because of this.
And, you know, that's not to be hoped for, but Mrs. You know, David Frum's line, which distills it, you know, if liberals won't enforce borders, fascists will.
Yeah.
But you know, honestly, this is mu even a deeper problem than the problem of unregulated immigration.
It's the fact that ideas spread and become contagious.
It's I mean, the you know, this this recent jihadist was a um British citizen, right?
He was an immigrant, but he was not, you know, he was not an immigrant yesterday.
He was somebody who grew up in the UK.
Yeah, but if you look at I don't know if you've been following this, the Facebook uh there were like Facebook posts of his father that have just been being examined in the British where he was celebrating on October seventh.
He was celebrating the massacre of October seventh.
So this is the home, this is where you know, this is where this young man was being th this is the the water he was swimming in, you know.
And so I mean, this was not something that, oh, the war got really bad, the quote unquote genocide.
These were the ideas that were being incubated with these people in the days after October seventh.
Yeah.
I I would also just add to that, I do think we're gonna see a big right wing swing in European politics from the UK through France through, you know, Germany through elsewhere for the reasons we're talking about here.
But what's so incredible to me is I think these politicians in Europe, Starmer, Macron, they knew they had this problem that you're describing.
And they have wanted to try to keep the temperature, you know, from spiraling out of control, you know, from just keep it at like a relative level from spiraling something completely unraveling society.
And the approach they took was we can kind of feed the beast by criticizing Israel, by attacking Israel, by criticizing the Jews.
I mean, I was just in France a few weeks ago and I was meeting with leaders of the Jewish community, and they said Macron after October seventh was fantastic.
They said, first of all, he was he was one of the first leaders in the West to travel to Israel.
He he loot Israel to show solidarity with Israel.
And he even was proposing a response to October 7th that is actually unimaginable now, which is he he said, we need an international, a global response to October 7th, like we did to ISIS.
We need to treat Hamas like ISIS, and then there was this m you know, 50 nation plus coalition that responded that took on ISIS.
We need to do the same thing to Hamas.
That's what he was talking.
I mean, just imagine that now.
It's it's like an it really is unimaginable.
And that's how he was talking.
And then a couple weeks later, after that, there was a solidarity, the Jewish community in France held this Solidarity March or Solidarity event, similar to the one in uh November of twenty three that was held in Washington, where, you know, in in the US, something like 300,000 plus people came to the mall.
And so France had its own version of that.
And they just assumed Macron would participate.
And then he was a no-show.
And they were like, wait a minute, how did he swing from showing up in Israel, talking about this robust response, and then just a couple weeks later, nowhere to be found.
And when leaders in the Jewish community went to his advisors, he said, Well, we need to show some balance.
We're concerned about showing balance.
Now, what balance is he talking about?
The balance he was talking about was not between Israel and Hamas.
The balance he was talking about was the seven and a half plus million Muslims that live in France and that represent something like 10% of France's population.
Yeah.
And I think it's eight percent, yeah.
Yeah.
Eight percent.
So it's just th this idea that, oh, we'll we'll pull back on support for Israel.
We'll pull back on showing solidarity with Israel.
No, we'll actually go farther than that.
We'll participate in calling what Israel's doing a genocide, and we'll cut off arms supplies to Israel, and we'll go ahead and recognize a Palestinian state with no conditions or calls on anything for Hamas.
So there was this hope, I think, that they could just continue to pander by to their local population.
And that would kind of keep things quiet.
And of course, the opposite happens, right?
It's not like this the people who are on the front lines of these attacks against the Jews are going to are going to be mollified by these foreign policy positions that their leaders are taking.
This is what is often referred to as feeding the crocodile, right?
You just in the in the hopes that it's not going to eat you.
But um well here's my question though is then so what happens now?
I mean, so I I clearly Starmer in the UK is rattled.
And I've got to believe Macron is rattled because he knows that this kind of thing could have easily happened in France.
These things like this as you just said have happened in France.
So what do they do now?
I mean I I you know because to to truly deal with the issue means to confront big political constituencies in their own governing coalitions.
Well what's amazing is is it's not that big.
I mean so as you we just said that France is 8% Muslim.
