Russell Rickford and the Cognitive-Emotional Knot

Posted on December 31, 2023 by Richard Landes

Russell Rickford, on October 15, a week after Black Friday, spoke at a rally of support for the Palestinians. He explained the violence and then embraced it.

Hamas has challenged the monopoly of violence. And in those first few hours, even as horrific acts were being carried out, many of which we would not learn about until later, there are many Gazans of good will, many Palestinians of conscience, who abhor violence, as do you, as do I. Who abhor the targeting of civilians, as do you, as do I, Rickford said during the rally. Who were able to breathe, they were able to breathe for the first time in years. It was exhilarating. It was energizing. And if they weren’t exhilarated by this challenge to the monopoly of violence, by this shifting of the balance of power, then they would not be human. I was exhilarated.

Normally, I’d consider this a terrifying example of own-goal “scholarship,” namely passing on the enemy’s war propaganda as news, a form of folly for which there are few explanations that do not involve psychoanalysis. But that analysis is based on the notion that the Jihadis are the enemy, and it’s not at all clear that some of these professors, when told that they were encouraging Jihad globally, would think that was a “bad thing.” Recycled, as did Black Studies Professor Rickford, as Hamas “challeng[ing] the monopoly of violence,” we get superficial revolutionary rhetoric.

Modern constitutional states (democracies, including Israel) claim that the government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” has that monopoly on violence in order to protect non-combatants “civilians” and assure the rule of public law, rather than private vengeance. A challenge to that right presumably lies in a critique of the given state’s fulfillment of its obligations. To see the acts of a “revolutionary” (actually Jihadi) movement that specifically targets civilians in the most sadistic fashion as “challenging the monopoly of violence” is to completely (deliberately?) ignore the issues at stake.

Either Rickford foresees conversion to Islam in his future, or he’s a colossal fool.

 

Posted in 7/10, Arab-Israeli Conflict, Auto-stupefaction, black hearts, cultural AIDS, Most Valuable Idiot of the Day, own-goal behavior, useful infidels | 2 Comments

Studies in the Pattern: Shame-Honor Dynamics, the Stigmatized Witness

Posted on December 7, 2023 by Richard Landes

In an article just published by Fathom on the Pattern and the addiction of Western journalists to lethal journalism about Israel, even when it’s also Own-Goal journalism about the West, I had a section on my explanation for Deutsch’s Pattern. I place it here. At some point, in another article on the Pattern, I’ll come back to this analysis. I welcome comment.

Part 6: Shame-Honour Dynamics, the Stigmatised Witness, and the Pattern

I taught a course at ISGAP with Deutsch, and in the final seminar I tried to explain the Pattern as a manifestation of shame-honor dynamics, a cultural matrix in which public criticism poses an existential threat to a “man of honor”: them’s fighting words. The legitimacy of hurting Jews protects non-Jews from the possibility that the Jew might say something that damaged his honor.

To an atheist, at least in principle, the Christian doctrine of the stigmatised “witness,” in which the degraded and miserable Jews, the Christ-killers, testify to the Christian “truth” of the divinity of Christ (which Jews stubbornly and inexplicably refuse to recognize) would not carry any conviction. And yet, so bold an atheist as Voltaire, managed to replicate Augustine’s approach: they deserve the eternal hated of mankind. “Still, we ought not to burn them.” So when at long last in the 18th century, “grown-up” Europeans who rejected Christian teachings finally had a chance to speak with other, even older critics of Christianity, they mostly preferred to adopt the teaching of the religion they otherwise rejected, thereby preserving the Pattern.

The dhimmi code in Islam serves the same purpose as Christian “Witness Doctrine,” providing a legal institution enforcing the need for triumphalist Muslims to dominate the public sphere. Jews and Christians and other infidels were “protected” from Muslim violence as long as they accepted their debased status. They must not “blaspheme Islam” or insult Muslims, they must not try to throw off the Muslim yoke. If they did, they were worthy of death, all of them. The Armenians, the Slavs under Ottoman rule, all suffered not just genocide, but the sadistic cruelties Hamas once again demonstrated.

Today, most people know all about the acute Jewish ability to criticise from the many examples of self-criticism by Jews so committed to taking responsibility for what goes wrong in the world, that they expend enormous energy and ingenuity accusing their own people of misbehaving. This is currently a great fashion among “progressive” Jews: “We are racists, Israel is apartheid, we are committing genocide!”

But that acute ability to analyse and criticise also testifies to an exceptional Jewish talent for discerning flaws and follies everywhere. Freud was afraid his ferociously introspective “science” might remain entirely Jewish (and Jung proved him right). The Frankfurt School and Derrida developed some of the most penetrating techniques of critique, of deconstructing the idols of the mind. The Jew is the child in the crowd who, seeing that the emperor has no clothes, speaks up.

In this sense one might even argue that progressive Jews affirm the Pattern because, like a defeated male cowering before the triumphant alpha, they can thereby reassure the non-Jews that they would never turn their critical skills against them. Heaven forbid! And certainly, the gentile enactors of the Pattern welcome their highly-prized service: confirming the legitimacy of hurting Jews.

Imagine, for example, what someone gifted in biblical criticism (i.e., tearing the biblical text to historical shreds) might come up with when turning the critique on the New Testament, or (gasp!), the Qur’an. Imagine what someone who had studied the ease with which modern egalitarian revolutions, threatened by outside enemies, devolve into totalitarian terror that devours their own, might say about the 75 years during which the Zionist revolution has maintained democracy under an existential threat not to the revolution but the entire people. Imagine someone with the critical acumen of a Derrida deconstructing anti-western grand narratives or psychoanalysing “oikophobia.” Imagine a Jew having the nerve to claim that antisemitism is a toxic form of envy? Or talk about the small-mindedness of goyische kopf’s zero-sum thinking in public?

It is not by accident that the Arabs who hate the Jews most are those who hide their shame of failed supremacy with their Pattern-enacting victim narrative, even though the last thing a man of honor wants to show is weakness. Nor is it an accident that the Palestinian’s most fervent amen chorus in the West, the “progressives,” think they are the global moral hegemon, and then use social media to cancel critics. No wonder both “identities” revel in heaping abuse on the Jews and respond with indignation when criticized in return. These are the classic patterns of shame-honor cultures in which no one should dare criticize a man of honor.

The perdurance of the Pattern, I therefore argue, is testimony to a limbic fear of public humiliation. As long as Jews are free to speak, everyone is in danger of being rebuked (i.e. in their minds of being shamed). As long as the Pattern rules, however, as long as people comply with its prime directive to legitimate hurting Jews, even when they have nothing against the Jews, even when they like Jews, then Rousseau’s dream of Jewish free speech will not materialise.

The cancel-culture of the 21st century began in earnest at Durban in 2001, just before 9/11, with an NGO resolution to make Israel a pariah, beyond the pale. The Zionist voice must not be heard; to do so would be to “normalise” evil. Independent Jews were the first target of 21st century cancel culture. And when that assault on the legitimacy of the Zionist voice gains traction, as it has over the last two decades with the development of social media, it threatens the free speech of all. We witness the formation of another persecuting society, like the Pattern-governed one set in motion exactly a millennium ago, in the early 11th century. But note: it only begins with the Jews, and it takes generations if not centuries to dig ourselves out of that pit, if we do at all.

