If you are of a certain age, you know that atheism was not something you talked about openly if you wanted to avoid a serious squabble in the family or a fight at work or become a social outcast. It was a belief you held quietly, even as you observed the dangers and absurdities of religion. Oscar Wilde would have had a witticism for it.
Another reason you may have been discreet was that you hadn’t fully formulated your arguments against those able to quote the bible at will, pretending that it really was the word of God, and who generally had the audience on their side.
The pantheon of great atheists, even if some, for reasons of scientific purity, preferred to be called agnostic because they couldn’t irrefutably prove that god didn’t exist, includes the Greeks Socrates, Democritus, Epicurus and the tragically, too brilliant for the liking of her religious opponents, Hypatia.
The Roman poet, Lucretius, wrote in his grand work, On the Nature of Things, that the universe consists of atoms, that physics, not gods, explain visible events and unusual happenings, that everything, including the soul is material, and will die with the person. Atoms and void and nothing else.
Centuries later, David Hume, Denis Diderot, the overlooked French Baron d’Holbach, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, Marie Curie, followed more recently by Isaac Asimov, and Carl Sagan, denied or questioned the existence of god and challenged belief in a divine creator and supreme judge.
The prominent voices among modern atheists/agnostics include Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, Stephen Fry, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and Sam Harris.
As Dawkins points out, we are all atheists to other people’s gods. There are thousands of gods past and present that others worship that we don’t believe in. We only believe in our god, the one that we were born into through geographical chance.
Imagine then that as you silently cheer this atheist cohort in interviews and debates with convicted religious opponents, you find out that one among them, one who could make consistently cogent arguments and be uncowed in hostile forums, is in fact, a genocide abettor.
Sam Harris, non-believer in God, someone who questions the wisdom and validity of organizing a state around religion, is in fact, a hardcore Zionist.
Harris doesn’t believe in God, but apparently because he was born into a Jewish family, he does believe in a group of people who organize their lives around God. He believes in this chosen group so much that he suspends rationality and defends its displacing and murdering those who don’t belong to the club, a crowd, whose core claim to the land they stole and occupy is that the God whose existence Harris denies, promised it to them.
Though not universal, it wouldn’t be a leap in truth to suggest that most atheists, those who don’t believe in any god or Buddha, are secular humanists. In fact, it follows if you don’t believe in a divine being or the supernatural, that you welcome and espouse the position that situates human beings, guided by reason and ethics, at the center of our existence. People can lead purposeful and principled lives without the intervention of a metaphysical overlord.
From years of listening to Harris, I assume that he has at least some of the core traits of humanism. He believes in reason over dogma, that we don’t derive ethics from gods, but that we are moral because, unless we work in the White House, the Kremlin, or the Knesset, we are capable of empathy infused with social responsibility.
He believes in progress, not in received wisdom from old holy books whose authors, not God nor people who spoke to him, saw events through the prism of the supernatural in their pre-science age. The humanist belief in progress centered around education and science is responsible for the immensely improved conditions and potential for happiness of modern life.
But one of the core tenets of humanism is the notion of human dignity, the knowledge that all people have intrinsic worth. And here is where Harris sabotages his claim to morality while tainting, if not destroying, his atheistic standing.
For some time, Harris has been saying that Islam is the only religion that normalizes fanaticism and encourages violence, citing thousands of acts of Islamic terrorism. Like most people, I have no time for religious lunatics who go around killing innocent people, flying planes into buildings, blowing themselves up in trains, driving cars into crowds, beheading those they consider their enemies or attacking other Muslims who don’t follow their preposterous life rules to the letter.
I have no time for the mindless fanatics who run Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan, who in the name of some severe and vengeful god, a god they have shaped to serve their own sickness, perpetrate violence against other Muslims, against Westerners, Jews, gays, and whomever else they deem as infidels.
If the undereducated, underemployed, and undersexed youth who make up the Islamic State, Boko Haram, the Taliban etc. were all jailed until they could be convinced of the baseness and fuckedupedness of their ways, the world would be a better and safer place.
But disingenuously, Harris takes the revulsion that most feel towards Islamic zealots and applies it to the situation in Palestine. According to Harris, for most of his life he wasn’t a pronounced Zionist. He was too far removed from the Holocaust to have it affect his thinking, but by God, when Hamas, and other armed factions within Palestine, attacked Israel on October 07, 2023, he morphed into a committed Zionist.
The dishonesty of this position is staggering. To imply that Palestine is the same as the Islamic State is dishonest and duplicitous. Gaza and the West Bank are what remains of a long-standing local population which has been systematically forced from its land by other religious fanatics, Jewish Zionists. The measure by which Harris determined that Islam is fundamentally flawed and naturally prone to bloodshed, somehow escapes him when it comes to Zionist extremism and brutality. Could it be that he is Jewish and that Israel is a Jewish state?
