April 11, 2024 - 8:00pm

Jihadists are worse than the Nazis were, neuroscientist and podcaster Sam Harris has claimed.

Citing jihadists’ religious fervour and the popularity of Islamic fundamentalism among ordinary citizens of Muslim-majority countries, Harris warned that they posed a greater threat to humanity than the Nazis did.

“It’s Nazism plus religious fanaticism,” he said on a Wednesday episode of his podcast, Making Sense with Sam Harris. “Nazism plus an eagerness to be martyred, and to see their children martyred.” He continued: “There are many differences between Nazism and jihadism, but they only make Nazism look comparatively benign.”

The issue came up in the context of Israel’s killing of aid workers in drone strikes last week, which Harris believes was an accident.

“The Nazis didn’t use their own women and children as human shields. That would have been worse. How could you have made Auschwitz worse? You could have given the guards a belief system that made them feel actual religious ecstasy as they herded innocent people into gas chambers. That would have been worse,” he said.

“And it would have been worse had these beliefs been central to the worldview of a majority of ordinary Germans, and therefore difficult to separate from their other religious beliefs that gave their lives meaning,” Harris said.

The 57-year-old discussed his support for Israel in the Gaza war, explaining that his views are unrelated to his Jewish heritage. He argued that the conflict is a fight between “civilisation and its enemies”, warning that jihadism was more difficult to erase from a population even after being defeated militarily because of its earnest adoption by wide sections of the civilian population.

Harris, an atheist, is a longtime critic of Islam. He has drawn attention to instances of censorship and illiberalism from the leaders of Islamic nations to make the case that these attitudes aren’t limited to extremists. More recently, he wrote that the term “Islamophobia” is used to shut down legitimate debate about Islam by labelling people as bigots.

The Gaza war has highlighted a tension within Harris’s worldview: religious freedom and tolerance in the West allow intolerant, illiberal ideas to flourish, including what Harris refers to as jihadism. To combat these intolerant ideologies, in Harris’s opinion, a certain degree of intolerance is required. In late October, Harris said that kicking students out of Stanford University for supporting Hamas was justified, and that “a certain form of cancel culture […] would make some sense to me at this moment.”


is UnHerd’s US correspondent.

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