France24 “debates” the conflict with a panel of like-minded participants

Posted on May 19, 2023 by Richard Landes

On March 1, 2023, Nadia Massih held a “Debate” about curbing the violence between Israelis and Palestinians. Her choice of participants, her questions, her body language all indicate that she views the conflict from the paradigm that views Palestinians as the innocent victims, resisting occupation. Thus, she has three Israelis all very self-critical and opposed to the occupation, and one Palestinian, apparently incapable of criticizing her side and opposed to the occupation. Any poorly informed viewer who didn’t listen carefully would get the impression that the occupation is the problem, and ending it is the solution.

Palestinian Media Protocols Compliance, 87%.

 

Gil Mihaely, ed. in chief, Causeur; Marc Lefebvre, Meretz; Nour Odeh, analyst and former spokesman for PA; and Alon Pinkas, former peace negotiator and Marc Lefebvre member of a far-left-wing Israeli party that has virtually disappeared since 2000 because of their insistence on making more concessions for the sake of making peace with a Palestinian leadership that clearly doesn’t want to share the land.

(In what follows, I summarize the statements and add comments in italics)

Nadia Massih (NM): another brutal cycle of violence, what’s new? settlers rampage with IDF looking on. How to break the cycle of violence, or is the region on the brink of a third intifada.

3:53-5:55 Gil Mihaely, editor in chief of the politically incorrect Causeur magazine, starts out with an energetic condemnation of the riots, using the loaded term “pogrom.” (At this point he has surpassed all the Palestinian spokespeople for criticism of his own side.) Having said that, he turns to background, making very guarded remarks which only allude to what he means. His reference to the 2nd intifada as a trauma for Arafat and the Palestinians on West Bank in which they learned the painful “collective lesson” that “violence was not an option,” for example, never spells out what he means, namely that, the choice of violence over negotiation (intifada) was [in his estimation] a choice with terrible consequences for Arafat. In the years 2000-2010, as Israel made clear that “violence was not an option,” the Palestinians lost a great deal and became both poorer and more isolated as a result.

This is, of course, his interpretation of affairs. He assumes that Palestinian suffering because they chose violence, with the Israeli crackdown (the barrier, the checkpoints) taught them a lesson. He, like Ami Ayalon and Iyad Saraj in the Gatekeepers, cannot imagine that this suffering is a price willingly paid in order to take vengeance on Israel.

Perhaps the most telling aspect of Mihaely’s comments are those about these young men. The new generation, in his opinion lives with hopelessness into “a blocked future with no horizon.” Here is a classic liberal cognitive egocentrist, depicting them as in despair for the lack of a future which, presumably is a decent life with economic prospects, denied him by the occupation. Not a mention of the genocidal incitement to which they are daily exposed.

6:15-7:49 Nour Odeh, Political analyst Ramallah is everything you would expect if you had listened to their (female) spokespeople, Nour Erakat, Diana Buttu, Hanan Ashrawi, namely: Israel, evil occupier; Palestinians innocent victims suffering and struggling for the rights and freedom from Israeli oppression. The script is monotone and repetitious, a secularized version of Hamas talking points, and contains not an ounce of self-criticism.

She agrees with Nadia’s opening question about a third intifada on its way, something one senses she looks forward to (i.e., undermining Mihaely’s assumption that Palestinians who lived through the 2nd intifada has learned a painful lesson). “Why have Palestinians been in conflict with an intifada? We can psychoanalyze them, we can explain their behavior as revenge, but the answer is simply people who do not want to be brutalized, oppressed and ruled by occupying power. Palestinians must be free of this will not stop. No formula for people being oppressed and brutalized without fighting back.”

Classic script written for the consumption of liberal cognitive egocentrists: we Palestinians want, like everyone else, to be free. It’s the brutal Israelis who are to blame for all the violence, theirs and ours. The appeal is to Westerners to project onto the Palestinians their mindset – only if i were “consistently and persistently oppressed and brutalized” would i behave this way. In such reasoning, the horrendous violence of the Palestinians is a measure of how great Israeli guilt.

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Posted in "Occupation", Arab-Israeli Conflict, Auto-stupefaction, Cognitive Egocentrism, Demopaths and Dupes, intifada, lethal journalism, Oslo Logic, Palestinian Media Protocols (PMP), Self-Criticism, Westsplaining | Leave a comment

Lethal, Own-Goal War Journalism Poisons the Western Public Sphere, 2000-202?

Posted on March 24, 2023 by Richard Landes

The following is a linked version of a talk I’ve given at several venues about my new book, Can “The Whole World” be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad,

The theme of my book is: the legacy media’s coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict (not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) in the 21st century constitutes the first and most enduring case of widespread fake news in modern professional journalism. This fake news – essentially jihadi war propaganda laundered as accurate, factual, news – has systematically:

  1. Blackened Israel’s face among the nations and turned her into a pariah
  2. Encouraged global jihad and shielded it from scrutiny,
  3. Damaged the credibility of the legacy media in democracies, and
  4. Undermined democracies around the world, both externally and internally,

for the last two decades.

In other words, not only can the “whole world” be wrong, but self-destructively wrong.

The original title of the book was: They’re so Smart cause We’re so Stupid. But my daughters convinced me not to start by insulting my readers. The current title,  combines two comments, one by Ahad Ha’am in 1892 who reported that when Jews said they didn’t sacrifice gentile boys and use their blood to make matzas, gentiles responded, “can everyone be wrong and the Jews be right?” And one from Kofi Anan, then Secretary General of the UN, when, in response to media reports of massacres at Jenin, Israelis said nothing even remotely resembling a massacre of civilians in Jenin occurred, he commented: “I don’t think the whole world, including the friends of Israel, can be wrong.”

And yet, Achad Ha’am entitled his essay, “Some Consolation,” concluding that we should take comfort in the fact that, indeed, “everyone” can be wrong and the Jews right. And as Anan’s comment illustrates, it’s happening again today.

The following discussion distinguishes between three kinds of ethically improper war journalism:

• Patriotic War Journalism (reporting your own side’s propaganda as news).
• Lethal War Journalism (reporting one side’s war propaganda in an outside conflict as news)
• Own-Goal (or suicidal) War Journalism (reporting your enemy’s propaganda as news to your own side)

And I distinguish also between two forms of antisemitism:

• Apocalyptic/genocidal antisemitism (exterminate the apocalyptic enemy before they exterminate you)
• Supersessionist antisemitism (rejoice in the degradation of those you claim to displace as the moral leaders of humanity)

Among professional journalists, patriotic war journalism is anathema – journalists resign rather than present their own country’s dishonest war propaganda as news. And yet, in the 21st century, we have twin phenomena on an unequalled scale in the history of Western professional journalism, in which journalists report the war propaganda of one side in a foreign conflict as news (lethal journalism), and, in the process, unwittingly engage in an ongoing campaign of reporting the war propaganda of their own enemies, as news (own-goal war journalism).

This disturbing development had multiple impacts on the West where it occurred: among them – the focus of this book – is the spread of antisemitism from its genocidal apocalyptic form in the Muslim world, especially in Palestinian circles, to the West where it found a particularly avid audience among supersessionist progressives who have an apparently insatiable appetite for news of Jews behaving badly. This news-laundered lethal war propaganda produced what observers already by 2003 were calling the “new antisemitism,” first among Western progressives – journalists, NGO activists and post-colonial academics, but which over the last two decades, has metastasized broadly across the political spectrum.

Today, I’d like to discuss 3 items:

1) NYT’s reporter William Orme on October 24, 2000, wrote an article on the role of incitement in inspiring the violence of the 2nd intifada. In it the only example he gave a speech by Sheikh Ahmad al Halabiyah in which he left out all the many genocidal comments.

2) France2’s Middle East correspondent, Charles Enderlin in 2007 gave an interview with Adi Schwartz, an Israeli journalist for HaAretz who covered the al Durah trial in Paris. Schwartz asked him “do you regret saying that the shots aimed at Al Durah came from the Israeli position?” Enderlin responded, “If I didn’t say that the boy and father were victims of fire coming from the IDF position, they would have said in Gaza ‘How did Enderlin not say this was the IDF?’”

3) In 2014, NYT Middle East Correspondent Jodi Rudoren, in response to an extremely unusual statement from the Foreign Press Association’s protest against Hamas intimidation of journalists tweeted: Every reporter I’ve met who was in Gaza during war says this Israeli/now FPA narrative of Hamas harassment is nonsense.

Now I want to focus on these three incidents because they embody the triple sins of commission, omission, and denial that have characterized the massive failure of journalistic standards that marks our unhappy century. So let me go back over these three incidents in some detail and in the order in which they occurred.

Let’s begin with Charles Enderlin, French Oleh, served in Do”tz when in the IDF, at the time of events, the senior ME correspondent for France2 based in Jerusalem. On September 30, 2000, he received from his Palestinian cameraman, 20 minutes of tape of which one minute contained six chopped up 10 second takes that the cameraman claimed showed the IDF shooting “in cold blood” a Palestinian boy in his father’s arms.

Enderlin edited the footage and gave it the Palestinian narration: the boy and the father “targets of fire coming from the Israeli position… the boy is dead, the father badly wounded.” Since the final 10 seconds showed the boy lifting his arm and looking at the camera, Enderlin cut them, claiming that it showed the death throes of the boy, too painful to broadcast.

Now of the five options for explaining the video footage shot by the Palestinian camera – Israelis killed the boy on purpose, by accident, Palestinians killed him by accident, on purpose, and staged – the odds are overwhelmingly that it was staged. In doing what he did, Charles Enderlin committed one of the most shocking acts of professional dereliction in the history of modern journalism. Indeed, although he may not have known it at the time, it turns out that in so doing, he unleashed the first post-modern blood libel, the first to “take” in the West since the holocaust, the first blood libel ever, in the 1000-year long history of the phenomenon, that was launched by a self-identified Jew. “The troubled dawn of the 21st century,” as Nidra Poller calls it, was launched and remains in thrall to this “icon of hatred.”

And the key, again, as Nidra points out, is the attribution of intent by Enderlin: “the target of fire coming from the Israeli position.” Without this malevolent dimension, this image could not play its role in the demonization of Israel that ensued. How, for example, could Osama Bin Laden have claimed that in killing this boy the Jews (al Yahood) had symbolically killed all the children in the world unless his audience believed they murdered him in cold blood? Or how, for example, could a major French journalist like Catherine Nay explain to nodding heads, that this footage “replaces, erases the picture of the boy in the Warsaw ghetto,” if the lad had been killed in a crossfire started by Palestinians shooting from behind his back?

Enderlin’s “cibles de tirs venus de la position israelienne” gave permission to the onslaught of vituperation that ensued. Al Durah was the patron martyr-saint of the hate fest at Durban in which Israel was accused of genocide by people who put out T-shirts with pictures of Hitler saying, “If I had won there’d be no Israel and no Palestinian blood shed.”

Al Durah was the icon of hatred that united the progressive left and the Jihadi Caliphators in an unholy alliance that saw Israel and the US as the two “Satans” whose demise will lead to global redemption from racist imperialism, an alliance from which we still suffer constantly. Indeed, again without knowing it, Enderlin’s “target of fire” introduced Holocaust Inversion into the mainstream of progressive thought.

The story only gets worse. The Israeli media itself promoted the blood libel and blunted efforts to denounce it. Haaretz, understanding the devastating revelation contained in Enderlin’s response – “what would they say in Gaza if I didn’t” – cut that passage from the English translation. In so doing, they enacted a key dysfunction of the Western media covering the Arab-Israeli conflict in the 21st century. For reasons we’ll discuss in a moment, journalists are taking their cues from Palestinian propagandists – no, let me be even more blunt – they directly transmit a scarcely-altered Palestinian narrative repeatedly. Indeed, this tendency is so engrained that Enderlin could just blurt out his damning admission without thinking about it. Here we have a terrible case of lethal journalism which was also a case of own-goal war journalism on the part of the Israeli journalist Enderlin: reporting your enemy’s most vicious war propaganda as news. And it both “shattered any dreams of peace,” and set off the most widespread and sustained case of “fake news” in the history of modern professional journalism.

Let’s go to the second example, that of William Orme. In the days after the al Durah story broke, Palestinian and al Jazeera TV played the footage non-stop, making the 12 year old boy Muhammad a Durah a martyr and symbol of the martyrdom of the Palestinian people, inspiring riots not only in the Palestinian territories, but on the Israeli side of the Green Line, where, just as European Christians had responded to blood libels in the 19th century by pogroms, so the Palestinian Muslims attacked Israelis and European Muslims attacked the Jews beside whom they lived. Indeed, the Palestinians took a shot of an Israeli soldier shooting rubber bullets at the rioters in Nazareth, and inserted it in the footage published by Enderlin, so that the Palestinian viewer saw the Israeli soldier aim and fire at the boy.