Posted in Arab-Israeli Conflict | 3 Comments

Pallywood’s Latest Blockbuster

Posted on December 4, 2023 by Richard Landes

Tablet just published the following article. Since significant amounts of the original essay were cut to make it more attractive to a wider readership (not one of my specialties), I may add below some of the passages that were cut.

Translated into Polish by Malgorzata Koraszewska.

Pallywood’s Latest Blockbuster

How the media’s pack coverage of the Al-Ahli Hospital explosion promoted Hamas propaganda

In 2003, after watching the first postmodern blood libel go viral, I coined the term Pallywood to describe the widespread use of staged scenes of Palestinians suffering violence supposedly at the hands of Israel, fabricated for global consumption. The term was decried as a “conspiracy theory,” and against all evidence, Israel was blamed for murdering 12-year-old Muhammad al-Durah. Twenty years later, we’re back where we started.

On Nov. 2, 2023, the “fact-checking website” (ostentatiously called Polygraph) of the government-funded Voice of America warned that “Israel supporters on X are using the derogatory label ‘Pallywood’ … to claim that Palestinians are staging scenes of death and violence using so-called crisis actors to elicit global sympathy and win the PR war with Israel.” These Israel supporters were “propaganda campaigners” spreading “disinformation,” the state media organ asserted.

The following day, the Anti-Defamation League joined in with a blog post (which it later stealthily deleted) titled, “ADL Debunk: Myths and False Narratives About the Israel-Hamas War.” The post tackled “a slew of misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories about the ongoing conflict.” It listed a number of “false or misleading narratives,” which it proceeded to “debunk.” Only the ADL post didn’t debunk any one particular example of Pallywood. Rather, it declared that Pallywood—the notion that “Palestine is using elaborate filmmaking tactics to create fake victim footage”—as a whole was a “false narrative.” The post then explained what “reality” is: “The ‘Pallywood’ conspiracy theory has been around for years … There is ample evidence of Palestinian victims suffering in Gaza.”

On the same day, Rolling Stone published a long article, which consulted a “senior fact-checker,” and which affirmed the same talking points: The “derogatory” Pallywood term is an “old myth” that “Palestine’s opponents” are reviving “to discredit the suffering, grief, and pleas for help coming from Gaza.” Rolling Stone then added another important point explaining why the Pallywood “conspiracy theory” is especially “insidious.” It’s not only because it claims “falsely, that the Palestinians are faking it,” but also because it “dovetails with a rise in anti-Muslim hate speech.”

The new, remarkably uniform line of attack echoed an initiative the White House had just unveiled: the first-ever national strategy to counter Islamophobia in the United States. As antisemitic incidents spiked across American cities following Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre, the Biden administration decided that an initiative to combat “the scourge of Islamophobia” was the nation’s most pressing priority.

With so much at stake, the danger posed by the conspiracy theory, that the Palestinians make visual productions for information warfare, had to be exposed and expunged. The Pallywood false narrative was a clear example of what the administration says are the two most egregious offenses against our democracy: “disinformation” and “hate speech,” namely against Muslims.

Against this background, one of the most vivid examples of the Pallywood genre during the current war in Gaza took place at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City the day before President Joe Biden landed in Israel.

***

At 6:59 p.m. on Oct. 17, a blast occurred in the parking lot of the Al-Ahli hospital. The crater it left was small and shallow, and the explosion that followed was a sudden fireball that left two fires burning in the parking lot. The hospital was undamaged, except for some broken windows on the blast side, and half a dozen cars were strewn around, badly burned.

Anyone who saw the crater knew right away that it was what observers call a “fell-short”: a Palestinian rocket that never made it to its target in Israel. It was a familiar sight, as 20%-30% of the rockets Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have fired into Israel in previous rounds of fighting have fallen short, according to the Israeli military. Sometimes, as in the Shati Refugee Camp tragedy of 2014, children are among the dead.

Moreover, the evidence apparently was cleared—“all traces of the munition have seemingly vanished from the site of the blast, making it impossible to assess its provenance,” The New York Times stated. The source of this information was a senior Hamas official, Ghazi Hamad. “The missile has dissolved like salt in the water,” Hamad told the NYT over the phone. “It’s vaporized. Nothing is left.”See how it works?

Read the rest at the Tablet. And feel free to comment here.

Posted in 7/10, al ahli hospital blast, Arab-Israeli Conflict, Are We Waking Up Yet?, Auto-stupefaction, CNN, Hamas Media Protocols, lethal journalism, New York Times, own goal war journalism, Pallywood, rekaB Street, Yidiots | 4 Comments

Why Is The #MeToo Crowd Silent On Hamas Rape? Janice Turner

Posted on December 3, 2023 by Richard Landes

For those who can’t get past the paywall. (HT: Yisrael Medad and Jonathan Hoffman)

Janice Turner December 01 2023, 1.35pm

All that toil: live-streaming a girl’s last moments to her social media account, raping so hard you break pelvic bones. You strew evidence everywhere of open-legged girls with no underwear covered in semen. So much diligent raping, yet where is the recognition for your work?

Instead, only silence. Nothing from the feminists who at the height of #MeToo threw men to the Twitter hounds for a lecherous pass. Nada from the hashtag activists, open-letter actresses, influencers, podcasters, the period poverty posse, the menopause matriarchs. Zilch from the big-time feminist charities and human rights lawyers lavished with public funds. What does a rapist have to do to catch a break?

Finally, last Saturday UN Women tweeted it had met Israeli women’s groups and that “we remain alarmed by gender-based violence reports on 7 October.” “Alarmed” not horrified. “Reports” not crimes. “Gender-based,” that feeble euphemism. Four days later the UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, noted “numerous accounts of sexual violence during the abhorrent acts of terror by Hamas.” Seriously, you’ve had seven weeks and that’s your best shot?

Even a screening of October 7 footage collated by the Israeli government, much of it filmed by Hamas, didn’t convince the Guardian columnist Owen Jones. In his little YouTube video he doesn’t deny bad stuff happened, he just has “questions.”

Continue reading →

Posted in 7/10, Arab-Israeli Conflict, feminism, rape, UN | 6 Comments

Omer Bartov: As-an-Israeli’s notion of genocide

Posted on December 1, 2023 by Richard Landes

Omer Bartov, born Israeli, now of unknown identity, has written a hit-piece on his (former?) fellow country-men for the NYT. It has, predictably, been picked up avidly by Israel-haters. In it he does what historians should never do, invoke their expertise to introduce terms voided of all their meaning, in order to pursue a present agenda. That that agenda targets his own people gives it particular prominence as own-goal scholarship. With his obsessive focus on Israeli warts while ignoring the flaming genocidal speech and deeds of the Palestinians – and not just Hamas – Bartov offers a good example of the four-dimensional Israeli, one-dimensional Palestinian agents.

Palestinians fleeing Gaza City on a road toward the south on Wednesday.
Credit…Mohammed Abed/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By Omer Bartov

Mr. Bartov is a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University.

Israeli military operations have created an untenable humanitarian crisis, which will only worsen over time.

