Sometimes, Violence Really Is the Answer

Listen to Sam Harris skillfully eviscerate the “both sides” argument in the Israel-Hamas war: “The boundary between antisemitism and generic moral stupidity is a little hard to discern, and I’m not sure it’s always important to find it. I’m not sure it matters why a person can’t… Show more

Perhaps the most astonishing lesson of World War Two is that, in the aftermath of total war and unconditional surrender, a hard reset of two very different cultures was possible. Judging from the Allied victory over Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, it certainly seems that one can bomb ideas—by obliterating many of the people who hold them. Kill a s

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Instead, the IDF sought to weaken Hezbollah, attacking both Hezbollah military targets as well as Lebanese civilian infrastructure, including Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International Airport. But Hezbollah fought back for several intense weeks during what became known as the Second Lebanon War and held a seemingly much more powerful IDF at bay. It was a

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None has had to fight against an opposition whose leadership (as intercepted messages from the leader of Hamas in Gaza have made clear) sees the loss of their own civilians as desirable because of the advantages it can bring them in the war for international public opinion. Because in this era war is not just waged on the battlefield, but in the ef

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