And the Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris.

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There are five myths about at Sam Harris.org.

There are five myths about Israel and the war in Gaza that I would like to address.

However, there are two things I should say at the outset that are important and easy to lose sight of,

with the various pseudo-moral hallucinations being spread everywhere, in particular on social

media.

The first point is that the problem that Israel faces with Hamas

and eventually Hezbollah and ultimately Iran, while it is existential for Israel and dangerous and difficult in many specific ways,

is a variant of a larger problem that has nothing in principle to do with Israel or Jews

or American foreign policy, This is a larger clash of cultures. I hesitate to follow

Samuel Huntington and calling it a clash of civilizations because I think real civilization, what we mean by civilization at this point in the 21st century,

exists on only one side of this divide.

And this clash is happening in varying degrees in a hundred countries.

In most places it can be described as a conflict between Islamic extremists, more appropriately

called jihadists, and ordinary human beings struggling to maintain the norms of open societies.

So while it might sound like I'm narrowly defending Israel here against propagandists for Hamas.

I would more or less have the same things to say about any civilized society fighting

...