Untenable is a strange word to use (later he uses “unbearable” as well). In comparison with what’s been happening for over a decade in neighboring Syria, where hundreds of thousands have been killed and millions displaced, one might be forgiven for thinking that this description, like similar ones – intolerable, unbearable, etc. – are more rhetorical than realistic. After all, as an historian of one of the most terrible periods in world history, might one not expect a certain comparative measure?

But are Israel’s actions — as the nation’s opponents argue — verging on ethnic cleansing or, most explosively, genocide?

So Bartov is aware that these accusations are explosive, even if he doesn’t actually mention the tsunami of antisemitic incidents around the world in response to events in the land twixt river and sea.

As a historian of genocide, I believe that there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza,

What, in the old days, one called a Verité de la Palice, an observation so obvious that one need not state it. The problem is, this statement is about to be followed by the ever-imminent “but…”

although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening.

Very likely. Impressive historical analysis, disguised by the hedge of “very likely.” Nor will this hasty observation receive any back-up about the nature of these “crimes,” since it’s addressed to an audience as ready to see Israeli war crimes as the journalists were to see al Ahli “flattened” by an Israeli bomb.

That means two important things: First, we need to define what it is that we are seeing, and second, we have the chance to stop the situation before it gets worse.

I would say, we first need to clarify what we are “seeing”, since clearly the Hamas-compliant Western media, extensively using advocacy journalists who report what they think is “pro-Palestinian” news, is hardly a reliable lens for observation.

Then we can start with the definitions.

Continue reading →

Posted in Arab-Israeli Conflict, Genocide, IDD (Israel Derangement Disorder), Jews against themselves, Oslo Logic, PCP, Peace Process | 4 Comments

How to launder Hamas Propaganda: CNN Interviews an “Historian”

Posted on November 29, 2023 by Richard Landes

Michel Martin, an NPR reporter who has no familiarity with the Middle East, conducts a stunningly passive interview for CNN, with an apologist for Hamas, after 7/10. If one wanted to misinform the public more thoroughly it would be hard to find a better combination than Baconi and Martin. Thank you Christiane.

Amanpour: Many Israelis and people the world over are still trying to understand where this barbarity came from. Tarik Piccone is an analyst, a historian and an author of Hamas Contained. And he’s written about that organization for years. He joined Michel Martin for a conversation about the complex historical and political dynamics leading up to the terror rampage of October 7th.

Michel Martin: Thanks, Christiane. Tarek Bacani, thank you so much for speaking with us.

Tareq Baconi: Thanks for having me.

Michel Martin: I just want to make it crystal clear that you are an historian. You are not a spokesman for Hamas. You are not an apologist for Hamas. You are an historian who has studied the movement for many years. So with that being said, give us the short course on how Hamas developed. What’s the origin story?

That’s quite a “crystal clear” statement, especially since, as the interview will show, he is most definitely an apologist for Hamas. The full title of his book is actually: Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance. One might expect the first question to be: How could you get it so wrong?

Tareq Baconi: Well, Hamas really is a chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a movement that’s present in different situations throughout the Middle East that is committed to what it calls the Islamization of society. So really, it’s it started as a social network that looks at providing educational facilities, health care, charitable work, training and vocational centers. And it really embeds itself in society as a movement that’s committed to helping Palestinians live a virtuous Islamic life.

No, this is clearly not apologetics. A spokesman for Hamas could hardly do better. Just a few details left out.

  • Muslim Brotherhood is dedicated to the Islamicization of societies around the world, not just Muslim ones. In 1994, MB superstar Yusuf al Qaradawi announced in America that the US will be conquered by Da’wa, not Jihad. Not that he, or any member of the MB had any problem with Jihad and its use of suicide terror martyrdom operations.
  • Hamas began in 1988 with a declaration of total war on Israel and a call to exterminate Jews the world over, invoking explicitly the genocidal hadith of the “rocks and trees.”
  • Hamas’ made good on its intentions by raising suicide terror (a technique most often used until then by the Tamils in Sri Lanka), to a theological principle, replete with rituals and peak moments like the “pink mist” when the explosion mingled the blood of the terrorist with that of his victims.

On the other hand, by invoking all these wonderful social services, Baconi has played right to the audience in the West eager to distinguish Hamas - not a terror organization from the terrorists in al Qaeda and ISIS.

Continue reading →

Posted in Arab-Israeli Conflict, Auto-stupefaction, CNN, Da'wa, Demopaths and Dupes, Fisking, Hamas, lethal journalism, own goal war journalism | Leave a comment

You’re our Cassandra, and we hate it.

Posted on November 23, 2023 by Richard Landes

All three of my daughters, much to my surprise, told me recently two things each of which explains the other:

You’re our Cassandra

ie you foretold this, you’ve been talking about it for two decades now, and we didn’t believe you. I was confused. I thought I had made the case clearly. How could they not have believed me? And…

We hate it that you were right.

And so do I. Which also explains why they didn’t believe me. What youth, looking forward to the future wants to believe warnings of very dark clouds ahead?

As someone else wrote me: Continue reading →

Posted in Arab-Israeli Conflict, Are We Waking Up Yet?, Caliphaters, Can "The Whole World" be Wrong?, Cassandra was right | Leave a comment

Roger Cohen and the Moral Disorientations of Narrative Equivalence

Posted on November 21, 2023 by Richard Landes

Roger Cohen writes a monument to narrative equivalence, producing in any uninformed reader, a radical empirical and moral disorientation. It’s not clear whether he is aware of what he’s doing (in which case he’s a IYI), or deliberately deceptive. He has however, clearly been spending way to much time with the unreconstructed peace camp, and the product, especially after 7/10, is yet another example of Kahneman’s slow thinking consisting primarily of doubling down on (too-)fast thinking.

Between Israelis and Palestinians, a Lethal Psychological Chasm Grows

In a conflict marked by complete incomprehension on both sides, the ability to see each other as human has been lost.

A group of people praying in lines on the left as some other people in military attire with guns stand behind them. In the distance the golden dome of the Dome of the Rock is seen surrounded by walls.
Israeli security forces looking on as Palestinians prayed in Jerusalem in October. Nearby is a site sacred to both Jews and Muslims that has been one focus of tensions over the years.Afif Amireh for The New York Times

Eight years after the foundation of the state of Israel, Moshe Dayan, the chief of staff of the Israeli military, stood close to the Gaza border to pronounce a eulogy for a 21-year-old Israeli security officer slain by Palestinian and Egyptian assailants.

“Let us not today cast blame on his murderers,” he said in 1956. “What can we say against their terrible hatred of us? For eight years now, they have sat in the refugee camps of Gaza and have watched how, before their very eyes, we have turned their land and villages, where they and their forefathers previously dwelled, into our home.”

His short speech, a little longer than Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and a powerful reference for Israelis, is perhaps recalled less for this insight into Palestinian anger than for Mr. Dayan’s resolute conclusion.

“Without the steel helmet and the cannon’s maw, we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home,” he said.

It’s worth mentioning that the reason they were in their refugee camps was because Egypt – and elsewhere Lebanon, Syria and Jordan – kept them there precisely to create the sewer of hatred that, at that time, the whole Arab Middle East, in their triumphalist hatred of autonomous Jews in Dar al Islam, shared fully. In other words their “terrible hatred” derived far less from the sight of Israelis taking their homes, as their taking Arab-Muslim triumphalist pride. Dayan’s speech is an early example of a faulty, over-generous, Israeli attempt to “understand” their self-declared mortal enemies.

