Sam Harris

After 7 October 2023, Harris rejected allegations portraying Israel as a genocidal state or as pursuing a project of extermination, and argued that much contemporary anti-Zionism constituted, in his view, a form of antisemitism or a cover for it.

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In 2006, Harris wrote that, at the demographic rate then cited, France could become majority Muslim within twenty-five years even without further immigration.

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Following the violent disruption of a Charles Murray lecture at Middlebury, Harris invited him to discuss IQ, The Bell Curve and measured average differences between populations, defending Murray as a researcher unfairly ostracised. The episode triggered a prolonged controversy with Ezra Klein and Vox over race, heredity and historical context.

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During a televised debate, Harris called Islam the 'mother lode of bad ideas', wording strongly challenged, notably by Ben Affleck, and cited as an example of stigmatising Muslims as a whole.

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During the 2014 Gaza war, Harris argued that the decisive moral difference between Israel and Hamas lay, in his view, in their intentions: he maintained that Israel sought to limit civilian deaths, while Hamas deliberately targeted civilians and instrumentalised its own population.

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In The End of Faith, Harris describes a scenario in which a suicidal Islamist regime possessing long-range nuclear weapons could render deterrence impossible and a Western first nuclear strike might become the only means of survival.

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In an essay about airport security, Harris proposed profiling 'Muslims, or anyone who could conceivably look like a Muslim', prompting strong criticism over discrimination and the effectiveness of profiling.

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Harris argues that, in an extreme scenario where thousands or millions of lives depend on information held by a known terrorist, practices such as waterboarding could be morally justifiable or even necessary.

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In The End of Faith and numerous subsequent essays, Harris argues that certain Islamic doctrines — jihad, martyrdom, apostasy and blasphemy — pose, in his view, a particular danger to liberal societies. His ranking of religions in this way has prompted lasting accusations of Islamophobia and excessive generalisation.

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