Is Sam Harris becoming a pariah for the anti-religious cause?

[Mudhammam]

Regardless of his opinions on Israel I have never really liked Sam Harris. He's always struck me as someone who doesn't really read opinions other than his own. There is also all his pretentious spiritual Buddhist mumbo jumbo. He should stick to talking to subjects he actually knows something about.

I am a bit miffed at his argument for blindly supporting Israel and his Buddhist woo does give me a lip twitch, but his books "The End Of Faith" and "Letter To A Christian Nation" do give lots of insight to the religious motivations of theists.

According to this blog post, "Generally, I have supported President Obama’s approach to waging our war against global jihadism, and I’ve always assumed that I would approve of his targets and methods were I privy to the same information he is. I’ve also said publicly, on more than one occasion, that I thought our actions should be mostly covert."

His mindset is to naively trust the powers controlling the media message. In other words, to disavow his principles of skepticism when it comes to trusting the USG (and isn't Israel in various ways, especially politically, basically that?).

Again, on Iraq he has recently written: "The truth is, I have never known what to think about this war, apart from the obvious: 1) prospectively, it seemed like a very dangerous distraction from the ongoing war in Afghanistan; 2) retrospectively, it was a disaster. Much of the responsibility for this disaster falls on the Bush administration, and one of the administration’s great failings was to underestimate the religious sectarianism of the Iraqi people."

So, in other words, ignore the Iraqis killed in any hypothetical or actual US excursion (hundreds of thousands, possibly million+), how bad did it make Bush and the U.S. look omg!

And of course, shift blame from our imperialist foreign policy onto the victims themselves:
"Whatever one may think about the rationale for invading Iraq and the prosecution of the war, there is nothing about the conflict that makes Islam look benign—not the reflexive solidarity expressed throughout the Muslim world for Saddam Hussein (merely because an army of “infidels” attacked him), not the endless supply of suicide bombers willing to kill Iraqi noncombatants, not the insurgency’s use of women and children as human shields, not the ritual slaughter of journalists and aid workers, not the steady influx of jihadis from neighboring countries, and not the current state of public opinion among European and American Muslims. It seems to me that no reasonable person can conclude that these phenomena are purely the result of U.S. foreign policy."

It's the neo-con mentality at play, same in his arguments for torture, racial profiling at airports, etc.