Today, 67 years later, at a time when Jews have again lost their lives to Palestinian gunmen at the same kibbutz, Nahal Oz, that Roi Rotberg guarded, Mr. Dayan’s explicit evocation of the sources of Palestinian “hatred and desire for revenge” remains rare in Israel. Many Israelis have preferred to avert their gaze from the rage at their doorstep.

Why do I get the sense that you consider the “sources” of this “hatred and desire for revenge” just as Dayan apparently did. Do you really think that it was because of what Israel did (won a war and took land, mild by the rules of the game in the ME), and not what she was (a blasphemy to supremacist Islam, where in order to be secure in the faith, one must dominate – dar al Islam)? Dayan had at least hadn’t read Yehoshua Harkabi’s Arab Attitudes towards Israel (1972). Have you? Recently? Maybe if you did, you might perceive a longue durée in this existential hatred.

Actually, the Israelis who have averted their gaze from the murderous religious hatreds of the Arabs (including Harkabi), were primarily the peace camp, who wanted to believe in the humane feelings they believed they could awaken in their long-time foe. Others, have documented the genocidal hatreds with which Palestinian leaders have been indoctrinating their children since 1948, but especially since the “Land for War” deal Arafat made with Israel. This is all well documented. As is the reluctance of major newspapers, like yours, to even let their readers know what kind of insane genocidal hatreds are preached daily from the pulpit and broadcast to the public. If you can even say today “Many Israelis have averted their gaze, it’s a good bet you’re spending an awful lot of time hanging with the peace camp (see below). Could it be that those who look the hatred in the face are not to your taste?

A man with an eye patch and military clothing is surrounded by other men in a black and white photo from 1956.

Moshe Dayan, the chief of staff of the Israeli military, center, with Ariel Sharon, left, in 1956, eight years after the foundation of the state of Israel. Mr. Sharon would become prime minister many years later.Israel Defense Forces, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In the same way, Palestinian insight into the devouring specters of antisemitic persecution awakened in Jews by the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack appears negligible. Mutual empathy is very hard to find.

You may misunderstand the meaning of empathy. For you it seems to be synonymous with sympathy. But empathy means you see “others” as they see themselves, not as we would feel were we in their place. The reason Palestinians can’t “see” (in your sense of empathy) Israel’s fear of eliminationist antisemitism, is because they are filled with precisely that antisemitism. I can’t say how many Palestinians share this view, but given the response to 7/10 by allegedly “non-violent, civil-society” Palestinian groups, as well as the allegedly secular members of the PLO, my guess is that many “saw” (in my sense of empathy) precisely the Israel’s fears you think they won’t acknowledge, and they rejoice in the trembling of “the Jews.”

Continue reading →

Posted in Arab-Israeli Conflict | 10 Comments

They cheer like their team won: Zombie Social Justice

Posted on November 20, 2023 by Richard Landes

the following was cut from an article (already too long).

One of the things that struck me on 7/10, redoubled by the reaction in favor of Hamas, was the savage hatred it revealed among Palestinians and the almost casually cruel support of their “woke” supporters. Mean girls had signed on to the cause.

If we ever needed an example of unadulterated racism, of so dehumanizing another people that anything, no matter how sadistic and deliberately cruel, was permitted indeed celebrated – then this was it. There’s no need here for any rhetorical inflation in the use of the term. If “racism” is one of the worst epithets one can throw at another (as in “Nazi racism about the Jews”), then here is its 21st century flagship in the arts of savage dehumanization. If “terrorism” means targeting civilians in the name of a cause, then this is the quintessence of terrorism, that emotive and judgmental term, by any of its variegated definitions.

On 7/10 the whole world got a glimpse into the soul of (religious) genociders, who, when they could, delighted in the darkest deeds of mankind. It was a horror and an abomination to anyone who considers life sacred, a ghoulish delight to those drawn to racist death cults. It should be a defining moment.

It should mean, understanding that this did not happen in a vacuum. It meant saying to the Palestinian Grievance Narrative: ‘No. You cannot fill the vacuum between what you claim to have suffered, and the deeds of Hamas.” That vacuum needs to be filled with heretofore un(der)reported world of genocidal hatred incited by the very Palestinian leaders who cry about their people’s suffering. It must be filled with the revival of the eliminationist Jew-hatred that had devastated Europe in the megadeath orgy of World War II only two generations earlier.

This most toxic of the many hatreds of Jews to be found in the millennia-long history of supersessionist monotheism, periodically exploded in the West throughout the last millennium (starting in 1010 in France), culminating last time in the horror of the Holocaust. After the Nazis industrially slaughtered 6 million Jews, the West all said “Nie wieder,” even as that murderous hatred found a warm welcome in the humiliated Arab political culture of the Naqba.

Most Westerners (including those whose job it was to do so) did not pay that much attention to this importation of Nazi ideology, nor the way that an apocalyptic Jihadi ideology has given great prominence to the genocidal hadith of the rocks and the trees. Indeed, the media actively suppressed evidence of it. And yet, we witnessed the resurfacing of that matrix of genocidal hatred in one of its most violently cruel avatars on 7/10. If anything ripped off the mask of, “when Palestinians talk about slaughtering Jews, they actually just mean just Israelis,” or the “we’re not antisemites, we’re ‘just’ antizionists,” then 7/10 did… at least to those who were looking into the face of the horror.

Possibly even more troubling in the long run, many in the world, both Muslims and infidels, exulted at the sight of this abomination. Demonstrations of loud solidarity with Hamas cropped up in cities and campuses around North America and in Europe, gatherings of people who could hear news of a slaughter of humans, of women, children, and old people, and rejoice! Attacks on Jews spiked: 400% in the USA, 1350% in London.

Previously, in past decades, these pro-Palestinian aggressions against Jews in the diaspora (where Muslims are not a majority), were widely considered regrettable but understandable responses to the TV’s rendering of the terrible suffering of the Palestinian people at the hands of the Jewish State. Who could not sympathize with these poor Palestinians enduring the blows of a so much more powerful enemy. This time, however, the response arose not from sympathy or pity but triumph: after witnessing abominable violence they rose to spread it, an open embrace of the aggressors’ savage hatred for the “other.” It was the mirror opposite of the post-modern embrace of the “other.” This attack on human beings in Israel reverberated globally as a battle cry… a Jihadi battle cry. Intifada.

I can understand Muslim anger and hatred; many live in a culture that celebrates the most ruthless “strong horse,” and that bans anything that might shame those “leaders.” They are products of a society without a free press. They have only the narrowest escape in a situation where both the information elites and the peer groups enforce the tribal scapegoating. Even if they know something’s wrong here, they have few tools to grapple with it. Especially when the infidel sources affirm the jihadi’s claims so spectacularly.

But allegedly “progressive” infidel activists who never cease invoking humane values and rights and the embrace of the other, and the value of every human life, who zealously cancel those they believe use “dehumanizing, hate-speech,” especially if used about Palestinians? These denizens of woke haven’t suffered the intolerable fate they believe the Palestinians have. Their hatred is second hand, and now reveals itself obscenely casual and self-indulgent. When they witness the most inconceivably savage, dehumanizing racism, expressed by the leaders of a cause they’ve been told is about freedom and human rights, against a racist and genocidal enemy, they cheer like their team just won a playoff.