The UK is 6% Muslim last I look right.
So the depth of this problem, the fact that you can get hundreds of thousands of people in the streets exerting what seems scarcely tolerable pressure on the political system and and the need to pander to it, all of this mayhem is the result of six percent of the population making itself noisy, right?
I mean can you imagine what it would look like with 30% of the population?
I mean it's just it it's completely untenable to not confront it at this stage, right?
I mean they I mean honestly there's no and this is this is going to sound like bigotry to anyone who's not actually doing the moral algebra here.
I mean so first, everything I'm saying is addressing the consequences of certain deeply held ideas, right?
This is nothing that I'm not talking in principle about any race or ethnicity or I mean the color of a person's skin is completely irrelevant for this conversation.
But left of center all of this gets coded as xenophobia and racism and you know white supremacy the moment you begin making noises like this.
But you have to think about Islam as a set of ideas that is analogous to any other set of ideas like you know communism, right?
I mean so to criticize communists, to worry about having more communists in your country, to not want more of them, to want to be able to point out that certain fundamental ideas within communism are inimical to how you want to organize your own society, all of that conversation could be had without any sense that you are expressing bigotry toward people based on their indelible characteristics acquired at birth, right?
The same attitude has to be taken when discussing the differences between our religions, especially religions that are religions of conversion, right?
That are you know aggressively missionary faiths that are spreading in a hundred countries, right?
I mean so Christianity and Islam are unlike Judaism in this regard.
When you're talking about Jews and Judaism, you are almost by definition, because Judaism is not a missionary faith, and because there are only 15 million Jews and virtually all of them are are Jews by virtue of being born to a woman who was herself self born to a woman who was herself born to a woman who is Jewish.
When you're talking about Jews, you are talking at least implicitly about an ethnicity and a race and and it's not to say you people don't convert to Judaism, but it's just not that common and the Jews don't make it easy, etc.
So And they don't seek it out.
We don't seek it out.
Right.
And and so it's there's a big difference here.
And that's why you can't just swap the terms anti-Semitism and Islamophobia into various sentences and and pretend that they're functioning the same way.
There's no such thing as Islamophobia.
There's such a thing as racism.
There's such a thing as xenophobia there's such a thing.
But Islamophobia is a word that has been made up to prevent criticism of Islam and to conflate it with bigotry.
So any secularist who wants to argue against creeping Islamic theocracy or to even just argue for the the human rights of women and girls in the context of Islamic theocracy, that person gets painted as a bigot and isn't and is Islamophobe.
And it's just not true.
It's just a rhetorical trick that has been foisted on the left half of our society and everyone left of center has been taken in by it and that's why they're uniquely unfit to even participate in this conversation at the moment.
Unfortunately as you go right of center, you begin to meet people who are you know rather eager to have this conversation for some bad reasons, right?
Then you begin to meet real racists and xenophobes and white supremacists and Christian identitarian lunatics and proper Nazis, and then guilt the guilt by association police come out of the woodwork and you get, you know, defenestrated for having talked to somebody who talked to someone who was himself, you know, uh untouchable.
And so there's a problem here in just how we talk about this, which is to say that, you know, so I mean there's a reason, for instance, why I haven't had Tommy Robinson on my podcast.
It's not because Tommy Robinson is wrong about most of what he says.
He's absolutely not wrong about most of what he says.
But he's just rough enough around the edges and just has enough of a colorful history that I that I'm uncomfortable being directly associated with him.
And I and frankly, I'm right to be uncomfortable given the consequences of being associated with him.
But I can talk to Douglas Murray, and yet Douglas Murray, for many people, la left of center is beyond considered beyond the pale, and you know, because he'll talk to pe he'll talk to Tommy Robinson without hesitation, right?
So the landscape here is a mess, but what is what is real is that we have to deal with the reality of religious fanaticism and its consequences.
And the problem here is especially acute in the Muslim community wherever it has anything like influence, right?
The more influence it gets, you know, even at the 6% level, you start hearing demands for uh, you know, not just sharia law being observed by Muslims, but everyone outside of the community bending the knee to their religious strictures, right?
None of us can draw a cartoon.
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