Some ten days later, on October 11, 2000, two Israeli reservists took the wrong turn and ended up in Ramallah the Palestinian “capital in exile,” and were taken into custody by the Palestinian police. As soon as word got out, however, a lynch mob came and beat the soldiers to death with their bare hands, dragging their bodies half-burned, through the streets. Wrote one sympathetic photographer:

It was the most horrible thing that I have ever seen, and I have reported from Congo, Kosovo, many bad places. In Kosovo, I saw Serbs beating an Albanian, but it wasn’t like this. There was such hatred, such unbelievable hatred and anger distorting their faces.

And all the time, the crowds chanted “revenge for the blood of Muhammad al Durah.

The Palestinians beat any journalist who tried to film the scene and confiscated the footage of others. Only one Italian crew brought out footage of the lynching, and they spent the night in the Italian embassy before being spirited out of the country to spare them the Palestinians’ wrath. The head of the “other” Italian news agency at the time, Riccardo Cristiano, who had been hospitalized by a beating he got in Jaffa ten days earlier, wrote a pathetic letter to Arafat, assuring him that his people would never have violated the “journalistic procedures for work in Palestine.”

William Orme, who had written extensively on the poor Muhammad al Durah, was present at Ramallah that day, saw the violence of the Palestinians against the media, and the compliance of the press with the PA’s demands, heard the cry of revenge for al Durah. And, despite filing daily articles at that time, he reported nothing about it. Indeed, when, as President of the International Press Association in Jerusalem, he was asked about the Palestinian intimidation of western journalists, he declared:

We have received hundreds of complaints about Israeli government handling of the press. … In contrast, only a handful of journalists have filed complaints against the PA… There is no self-censorship of journalists afraid of the PA.

The following day, PA-appointed Sheik Halabaya, gave a sermon in Gaza which was aired on PA TV.

The Jews are the Jews. Whether Labor or Likud, the Jews are Jews. They do not have any moderates or any advocates of peace. They are all liars. They must be butchered and must be killed… It is forbidden to have mercy in your hearts for the Jews in any place and in any land. Make war on them any place that you find yourself. Any place that you meet them, kill them.

Nor was this an isolated incident nor even confined to Palestinian sheikhs. A Saudi theologian described the scene in the Arab Muslim world after al Durah:

An unprecedented Muslim consensus that the only solution is jihad, these are the words of leaders, scholars, thinkers, strategists, populists, preachers, the illiterate masses, men, women, children…. Everyone agrees with these words which no sooner enter the ear and settle into the depths of the heart, then new questions arise: how? …A government-appointed scholar of the Azhar declares on the most widely viewed satellite television channel (Al Jazeera) that the only way to deal with the Jews is with the principle: “Slay them wherever you find them.” The interviewer asks, “But Shaykh, do you mean actual killing?” (That is, “Do you understand what you are saying?”) “Does the Azhar agree with you?” And the answer is unequivocally: “Yes.” Tremendous anger everywhere…

The time for the enactment of the apocalyptic hadith of the rocks and trees, piously and eagerly anticipated by Hamas in its charter of 1988 had at last come, the time just before the Last Judgment, in which Muslims would rise up and kill every last Jew, and the trees and the rocks would call out “Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill it.” Jihadis had entered apocalyptic time and it most resembled Nazi apocalyptic: paranoid, genocidal, antisemitic, world conquering, world destroying.

The Israelis, painfully aware of the genocidal incitement coming from the Palestinian side retaliated for the lynching at Ramallah by firing a rocket through the window out of which the two slain Israelis had been thrown, and bombed the Palestinian radio station at night, citing as justification, the ICC’s indictment of the Hutsi radio station Mille Collines for incitement to genocide of the Tutsis only six years earlier.

Dutifully, the NYT set Orme to work on an article investigating the Israeli claim that the violence of the intifada was provoked by Palestinian incitement. His article, entitled: “A Parallel Mideast Battle: Is It News or Incitement?” offers one of the most exceptional examples of lethal journalism extant. He never once mentioned Muhammad al Durah’s role in Palestinian media, nor the behavior of the crowds in the Ramallah lynch. Instead he played “he said, she said,” with Israelis saying it’s genocidal incitement and the Palestinians saying “whatever we say the Israelis consider incitement.” And as the only concrete example of incitement Orme offers, he cites from Sheikh Halabaya’s sermon cited above, but only the opening sentence:

“Labor of Likud, they’re all the same they’re all Jews.” QED for the Palestinian spokesman.

Now as far as I can make out, there are only four possible explanations for Orme’s choice of what to quote: 1) he’s incredibly stupid and couldn’t get a D in a 11th grade history class (not); 2) he hates Jews and wanted to protect from opprobrium those who want to exterminate them (most improbable); or 3) he adheres to a post-colonial ideology in which the Palestinians are underdog victims who deserve support; and 4) he’s intimidated by the Palestinians into reporting by their rules.

I personally think it’s a combination of #3 and #4, but with heavy emphasis on intimidation. After all, despite his comments about Israeli intimidation as head of the FPA, he had been at Ramallah and seen the savagery, including beating journalists. He knew perfectly well that to affirm Israeli claims about Palestinian genocidal incitement, violated the “journalistic procedures for work in Palestine.” A year later the same dynamics played out, and AP, under clear threats, removed the embarrassing footage of Palestinians celebrating 9-11.

Indeed, the journalistic procedures to which Cristiano alluded in his letter to Arafat is the dirty public secret of western journalists working here. If the iron filings above the table take an ideological form (the post-colonial narrative, liberal projections, rooting for the underdog), or emotional forms (hostility to the Jewish state), the magnet underneath, that shapes those filings and gives them their across-the-board consistency, is fear of Palestinian retaliation for not observing their journalistic procedures.

So when, in the 2014 conflict in Gaza, Hamas’ ugly behavior became hard to ignore (firing from the midst of civilians, not letting Gazans leave those areas so the Israeli retaliation would kill them, killing Gazan children with stray rockets and blaming Israel), they had to raise the level of threat to keep journalists in line. In response to many complaints, the FPA finally issued its unwonted protest – its only protest – against Palestinian intimidation. Jodi Rudoren, however, the NYT correspondent who was not even in Gaza at the time, rushed in to shore up the public secret.

Every reporter I’ve met who was in Gaza during war says this Israeli/now FPA narrative of Hamas harassment is nonsense.

In the name of the broad consensus of the journalists (everyone who was anyone) who were in Gaza, the FPA “narrative” is just a replication of the Israeli narrative, which is “nonsense.” Instead Rudoren transmitted the Palestinian, also legacy journalist’s narrative that there is no intimidation… in other words, the real nonsense. Nor was Rudoren alone in circling the wagons. CNN International Chief Tony Maddox formally stated:

We have had no intimidation from Hamas and received no threats regarding our reporting.

And Rudoren and Maddox carried the day. Those exposing the frauds, including the 10 children killed by a Hamas bomb breaking the Eid al Fitr cease-fire, remained largely in the Zionist news ghetto. Overall, the Western world’s exposure to the 2014 Gaza war complied closely with Hamas’ journalistic procedures: the “vast majority” of the many thousands of dead were innocent civilians killed by Israel; Hamas and Islamic Jihad were resisting Israeli aggression.

Now the reason I’ve covered these three incidents in close detail is because they represent a most telling sequence in the systematic misinformation that flooded the West in 2000 and continues to do so today. On the one hand, we have the presentation of the most malicious Palestinian propaganda (murdering children in their parents’ arms, massacring civilians like Nazis), on the other, we have the systematic suppression of information about the genocidal preaching from Palestinians, inciting terrible violence (indeed precisely what they accused Israel of doing) against Israel and Jews and against anyone perceived as “their allies,” like Americans.

As a result of this concealed intimidation and compliance with the Palestinian narrative, by 2003, at the height of the Jihadi war of suicide terror waged by Palestinians, both religious (Hamas) and allegedly secular (PA), it became, according to Ian Buruma,

“the universal litmus test of liberal credentials to support the Palestinian cause.”

How could “liberals” universally and uncritically support such a savage cause, one driven by such genocidal hatreds? Paul Berman explained:

…each new act of murder and suicide testified to how oppressive were the Israelis. Palestinian terror, in this view, was the measure of Israeli guilt. The more grotesque the terror, the deeper the guilt.

This perverse logic owed everything to the lethal journalism of the legacy media, and it not only betrayed Israel and the Jews world-wide, but the very liberal values it allegedly championed.

The following year Itamar Marcus challenged this dominant meme whereby suicide bombings were caused by desperation”: “it’s aspiration, not desperation…” aspiration to destroy Israel that motivates, not desperation at not having a their Palestinian nation and their inalienable human rights. His argument has been ignored by “the whole world,” as exemplified during Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s recent visit.

This assumption of Israeli guilt, spread effortlessly to the guilt of all “Jews.” After every bout of lethal journalism there is a wave of angry demonstrations, attacks on Jews in the diaspora, justification for those attacks, including from “as a Jew” Jews who complained bitterly that they weren’t responsible for Israeli evil which they loudly denounced. In the aftermath of the 2014 Gaza war, with its attendant lethal journalism inspiring attacks on Jews in Europe, Swedish journalist Helena Groll asked the Israeli ambassador,

Do the Jews themselves have any responsibility in the growing anti-Semitism that we see now? [After all, she persisted], a lot of people would look at the Middle East today and say, “we see the Gaza war, we see things that have been happening, that Israel and Jews in Israel have a responsibility to reactions that are coming.”

At the very same time, the BBC’s Tim Wilcox, interviewed a Jewish woman after the attack on customers in a Kosher supermarket in Paris in early January 2015. When she voiced concerns that this is like the 1930s, he interrupted her:

Many critics of Israel’s policy would suggest that the Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands as well…

Pointing out that this was an unfair lumping of French Jews with Israelis, he responded,

You understand everything is seen from different perspectives.

– presumably meaning that from some perspectives (definitely from a Jihadi and a Palestinian one, also possibly from his), the Jews are indeed collectively responsible for what people believe some Jews have done. Although Wilcox later apologized for the “unintentional offense” his “poorly phrased question” may have caused, he clearly had no inkling that he was promoting the jihadi narrative (Muslim terror is a product of their victimhood at the hands of the Jews), even as he interrupted the Jewish (and civil-society) narrative about civilians – citizens – being targeted by Jihadis. Own-goal journalism at its self-righteous finest. And as Nick Cohen pointed out: this attitude permeates the English “left middle class.”

At its worst, inverted narrative compares Israel to the Nazis, Palestinians to the new Jews, victims of genocide. And the decent center, the real liberals and democratic conservatives, have no defense against this. Here’s vice president Kamala Harris dealing with a student who just had to bring up Israel’s “ethnic genocide” against the Palestinians:

I’m glad you brought that up, and again this about the fact that your voice, your perspective, your experience, your truth, should not be suppressed. And it must be heard, right?

Nor is this just bad news for Jews and Israelis. It’s bad news for Western democracies. Just look at what a profoundly anti-intellectual BDS and its lethal, deliberately dishonest propaganda has done to the Western academy.

Alas! for the good people in the West sitting in their democratic citadels looking down on Israel in pity and scorn, what constitutes lethal journalism in the regional context – running Palestinian war propaganda as news – is, in this case, also own goal war journalism – running global Jihad’s lethal propaganda as news. Thus, every time the news broadcast videos and reports of Israelis killing Palestinians, the journalists did not realize it, but they were broadcasting images of infidels slaughtering innocent Muslims. One cannot find a more spectacular affirmation of the Jihadi narrative that the West is at war with Islam.

Curiously, at the same time, authorities like Obama, Kerry and Clinton all insisted that we not even mention radical Islam because that would affirm that same Jihadi narrative. In other words, this combination replicated the one I’ve detailed above: the loud circulation of false information about the behavior of infidels, combined with silence on accurate information about the behavior of Jihadis. When the history of the global Jihad against the West is written – whether as a success (let’s hope not) or a failure – it will necessarily chronicle that assault’s most successful strategy: using the West’s receptivity to news of Jews behaving badly as the soft-underbelly by which it invaded.

Irwin Cotler pointed out in the early aughts,

“It is not only that the Jewish people are the only people who are the standing targets of state-sanctioned incitement to hate and genocide, but they are the only people who are themselves accused of being genocidal.”

Let me rephrase that:

Israel is the only country successfully accused in Western languages of being racists and Nazis bent on genocide, by the people who in their own tongues, are deeply racist by the real meaning of the word (Jews are sons of pigs and monkeys), admire the Nazis and wish to finish the job of exterminating the Jews.

