#492 — The Second Plane, 25 Years Later

0:20Sam Harris:Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. So it's been 25 years since the morning of September 11th, 2001, which means that many of you listening to this will have no memory of that day at all. You can be out of college now and married and raising kids, and the defining event of my generation is something you only know from books or documentaries. For those of us who do remember it, the memory is of passing from one reality to another. There's a sense of before and after that I never experienced before that moment. A feeling of being helplessly pulled into the stream of history where it seemed like literally anything could happen next.

1:10Sam Harris:I've spoken about this on the podcast before. Five years ago on the 20th anniversary, I devoted an entire episode to it and called it the second plane because that was what really changed everything. When the first plane hit the North Tower, you could still tell yourself a story that kept normal life intact. Maybe it was an accident, some catastrophic navigational failure, or the actions of a madman. But when United 175 hit the South Tower, those possibilities evaporated in an instant. The second plane proved that all this horror, this mass murder of thousands of innocent people was intentional.

1:53Sam Harris:It proved that the people who committed this atrocity also intended to die in the process. And once you have both intentionality and a willingness to die, you have sincere belief. In one plane, could have been the act of a lunatic, but not two. The severely mentally ill don't coordinate to commit mass murder. And most people who coordinate to commit mass murder aren't suicidal. So at 9.03 that morning, everyone on earth was asking the same question. What set of ideas could possibly get sane people to do such a thing intentionally, to murder innocent strangers by the thousands and to kill themselves in the process?

2:36Sam Harris:For those of us who had spent time studying the world's religions, didn't have to search very long for an answer. It wasn't going to be the Mormons or the Anglicans or the Jews. From where I sat, not much more information would have been added beyond the sight of the second plane hitting the south tower had we heard the hijackers screaming Allahu Akbar from the cockpit, as you can bet your life they were. The point I made then and the point I think bears repeating now is that an understanding of who this enemy is and the time horizon across which they fight and the sacrifices they're willing to make should have been permanently inscribed on our minds in that moment.

3:17Sam Harris:We fought an eight trillion dollar war on terror in the aftermath. We did many necessary things and made some catastrophic mistakes, but most of us have had the luxury of moving on and forgetting about the problem of Islamic extremism for years at a stretch. I've told this story before, but it bears repeating on this anniversary, because September 11th is quite literally the reason you're listening to me now. In the fall of 2001, I was in the middle of my PhD program in neuroscience. I had finished most of my coursework and was just beginning my research on belief, on what happens in the brain when we accept propositions as true or reject them as false.

3:54Sam Harris:And I spent the better part of the previous decade immersed in religious and philosophical literature and in the practice of meditation. So when the towers came down, my concerns about faith, about the way it leverages human hope and fear and delusion and tribalism, were already well formed. And on September 12th or 13th at the latest, I started writing. I didn't know I was writing a book. I thought I was just trying to get the feelings of horror and moral outrage out of my head and onto the page. But that document became the first chapter of The End of Faith, and the resulting book pitched me into almost every culture war battle we've fought since.

4:33Sam Harris:It also got me speaking and writing about how to live an ethical and spiritual life without believing any divisive bullshit. So my entire career as an author and public speaker and as the creator of the Waking Up app, as the host of this podcast, is downstream of that morning. But the end of faith wasn't only a reaction to the crimes committed by jihadists on September 11th. It was a reaction to the confusion that surrounded these events. We had just been attacked by religious faith at its most committed. Nineteen men murdered three thousand people because they were certain that they were bound for paradise.

5:12Sam Harris:And what was our response? Well, right of center, it was just more piety. We consoled ourselves with our own religious fanaticism. and we launched a crusade against evil. On the secular left, something arguably worse was happening. Within weeks, serious people, or seemingly serious people, credentialed people at any rate, began telling themselves and the world that the hijackers had been driven to take these desperate measures by poverty, or by American foreign policy, or by despair. And it didn't matter that the hijackers themselves and the people who trained them told us why they did it. They left letters.

5:52Sam Harris:They made videos. Twelve of the 19 hijackers had attended college. All four of the pilots had earned FAA credentials. These were not, as a group, poor and desperate men driven to terrorism because they had nothing to live for. No, as it turns out, they really had something to live for and to die for because they were obsessed with waging jihad against infidels and Jews and with achieving martyrdom in that cause as a way of getting to paradise directly. We know this from surveillance, and from their recovered writings and correspondence, and from witness testimony. The instructions the hijackers carried on 9-11 told them to anticipate paradise and to ask God to grant them martyrdom.