Posted in Arab-Israeli Conflict | 4 Comments

Response to a Classmate (’71) about Gaza: Where there are no men…

Posted on November 19, 2023 by Richard Landes

A week ago (November 12), I received this note, off-list, from a classmate (’71), a good liberal Jew, shaken by 7/10, but equally shaken by the images of death and destruction from Gaza. I have had difficulty answering effectively; have discussed it with others.

I confess I am increasingly uncomfortable with the situation.  Our rabbi gave a sermon last week based on a saying of Hillel from the Pirke Avot, “In a place where no one behaves like a human being, we must strive to be human.” I don’t get the sense that the government has a strategy beyond obliteration – a long-term plan for how to solve the Palestinian problem in a human way.  And its failure to rein in the settlers on the West Bank, its crackdown on dissidents within Israel (the Washington Post reported on prosecution of Palestinians for instagram posts), and, most important, my increasing sense that the civilian toll in Gaza may be disproportionate to the military benefit, are leaving me disconcerted.  I recognize that the casualties are an inevitable result of Hamas’s inhumane policies, but “in a place where no one behaves like a human being, we must strive to be human.”  My friends in Israel – none of whom, to be sure, was ever a fan of Netanyahu’s – are scathing about his behavior.  I am told he has met with militant settlers but not with hostage families.  What happens next, after 25,000 Palestinian civilians are killed and Israel has control of Gaza?

Here’s my fisk, which I will later try and make a coherent essay.

I confess I am increasingly uncomfortable with the situation. Our rabbi gave a sermon last week based on a saying of Hillel from the Pirke Avot, “In a place where no one behaves like a human being, we must strive to be human.”

The Hebrew is “Ish”, man. And it’s addressed to people who have the courage to take on responsibility when no one else will. One commentator writes: “In a place where there is no one who knows, or is designated to perform the correct actions, strive to be that person.” In this case, it could mean, not following the majority for evil.

You shall neither side with the multitude to do wrong—you shall not give perverse testimony in a dispute so as to pervert it in favor of the crowd. (Deuteronomy 23:2)

Translating Hillel’s ish as “human being,” becomes dangerous when the emphasis shifts from decisiveness and responsibility to wringing one’s hands in compassion.

I don’t get the sense that the government has a strategy beyond obliteration

You get the sense that Israel has no strategy beyond obliteration because you’ve read the Israeli publications on the matter? Or because everyone around you is saying that?

[i.e.,] – a long-term plan for how to solve the Palestinian problem in a human way.

I think you may have meant humane (a common confusion). Of course, no one has any idea how to solve that problem in a humane way. In the meantime, while we start taking seriously and analyzing a battlefield that opened up 23 years ago, the Israelis, at the forefront of the war against this long-ignored enemy, are conducting a campaign against the most savage avatar of that goal of a global Caliphate. This apocalyptic enemy is a force most people in the West, instructed by their information professionals, have drastically underestimated for the last two decades. So no one, not the humanitarians, not the Clausewitzian war-gamers, not the legally-minded policy makers, has an idea of the “right strategy” for fighting this war. We Israelis are as shocked as you by the savagery we face. We are necessarily playing it by ear.

And its failure to rein in the settlers on the West Bank,

Continue reading →

Posted in Arab-Israeli Conflict | 2 Comments

Lethal Journalism and the Pattern: Why the World Fell for Hamas’ Al Ahli Lie

Posted on November 13, 2023 by Richard Landes

NOVEMBER / 2023

Fathom Long Read | Lethal Journalism and the Pattern: Why the World Fell for Hamas’ Al Ahli Lie

by Richard Landes
BACK
1390865785Palestinians around the damage caused from an explosion, at the Al Ahli hospital, in Gaza City, 18 October 2023. Photo by Atia Mohammed/Flash90

AUTHOR

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Richard Landes is author of Can ‘The Whole World’ Be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad (2022)

INTRODUCTION

This essay begins with the credulous media reaction to the Hamas propaganda about Al-Ahli hospital on 17 October. I offer two explanations for that terrible and dangerous journalistic failure in terms of, on the one hand, the contemporary prevalence of (now reflexive) ‘lethal journalism’ and, on the other, the historic ubiquity of what David Deutsch calls ‘the Pattern.’ After arguing that the lethal-journalism enabled demonisation of Israel is one of the last redoubts of the Pattern in the West, as illustrated by rapidity with which Western journalists restored it with their coverage of the Hospital tragedy. I conclude by warning that our unparalleled and difficult global experiment in freedom and abundance, not only Israel’s, depends on how we respond in the times ahead.

PART 1: AL AHLI HOSPITAL, 17 OCTOBER 2023: A CASE STUDY IN LETHAL JOURNALISM

17 October offered an example, literally breathtaking, of the unseemly haste with which professional commitments can be cast off and Jihadi war propaganda broadcast to the world. While rocketing Israel, one of the Jihadi’s own bombs landed in a parking lot outside a hospital in Gaza City. The explosion blew out some of the hospital’s windows, and caused, based on photos of the blast area and few bodies, a soberly estimated dozens of dead. Hamas, as it has so often in the past when their rockets kill their own children, announced to the world the triple lie that it had been 1) an Israeli strike on 2) a hospital, and had 3) killed hundreds.

Had there been a real journalist in Gaza to film the undamaged hospital, or the small crater, we would have known right away. But no. There were none, only ‘journalists fighting with their cameras’ and keyboards passing propaganda off as news. Gauging from the loop of footage shown by CNN, played again and again, there was nothing to confirm any aspect of the Hamas claims.

It’s worth mentioning here that Jihadi rockets aimed at Israel fall short 20-30 per cent of the time; and they repeatedly kill Gazans, including children and infants. Since much of the appeal of the Palestinian grievance narrative to the West is: ‘look at the terrible things they do to our innocent civilians whom we love, that’s why we hate them so’, these own-goal incidents, were they reported, might undermine that tale. In 2012, for example, in the case of 4-year-old Muhamad Sadallah, CNN’s Sara Sidner took part in a performance that climaxed with a photo-op in Shifa Hospital with Hamas chief Haniya and Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood Foreign Minister Kandil kissing the child Hamas had killed.

Hamas understood the danger of these ‘fell-shorts,’ and during its now 18-year-long rocketing of Israel, they developed a procedure: keep out the journalists until the tell-tale debris is removed, then bring them in to record the weeping over children the cruel Israelis had just killed. And for the longest time, journalists have complied with Hamas protocols, aware that revealing what really happened, much less elaborating on the ghoulish hypocrisy of Jihadis making photo-ops of children they had killed, would endanger their lives and the lives of their local fixers.

So how did the lethal journalists, not in Gaza, directly subject to Hamas intimidation, behave when confronted with Hamas claims about al Ahli hospital? Ten days after Hamas had shocked the humane world with their moral depravity, did they ask themselves, ‘Could Hamas be lying? Could this even be another case of Jihadi rockets killing Gazans, which, according to their modus operandi, the Jihadis try to blame on Israel? Can we check the source on the very high figure of dead? (After all, it took Israel a week to count their dead.) Should we wait for confirming evidence, like pictures of the demolished hospital? Or shots of the terrible pile-up of corpses?’