The success of this perverse “Holocaust Inversion,” in both explicit forms, and more subtle ones, represents a massive cognitive-war victory for Palestinian irredentism, and an equally disastrous loss for the forces of peace.

The permanent reluctance of the news media, compliant with Palestinian “procedures for journalists,” to even raise the issue of Palestinian genocidal incitement, much less illustrate it, to reveal Palestinian sympathies for the Nazis and hatreds of the US, reinforces this viewpoint and the persistence of the myth which “everyone knows,” that the two-state solution is the only legitimate one, and that it’s Israel, with her settlements and occupation that are the main obstacle.

Now if this were only Israel at stake, one might understand (if not forgive) an outsider, like my Harvard classmate who came to visit Jerusalem, saying, “Israel is putting us all in danger. If Israel didn’t poke the Islamic bear, we’d all be a lot safer.”

And yet the only thing that would be safer, and even then, only momentarily, would be the delusion that the Palestinian cause was noble, that Israel treats them cruelly, beyond endurance, and that if you feed the Israelis to the Islamist crocodile, that will sate, not whet its appetite.

At the height of the Jenin massacre hysteria on April 17 2002, a Hamas preacher proclaimed the following, invoking the genocidal hadith of the “rocks and trees”:

We believe in this Hadith. We are convinced also that this Hadith [i.e. the extermination of the Jews] heralds the spread of Islam and its rule over all the lands… Oh Allah, annihilate the Jews and their supporters… Oh Allah, raise the flag of Jihad across the earth… Oh beloved, look to the East of the earth, find Japan and the ocean; look to the West of the earth, find the country and the ocean. Be assured that these will be owned by the Muslim nation, as the Hadith says, ‘from the ocean to the ocean.’

If “never again,” means anything, it means that when some group preaches genocide from the pulpits, and these genocidal sermons are then broadcast by the public by the authorities, that’s news, relevant and accurate. And when the advocates of this genocide see it as a prelude to world conquest, it’s even crucial for the target of this imperial ambition, namely audiences in the West, to know about it. At such a juncture, one might think, it was time for journalists, the “witnesses to their time,” to speak up.

But no. The Jenin Massacre meme was far too important to dwell on such trivialities that contradicted the narrative.

This is, let me repeat, not just about Israel. Palestinian jihad, including the “secular” PLO, is a leading force in global Jihad whose aim is world conquest. This is, of course an unlikely ambition to be realized and many westerners, like our journalists and even our own military intelligence, will dismiss it as mad, and assume that the vast majority of Palestinians and Muslims wouldn’t fall for such nonsense. But as Hitler, Stalin and Mao all showed us: wrong, where millennial beliefs are concerned, hardly means inconsequential. Rather, unopposed, it means the mass murder of tens of millions, on the way to its inevitable failure.

So when we Israelis defend our cause, we also defend a society of decency and tolerance, of democratic rights mutually granted, or what Eli Sagan referred to as “a near miracle.”

***

All of us who read (or heard from our parents) the story of the emperor’s new clothes when we were young probably thought two things: 1) it’s a fairy tale, this doesn’t really happen; and 2) it’s a comedy, in the end everyone is laughing at the emperor and his courtiers.

But no. Andersen didn’t tell us how the crowd reacted to the revelation of everyone’s public stupidity. If one considers what it means to have a ruling class so staggeringly stupid and in denial of reality as to parade a naked emperor in public, one can readily imagine that the crowd wept in despair.

And again no. It happens. And it’s happening now. Only this time the drama surrounds not a naked emperor, but an icon of hatred, the Palestinian cause with its genocidal animosities and pitiless violence. In this scenario, the tailors are the Soviet propagandists and the Palestinian “nationalists” who insist only racists can’t see the justice of the cause and its means, the foolish emperor is the progressive left who think they speak for “the whole world,” the chamberlain is Edward Saïd (or, in the case of the Al Durah icon of hatred, Charles Enderlin), the courtiers are the “human rights” NGOs, the town criers announcing the parade and grooming the public to cheer the emperor are the news media, and the crowd praising the emperor’s garb are the liberal cognitive egocentrists including the Peace-negotiators. And when the child, in this case Israel, speaks, his father (Diaspora Jews) tells him to shut up.

If in the 20th century, the dark joke was

“Anti-Semitism is hating Jews more than absolutely necessary,”

then in the 21st century it’s

hating Jews even though it’s killing you.

This book I have just published is my small contribution to both the voice of the child in the crowd revealing the folly of those culture leaders who think they as spokesmen for “the whole world” cannot be wrong and that (shudder) Israel might be right, and a call to arms in a civilizational war that I truly believe we can still win.

Thank you.

Posted in Arab-Israeli Conflict | 3 Comments

Downie tries to square the circle: Pomo journalism can be reliable (Middle East news)

Posted on March 2, 2023 by Richard Landes
The following is a fisk of an article by a pre-eminent information professional who tries to argue that post-modern, post-truth journalism can be reliable. In doing so he lays bare the folly of this generation of journalists and sheds a harsh light on the massive failure of the profession in the 21st century. I first heard of this article from an article by Bret Stephens, who does a good, if brief, job of critiquing it. I will bring his comments to bear when appropriate.
Newsrooms that move beyond ‘objectivity’ can build trust
By Leonard Downie Jr.
January 30, 2023 at 7:15 a.m. EST
Leonard Downie Jr., a former executive editor of The Washington Post, is a professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.
Amid all the profound challenges and changes roiling the American news media today, newsrooms are debating whether traditional objectivity should still be the standard for news reporting. “Objectivity” is defined by most dictionaries as expressing or using facts without distortion by personal beliefs, bias, feelings or prejudice. Journalistic objectivity has been generally understood to mean much the same thing.
But increasingly, reporters, editors and media critics argue that the concept of journalistic objectivity is a distortion of reality. They point out that the standard was dictated over decades by male editors in predominantly White newsrooms and reinforced their own view of the world.
This is a classic misuse of anti-racist arguments. If it’s white it must be bad. That “whites” (ie Westerners) were the first to develop a news media that struggled against the natural and political tendency to slant the news in favor of the self or the powerful, cannot be held against them. Indeed, the ability of others (Jews, Blacks, Arabs, etc.) to join that media phenomenon was precisely because of this commitment to not indulging an in-group bias.
As for reality, the best definition I’ve seen is “that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” White males told us the earth revolved around the sun, not vice-versa, as “everybody knew.” Does that make it less “true” because the vast majority of the world’s traditions (including the “white” tradition) thought the opposite? Is understanding reality despite what blows it might bring to our subjective desires, just a form of white imperialism?
They believe that pursuing objectivity can lead to false balance or misleading “bothsidesism” in covering stories about race, the treatment of women, LGBTQ+ rights, income inequality, climate change and many other subjects.
Bothsidesism being here a term used to dismiss anyone who disagrees with what the given journalist – or even the journalistic culture – has decided is “the science.” The crisis of faith in both media, and more generally “experts” promoted by that media, goes unattended. In Downie’s report, loss of credibility of the media is due less if at all to its (unexamined) failures, but “greatly exacerbated by [right-wing] politicians and ideologues who demonized the mainstream media as fake news” (p. 12).
And, in today’s diversifying newsrooms, they feel it negates many of their own identities, life experiences and cultural contexts, keeping them from pursuing truth in their work.
This is a remarkable statement. The diversification comes from the commitment to “objectivity,” namely the openness to anyone willing to play by agreed upon rules of impartiality. Then two things happened: 1) a commitment to diversity as defined by identities, hence a “ethnically” diverse collection of people but a “view-point” restricted one; and 2) a commitment to causes that were “politically correct” (anti-racism, LGBTQ, transgender, Palestinian “national” cause) and a corresponding increase in identity bias.
Something like this occurred during my early years in the field in the 1960s and ’70s. Under the leadership of a few editors, including especially The Post’s Ben Bradlee, our generation of young journalists moved away from mostly unquestioning news coverage of institutional power. I was one of the editors on The Post’s Watergate story, which spawned widespread national investigative reporting that continues today. Colleagues at The Post, other newspapers and broadcast networks reported skeptically on the unwinnable Vietnam War.
This is a mistaken connection. The news coverage of the 60s and 70s challenged those in power, and brought information to the public that would not have been covered in a newsroom dedicated to reinforcing those in power. In Shame-Honor culture, where public criticism is an affront to one’s honor, violence is a legitimate challenge to a free press (during the Dreyfus Affair there were dozens of duels in which numerous journalists lost their lives).
The people who did the Watergate story were “white” and their work an exemplary case of honest and fearless investigative reporting. When, after a similar case of investigative journalism in the Boston Globe about sexual abuse in the Calthoic Church, a French friend ridiculed American Catholics for letting this abuse go on so long, I responded: “And you think nothing like this goes on in the French Catholic Church? Or that the French press doesn’t have les couilles to investigate and publish?”
Throughout the time, beginning in 1984, when I worked as Bradlee’s managing editor and then, from 1991 to 2008, succeeded him as executive editor, I never understood what “objectivity” meant. I didn’t consider it a standard for our newsroom. My goals for our journalism were instead accuracy, fairness, nonpartisanship, accountability and the pursuit of truth.
This is a strangely demeaning confession made with aggressive self-assertion. It seems like an early (if memory serves the author) example of trying to apply the post-modern paradigm in which objectivity is both impossible and incapable of describing “reality” to journalism. What we get instead is a laundry-list of terms, equally problematic to define, which are supposed to replace “objectivity” and instead, rephrase it:
  • accuracy, ie as good a job as possible to actually describe things that happened, and a clear distinction between those descriptions, and opinions about motive, context, explanation, as well a good filter for lies and propaganda.
  • fairness: a commitment not to take sides, but to listen to both/all sides in a dispute and not side (certainly a priori) with one against the other(s).
  • non-partisanship: (see above, “fairness”)
  • accountability: willingness to be corrected and to self-correct when impartial (objective?) evidence from the “real world” contradicts one’s previous work.
  • the pursuit of truth: in journalistic terms, the “truth” with a small T means the best take one can make on what “really happened.”

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Posted in Arab-Israeli Conflict, dhimmi journalism, journalism, lethal journalism, own goal war journalism, pomo | 1 Comment

Two Nice Jewish Boys interview me

Posted on March 2, 2023 by Richard Landes

Posted in Arab-Israeli Conflict | Leave a comment

Muhammad al Durah and Shireen Abu Akleh: The Anatomy of Media-Promoted Blood Libels

Posted on February 28, 2023 by Richard Landes

This essay was originally composed at the time of events. When Israel took responsibility for the death (but not the murder) of Abu Akleh, I tried to find out on what basis they made that concession, and got nowhere. I moved on to other things and forgot about it. In composing another post on post-objective journalism, I went back to it. Since it’s dated, I doubt any publication will be interested, but it’s here for the record.

Muhammad al Durah and Shireen Abu Akleh: The Anatomy of Media-Promoted Blood Libels

Few recent incidents illustrate so sharply and in depth just how morally and empirically disoriented we have become in our era of “fake news.” The dynamics that produced the world-wide phenomenon of shock and horror at the death of an al-Jazeera journalist during an Israeli anti-terror operation in the refugee camp of Jenin, the evidence that fed the (still-churning) news cycle, and the mobilization of protest, all attest to the continuing success of a cognitive war against the West that is as effective today as when it was launched in 2000.

On May 11, 2022, one Palestinian journalist, Shireen abu Akleh, was killed, and another, al Jazeera news channel producer, Ali al-Samoudi, was shot in the back. The Palestinian eye-witnesses, especially the survivor al-Samoudi, immediately accused Israeli snipers of deliberately targeting the journalists, a highly flammable accusation. The story hit the global community with the force of a tsunami. Within two days, there were over 14 million hits on Google: from the UN to the glitterati to the halls of Congress, concerned figures raised their voices in horror and indignation. Nothing even remotely like this level of global attention and anger has ever happened for any other journalist of any identity or gender killed in a war zone. As for the deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians, as in the deliberate murder of 3 civilians at a café in Tel Aviv two weeks earlier, that managed only 53,000 hits all told, even as it was one of the reasons for the operation in Jenin.

Key to the outrage was a claim, made immediately by eyewitnesses and Arab reporters from the scene: that the IDF had targeted the journalists, deliberately, in cold blood. Grief and Anger: The killing of Shireen Abu Akleh and the Israeli assault on Palestinian press freedoms, announced The New Arab. The key players in spreading the accusation of deliberate murder were the NGOs, Palestinian, Israeli, American, international. With a single voice they all quickly and actively accused Israel of cold-blooded murder, assassination, a pattern of war crimes. As a result, anyone in woke circles who circulate such material, read the more restrained journalistic accounts of her “killing,” as evidence of Israel’s guilt. Palestinian-American congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, one of the highest profile of such “readers” had no problem immediately accusing Israel of murder and calling on the US to reconsider aid:

When will the world and those who stand by Apartheid Israel that continues to murder, torture and commit war crimes finally say: “Enough.” Shireen Abu Akleh was murdered by a government that receives unconditional funding by our country with zero accountability.