6:35The atrocities committed that day were not political or economic or merely psychological. They were acts of religious worship, and an entire class of Western liberals, academics, journalists, intellectuals, simply couldn't metabolize that fact at all.

6:52Sam Harris:And many still can't. There's a version of skepticism and self-criticism here that isn't patently insane. You might think, whatever the hijackers believed or intended, and whatever Al-Qaeda itself took credit for, the greatest damage of 9-11 came from our response to it. 3 ,000 people died on the day itself, But we answered this evil by waging two decades of war and wasting trillions of dollars and killing hundreds of thousands of people. We didn't kill all of these people directly. It's estimated that we killed anywhere from 20 ,000 to 50 ,000 civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq in all our years of waging war there.

7:31Sam Harris:But our interventions unleashed civil wars in both places, leading to 10 times this number of dead at the hands of sectarian militias and other combatants. and many more people died from the indirect effects of all this social upheaval. So we invaded Iraq and broke that country, creating the conditions for even more jihadist violence in the form of the Islamic State, which we then had to deal with by killing even more people. And after 20 years in Afghanistan, we handed that country back to the Taliban in a withdrawal so ignominious that it stands as a monument to the foreign policy failures of several presidents.

8:06In fact, this withdrawal declared American impotence so effectively that many people think it triggered Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

8:14Sam Harris:So, the argument runs, wasn't the real lesson of 9-11 about the pathologies and misuses of American power? Well, some of that indictment is justified. My views on this front haven't changed all that much over the years, though the phrase nation-building now has a ring of damnation about it that it didn't have at the time. The war in Afghanistan seemed quite necessary in 2001, and it does even in retrospect, but it could have been very short, narrowly targeting al-Qaeda, and without our succumbing to the delusion that we could turn Afghanistan into a secular democracy. And delusional or not, the war had to end sometime.

8:57Sam Harris:However, the manner of our exit under President Biden was a disgrace, however you look at it. And the subsequent abandonment of our Afghan allies, the thousands of translators and others who risked their lives to help us struggle to drag that country into the modern world, stranding them at the mercy of the Taliban, as the Trump administration has now done, is one of the greatest self-inflicted moral injuries I can think of. We made these people a promise, and we didn't keep it. And many of them will die because of that. It's absolutely shameful. And if any people on Earth deserve expedited green cards, it's these Afghans who risked their lives to help us, along with their families.

9:40Sam Harris:The war in Iraq always seemed like a bad idea, though I admit it's hard to imagine the counterfactual and be confident that leaving Saddam Hussein and his psychopathic sons in place for the last 20 years would have been good for the people of Iraq or for the world. Anyone who is confident about that is either Nostradamus or a little crazy. But the claim was never that American foreign policy is perfect or even good enough. It's neither. The claim is that we have enemies whom we have not merely made. Are there people who have rational grievances against America or against the West? Sure, but we have other enemies, and we really must understand them.

10:24Sam Harris:The claim, and this was obvious before 9-11, but the second plane should have proved the point for all time, the claim is that jihadism is a machine for converting sincere religious belief and spiritual aspiration into mass murder. And unfortunately, the gears of this machine exist perpetually, in plain language, in scripture that a quarter of the world's population considers to be the literal word of the creator of the universe. Nothing we did wrong in Fallujah, or at Abu Ghraib, or in the aftermath of World War I, makes that claim false. And no doubts about the wisdom of nation-building tell us what to do about people who can sincerely claim to love death more than we love life.

11:09say whatever you want about the failures of American foreign policy, this criticism does not address the reality of jihadism.

11:17Sam Harris:One thing that makes this anniversary strange is that, in one sense, we have won the so-called war on terror, or at least we bought ourselves an astonishing reprieve. Bin Laden is dead, and in the 25 years since 9-11, jihadists have managed to kill no more than a few hundred people inside the United States. A few hundred people in a quarter century, in a country where that many die of drug overdoses every day, how much more successful could we have hoped to be? And it's worth reflecting on that, because this relative freedom from chaos and violence was secured by the very apparatus that critics of the war on terror have always deplored.