Whatever you think of Hamas, it exists as an expected response to the Israeli establishment of the 80-year-old Gaza concentration camp. There, millions of poor people crowded into a tiny parcel of land, will be born and die before their time, their movement restricted by the Israeli government, their lives controlled by the Israeli government, an Israeli government committed to displacing them by making their lives as humiliating, miserable, and hopeless as possible.
Who among us, growing up in these unbearably restrictive conditions that crush all aspiration, would not fight back?
Who among us, seeing their sisters, brothers, parents and friends, suffer, starve, and be killed every day of their lives, would not be angry enough to lash out at their oppressors?
Yet Harris pretends that October 7th occurred in a vacuum, that nothing led up to it, that in fact it was not the essentially unarmed Palestinians who faced genocide, it was the Jews.
That’s quite a claim when Israel has one of the most powerful militaries in the world, and the backing of a venal superpower. It’s a preposterous assertion when Zionists, both Jewish and Christian, occupy positions of importance and influence throughout much of the world, when Israel and its supporters have a finely honed global attack machine that labels anyone opposed to Israeli policies in Palestine and the region as antisemitic.
Ordinary people are struck dumb, appalled though they may be by Israel atrocities. To be accused of antisemitism means losing your job, means becoming a social pariah, means that you may be charged with a hate crime, for which a conviction would dramatically affect your life.
Israel, and its global network of Zionist bully boys, wield antisemitism as a weapon to stifle dissent, cower governments, and cover up war crimes.
The pogroms of Russia and the Nazi policies against the Jews and the subsequent Holocaust, were genocidal. After World War II, the world prosecuted those who had committed war crimes and genocide against the Jews. To suggest now that it’s Jews that face genocide and not the Palestinians, is deceitful and self-serving. It allows Harris to justify Israeli’s indefensible barbarity and to deny the violence and despair they have unceasingly inflicted on the Palestinians.
The descendants of the victims of genocide are in turn committing genocide and millions like Harris go blithely about their lives denying what is plain to all and propagating Zionist talking points.
One of the artful games that Harris and all Zionists play, is to speak only of Hamas, while ignoring the plight of the Palestinian people in Gaza, the West Bank, and the refugee camps throughout the region. Hamas, conveniently designated as a terror organization by Israel’s international collaborators, is a canard, the decoy whose mere mention stops the conversation.
Harris, and his lot, never mention Palestine because they don’t recognize it. They don’t even say its name because doing so might imply that it exists. Instead, Hamas, easy to demonize and hard to defend, becomes a synecdoche behind which they hide. It is a gutless, conceited fraud.
In an interview, Harris said that Israel couldn’t be committing genocide because they were the good guys. Imagine, he cried, if Israel adopted the same war tactics as Hamas, for example hiding behind women and children, using them as human shields. It’s inconceivable that could happen in Israel. Israelis would never stoop to something so cowardly because of course Israelis are moral people while Hamas, and by extension, Palestinians are not.
Let’s be clear as to who says that Hamas hides behind women and children. Well, Harris for one. But it is a claim made by the Israeli military who have proven to be not the most reliable source of the truth. The claim is blindly supported by the U.S. and other quisling nations who throw around the epithet, Hamas, as a justification for their own moral cowardice.
In fact, less biased observers like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, found no evidence of women and children being used as human shields.
Everyone is a human shield when their homes, schools, and hospitals are being destroyed, when over two million people live on a tiny sliver of land, systematically relocated there by the very thugs that Harris defends. No matter where you are in Gaza, women and children can’t be far away. But it fits the Harris and Israeli narrative to portray Hamas, hence Palestinians, not only as mindless terrorists, but as morally inferior.
Meanwhile, here’s what the principled, armed to the teeth, warriors of Israel do:
- They kill journalists so their war crimes are not exposed. War crime
- They blow up hospitals so the people they wantonly attack have nowhere to go for help. War crime
- They kill aid workers that are clearly identified as aid workers War crime
- They intentionally kill children. Multiple doctors who have treated child victims and a UN inquiry, have stated that Israeli snipers and precision drones are targeting young children with head and torso shots. An inquiry of June 2026 catalogued over 20,000 child deaths since October 2023, many targeted. War crime
- They assume almost total control of the supplies getting into Gaza, severely limiting the distribution of food and medical supplies, creating a crisis that forces the population to the edge of starvation. Bezalel Smotrich, Israeli Finance Minister and religious lunatic, said that it was “just and moral” to let two million people die of starvation. War crime
- When the starving population of Gaza lines up for the meagre supplies that Israel permits, they shoot them. War crime
- They coerce aid organizations into signing restrictive agreements that proposed sharing lists of their staff, their vehicle details and delivery routes. Given the fact that many aid workers had already died at the hands of Israeli forces, most groups refused, giving Israel what it really wanted, less succor and support for the defenseless people of Gaza. Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders (MSF), ActionAid, Medico International, and Medical Aid for Palestinians, are among the many valuable organization’s who would not sign the extortion agreement out of legitimate fear for their workers. Facilitating war crimes
The moral soldiers of the Israeli Defense Force, the most moral military in the world, may not hide behind women and children like the vile fighters of Hamas, but the UN has documented hundreds of Israeli war crimes that include the atrocities listed above.