Note Tlaib’s free use of murder. The libel takes across a web of activists some of whom now operate in Congress.

Even though there were no corroborating details, journalists and news outlets repeated the Palestinian claims as credible if not decisive. The typical headline blared the accusation. The very day of the incident, the London Times headline read: “Shireen Abu Akleh: reporter shot dead by sniper as Israel raids refugee camp.” Sniper, of course, implies deliberate targeting. Others reported the accusation, and then tacked on a source: “Israeli forces deliberately shot Shireen Abu Aqleh, Palestinian probe finds” (Guardian). And if Western news media kept at least that one level of distance from the murder narrative, their Arabic services had no problem pumping the Arab world with Western laundered propaganda.

But even in the West, whether explicit or implicit, the presumption behind pointing the finger at Israel for he death was deliberation: that alone could justify the level of shock and indignation; that lay behind the calls to investigate what could be a war-crime, what constituted a terrible threat to journalists the world over. Every announcement of Israeli responsibility carried with it the implication of guilt, every call for an investigation (international, UN, FBI), assumed that guilt: “Killing of Palestinian journalist potential war crime: UN Special Rapporteur.”

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Posted in Arab-Israeli Conflict, Are We Waking Up Yet?, Auto-stupefaction, Demopaths and Dupes, lethal journalism, Lethal Narratives, lying, own goal war journalism, Pallywood, Shireen abu Akleh | 1 Comment

Zoom Lecture to Bnai Brit UK on my book

Posted on February 27, 2023 by Richard Landes

The following is a lecture I gave to Bnai Brit UK on the main themes of my book,
Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad. I have appended the text from which I read.

 

The Sad Tale of the New Antisemitism in the 21st Century

The theme of my book is: the legacy media’s coverage of the arab-israeli conflict in the 21st century constitutes the first and most enduring case of widespread fake news in modern professional journalism. This fake news – essentially jihadi war propaganda laundered as accurate, factual, news – has systematically

  • blackened Israel’s face internationally and shamed many liberal and progressive Jews who had been proud of her,
  • encouraged global jihad and shielded it from scrutiny,
  • damaged the credibility of the legacy media in democracies, and
  • undermined democracies around the world, both externally and internally, for the last two decades.

The original title of the book was: They’re so Smart cause We’re so Stupid. But my daughters convinced me not to start by insulting my readers. The current title, can the whole world be wrong? It’s a combination of two comments, one by Achad Ha’am in 1892 when Jews said they didn’t sacrifice gentile boys and use their blood to make matzas, gentiles responded, “can everyone be wrong, and the Jews be right?” And one from Kofi Anan, then Secretary General of the UN, when, in response to media reports of massacres at Jenin, Israelis said nothing even remotely resembling a massacre of civilians in Jenin occurred, he commented: “I don’t think the whole world, including the friends of Israel, can be wrong.”

And yet, in his ironic essay, Achad Ha’am concluded, take comfort in the fact that, indeed, “everyone” can be wrong and the Jews right. And as Anan’s comment illustrates, it’s happening again today.

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Amanpour embodies the media’s “take” on the Middle East Conflict

Posted on February 23, 2023 by Richard Landes

In a recent broadcast (January 3, 2023) about the visit of the new Israeli National Security Minister Ben Gvir to the Temple Mount, widely seen as a gratuitous, even deliberate provocation, Christiane Amanpour interviewed Ha-Aretz deputy editor Noa Landau on the situation. Here we see her framing the issue. I will follow this video with a detailed critique:

The core issue here is an almost reflexive anxiety among Westerners about provoking Muslims. According to a widespread version of humanitarian racists, Westerners have no moral expectations from Muslims for any kind of restraint: if they are offended, they will blow up and kill people; they are a force of nature. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer even tentatively speculated that burning a Qur’an might be compared to shouting fire in a crowded theater – the panic of the crowd and the rage of the Muslims being so instinctual and the damage that would ensue so predictable, that it is reasonable to outlaw provocative behavior. In 2006, in response to (false) reports in Muslim media that the Pope called Islam an inherently violent religion, Muslims (including Palestinians) rioted violently, burned churches and killed Christians (including a nun, and beheading a priest)… and no one dared laugh at Muslim violence to protest being called violent.

When it comes to Jerusalem, matters are even more volatile, a powder keg. When Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem, there were widespread apocalyptic warnings of the consequences and large crowds of journalists eagerly awaiting violence. In fact, nothing of the sort happened. But the attitude remained.

Here that anxiety is clear, among the journalists and those they cite. Former Prime Minister Lapid’s remark: “Ben Gvir is the most irresponsible man in the Middle East” embodies the way in which liberals place all the responsibility on the Western players (including Israel) and have no expectations of the Muslims, who again are seen as a force of nature. “You don’t go up to the Temple Mount because people will die.” (Note the avoidance of any agency to those who will kill the people who “will die.”) This is Breyer’s logic: you don’t burn a Qur’an because people will die, not because Muslims will kill people. Of course, nothing of the sort happened in this case as well.

Having cited Lapid approvingly on this, Amanpour adds: “Though under Lapid’s Prime Ministership 15o Palestinians were killed by security forces and some settlers. It’s the most Palestinian deaths in almost two decades. The 29 Israelis were also killed in Palestinian attacks.”

First, it’s not clear what Amanpour is thinking, but as she states the claim – “most Palestinian deaths in two decades” – it’s ludicrous. More were killed in 11 days of fighting in Gaza just two years earlier. (She may mean West-Bank Palestinians.) Moreover, the death of Palestinians were the result of IDF operations to catch terrorists, and those killed were almost all combatants defending them. On the other hand, a statistic she, along with many an “observer,” doesn’t give: those 29 Israelis killed were overwhelmingly civilians targeted because they were civilians and that is the the highest number of terror attacks from the West Bank in several years. Her presentation makes no distinction between Israeli terror victims and Palestinian terrorists, thus leaving the listener with the impression that, whether a “moderate” Israeli PM like Lapid, or a far-right extremist like Netanyahu, Israelis kill far more Palestinians than vice-versa (150 to 29).

Amanpour then turns to Noa Landau from Israel’s most radical left-wing paper (known jokingly as the Hebrew Palestinian news) to explain why the visit is considered provocative. Here would be Landau’s chance to explain the workings of humanitarian racism, but predictably, she doesn’t. On the contrary, she discusses the status quo and its violations by Israelis (“continuing erosion of that status quo by Israel”), with no mention of the massive changes effected by the Palestinians (excavations of Solomon’s Stables 1996-99, closing the Dome of the Rock to infidels, 2000) which did provoke anger but not hysterical violence from the Israelis. Nor does Landau or Amanpour mention that Ben Gvir’s visit was entirely within the guidelines of the current status quo.

Then Amanpour responds with a reminder of Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount in 2000, reflecting yet another of the media’s major, uncorrected analytic failures brought on by their humanitarian racism. Sharon, having cleared his visit with Arafat, went up to make a tour in which he steered clear of Muslim prayer sites. The Arab press reported that he stormed al Aqsa Mosque with over 1000 soldiers and entered the Mosque, inspiring a violent riot the next day that launched the Intifada. Since that time it’s common for journalists to describe Sharon’s carefully prepared visit as the match that set fire (here “caused” the explosion that followed), not fake Palestinian news that even made it into Western media, and hysterical violence from the Palestinians, and certainly not deliberate planning on Arafat’s part.

Then she lays out her take to a nodding Landau: this was “deliberate,” a provocation, crossing a line in the sand, “this is what the hardliners have said they want to do, reclaim every inch of Israel for Israel, etcetra etcetra (always worry when people say etcetra etcetra). Of course, Ben Gvir, who again, followed all the regulations of the status quo, said just the opposite: he talked about access to all the faiths to the Temple Mount, and called for an end to racist discrimination (namely the Muslims forbidding Jewish prayer).

Amanpour rarely if ever interviews an articulate defender of Israel, even an Palestinian like Khaled abu Toameh, and regularly interviews Palestinian and Israeli critics who agree with her. As evidenced here, she systematically misrepresents matters in her presentation of Israel’s “far right” government. (NB: by any approach that hold both sides accountable to the same standards, Ben Gvir, no matter how extreme his is, is more moderate than any prominent Palestinian politician active today.

Is it any wonder that “the whole world can get it wrong”?

 

Posted in dhimmi journalism, humanitarian racism, Palestinian Media Protocols (PMP), Temple Mount/Haram al Sharif | 4 Comments

Remarks at my book launch at the Begin Center

Posted on February 22, 2023 by Richard Landes

Here is the recording of the launch of my new book, Can “The Whole World” be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad at the Menachem Begin Center on February 21. Below is the text of my opening remarks (with some links). 

My remarks have been translated into Polish by Malgorzata Koraszewska: Cały świat może się mylić.

Thanks to the Begin Center, David Gross, Yisrael Medad, Nachum Pomeranz and my fellow panelists, for making this evening possible, and to all of you for coming.

Irwin Cotler pointed out in the early aughts, “It is not only that the Jewish people are the only people who are the standing targets of state-sanctioned incitement to hate and genocide, but they are the only people who are themselves accused of being genocidal.”

Let me rephrase that: Israel is the only country successfully accused in Western languages of being Nazis bent on genocide, by people who in their own tongues, admire the Nazis and wish to finish the job of exterminating the Jews.

The success of this perverse “Holocaust Inversion,” in both explicit forms, and more subtle ones, represents a massive cognitive-war victory for Palestinian irredentism, and an equally disastrous loss for the progressive forces of peace.

And a key moment in the widespread acceptance of this inverted narrative occurred at the turn of the century (millennium), beginning with the successful accusation that the IDF targeted Muhammad al Durah in his father’s arms, and climaxing with the furious demonstrations in the West, protesting the Jenin massacre that never happened. The results can be seen in the comments of two Jewish public intellectuals.in 2003.

In an oped in the NYT in August, Ian Buruma noted in passing that “the Palestinian cause has become the universal litmus test of liberal credentials.” And this at a time the Palestinian cause was the world’s major purveyor of suicide terror against Israeli civilians. How could “liberals” universally and uncritically support such a savage cause, one driven by such ferocious apocalyptic hatred? Paul Berman (Liberalsim and Terror, p. 154) explained:

…each new act of murder and suicide testified to how oppressive were the Israelis. Palestinian terror, in this view, was the measure of Israeli guilt. The more grotesque the terror, the deeper the guilt.

Or as a colleague put it to me at the height of the suicide-terror campaign: “What choice do they have?”

This assumption of Israeli guilt rapidly and inexorably spread from Israel to “the Jews,” and is everywhere apparent today, often unthinking. The underlying assumption holds the Jews collectively responsible for what people believe some Jews have done. And there’s a double distortion here: not only have the diaspora Jews not done any of these lethal accusations that animate this hatred, but neither has Israel.

The overwhelming sense that Israel is unjustifiably cruel to the Palestinians, gratuitously humiliating them, driving them to despair, pervades the way the news media cover the conflict. For those many journalists who participate in what Matti Friedman calls “the cult of the Occupation,” the only obstacles to peace worth mentioning are the Israeli Occupation and Settlements; Palestinian “incitement” and terrorism are overlooked as driven by desperation. As Itamar Marcus pointed out in 2004, largely in vain, “it’s aspiration, not desperation…” aspiration to destroy Israel that motivates, not desperation at not having a Palestinian nation and human rights.”

I refer to this “despair” mentality in my book as “liberal cognitive egocentrism,” or the projection of his own mindset onto people who don’t share it. The liberal thinks, “I’d have to be terribly desperate to do such horrible things and I would never aspire to exterminating another people.” And in a categorical error of confusing humane with human, denounces anyone who describes the genocidal aspirations of the Palestinian leadership as a dehumanizing racist.

The permanent reluctance of the news media to even raise the issue of Palestinian genocidal incitement, much less illustrate it, to reveal Palestinian sympathies for the Nazis and hatreds of the US, reinforces this egocentric projection.

Now if this were only Israel at stake, one might understand (if not forgive) an outsider, like my Harvard classmate who came to visit Jerusalem, saying, “Israel is putting us all in danger. If Israel didn’t poke the Islamic bear, we’d all be a lot safer.”

And yet the only thing that would be safer, and even then, only momentarily, would be the delusion that the Palestinian cause was noble, that Israel treated them horribly, and that if you feed the Israelis to the Islamist crocodile, that will sate, not whet its appetite.