Or did they (unconsciously) think, ‘they might slaughter Jews, but they wouldn’t lie to me.’? This story was too good to wait on?

Read more at Fathom.

Posted in Arab-Israeli Conflict | 1 Comment

Failing the Hamas Litmus Test, Quillette

Posted on November 13, 2023 by Richard Landes
Failing the Hamas Litmus Test
Palestinians evacuate the Al-Ahli Arabi Baptist Hospital for safer spots after it was hit in Gaza City on October 18, 2023. Alamy

Failing the Hamas Litmus Test

The inflammatory Al-Ahli hospital hoax shows that much of the Western media remains compulsively addicted to dangerous and self-defeating war journalism.

Richard Landes
Richard Landes

 · 13 min read

If the unfathomable violence of October 7th showed us Hamas’s true nature and goals—and if the exultant response from Palestinian activists in the West taught us what they mean by a “non-violent civil society movement for freedom, justice and equality”—then what happened ten days later, revealed to the full light of day, the stunning, self-destructive dysfunctions of the Western media.On October 17th, an explosive projectile was reported to have hit the Al-Ahli Baptist hospital in Gaza City at about 21:30. Hamas quickly alleged that an Israeli airstrike had destroyed the building and killed as many as 500 people. In fact, an errant jihadist rocket, fired from within Gaza, had fallen in the hospital’s parking lot. Although the final casualty figures are still not established, given the limited size of the blast and the few photos of the bodies, one European intelligence source estimated that 10–50 people died.

When Western journalists first approached the Israelis for comment about the alleged strike, they were told that Hamas’s claims were being investigated. But instead of awaiting further details, many of these reporters simply printed Hamas’s version of events. Like “stenographers,” journalists at the New York Times, BBC, AP, France 24, Reuters, CNN, the Washington Post, and the LA Times all repeated the unsubstantiated claims of a terrorist organization. Despite the egregious implausibility of those claims, and the highly volatile situation in which they were being made, the West’s legacy media carried the story just as Hamas wanted. Jihadist war propaganda was transformed into news.

Within hours, the IDF produced compelling evidence—including clips from Al Jazeera Arabic, of all places—that the blast had been caused by a PIJ rocket. But by then, it was too late to prevent riots from breaking out across the Muslim world and angry protest marches from erupting across the West. Calls were raised for the overthrow of cowardly Arab governments, including the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, while protestors took to the streets of New York and other Western cities to demand a global intifada. The news of an alleged Israeli atrocity gave a shot in the arm to the already aggressive forces of Palestinian and global jihad, who duly began to accuse Israel of committing genocide.

Read more at Quillette

Posted in al ahli hospital blast, Are We Waking Up Yet?, Auto-stupefaction, Hamas, hate propaganda, headline fail, hoaxes, lethal journalism, own goal war journalism, Pallywood | Leave a comment

Hamas Pallywood as a Palestinian Cognitive War Strategy

Posted on November 13, 2023 by Richard Landes

I recently had a conversation with Dan Diker and Maurice Hirsch at the Jerusalem Center of Public Affairs, November 8, 2023.

Posted in al ahli hospital blast, Hamas Media Protocols, lethal journalism, own goal war journalism, own-goal behavior, Pallywood | Leave a comment

Studies in RUI, IV: Rosemary Church explains to IDF Spox Peter Lerner what media organizations do.

Posted on November 7, 2023 by Richard Landes

Studies in Reporting while under the influence of Hamas propaganda: Rosemary Church.

October 18, 9:10 AM IDT. After a long (perhaps too long) explanation of why Israel thinks that the blast near the hospital was a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket, Rosemary Church interrupts Peter Lerner to play the “we-don’t-know-yet, two-different-versions card.”

This is hours after intelligence agencies around the world have been examining the evidence that makes it clear that the numbers are “incredibly high… honestly implausible.”

Note the chiron.

Transcript:

Peter Lerner: …Because we are a serious operation.

Rosemary Church: Right. So sorry to interrupt you, but I just do want to say that we are waiting to see all the video from Israel that apparently shows it did not hit the hospital [sic: no one hit the hospital], that intelligence has been shared with the United States. And I wanted to ask you, will an upcoming news conference this hour share all that video and of course, that conversation that apparently was recorded between Hamas militants?

Note that there has been no effort by CNN to get photos of the hospital damage or piled up corpses in the hundreds, or to examine the photos of the parking lot and the intact hospital made available by independent photgraphers (see below).

Clarifying that, I mean, this is what the world needs is some clarity on this point. It’s not that anyone’s going either way. I mean, we’re just seeing the blame being cast in two different directions. And we as media organization need to establish it on the basis of facts. That is our task.

“It’s not that anyone’s going either way”? For the previous 14 hours, CNN has repeated every element of the Hamas claims as possible, starting with their initial chiron: (21:08 IDT).

All through the night: “hundreds dead, hospital hit, bodies under the rubble, thousands gathered to escape the bombing,” even as they ran videos “as horrible as the incident itself” with grave warnings to viewers, videos that were neither terrible (certainly not by wartime standards) nor evidence for any of the false claims they were repeating as news.

Later in the same hour, apparently unbeknownst to Rosemary or any of the CNN TV staff, CNN researchers published a piece with a photo of the parking lot, the undamaged hospital, and the Israeli claim: “The lack of structural damage at the al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City proves Israeli airstrikes didn’t cause Tuesday’s deadly explosion.”

But for reasons unknown, Rosemary preferred to sit on her hands and wait to be served, and as she waited, to explain to the IDF how a media organization works.

Aftermath of hospital blast in Gaza CityEarly morning, October 18, photo of site of blast, Mohammed al-Masri.

Posted in al ahli hospital blast, Are We Waking Up Yet?, Auto-stupefaction, CNN, Demopaths and Dupes, lethal journalism, RUI (reporting under the influence) | 2 Comments

Studies in RUI, III: Jake Tapper responds to the Israeli claim that it was a Palestinian rocket

Posted on November 7, 2023 by Richard Landes

Studies in RUI (reporting under the influence of Hamas propaganda).

Like everyone else at CNN, Tapper was absolutely convinced for many hours, on the basis of a medley of photos they ran over and again that proved nothing of the sort, that the hospital was hit and that the already massive death count (note chiron) would mount as “bodies are pulled from the rubble.”

When he finally gets the news from Regev around midnight (00:06, five hours after the blast) that Israel’s analysis says it was a Palestinian rocket, he responds not by questioning his fantasy world, but by asserting it: “That is a lot of damage for one rocket.” (Meantime CNN’s own reporters are working on an article that went up 20 minutes later (00:24 EDT) that

Israel’s military claims lack of structural damage at Gaza hospital rules out airstrikes

(Regev doesn’t seem to realize that the most powerful point he can make is that the rocket hit the parking lot and made a small dent.)

Jake Tapper: Mark Regev, senior adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a former Israeli ambassador to the UK. So, Mr. Ambassador, thanks for joining us. Israel is saying that the hospital was hit by a misfired rocket launched by Islamic Jihad, one that one that fell short. The Israeli government has posted some video on the social media site formerly known as Twitter. I mean, I’m looking at the video here. I don’t really know what I’m looking at. I can’t interpret it. That doesn’t mean it’s not real. I just don’t know what it is. Is there more proof? Is this definitive proof? How sure are you that this was not an accident until a strike by the Israeli Air Force or the Israeli military?