Harris says that there was, or is, no famine in Gaza, that famine has a specific meaning and that what’s happening in Gaza doesn’t rise to that level. I suppose one could be starving to death, and it is not necessarily called a famine, but let’s see what observers with no dog in the hunt have to say.
- World Food Program (WFP): Reported that northern Gaza had crossed famine thresholds, with catastrophic hunger and children dying of malnutrition.
- UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA): Confirmed famine conditions in multiple enclaves in Gaza, citing starvation deaths among infants.
- World Health Organization (WHO): Declared famine‑level malnutrition, noting dozens of children dying monthly from hunger.
- UNICEF: Reported that Gaza’s children were experiencing “unprecedented levels of wasting and starvation,” consistent with famine.
- Save the Children, Oxfam, ActionAid, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF): Issued joint statements saying famine was already present in Gaza, not just imminent
- Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC): The global measure of famine declaration—its March 2024 report classified northern Gaza as Phase 5 (Famine). It has since updated its classification to Acute Malnutrition so in this ranking, Harris is correct, they are not really starving, just very hungry and undernourished. They should just suck it up and stop complaining.
Are we to believe Harris and his dangerous sophistry, or should we believe some of the most respected, non-aligned aid groups in the world who bear witness to the criminal and barbarous tactics of the most moral army in the world, the good guys as Harris might have them?
What wickedness can be conjured up when loyalty to culture requires the obscuration of evidence, when your standing in a community trumps reason, when moral acuity is lost in a web of deceit?
Harris continues his dangerous demagoguery by mentioning, thus tacitly endorsing, Amalek, the first tribe of Israel’s ancient enemies, whom the Hebrew Bible commanded to be wiped out; every man, woman, and child, a preemptive strike on future enemies.
Amalek has since taken on a symbolic meaning that represents malevolence and cruelty. For Jews of the 20th century, that meant Nazi Germany and for Zionists like Harris, it is Hamas. By confining his rhetoric to Hamas, Harris plays the game of Zionists everywhere by implying that Palestinians are Hamas and therefore it is Israelis, not Palestinians that face genocide and Amalek, the complete annihilation of Israel’s enemies, is not just justified, but ordered by God.
Whether Harris supports the literal or symbolic interpretation of Amalek is not the point. For a guy well-familiar with the power of words, by merely inserting Amalek into the conversation, he stands with other Zionist fanatics whom you can easily find on social media, casually or venomously supporting the extermination of all those less than human Palestinians. They continue the violent work of the Zionist movement from its inception, from Herzl to Ben-Gurion. Israel cannot exist until the Palestinians are gone, whatever that takes, including, Amalek.
Harris is spewing historically ugly trash, embracing the same mentality that the Nazis used to justify the killing of six million Jews as well as Slavs, Roma, homosexuals, the disabled, blacks, any clergy opposed to them, academics, scientists, journalists, artists, musicians, philosophers, socialists and trade unionists.
Maybe Harris could throw atheists into the bonfire of undesirables. Despite a lifetime of arguing against god and religion, he is an atheist of convenience. As much as he might want to view Zionism as a political movement, not a religious one, how non- secular can you be when the premise of displacing and annihilating Palestinians, is justified by claiming that God gave you the land 3500 years ago?
As spurious as that land claim is, God’s benevolence to the chosen people is at the core of Zionism and Harris´s dancing on the head of a thousand pins, doesn’t make it not so.
Moliere’s Tartuffe posed as a religious man, as befit 17th century France, but his religion was a mask that hid his human cravings. Harris poses as an atheist to give cover to a religious fervor that asserts the superiority of his clan over what he views as a decidedly inferior race.
His chosen tribe is rife with members who support the displacement or annihilation of the Arab population, millions of whom who co-existed peacefully with the tens of thousands of Jews living among them in Palestine before Zionism.
Sam Harris, avowed atheist, once wrote that religious belief encourages violence, intolerance, and irrationality, and that even moderate religion enables dangerous fanaticism.
He is now dining at the same table as Israeli’s obnoxious Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who said it was justified to starve the people of Gaza, and who oversees the worst people in the world, the Israeli settlers.
He sups with the abhorrent Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Israeli Security Minister, who said that Israel should be killing 30 to 40 Palestinians a night whether they are a threat to Israel or not, because they are not even worthy of life.
And he breaks unleavened bread with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the smug prick who has overseen the displacement and killing of thousands of Palestinians, journalists, aid workers and who aligns himself and Israel with right wing extremist groups around the world.
These three fanatical cunts, representing a large percentage of a violent, racist, and irrational nation, illustrate Harris’s lament about the effects of religion. That, under the cover of religion, he has chosen to align with them, says all you need to know about Sam Harris, sectarian charlatan and genocidal cheerleader.
Paul Heno September 2026
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