At the height of the Jenin massacre hysteria on April 17 2002, a Hamas preacher proclaimed the following, invoking the genocidal hadith of the “rocks and trees”:

We believe in this Hadith. We are convinced also that this Hadith [i.e. the extermination of the Jews] heralds the spread of Islam and its rule over all the lands… Oh Allah, annihilate the Jews and their supporters… Oh Allah, raise the flag of Jihad across the earth… Oh beloved, look to the East of the earth, find Japan and the ocean; look to the West of the earth, find the country and the ocean. Be assured that these will be owned by the Muslim nation, as the Hadith says, ‘from the ocean to the ocean.’

If “never again,” means anything, it means that when some group preaches genocide from the pulpits, and these genocidal sermons are then broadcast by the public by the authorities, that’s news, relevant and accurate. And when the advocates of this genocide see it as a prelude to world conquest, it’s even crucial for the target of this imperial ambition, namely audiences in the West, to know about it. At such a juncture, one might think, it was time for journalists, the “witnesses to their time,” to speak up.

But no. The. lethal Jenin Massacre meme was far too important to dwell on such trivialities.

Which brings me to my major point.

This is not just about Israel or Palestine however understood. As the above quote illustrates, Palestinian Jihad, including the “secular” PLO, is a leading force in global Jihad whose aim is world conquest. This is, of course an unlikely ambition to be realized and many a cognitive egocentrist, like journalists and even our own Israeli military intelligence, will dismiss it as mad, and assume that the “vast majority” of Palestinians and Muslims wouldn’t fall for such nonsense. But as Hitler, Stalin and Mao all showed us, being wrong, where millennial beliefs are concerned, hardly means inconsequential. Rather, unopposed, it means the mass murder of tens of millions, on the way to its inevitable failure.

So when we Israelis defend our cause, we also defend a society of decency and tolerance, or democracy, that is, what Eli Sagan referred to as “a near miracle.”

All of us who read (or heard from our parents) the story of the emperor’s new clothes when we were young probably thought two things: 1) it’s a fairy tale, this doesn’t really happen; and 2) it’s a comedy, in the end everyone is laughing at the emperor and his courtiers.

But no. Andersen didn’t tell us how the crowd reacted to the revelation of everyone’s public stupidity. Indeed, in his initial ending of the story, no child speaks out, and the emperor returns pleasurably planning future processions. If one considers what it means to have a ruling class so staggeringly stupid and in denial of reality as to parade a naked emperor in public, one can readily imagine that, when the child spoke, at least some in the crowd wept in despair.

And again no. Naked parades happen. And at least prominent one has been going on for two decades. Only this time the drama surrounds not a naked emperor, but an icon of hatred, the Palestinian cause with its genocidal animosities and pitiless violence. In this scenario, the tailors are the Soviet propagandists and the Palestinian “nationalists” who insist only racists can’t see the justice of the cause and its means, the foolish emperor is the progressive left who think they speak for “the whole world,” the chamberlain is Edward Saïd (or, in the case of the Al Durah icon of hatred, Charles Enderlin), the courtiers are the “human rights” NGOs, the town criers announcing the parade and grooming the public to cheer the emperor are the news media, and the crowd praising the emperor’s garb are the liberal cognitive egocentrists including the Peace-negotiators. And when the child, in this case Israel, speaks, his father (Diaspora Jews) tells him to shut up.

If in the 20th century, the dark joke was

Anti-Semitism is hating Jews more than absolutely necessary,”

then in the 21st century it’s

hating Jews even though it’s killing you.

Indeed, just because “the whole world can be wrong” about Israel hardly means that getting it wrong can’t have terrible consequences.

The apocalyptic analysis of what destroyed the Second Temple runs as follows: In the run up to an apocalypse that will not happen (the world goes on), the mutual hatreds and hostilities have cosmic import. Only in the massive destruction that follows, does it appear to those who survive, as sinat chinam, baseless hatreds. Today, Israelis and Jews around the world are being torn apart by the folly-driven tensions I am describing, which manifest not only in fights among Diaspora Jews – the revolt against the woke behavior of the current Jewish leadership – and between Diaspora Jews swept up in the woke wave and Israel, but also now in developments within Israel. Some diaspora Jews no longer say the prayer for the state of Israel, about which “we no longer can be proud.” People speak in ominous tones about “the death of democracy,” and the polarization intensifies.

Whether we support, oppose, or don’t know what to think about the proposed actions of our elected government, let us never lose sight of the fact that voting in Israel is deeply influenced by the massive hatred that surrounds us, a hatred “the whole world” including many Jews, refuse to acknowledge. It took the French revolution three years to melt down into a paranoid terror that ate its own, and the Soviets and Maoists even less time, and all told, over a hundred million died from the madness of the last century. Israel is now 75 years into a revolutionary egalitarian state, beset by murderous enemies, resisting that meltdown into mutual paranoia. But I can guarantee that if these internecine hatreds, framed in apocalyptic, all or nothing terms – what Irwin Cotler characterized euphemistically as “counterproductive” – succeed in destroying Jewish solidarity and, God forbid, Israel, the survivors will look back on these conflicts as another tragic tragic example of sinat chinam.

This book I have just published is my small contribution to both the voice of child in the crowd revealing the folly of those culture leaders who think the whole world cannot be wrong in its charge to world-redemption, and a call to arms in a civilizational war that I truly believe we can still win. Let us, this time, not come out of this much sadder and wiser. Let us become wiser now and come out glad later.

Thank you.

Posted in al Durah Affair, Arab-Israeli Conflict, Are We Waking Up Yet?, Cognitive Egocentrism, Cognitive Warfare (SG's Thesis), cult of the occupation, IDD (Israel Derangement Disorder), lethal journalism, own goal war journalism | Leave a comment

Fisking Mira Fox at the Forward on Jenin

Posted on February 6, 2023 by Richard Landes

I wrote a chapter in my book on the Jenin “Massacre” as the supreme example of Lethal Journalism turning into Own-Goal Journalism with Western demonstrators, at the news of invented Israeli massacres, cheering on Jihadi suicide terrorists who would soon attack them. Now, over two decades later, a journalist writing in the (Jewish) Forward presents a remarkably twisted account of what happened then in which she channels the Palestinian libels, in order to characterize what is happening now in Jenin.

When I first read the words of the apocalyptic Saudi theologian in 2001 about the intifada

it is the Zionist’s duty to fight for the opposing side

I thought, how ridiculous. What Jew, much less Zionist, would fight for the insane hatreds of apocalyptic Jihadis with their ambitions to conquer the world and their weapon of suicide terror? Well, here we are in 2023. And Jewish Own-goal Journalism is thriving at the Forward. (Don’t they have any fact-checkers?)

A controversial documentary upended the narrative on Jenin 20 years ago. Has anything changed since?
Last week’s violent killings in Israel and the West Bank echo events from decades ago

Palestinians hurl rocks at an Israeli army bulldozer, during confrontations in the occupied-West Bank city of Jenin.

Palestinians hurl rocks at an Israeli army bulldozer, during confrontations in the occupied-West Bank city of Jenin. Photo by Getty Images

By Mira Fox February 1, 2023

Two decades ago, during the Second Intifada, Israeli forces raided the Jenin refugee camp. In the aftermath of the 10-day battle, Israel blockaded the camp for days, forbidding medical teams, journalists and a U.N. fact-finding mission from entering. But Muhammad Bakri, an Arab-Israeli actor, snuck into the camp with a camera, interviewing numerous residents.

Bakri did not slip into the camp during the fighting, but came (weeks) after to interview Palestinians (only). In the opening footage he dates the end of filming around June 23, 2002. Anyone who has actually seen the film would know these interviews were not during the fighting.
The resulting film, Jenin, Jenin, which Bakri released shortly afterward,
If several months later is shortly afterwards…
told the Palestinian side of what West Bank residents refer to as the Jenin massacre, painting a very different story — with a much higher civilian death toll — than the version from the Israeli government.
This formulation is strange and, as will be seen below, disinformative. The Western media, with the help of Human Rights NGOs, had been circulating the Palestinian claims of massacre for weeks. The Israeli narrative took time to take shape, and was widely ignored even after the evidence came to light. Also note the post-modern take: two versions, two stories, as if de facto, the evidence of honesty in the narratives were irrelevant.
And yet, the most outstanding trait of Bakri’s film was the extensive, consistent, pervasive, dishonesty of the “witnesses,” from the old man whom Israeli’s helped but claimed they shot at him in cold blood, to the head of the hospital who claimed the israelis shelled his hospital and denied them deliveries of food and medical supplies. All of this was refuted by subsequent documentaries including Pierre Rehov’s The Road to Jenin, and Martin Himmel’s Jenin: Massacring the Truth. For a discussion of these issues, see Phyllis Chesler’s posts from 2004: here and here, as well as a discussion of Pierre Rehov’s documentary done in Gaza after the 2o14 conflict.
Within hours after the Israeli military attacked, videos emerged on Twitter of tanks rolling through the streets of Jenin. A viral clip showed mothers and children running through the halls of a hospital, apparently fleeing tear gas from IDF soldiers. The daughter of Majda Naefa, the 61-year-old woman allegedly shot by Israeli forces, made a video showing exactly how the bullet hit her mother through a window. Others compiled a video of smiling photos of Naefa to mourn her death. Both videos quickly went viral.

Palestinians carry some bodies of the nine victims killed in an Israeli raid on the West Bank’s Jenin refugee camp, during their funeral procession on January 26, 2023. Photo by Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP via Getty Images

Twenty years ago, Jenin, Jenin was one of the only ways to hear these sorts of stories.