MR: Well, at the beginning we were investigating and it took its time to find out exactly what happened. And I’m in a position now to tell you, and I can tell you unequivocally that this was an Islamic Jihad rocket. Israel knows it. And I have to tell you, Hamas knows it, too. They are they know it was an Islamic Jihad rocket and they are deliberately putting out this story for their own propaganda purposes. Islamic Jihad has had problems with its rockets for years in previous round, in previous rounds of violence, some 33% of Hamas, of Islamic Jihad rockets fell short and landed in the Gaza Strip, often killing people. And that’s apparently what has happened now. And, of course, Hamas doesn’t want to admit that. How could they? From their point of view, this is a propaganda opportunity. Let’s blame the Israelis for terrible violence. It wasn’t us during. Simple.

JT: That is a lot of damage for one rocket.


Mohammed al-Masri photo.

See if you can find the crater.

Posted in Arab-Israeli Conflict, Are We Waking Up Yet?, Auto-stupefaction, Demopaths and Dupes, lethal journalism, RUI (reporting under the influence) | Leave a comment

Two sides of the story: The women and children shot while fleeing northern Gaza

Posted on November 7, 2023 by Richard Landes

In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper about their coverage of Al Ahli hospital, Naftali Bennet hit back at their atrocious coverage, as, for example, Anderson Cooper and Clarissa Ward (I’m writing a piece on that now).

“There are no two sides to this hospital. Either it was bombed by Israel or it was targeted [sic] by someone else on the Palestinian side… If two people come and one says it’s raining outside and the other said it’s dry, you don’t bring the quotes from both sides. You just goddamn open the window and look.”

Indeed, by the time he said this, independent experts were weighing in on the ridiculously inflated casualty figures (50, not 500), and yet for hours to come CNN ran the chiron “HUNDREDS BELIEVED DEAD IN GAZA HOSPITAL BLAST.” 

Here’s another interesting case of a no-brainer for those who take a peek out the window at reality.

Here’s footage, shot by a Gazan bike rider of the coastal road to southern Gaza, strewn with dead refugees shot dead as they fled. The bicyclist speaks in a voice moved with emotion:

“God, a child. God, women. God, the girl. Please God protect our people. Please look,” the cyclist is heard saying in Arabic. 

The footage got tweeted in Arabic, with the following commentary: Continue reading →

Posted in Arab-Israeli Conflict, Genocide, Hamas, lethal journalism, Scapegoating | 2 Comments

RUI of Hamas Propaganda II: Clarissa Ward questions the Israeli claims

Posted on November 5, 2023 by Richard Landes

Soon after making his opening remarks at 6:00 AM October 18, Anderson Cooper spoke with CNN correspondent Clarissa Ward about the Israelis claim [that it was an errant rocket that hit the parking lot causing minimal damage]. Her response is triply revealing.

Transcript:

Clarissa Ward: I will say, just based on seeing these rocket attacks many times over the years,

she admits to the frequency of rocket shortfalls, something that (I’ll bet) she’s never reported at the moment they happened.

that they don’t usually have an impact like that in terms of the size of the blast, in terms of the scale of the death toll and the scope of the damage.

Here she uses the Hamas narrative of a massive strike to question the Israelis, when they’ve looked at the evidence and she has clearly not.

It’s also not the first time. It’s important to add that we have seen the IDF categorically deny something before being forced to kind of do an about face after an extensive investigation.

She invokes the time(s) that Israel has admitted error and taken the blame, without mentioning

  • the frequency of Hamas disinformation,
  • their spotless record of denial of any fault no matter what the evidence, and, last but certainly not least,
  • the many times CNN has been taken in, specifically in the matter of fell-shorts.

This is not reporting, this is lethal journalism. In the end, every Hamas claim was false, every IDF claim was supported by evidence: the hospital wasn’t hit, the “size of the blast and scale of the death toll” were exactly proportionate to “these kind of rocket attacks,” with which she claims to be so familiar.

Posted in Are We Waking Up Yet?, Auto-stupefaction, CNN, Demopaths and Dupes, lethal journalism, own goal war journalism, Pallywood | 1 Comment

Reporting Under the Influence (RUI) of Hamas propaganda: CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Al Ahli Hospital

Posted on November 5, 2023 by Richard Landes

Anderson Cooper on the Al Ahli Hospital “Blast.”

This comes at 3AM in Israel where Cooper was reporting from. By this time he knows the hospital wasn’t hit, but rather the parking lot alongside (see final remark). Presumably he’s seen the photo.

Note that the hospital has not been hit; only a half-dozen cars have been damaged, only two seriously. No rubble.

What you are about to see is a display of credulity about Palestinian claims that beggars the (sound) imagination. Citing the “Hamas run Palestinian Health Ministry” Cooper precedes to tell their story (with his own compassionate embellishments) even as the pictures he shows (and doesn’t show) provide evidence for none of his (and Hamas’) claims. On a level of professional journalism this is criminally negligent.

Anderson Cooper

It is 3 a.m. here in Israel, which is even at this late hour dealing with the repercussions of a human tragedy on a terrible, terrible scale. The massive explosion at a hospital in Gaza City, we should say at the outset, the pictures are as horrible as the incident itself. We want to show you new video just moments after the blast. Hundreds are believed dead. We’re talking about men, women and children, civilians. More may still be buried in rubble at the El Ali Baptist Hospital.

Rubble? What rubble?

According to the Hamas run Palestinian Health Ministry, the hospital not only had patients and doctors and nurses inside, but thousands of displaced people outside who had been seeking shelter there, displaced from the bombings that had been going on in Gaza, compounding the loss of life.

NB: the footage he shows without comment are the same loop CNN has been showing for hours. None of them prove any of the claims made about them. On the contrary, they are all close-up, dark, jerky, unfocussed clips of chaos and injury. None of them show large numbers of bodies, of damage to the hospital. It’s classic Pallywood (although in this case I do not doubt the dead, just the magnitude, exaggerated by an order of ten (50 vs. 500).

Anderson Cooper: We cannot independently confirm how many people were killed in this blast, but the pictures are sickening.

Really? It’s sad, but sickening? Aren’t you a war correspondent?

One photojournalist who has witnessed many moments like this telling The New York Times, quote, “There were so many bodies I couldn’t even photograph.”

Poor man. Wait. Isn’t he a photographer? Wouldn’t this be the money shot? Where is it?

Many, many wounded people, women, children were taken to al-Shifa Hospital nearby. Here you see a child and an adult being taken from an ambulance that the number of dead and wounded was so great, there was almost no room for the medics.” Another reporter who witnessed the initial wave of casualties telling the Times, quote, “Their bodies are now in the courtyard. The morgue freezer is full. The morgue extension is full. And now they are storing the bodies in the area designated for journalists.”

Apparently it did not occur to either the team under Kinglsey at the NYT, nor Anderson Cooper’s to wonder why they had received no pictures of these piled up corpses in the reporter’s area. Surely every reporter there had a cell phone.

Hamas officials are blaming Israel for the blast. Israel categorically denies that, saying a failed rocket launched by the group Islamic Jihad fell short, landing by the hospital.

Oh, so you have heard about the parking lot.