11:58Sam Harris:Independent analysis by Rand and others suggests that our counterterrorism efforts have stopped something like 100 attacks on American soil in that time. There have been a few small ones, mostly lone wolves, but almost everything that was being coordinated with overseas organizations has been stopped. We did trade away some significant freedom, both at home and abroad, for this increased security, and it appears to have worked. So most of us have enjoyed the luxury of moving on to other concerns. The media moved on, the foreign policy establishment moved on, I've moved on for long stretches of time.

12:36Sam Harris:in my writing and on this podcast to all kinds of topics, to AI and free will and wealth inequality and the absolute wreckage of our politics, research on psychedelics, meditation. The war on terror began to feel like an artifact from history. That is, if you weren't paying close attention to what was happening elsewhere on earth. There was never any reason to believe that jihadists had moved on. And October 7, 2023, put this back in perspective. What happened in southern Israel on that morning was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, and it was documented by the perpetrators themselves on GoPro cameras.

13:17We have the audio of a young man calling his parents to boast in a state of rapture about how many Jews he had just killed with his own hands. To listen to that audio, that's not what despair sounds like. That is what religious certainty sounds like.

13:35Sam Harris:And it was the same certainty that had been running in Muhammad Atta's brain on 9-11. The continuity between September 11th and October 7th could not be more clear. Martyrdom, paradise, the murder of Jews and infidels as a sacrament. To anyone who understands the problem of jihadism recognized this immediately. But then came the Western reaction, which is where 25 years of seeming progress collapses into nothing. In 2001, it took the apologists and useful idiots a few weeks to organize and spread their confusion. In 2023, it took minutes. There were people celebrating in the streets of New York, and on the campuses of our most prestigious universities, before Israel had even begun to defend itself.

14:25Over 30 student groups at Harvard held Israel entirely responsible for the massacre of its own civilians, for the rape, mutilation, and murder of kids at a music festival devoted to peace who were the same age and probably shared the same politics of the kids who were celebrating their murder and spoke of this carnage in terms of liberation. It was resistance to occupation. It was decolonization. And they're still doing this. This is worse than the confusion I saw back in 2001.

14:58Sam Harris:The old confusion was political. It referenced root causes and blowback and poverty as an engine of terror. That was total bullshit. But it wasn't a new religion. The new confusion is a kind of religion. It's identitarian. There's now a pseudo-moral framework, which appears utterly dominant in elite institutions, in which the only questions worth asking about any conflict are, who is the oppressor and who are the oppressed? And once those roles are cast, no facts on the ground can revise them. A theocratic death cult that's explicitly committed to committing genocide and that throws gay men from rooftops gets classified as a liberation movement at Harvard and Stanford and Columbia.

15:51Sam Harris:The political rise of Zoran Mamdani in New York and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, whatever else it represents, tells you how little an entanglement with Islamism now costs a person on the left. If anything, it's an asset. We have a term, in fact, Islamo-leftism, or a red-green alliance, to name this phenomenon. And we now have a mayor of New York, which is home to more Jews than any place outside of Israel, who won't clearly condemn the phrase globalize the Intifada when he knows perfectly well that these words advocate for a global campaign of terror against Jews. And we have a Democratic Senate candidate and likely future senator, El-Sayed, who in the aftermath of an attempted massacre of his own constituents in a synagogue in Michigan said that hurt people hurt people and then linked this barbaric attempt to kill 140 preschool-aged children to Israel's war in Lebanon.

16:49Sam Harris:And he's since apologized for this out of political necessity. I don't mean to be cynical about apologies in general. I think it should be possible to apologize for something like this. But in the absence of any honest reckoning with the problem of jihadism, and in light of his continued association with the raving anti-Semite Hassan Piker, I think we should understand the apology for what it is. His attempt to just barely appear like a decent enough human being to get elected. all the while saying nothing to disappoint the fanatics on the far left and in the Muslim community who've converged to support his campaign.

17:25Again, ideas have consequences. This truth shouldn't be remotely controversial.

17:31Sam Harris:And yet it has long been taboo to acknowledge this when discussing the religion of Islam. We don't even have a standard terminology to guide our thinking. When emphasizing the political dimensions of the problem, the term Islamism often seems best. When referring to Islamists who are eager to die as martyrs for their cause, we generally speak of jihadism. And I've used both words here. Depending on the context, we can also use terms like radical Islam, or Islamic extremism, or militant Islam, or even Islamofascism. Call this dangerous zealotry whatever you want. What you cannot do, honestly, is claim that it has no connection to the mainstream religion of Islam.