The author shows no awareness (despite her judicious use of the words “apparently” and “alleged”) of the irony here. Given the extensive dishonesty of Bakri’s “witnesses” her invocation of having access to “these sorts of stories” has the opposite meaning from what she intends.
Otherwise, information about the battle was dominated by official government statements about death tolls and danger — Israel claimed they killed around 50 Palestinians, the majority of whom were responsible for bus bombings and terrorist attacks that killed hundreds of Israelis, while Palestinians alleged a death toll near 500 composed largely of civilians. But both sides of the debate focused on numbers instead of humans.
The misinformation here is impressive. Israeli officials indeed tried to dominate the information about the battle, but that hardly meant they succeeded. On the contrary, the Palestinian claims of deliberate massacres of hundreds, dominated the Western media, and the Israeli claims treated as propaganda. As for the casualty figures, initially the Israelis admitted that as many as 100 Palestinians were killed. The figure of 50+ comes from the (not Israel-friendly) UN and Human Rights Watch investigation six months later. The Palestinian claim is refuted by the number, but here we get it as “he said, she said.”
Bakri’s documentary was one of the only ways to hear the stories of Palestinian people after the violence in Jenin. Though he only entered the refugee camp after the fighting had ceased, the descriptions are vivid.
What happened to “snuck in”?
“They shot at everything that moved, even a cat,” says one man. “Why does a sniper shoot a 12-year-old unarmed child who can barely walk? Why shoot an old woman? Why crush a young man under a tank when he is holding his arms up in the air?”
None of these alleged crimes actually happened. In fact, Israeli troops behaved with extraordinary restraint, as evidenced by the remarkably low death toll (50+ in three weeks of urban warfare) and even more remarkably low civilian death toll (15-22). For an eye-witness accounts, see Brett Goldberg’s A Psalm in Jenin, and Gil Mezuman’s Dairy of a Reservist; for a comparative analysis, see Yigal Henkin, “Urban Warfare and the Lessons of Jenin,” Azure (Summer 2003): 33–69. 
Perhaps most shocking is the testimony of a young girl, perhaps around 12, who says she dreams of torturing then-prime minister Ariel Sharon. “I’m not afraid of these cowards. They’re like mice. Despite their great weapons, they still hide behind their tanks, afraid of civilians like us. Their cowardice is legendary,” she says. “I would sacrifice my life for the camp.” Yet, today when social media has given everyone a platform to tell their personal stories, the stories in Jenin, Jenin feel almost commonplace. Now everyone has a camera in their pocket, and can capture the violence as it unfolds, unlike Bakri’s film which was limited to shots panning over rubble afterward.
Which makes the current accounts more immediate in impact and diffusion, but not any more reliable.
And this access has changed the narrative. In Jenin, Jenin, residents say, frustratedly, that the world mourns a single Jewish death yet hardly cares about hundreds of Arab lives.
Yet another example of Palestinian misrepresentation. No demonstrations mourned the death of 23 IDF soldiers who sacrificed their lives in order to spare the lives of Palestinian civilians. But many showed enthusiastic support for Palestinian suicide bombers (demonstrators wore moke suicide belts), and at the same time, expressed great hatred for the Jews, accusing Israel of genocide for killing mostly combatants. Indeed, the Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Anan commented:
“I don’t think the whole world, including the friends of the Israeli people and government, can be wrong…”
And yet, the author of this piece cites the Palestinian claim of the world being on Israel’s side as proof of the Israeli domination of the narrative.
Today, however, “Free Palestine” or the emoji of a Palestinian flag is a ubiquitous comment online.
Again a misrepresentation. Palestinian activists do not want a free Palestine (and if the behavior of the PA and Hamas is any indicator, the “liberation of Palestine” will bring no freedom). On the contrary, they want to destroy the only country in the Middle East that takes everyone’s freedom seriously.
A Jewish influencer posts a challah recipe? You’ll find Palestinian flags in the comment sections. At this year’s World Cup in Qatar, players from Arab countries wore the Palestinian flag as an armband. And even after an armed gunman killed eight Israelis outside a synagogue on Friday night, the day after last week’s Jenin raid, tweets mourning those deaths were ratioed by comments calling the Israeli deaths “karma” and otherwise referencing the Palestinian deaths the day before.
These pro-Palestinian tweets invoking the deaths of Palestinian combatants involved in terror attacks are presumably an improvement on those tweets mourning the deaths of civilians at worship?
This scenario would have been hard to imagine in 2002 when Jenin, Jenin came out.
This must have been written by someone who was not around in 2002 (Fox got her MA at Harvard Divinity in 2019). Hard for her to imagine, maybe, but even without social media, in 2002, the “Jenin Massacre” was on the lips of the “whole world.” And Jenin, Jenin was showered with awards.
The claim that it showed “only one side” was the least of the reasons. That it was filled with outright, provable lies, was the main reason. It was not about competing “narratives” but about dishonest, slanderous, lethal narratives.
(Independent cinemas in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv continued to illegally screen the film.) Bakri countered that media only showing the Israeli side is widely distributed, and ultimately, the court overturned the ban, saying the film board did not have “a monopoly over truth.”
Despite the plethora of lies it acknowledged filled the film.
Today, banning a documentary seems useless — after all, what’s the point in an era of social media? A viral video is likely to reach more eyes than an independent film anyway, and courts have little sway over the moderation policies of social media companies.
In other words, today, with social media and an atmosphere where anything deemed “politically correct” can go viral, we are now uncontrollably subject to libel.
This is not to say that the tables have turned entirely. While the Palestinian fight may be trendy online, the real-world changes have not been so abrupt. Palestinians still live under occupation, and Israel’s military might still greatly outstrips Palestinian insurgents. Part of the reason videos of Palestinians running down the street, throwing stones at tanks or being forcibly evicted from their homes, are so common online is because they’re so common in life.
Or maybe not. Maybe they’re so common because so many people want to believe them and the Palestinians have continued to practice their cognitive warfare against the enemies whom they want to eradicate but can’t. So they content themselves with blackening their face.
And at least institutionally, Israel’s command of the narrative remains strong; The New York Times, the U.S. newspaper of record, sent a push alert about the Israeli synagogue deaths but not about the Palestinian deaths in Jenin the day before.
Numerous American politicians released statements mourning the Israeli deaths though they had been silent about the Palestinian ones.
Fox shares with the journalists of 2002, like Phil Reeves and Janine di Giovanni, the inability to distinguish between arsonists, firemen and victims. For her, it’s a moral outrage that politicians should regret the killing of civilians at prayer and not the death of people who are part of the network of terrorists who attacked them.
But online — where many of us conduct large portions of our lives — we no longer need to rely on a film like Jenin, Jenin to hear civilians’ voices.
But in the online media bubbles, we no longer need to rely on a film like Jenin, Jenin to get our lies about Israel.The fact that such a twisted piece of work, one with not only no knowledge of the past, but a repetition of past distortions, could appear in a Jewish publication is astounding. And the fact that the editor of the Jewish publication in which it appears suggests, to those who weren’t already convinced by her stint at the NYT, that she too fulfills Halawi’s startling prediction: the Zionists will fight for the other side.
What are they teaching at Harvard Theological Seminary, and what are they drinking at the Forward?
Posted in Arab-Israeli Conflict, Are We Waking Up Yet?, Auto-stupefaction, Demopaths and Dupes, IDD (Israel Derangement Disorder), Jenin "Massacre", lethal journalism, lying, own goal war journalism, Palestinian Media Protocols (PMP), Pallywood, Y2K Mind, Yidiots | 3 Comments

Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong? Apparently

Posted on December 16, 2022 by Richard Landes

I have, after over a decade of on and off writing, finished my book which, in the true style of a medieval historian, is a history of my own time. More specifically, like Rodulfus Glaber did a history of the turn of the millennium in the 1020s, I have done a history of the turn of this millennium… only whereas his history was about the wondrous new world covered in a white mantle of churches, mine is a pathetic tale of a medieval apocalyptic movement attacking democracies, and the feckless response of a post-modern leadership which blamed the democracies and, despite insisting the opposite, did everything they could to encourage their enemies.

As the epigram puts it: If I were a Muslim, I’d take the stupidity of Westerners as a sign from Allah, that I should join Global Jihad. (To which Tarek Fateh responded, I know many a Jihadi who says the same thing.)

Paperback and Kindle ca. $25
Reviews by Jeffrey Herf and Phyllis Chesler.
Please consider not only purchasing it, but leaving a review at Amazon, and forwarding this email to friends you think might be interested.
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Jeffrey Herf reviews “Can ‘The Whole World’ Be Wrong?”

Posted on December 13, 2022 by Richard Landes

Islamist Terror; Journalistic Error

In a valuable new book, historian Richard Landes argues that Western reporting on the Second Palestinian Intifada helped to seed a misunderstanding of terrorism.

Jeffrey Herf
Jeffrey Herf

 · 19 min read

 

A review of Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad by Richard Landes, 523 pages, Academic Studies Press (November 2022)

In Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?,Richard Landes, a historian of apocalyptic movements in medieval Europe, re-examines the reporting of Palestinian attacks on Israel, starting with the Second Intifada that began in September 2000. Principally, he looks at the ways in which postcolonial ideology and the intimidation of journalists have been used to obscure the links between Islamist ideology and terrorist practice, and how this process disfigures public discourse and understanding.

Many of Landes’s points and arguments will be familiar to those who have followed this topic over the years—his criticisms of anti-Zionists like Edward Said, Judith Butler, and Tony Judt; his disapproval of Western feminists’ reluctance to denounce Islamist misogyny and antisemitism; and his impatience with progressive Jewish academics reluctant to address the Islamist ideological sources of the terrorist campaigns against Israel. It would also have been a better book at half the length, and some of the language—“lethal journalism,” “Caliphator,” “demopolitics,”

[author’s note: it’s demopathy]

“cogwar,” “cognitive warrior”—is unnecessarily hot. Nevertheless, overall, Landes’s new work makes a distinctive and valuable contribution to the large body of existing literature on antisemitism and the global jihad.

This is especially evident when he foregoes his fondness for polemic and instead brings his excellent skills of close reading, textual analysis, and attention to detail to bear on the material. At its core, this is a compelling critique of the various journalists and public figures—especially in France, Britain, and the United States—who managed to be consistently wrong about the facts and their causes. Their errors were not random, however. Landes argues that they resulted from a combination of political biases and threats issued by Palestinian organizations. The failure of journalists, in particular, to grasp the ideological causes of the attacks on the Jewish state in 2000 helped to prevent a coherent understanding of the Islamist attacks on the United States and Europe that followed.

Since the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran after the revolution of 1979, the publication of the Hamas Covenant in 1988, and al Qaeda’s declaration of jihad against Jews and Crusaders in 1998, the governments of the West’s liberal democracies have, with only a few exceptions, been reluctant to speak clearly about the causal connection between Islamist ideology and violence. This reluctance persisted through the Second Palestinian Intifada, the terrorist atrocities of September 11th, 2001, and those that followed in London, Paris, Madrid, Berlin, and Amsterdam. The Bush administration described Islam as “a religion of peace” even as quotations from the Koran were filling terrorist manifestos, and any analysis of the connection between Islamism and terror was absent in the Obama years. The popularisation of a new term, “Islamophobia,” became a rhetorical cudgel with which to beat anyone who noticed references to Islamic texts in the Islamist literature celebrating terrorism.

read the rest…

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Phyllis Chesler reviews “Can ‘The Whole World’ Be Wrong”

Posted on December 12, 2022 by Richard Landes

The history of the media intifada against Israel

Historian Richard Landes’s new book shows how a war of lies and language endangers not only the Jewish state, but the West itself.
Phyllis Chesler

(December 12, 2022 / JNS) From the moment Yasser Arafat launched his long-planned second intifada against Israel in 2000, the most brazen lies about both Jews and Israel were relentlessly told and widely believed. For years, master propagandists in cyberspace, the Western media and academia managed to diabolically invert reality. The entire world believed an utterly false narrative.

Richard Landes’s new work Can the Whole World Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism and Global Jihad fearlessly, carefully, relentlessly and brilliantly documents this history.

Landes is a historian and a scholar of apocalyptic movements. He is the author of eight books and countless articles. He maintains a formidable website, The Augean Stables. He is also a consummate wordsmith. For example, he coined the phrase “Pallywood” (Palestinian Hollywood) to describe the Palestinians’ tactic of staging theatrical productions in war zones in order to create anti-Israel propaganda disguised as news.

In his book, Landes proceeds blood libel by blood libel, beginning with the iconic death of Mohammed al-Dura, a Gazan child allegedly murdered with malice aforethought by cruel Israeli soldiers. With his death caught on video and immediately blamed on Israel, even though the video proved no such thing, al-Dura became the boy whose image has graced a thousand mugs and t-shirts, inflamed the entire world and led to countless Muslim atrocities, including suicide bombings, shootings, knife attacks and car-rammings against Israeli civilians.

As Landes notes, the initial reporting on the incident was malicious and incendiary: “The (flawed) footage and its accompanying narrative immediately went viral, then mythical. The footage was spectacular, as emotionally powerful as the dogs attacking Black protesters in Birmingham (1963), and the terrified Vietnamese girl running down the road naked, aflame with napalm (1972). … Despite extensive problems with the footage … journalists piled on the story. … It became the icon of hatred for the 21st century. One cannot overestimate its impact.”

Read the rest

Posted in al Durah Affair, Anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, Arab-Israeli Conflict, lethal journalism, Media, own goal war journalism | Leave a comment

Interview with historian Rodrigo Coppe Caldeira in Estado de S. Paulo (Brazil) on Millennialism in the 21st Century

Posted on November 30, 2022 by Richard Landes
The following is the original correspondence between me and R.C. Caldeira now published in Portuguese for Estado de S. Paulo under the title

Millenarianism, Apocalyptic and Demotic Millenarianism: An Interview with Richard Landes.

– One confuses millennialism and millenarianism. Can one consider millennialism as one of the possible currents within Judeo-Christian millenarianism?

I use millennialism and millenarianism/chiliasm as interchangeable, referring to the advent of a collective salvation, a messianic period of “heaven on earth” with all the dangerous political implications of perfecting life on earth (as opposed to eschatology, where the time-space continuum disappears). The term millennialism or millenarianism derives from the Christian belief that that period would last 1000 years (Revelation 20). 

The distinction I try to make is between apocalyptic and millennial. I use apocalyptic to mean both a sense of imminence of the transformation (whether to a millennial heaven on earth or to an eschatological cosmic heaven and hell), and the scenario whereby one gets from here to there. The Greek title of the last NT book, Revelation, is Apocalypse. While both apocalyptic scenarios and beliefs about what form collective salvation will take, can exist with a long run-up (eg the sabbatical millennium which, when introduced in ca 200 AD had a 300 year run-up to 6000 Annus Mundi = 500 AD), when a new prophetic text appears, contemporaries take it as a sign of imminence. (If you had told the earliest disciples of the crucified and resurrected Jesus that 2000 years later he still would not have returned, I don’t think you’d have Christianity.)

– In your book Heaven on Earth you treat the French Revolution as an inaugural moment of democratic millenarianism. How would it be characterized? Do we still find traces of it today?

I didn’t discuss it much in the book, but I actually think the American Revolution was also an expression democratic (or as i call it, demotic millennialism). It’s characterized by a) notions of equality of all believers (all the groups that opposed slavery from the outset were millenarians – Quakers, Shakers, (Ana)Baptists, Methodists); 2) the dignity of manual labor; 3) anti-monarchical political views (“no King but God,” or in the case of the American Rev. “no king but Jesus”); 4) every individual is an autonomous moral agent; and 5) an iconoclasm that transgresses all conventional boundaries.

In some senses, the Enlightenment is a secularization of this demotic religiosity (eg Kant a secularization of his parent’s Quietism). It remains an extremely powerful impulse especially in the West. If anything it has grown more pronounced with each subsequent rearticulation of the millennial vision (Marx took it from equality before the law/equality of opportunity to equality of outcome) and each apocalyptic episode (Bolsheviks, 1917; Maoists 1949, Khmer Rouge 1975) attempted to realize that vision. I think the late 60s were an apocalyptic wave of demotic millennialism.