 

Posted in Arab-Israeli Conflict, Are We Waking Up Yet?, Auto-stupefaction, hoaxes, lethal journalism, Lethal Narratives, New York Times, own goal war journalism, Palestinian Media Protocols (PMP), Pallywood | 2 Comments

“One Man’s Terrorist . . .”: Editorial Compliance with Jihadi Demands Part II

Posted on October 16, 2023 by Richard Landes

This is Part II of a discussion of the introduction of the principle not to use the term terrorism and its variants in describing terrorist attacks right after 9-11. The first part is here.

Palestinians Celebrate 9-11 and Intimidate Media into Not Reporting

The intimidation of Western news media by terrorists concerned with their “image” came to the fore in the Palestinian territories in the wake of 9-11. Western film crews based in Israel filmed Palestinians celebrating the event, and openly praising Bin Laden for his blow against the US. This reaction would come as no surprise to anyone who followed the Palestinian media, where the US is only second to the Israelis as a target of hatred, and the celebration of massacred enemy civilians was an act of high culture.[1] But, in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, with widespread expressions of sympathy for the US coming even from Muslim countries that were openly hostile to the US like Iran, with the POTUS, directed by Muslim advisors assuring the American people that Muslims around the world were appalled by the attacks of 9-11, these celebrations made the Palestinians look bad. Arafat, sensitive to image as always, shut down the demonstrations and staged a photo-op of him supposedly donating blood to the pulverized victims.[2]

As for the footage, Palestinian authorities, including the Tanzim, the military arm of the PA, did everything they could to prevent its circulation. They stopped camera crews at the site from filming; they called the camera crews who had filmed the celebrations into the PA offices and informed them that they would be held personally responsible if this footage were shown. Ahmed Abdel Rahman, Arafat’s Cabinet secretary, said the Palestinian Authority “cannot guarantee the life” of any member of the camera crew, if they broadcast the footage. AP, pressured both by the PA and their own cameramen, decided not to show the footage.

Publicly, AP Chief of Bureau Dan Perry protested somewhat entreatingly: “I ask the assurances of the Palestinian Authority that you will protect our journalists from threats and attempts at intimidation and that no harm would come to our freelance cameraman from distribution of the film.:[3] Privately, he admitted to an inquiring journalist that the AP had to fold: “We are acting to assure the safety of our staff. The safety of our staff is paramount. At this point, we believe there to be a serious threat to our staff if the video is released and we have protested this to the PA.”[4]

The incident confirmed what the events of the previous October in Ramallah had already illuminated: al Shabab and PA officials play tough-cop/nice-cop, to control the news media and make sure that that news that might harm the Palestinian “image” in the West does not get out. Here, on the topic of 9-11, the AP’s cautious response of pulling the footage replicates Cristiano’s protests and Orme’s astoundingly deficient report on Palestinian incitement the previous year.[5] Compliance with Palestinian demands, with a whimper of protest.

And on the backs of this MSNM compliance, George Bush, five days later, could assure the American people that “Muslims all across the world were as appalled and outraged as you at last Tuesday’s attacks.” Lethal journalism’s silence permitted triumphalist Muslims to hide their malevolent Schadenfreude at this blow to the US even as they asserted their innocence. Indeed, they could accuse anyone who brought up this disturbing behavior of being racist and Islamophobic, as blaming the victim (Islam and the vast majority of moderate Muslims) for deeds that have nothing to do with their “religion of peace.”

The “Responsible” Mainstream Media Adopt Reuters” Policy on the T-Word Continue reading →

Posted in 7/10, 9-11, ASSO21C, Auto-stupefaction, Can "The Whole World" be Wrong?, dhimmi journalism, Even-Handedness, Hamas, Intimidation of MSM, New York Times, own goal war journalism, Palestinian Media Protocols (PMP), Proleptic Dhimmitude, terrorism | 1 Comment

“One Man’s Terrorist . . .”: Editorial Compliance with Jihadi Demands Part I

Posted on October 16, 2023 by Richard Landes

Given the widespread revulsion with the media’s reluctance to call what Gazans did on 7/10 “terrorism,” I post here my treatment of the issue from my book, Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad. It comes near the end of my chapter on 9-11, and deals with the refusal of Reuters and BBC (both British media outlets) to use the term terror. It’s conclusion: this is not about “impartiality” and “not taking sides.” It is a craven submission to the threats by terrorists who do not want to be so called and, accordingly, in the name of high-minded principles, the journalists end up taking the side of the terrorists.

It is in two parts, the first part here analyzes the widely invoked meme: one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter, and the second here: a study of some specific discussions.

“One Man’s Terrorist . . .”: Editorial Compliance with Jihadi Demands

Among its many effects, 9-11 revealed an issue in journalism that had remained hidden from most news consumers beforehand, but which became a major topic of discussion and journalistic opinion in the subsequent years. For some years already, Western news agencies had adopted an increasingly formal rejection of using the word “terrorism/terrorist.” It was, they argued, “too emotive” a term and notoriously difficult to define.[1] Its use in describing a person or an act unfairly prejudiced the news consumer against those so designated. After all, as the saying goes, “One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.” [In the book I put in bold statements I consider “astoundingly stupid”.]

With this practice, news agencies aligned themselves with a position staked out in academia by the new and advocacy-driven “field” of Peace and Conflict Studies on the one hand, and by the Saïd-dominated “Middle East Studies Association,” on the other.[2] Martin Kramer, serious critic of the postcolonial academy, noted the absence of “terrorism” from the MESA statement on 9-11, and its hefty program of talks at their annual conference that year:

For years the academics’ response to terrorism has been to act as amplifiers for the “grievances” behind it. For the professors, terrorism was a kind of political protest—and since they sympathized with its supposed motives, they expelled the word “terrorism” from their lexicon. This weekend’s [MESA] conference demonstrates the neglect: With the exception of a hastily announced special panel, nothing in the program deals with terrorism.[3]

In other words, mainstream news media had become practitioners of “peace journalism,” lining up with a postcolonial paradigm weaponized against the victims of the jihadi attack. Given how peace journalism had disoriented the Israelis at the approach of the Al Aqsa Intifada,[4] it was a highly dubious direction in which to move.

Few expressions better qualify as an astoundingly stupid statement, than “One man’s terrorist . . .” not because there are no cases where one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter, not because it is absurd (just a false dichotomy[5]), but because in this case editors applied it to exactly the wrong situation. A great deal here hangs on what one means by “freedom.” In some cases, “resistance” and its attendant terror comes not from fighting for independence and autonomy, but for dominion.  So anyone claiming that an imperialist movement that repeatedly attacks civilian populations marked for subjection should not be called “terrorists,” because they might be “freedom fighters,” shows little respect for either language or empirical reality (or the moral intelligence of his or her readers]. Here, the “enlightened” Western mind meets triumphalist religiosity in the raw and cannot see it for what it is. For the Caliphate is not about freedom; it is literally about “submission”―Dar al Islam.

Reuters Refuses to Use Terrorism Label for 9-11: One Man’s Terrorist . . . Continue reading →

Posted in 7/10, 9-11, Auto-stupefaction, Can "The Whole World" be Wrong?, dhimmi journalism, Intimidation of MSM, own goal war journalism, Proleptic Dhimmitude | 3 Comments