18:13And this is why a topic that's now central to the health of open societies remains taboo to discuss. And there are several reasons for this. First, there are actual racists and xenophobes in every Western society. And wherever such people exist,

18:29Sam Harris:their bigotry can be used to discredit rational concerns about Islam. Second, Islamists have worked very hard to make any criticism of Islam as a system of ideas seem like bigotry. It would be natural, of course, for Muslims to feel uneasy about having their faith singled out for scrutiny, whether by governments or by the media. But much of this resistance reveals something more sinister, coming, as it so often does, from genuine Islamists, who know precisely how deep their theocratic aspirations run. Throughout the West, we find Islamists and their apologists working to increase their political power within a social order that they clearly despise and which they hope to subvert by using the values and norms of liberal tolerance to undermine liberalism itself.

19:18Sam Harris:This can take countless forms, from valorizing the hijab as a symbol of female empowerment, where it is in fact the most conspicuous means of enforcing gender apartheid throughout the Muslim world, to seeking to criminalize blasphemy at the United Nations, to blaming Salman Rushdie for the fatwa against him and the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists for getting themselves butchered by jihadists, they should have been more sensitive to the delicate sensibilities of the Muslim community. Please don't lose sight of what is happening here and how it is a direct assault on liberal values. Islam is the one religion on earth that seeks to force everyone, even those of us outside the faith, to live by its strictures.

20:03Take the cases of Rushdie or the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists

20:07Sam Harris:or the Danish cartoon controversy or dozens of other cases. The claim isn't that Muslims can't criticize or even depict the Prophet Muhammad in artwork without the risk of being killed. No, the claim is that no one can. And the truth is, that is our lived reality now, even in the West. Of course, there's no shortage of useful idiots to help in this cause. I'm sure many kids at Harvard and Columbia and Stanford actually believe that the hijab is a sign of female empowerment. But Islamists know that it isn't, and they're very happy to use identity politics and grievance culture and the very norms of liberal tolerance as weapons against liberalism itself.

20:54It's a remarkably cynical strategy, but it's working. For decades now, Western liberals have defended Islamist intolerance in the name of tolerance. There is simply no question that this masochistic folly puts open societies at risk. And crucially, it empowers the far right. Because if liberals won't protect us from Islamic theocracy, and now Islamo-leftism, fascists will. And it's here that the term Islamophobia gets deployed to confuse matters by conflating any criticism of the ideology of Islam with xenophobia or racism or an irrational hatred of Muslims as people. And this is why critics of Islam, even those who are born into the faith and speak Arabic or Urdu or Farsi and are non-white, even they can find themselves described as anti-Muslim extremists or, absurdly, as racists, and even get profiled on the hate watch page of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

21:59This inability or refusal to distinguish between a criticism of dangerous ideas and a hatred of people is itself a capitulation to the forces of theocracy. The term Islamophobia is routinely used as though we're analogous to anti-Semitism, but it really isn't analogous to anti-Semitism. As a religion, Judaism is non-proselytizing. In the general case, the way you become a Jew is that you're born one, because your mother was born one. It's possible to convert to Judaism, but almost no one does this, because Jews don't tend to make it very easy. However, the more important fact is that Jews are not looking for converts.

22:36Sam Harris:And as a result, there are only 15 million Jews on earth, nearly all of them born to parents who are themselves Jewish. So Jews, along with the people who hate them, tend to agree about at least one thing. Being Jewish has ethnic and racial implications, at least most of the time. Islam, by contrast, is an aggressively missionary faith, and so it has nothing in principle to do with a person's ethnicity or race. There are now over 2 billion Muslims, a quarter of the world's population, and over 50 Muslim-majority countries, and none of them are good places to live if you care about human freedom.

23:13This is unlikely to be an accident. Is it actually a surprise that killing people for apostasy has a chilling effect on free thought?

23:21Sam Harris:Might the explicit denial of political equality to women have something to do with its relative absence throughout the Muslim world? Even though our best newspapers and magazines still use the term, there is no such thing as Islamophobia. There is such a thing as racism. There is such a thing as xenophobia. Both of these concepts cover any bigotry against immigrants from Muslim majority countries. Obviously, racism and xenophobia are worth condemning, but Islam is not a race or an ethnicity or a nationality. It's a set of ideas. Criticizing ideas is not bigotry. It's the essence of liberalism, in fact.

24:02Criticizing Islam as a system of ideas and noticing the terrible effects that some of these ideas have on our world is no more a form of bigotry