Today the traces are everywhere, from the active cataclysmic apocalyptic millennialism of global jihad (the Mujahideen are Allah’s agents in destroying evil and preparing the way for collective redemption in the Global Caliphate), to the radical critique of CRT (critical race theory) which pushes (again) for equality of outcome, and transgresses all boundaries. I don’t think it’s possible to understand today’s mad politics (trans-gender, BLM, pro-palestinianism) without recognizing the perfectionist impulse behind it: the world is unbearably evil and only my radical, transformative, vision can save us all.

In terms of the Red-Green alliance (radical left and jihadis), it comes together in a joint apocalyptic scenario that considers Israel and the USA a joint Antichrist, or as Khoumeini and his followers put it, the two Satans. As Eric Hoffer, one of the most brilliant analysts of millennialism put it: “Mass movements don’t need God, but they do need a devil.” (True Believer). The anti-imperialist left is so blinded by its (apocalyptic) rage against US imperialism (and their Zionist lackeys) that they embrace groups like Hizbullah and Hamas as “members of the global progressive left” (Judith Butler), even though they are perhaps the most ruthless and terrifying imperialists on the planet (a good definition of the “anti-imperialism of fools”).

– I would like you to comment on your vision about when “God tarries”, how people react when prophecy fails.

The classic response of those eager to see and participate in the apocalyptic transformation, to the inevitable disappointment (at least so far, nothing doing), is a state of acute cognitive dissonance (they can’t believe the evidence of failure). So in the first stage, they engage in apocalyptic jazz, where they improvise the scenario to sustain apocalyptic time, and when that fails (too much time passes), they redate while maintaining the millennial hopes. So when 1848 failed, and Marx had to flee the Germany he was certain was about to be transformed, he wrote Das Kapital, in which the apocalyptic scenario of the Communist Manifesto was maintained, but the process of coming about was postponed. When it became clear that the transformation wouldn’t be happening in advanced capitalist societies (England, USA, France) his followers like Lenin decided Russia could skip the capitalist phase and go from agrarian to communist. Anything to make working for heaven on earth possible.

Continue reading →

Posted in al Durah Affair, anti-Zionism, Antichrist, apocalyptic, demotic religiosity, Global Jihad, Jenin "Massacre", lethal journalism, Media, millennial, own goal war journalism | Leave a comment

Warning to Reader: If I’m Right, We’re in Deep Trouble

Posted on November 23, 2022 by Richard Landes

Malgorzata Koraszewska, at her blog, “Listy z naszego sadu“ (Letters from our Orchard) has translated the opening passage of my new book – “A warning to the reader” – into Polish.

So that my English readers have access to the same material, I include The Warning below. I also want to thank Henry Rosovsky, who recently passed away, for both advising me on my senior thesis  on William Blake at Harvard in 1971, and for whom I wrote this passage after some animated conversations. 

Warning to the Reader

If I’m Right, We’re in Deep Trouble

This book is not for everyone. First, it’s not for people who hate democracy and want to replace it with a theocracy that re-invents inquisitorial, totalitarian efforts to police thought, and resurrects holy war (religious or secular) to eliminate designated enemies. Secondly, it’s not addressed to those who think that their race, or tribe, or super-tribe, or cause gives them the right to dominate others.

It is addressed to people who have liberal and progressive values, especially those capable of acknowledging that, for all its flaws, Western democracy constitutes a significant and perhaps unique step in the direction of freedom and human dignity. It is addressed to those who wish to preserve and improve that record rather than go all or nothing (perfection or destruction). It is for people who can’t understand why the West seems to be falling apart, torn by a culture war that pits left against right in a winner-take-all struggle that, it seems with every news cycle, has been reaching ever-more terrifying extremes.

This book is something of a take it or leave it. You’re free to walk away from this analysis and write it off as the rantings of an “Israel-firster,” a Zionist propagandist. And from some points of view, that’s an obvious and easy way to deal with my argument. Easy, that is, as long as you’re right that I’m wrong. On the other hand, if I’m right, then you, liberal, progressive, democratic, lover of human dignity and freedom, engage in very high-risk behavior by ignoring what I have to say.

As far as I can make out, some the great ironies of the twenty-first century―and there are many candidates―are:

  • Since the 9-11 assault by devout Muslims, many more Muslims proudly wear hijabs in the West, and many fewer Jews, out of fear, wear kippahs in public.
  • The Jewish people are the only people who are the standing targets of state-sanctioned incitement to hate and genocide, but also the only people who are themselves accused of being genocidal.
  • The same people who make heroic efforts to ban hate speech that might offend others, have immense tolerance for hate speech directed at themselves and at their Jewish co-citizens.
  • The postmoderns, whose philosophy was to renounce both the illusion of objectivity and grand narratives, have produced a political movement that, in the name of progressive values and peace, has adopted a war-mongering premodern grand narrative, and use “science” and “facts” to promote their cause.
  • Vast numbers of people around the world want to emigrate to societies whose own elites have come to consider them the embodiment of evil.
  • Western democracies, who had convinced themselves and their Jews that they had renounced Jew-hatred after the Holocaust, may be destroyed by a medieval apocalyptic movement that exploits unacknowledged, Western Jew-hatred.

This book tests readers’ ability to think differently about what they thought they knew. Although the book is about the fate of the democratic modern world, under assault by a medieval religious movement, it focuses much of its attention on Israel’s dilemma and the Western world’s response to it. It cuts against the grain of much of the current public discourse about Israel, a country readily associated in the public sphere today with violence and oppression. In that sense, my take fits directly into the image, so readily and contemptuously dismissed as “Zionist propaganda,” by precisely those people this book criticizes for their unthinking and foolish adoption of far more lethal propaganda from Palestinian, and beyond that, Caliphator cognitive-war factories. And one of the more striking abuses of both language and values is the way Palestinians accuse Israel of being the “new Nazis” and present themselves as the new “victims of genocide.”

Continue reading →

Posted in Anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, ASSO21C, cult of the occupation, GPL (global progressive left), hate propaganda, IDD (Israel Derangement Disorder), Jenin "Massacre", Jew-Baiting, Judeophobia, lethal journalism, Most Valuable Idiot of the Day, Obsession, Peacock Rhinos, Red-Green, Replacement Theology, supersessionism, useful infidels | Leave a comment

Announcing “Can ‘The Whole World’ Be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism and Global Jihad”

Posted on November 18, 2022 by Richard Landes

After too many years, my book on the early years of the 21st century (for we medievalists, 3rd millennium), and the origins of the current folly sweeping the West is at last published by Academic Studies Press (Boston). Originally entitled They’re so Smart because We’re so Stupid: A Medievalist Guide to the 21st Century, it now appears as

Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?
Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism and Global Jihad.

The title is explained by two of the epigrams with which it starts.

Is it possible that everybody can be wrong, and the Jews be right? —Ahad Ha’am, 1892 (on the gentile response to Jews denying the blood libel)

I don’t think the whole world, including the friends of the Israeli people and government, can be wrong. —Kofi Anan, UN Secretary General, 2002 (in response to IDF operation in Jenin)

Or, as a friend put it: “500 pages of ‘yes’.”

Below is the announcement put out by my publicity agent Stuart Schnee:

In 1892, when Jews denied accusations of eating the blood of Christian boys, the response was: “Can everybody be wrong and the Jews right?” In 2002, when the news media buzzed with accusations of the IDF massacring Palestinian civilians at Jenin, the then Secretary General of the UN didn’t even ask: “I don’t think the whole world can be wrong and Israel be right.” And yet, not only were they both wrong, but getting it wrong has put the entire global democratic experiment at risk.

Drawing on his familiarity with the dynamics of apocalyptic movements, Richard Landes examines the political and journalistic scene at the turn of the third millennium (2000-2003) and the radical mismatch between two millennial styles, an Islamist pre-modern and a Western post-modern. Landes, a medievalist and historian of apocalyptic movements who has written extensively on apocalyptic expectations around 1000, now turns his attention in Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad, to the year 2000, and documents how a radical inability of Westerners to understand the medieval mentality that drives Global Jihad prompted a series of misguided reactions that have shaped our so-far unhappy century.

Misinterpretations of unfolding events on the world stage in 2000 (the “murder” of Muhammad al Durah), 2001 (9/11), 2002 (the Jenin “massacre”), contributed fundamentally to the ever-worsening moral and empirical disorientations of our information elites exemplified in the disastrous Western response to the Danish Cartoon riots (2005-6). These radical disorientations have created our current dilemma of pervasive information distrust and its attendant proliferation of conspiracy theory, deep splits within the voting public in most democracies between information elites and the populace, the politicization of science and tribalization of politics, and the inability of Western elites to defend their civilization even as the adopt increasingly self-destructive ideologies, and instead, to stand down before an invasion.

As the world comes closer to the second quarter of this century and the political arena has become more polarized and distrust in the media has become more pervasive. Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Generation Caliphate offers original and compelling insights into our current condition.

 About the Author

Professor Richard Landes was trained as a medievalist and taught in the Boston University History Department. He is now an independent historian living in Jerusalem. His work focuses on apocalyptic beliefs at the turn of the first millennium (the Peace of God) and the second millennium (Global Jihad, Woke).

Title: Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad Author: Richard Landes Publisher: Academic Studies Press Library Hardcover ISBN: 9781644696408 pgs., Price: $129,  Paperback ISBN: 9781644696415 pgs. , Price: $24.95, Digital PDF (library purchase only): 9781644696422 Price: $150 Digital ePublication: 9781644699942 Price: $9.95 Pub date: September 30, 2022

Posted in Anti-Semitism, apocalyptic, Arab-Israeli Conflict, ASSO21C, Auto-stupefaction, Cognitive Egocentrism, Demopaths and Dupes, Global Jihad, Proleptic Dhimmitude | 1 Comment

Cliff May does a Podcast with me about my new book

Posted on November 18, 2022 by Richard Landes

The New Millenarianism

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NPR’s Jacki Lyden interviews Talal abu Rahmah about Muhammad al Durah October 1, 2000

Posted on June 28, 2022 by Richard Landes

In preparing an article comparing and contrasting the informational dynamics in the death of Shireen abu Akleh and the case of Muhammad al Durah, I found a copy of a transcript of an interview that Jacki Lyden of NPR conducted with the cameraman whose award-winning footage caught the moment al Durah was allegedly “gunned down in cold blood” by the IDF. Note above all the ready acceptance of the testimony and complete sympathy with the witness. The eye-witnesses at abu Akleh’s killing – all unanimously accusing Israel of deliberate targeting… a sniper! – were equally granted unchallenged credibility which subsequent contradictory evidence did nothing to dent.

National Public Radio October 1, 2000: 20:00

INTERVIEW: TALAL ABU RAMEH, FRANCE 2 JOURNALIST, DISCUSSES FILMING A YOUNG BOY GETTING SHOT IN CROSSFIRE BETWEEN ISRAELIS AND PALESTINIANS

Article Text:

JACKI LYDEN, host:

It’s an image to freeze your heart. Many Americans woke today to a newspaper picture of a terrified and crying boy, hiding behind his father, as both crouched near a stone wall to avoid gunfire. Moments later, 12-year-old Mohammed Jamal Aldura was shot dead. His father, Jamal, remains hospitalized today with serious gunshot wounds. The father and son were reportedly returning from a trip to purchase a new car when they found themselves caught in crossfire near the Jewish settlement of Netzarim in the Gaza Strip. The image, which has also been seen on worldwide TV, comes from video footage taken by Talal Abu Rameh(ph), a journalist for France 2 television. We reached Talal Abu Rameh in Gaza City, where he explained what was happening as his camera rolled.

Mr. TALAL ABU RAMEH (Journalist, France 2 Television): I saw the young boy and his father, and I decided to film, you know? I filmed a little bit, then the shooting began really heavier and heavier. Then I saw the boy getting injured in his leg, and the father asking for help. Then I saw him getting injured in his arm, the father. The father was asking the ambulances to help him, because he could see the ambulances. I cannot see the ambulance.

LYDEN: You could hear them. You could hear the boy and the father.

Mr. ABU RAMEH: Yes. Yes. I wasn’t far away maybe away from them, face to face, about 15 meters to 20 meters. But the father didn’t succeed to get the ambulance by waving to them. He look at me, and he said, `Help me.’ I said, `I cannot. I can’t help you.’ The shooting toward them was really heavy.

LYDEN: And you couldn’t save them because there were too many bullets flying for you to go to them.

Mr. ABU RAMEH: It’s not too many bullets. It was raining bullets. It was really raining bullets, more than for 45 minutes. They I hear something, boom, really is coming with a lot of dust. I looked at the boy. I find the boy leaning down in the father’s lap, and the father getting really injured and he was really dizzy. I said, `Oh, my God, the boy has got killed. The boy has got killed.’ I was screaming. I was losing my mind. While I was filming, the boy got killed.

LYDEN: Was the father able to say anything to you?

Mr. ABU RAMEH: In the beginning, yes. He was asking for help, but after 25 minutes exactly, he got injured, no, he cannot say nothing.

LYDEN: Talal, I know that you are a professional journalist, and you have been a television journalist for a long time and a cameraman. Was it difficult to keep the film rolling while this was going on, trained on these two people who were pinned down?

Mr. ABU RAMEH: Yes, it was very difficult. I was very afraid. I was very sad. I was crying. And I was remembering my children. I was afraid to lose my life. And I was sitting on my knees and hiding my head, carrying my camera, and I was afraid from the Israeli to see this camera, maybe they will think this is a weapon, you know, or I am trying to shoot on them. But I was in the most difficult situation in my life. A boy, I cannot save his life, and I want to protect myself.

LYDEN: Was there any attempt by the troops who were firing to cease fire to listen to what the father had to say? Could they even see what they were shooting at?

Mr. ABU RAMEH: OK. It’s clear it was a father, it’s clear it was a boy over there for ever who was shooting on them from across the street, you know, in front of them. I’m sure from that area, I’m expert in that area, I’ve been in that area many times. I know every …(unintelligible) in that area. Whoever was shooting, he got to see them, because that base is not far away from the boy and the father. It’s about 150 meters.

LYDEN: Hmm. Have you ever seen anything like this in clashes on the West Bank or in Gaza?

Mr. ABU RAMEH: I covered the Intifada, all the Intifada. I never saw like this in my own life. This was the most terrible thing that’s happened to me as a journalist. I’ve been a journalist now for 15 years. It’s really–I don’t know how to explain my feelings. I don’t know what I have to say, but really the picture is still in my eyes up to this minute. I will never forget it.

LYDEN: Talal Abu Rameh, thank you very much for speaking with us.

Mr. ABU RAMEH: You’re welcome.

LYDEN: Talal Abu Rameh is a correspondent for France 2. We reached him at his office in Gaza City

 

Posted in al Durah Affair, Demopaths and Dupes, Durah Journalism, humanitarian racism, Lethal Narratives, lying, Media, Most Valuable Idiot of the Day | 1 Comment

David Rovics on Jenin 2002

Posted on May 24, 2022 by Richard Landes

On my way to my 50th Reunion, I spoke with a musician classmate, Leonard Lehrman about various matters, including the odious Harvard Crimson editorial endorsing BDS. I mentioned Kofi Anan’s notorious comment about the Jenin Massacre, “Can the whole world be wrong and Israel be right?” (This along with a quote from 1893 from Ehad Ha-am about the blood libel, “can everybody be wrong and the Jews be right?”, has inspired the title of my upcoming book, Can “The Whole World” be Wrong? A Medievalist’s Guide to the 21st Century.)

Leonard responded that one of the musicians he has played with musician-social activist, David Rovics, wrote a song about Jenin. It is a classic example of the phenomenon my book documents, namely the way Palestinian war propaganda, passed on as news by lethal journalists, can inspire progressive artists to exercise an overheated imagination about Israel. Can they be wrong? Unthinkable.

And yet, no example offers a more stark contrast between what happened at Jenin refugee camp, the “terror capital of Palestine” and what the world believed. Instead of hundreds, even thousands, massacred by the Israelis according to Palestinian sources, eagerly passed on as news by major newspapers like the Guardian and Le Monde, there were 52-56 Palestinians dead, well over half of them (40 by one count) were combatants; and 23 Israeli soldiers were dead as a result of being forced go door to door, and stepping into an ambush.

A brief bibliography:

Tom Gross, “Jeningrad: What the British media said,” National Review, May 13, 2002.

Yagil Henkin, “Urban Warfare and the Lessons of Jenin,” Azure (Summer 2003): 53,

Brett Goldberg, Psalm in Jenin (Israel, Modan Publishing, 2003).

David Zangen, “Seven Lies About Jenin: David Zangen views the film Jenin, Jenin and is horrified.” Ma’ariv, November 8, 2002.

Pierre Rehov, La route de Jenin, 2003.

Martin Himmel, Massacring the Truth, 2004

So here’s a fisking of Rovics, Jenin, 2002.

Jenin Lyrics, by David Rovics

Oh, child, what will you remember
When you recall your sixteenth year
The horrid sound of helicopter gunships

Actually there were no helicopter gunships, nor their (imagined) horrid sound. On the contrary, the IDF deliberately chose not to do what the US/Nato troops had done just three years earlier at Kosovo, bombing from the air (and losing no troops). Instead, they went house to house.

The rumble of the tanks as they drew near

no tanks either.

As the world went about it’s business
And I burned another tank of gasoline
The Dow Jones lost a couple points that day
While you were crying in the City of Jenin.

and no town of Jenin. The operation concerned five square blocks of the adjacent refugee camp. Of course, with headlines like “City of Jenin destroyed,” it would be hard to know that.

Did they even give your parents warning

Yes, they actually did. Extensive warning before going in.

Before they blew the windows out with shells

no shells, actually, just like no tanks and no helicopter gunships.

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Posted in Arab-Israeli Conflict, Demopaths and Dupes, GPL (global progressive left), Jenin "Massacre", lethal journalism, Most Valuable Idiot of the Day | 1 Comment

Mick Hume: The West is turning on Israel today because it is losing confidence in itself (2002)

Posted on May 5, 2022 by Richard Landes

In response to a tweet today,

I wanted to reply with a link to an article written twenty years ago, in the wake of the wave of lethal journalism known as the “Jenin Massacre,” (when it was the opposite). At that time, Mick Hume wrote a great piece for the New Statesman, which is no longer available there, nor even at the site from which I drew the title and text of the article.

So I’m uploading the piece here.

Mick Hume, “The Anti-Imperialism of Fools,” New Statesman, April 22, 2002

A few months ago Daniel Bernard, the French Ambassador to Britain, caused a storm when he was quoted as saying that the problems thrown up by the Middle East were the fault of “that shitty little country, Israel”. It now appears that his alleged opinion is shared by a global coalition incorporating governments, intellectuals and everybody else from Islamic
fundamentalists to anti-capitalist protesters and poets. As one who has long sympathised with the Palestinian cause, I feel increasingly suspicious of what is behind the anti-Israeli turn in Western opinion. The newfound discomfort with Israeli aggression looks less like a response to events in the Middle East than a symptom of the West’s loss of conviction in itself.
It is becoming clear that, while the Israelis stand accused of a brutal crackdown in the Palestinian refugee camp at Jenin, there was no massacre of civilians. Yet last week leading institutions and commentators were quick to give credence to the wilder claims of war crimes and secret mass graves. Those who suggest that the horrors of Jenin are unique in the annals of the Arab-Israeli conflict have short memories.

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Posted in anti-Zionism, Arab-Israeli Conflict, cultural AIDS, Envy, Global Jihad, global jihad warming, Jenin "Massacre", lethal journalism, Nail on the Head, own goal war journalism, own-goal behavior, Scourges, Y2K Mind | Leave a comment

Harvard Crimson’s Useful Infidels: Supporting BDS for the sake of Palestinian “Dignity”

Posted on May 4, 2022 by Richard Landes
The Harvard Crimson editorial board published a piece endorsing BDS. It represents a combination of uncritical thinking, unsubstantiated claims, and self-contradictory arguments that attests to the disastrous deterioration of higher education in the 21st century. The editors are proud of their courage in taking the position they take; future generations will look back on this the way historians look at Chamberlain’s faith in Hitler or the useful idiocy of the Western communists like Walter Duranty.
Here is Ellen Horowitz’s take:
Editorials

In Support of Boycott, Divest, Sanction and a Free Palestine

When oppression strikes anywhere in the world, resistance movements reverberate globally. The desire for rightful justice spreads, like wildfire, moving us to act, to speak, to write, and right our past wrongs.
Over the past year, the Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee has strived to do just that. Amid escalating tensions between Israel and Palestine, PSC has hosted informational programming, organized weekly demonstrations of support through “Keffiyeh Thursdays,” and even installed a colorful, multi-panel “Wall of Resistance” in favor of Palestinian freedom and sovereignty.
the colorful “wall of resistance” was in fact a systematic slander of Israel as a racist society that expressed precisely the kind of racism among Palestinians that it denounced among Israelis. The euphemism “colorful” disguised the ugly dimensions of Palestinians with their relentless hatred – race-based – of the Israelis (and Jews).
In at least one regard, PSC’s spirited activism has proven successful: It has forced our campus — and our editorial board — to once again wrestle with what both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have called Israel’s “crimes against humanity” in the region.
wrestling suggests struggle. this is just a capitulation to deeply dishonest, pervasively flawed, systemic misinformation about Israel.
We first and foremost wish to extend our sincere support to those who have been and continue to be subject to violence in occupied Palestine,
of course, not those Palestinians subject to the extensive violence of their “leadership,” both religious (Hamas) and “secular” (PA).
as well as to any and all civilians affected by the region’s bellicosity. We are not sure how these words will reach you, or whether they’ll do so at all. But our stance isn’t rooted in proximity or convenience, but rather in foundational principles we must uphold — even if (or perhaps especially when) it proves difficult.
This editorial board is broadly and proudly supportive of PSC’s mission and activism, including its recent art display.
proudly. interesting term for supporting one of the more depraved movements in the world today, a movement dedicated to the destruction of a nation that it systematically libels.
The admittedly controversial panels dare the viewer to contend with well-established, if rarely stated, facts. They direct our eyes towards the property and land confiscations, citizenship denials, movement restrictions, and unlawful killings that victimize Palestinians day in and day out. Art is a potent form of resistance, and we are humbled by our peers’ passion and skill.
of course not a mention of the violence Palestinians direct at Israeli civilians that explain what is quaintly described as “unlawful” killings.
In the wake of accusations suggesting otherwise, we feel the need to assert that support for Palestinian liberation is not antisemitic. We unambiguously oppose and condemn antisemitism in every and all forms, including those times when it shows up on the fringes of otherwise worthwhile movements. Jewish people — like every people, including Palestinians — deserve nothing but life, peace, and security.
a strange formulation: aside from the “deserve nothing but” it somehow doesn’t include nationhood, which is, of course the fundamental claim of the Palestinian resistance.
The PSC “wall” explains its goals:

Israel ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall of separation.

Do the editors of the Crimson understand what “all Arab lands” means? That it means all the lands colonized by the Arabs in the 7th century, including the “Israeli side” of the Green Line. That they’ve used deliberately coded language aimed at duping Westerners with demopathic appeals. In English, “occupation” means the “other side” of the Green Line; in Arabic (and often enough in English), “from the river to the sea.” And if they don’t realize what this means, what does that say about their critical intelligence?

As for the “Wall of Separation”, it was built to keep out terrorists inspired by relentless, hate-mongering Palestinian propaganda. Take it down because that incitement and those desires are no longer there? Or to enable the terrorism?

Achieving full equality for Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel;

Israeli Arabs enjoy a level of equality in the enjoyment of democratic human rights unmatched by any Arabs anywhere in the world (except maybe the USA). This is doubly remarkable since so many of them (including their elected representatives) have expressed implacable hostility to the very state that grants them these rights. For Americans, whose own progressives describe it as systemically racist, to take sides in a conflict in which one side has a 1400 year-long history of denying the other its “full equality,” seems less a product of bravery than presumptive folly.

Securing the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.

Of course, 194 does nothing of the sort. And of course, the demopathic formulation of “the right of return” is nothing more than a formula for a demographic invasion. Do the Palestinians want a nation of their own where they can take care of their own people? Or do they want to use their people as a weapon to destroy another people’s nation? This suggests the latter.

Nothing about PSC’s Wall of Resistance denies that.
Nothing that the illiterate would notice.
While members of our campus might well find its messages provocative, or disagree with their philosophical outlook, nothing about them is, in our view, worthy of that delegitimizing label. We have a certain community-wide tendency to dismiss opposing views as inherently offensive and unworthy, straw-manning legitimate arguments and obfuscating difficult but necessary discussions. Yet civil discourse and debate, even when trying, are fundamental steps towards a better reality.
How ironic. No group does more to dismiss opposing views as… blah blah blah… than the group the editors here side with. Indeed, BDS insists on non-normalization, which is precisely a formula for refusing to listen to the other side.

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Posted in "Occupation", Anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, Arab-Israeli Conflict, Auto-stupefaction, BDS, black hearts, Westsplaining | 3 Comments