Showing posts with label Richard Landes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Richard Landes. Show all posts

Friday, June 23, 2023

I generally abhor divisions in the Jewish community. There are too few of us to be able to afford partisanship and needless hate for our own.

For those reasons I have been reluctant to criticize fellow Jews outside of the fringe who are anti-Zionist or anti-Judaism. And I have been equally reluctant to criticize the leaders of American Jewish organizations, trying and wanting to assume that they do the best they can with the resources they have.

That position is no longer tenable after reading Betrayal: The Failure of American Jewish Leadership, a new book of damning essays edited by Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser.  

Betrayal is a strong indictment of those American Jewish leaders, on both the national and local levels. 

The single biggest issue that should unify American Jews is the fight against antisemitism. But as Betrayal shows, the mostly self-appointed American Jewish leaders have been more interested in maintaining their positions of power than in going toe to toe with today's antisemites.

Worse, in example after example in this book, when grassroots Jewish groups organize to fight a specific threat to American Jews, these pseudo leaders generally try to dissuade and discourage them. They claim that their connections with other powerful people, and their quiet diplomacy, will carry the day. Their message to ordinary Jews who want to defend themselves from specific threats is "sha, shtill" - shut up and be quiet.

We cannot read minds, but the overwhelming impression given is that these so-called leaders enjoy their perks of being considered as such. They love to attend their interfaith breakfasts and to attend meetings and parties with local and national secular leaders. They don't want to make waves, to risk their positions and their perceived prestige, their speaking engagements at Temples, their parades for progressive causes.

Problems which should and could have been attacked early on - mosques with terror links, undermining K-12 and university education with the concepts of "wokeness" that slot Jews as oppressors and supremacists, BDS and campus "apartheid weeks" as well as the other constant attacks on Israel that these leaders prefer to sympathize with instead of battle against - have metastasized into major sources of today's American antisemitism. 

An essay by Jonathan Tobin sets the tone with his analysis of how the Anti Defamation League has turned its back on fighting antisemitism and instead steered the ship to be more progressive and partisan rather than defending Jews.  The organization's hiring of a rabidly anti-Zionist Tema Smith as "director of Jewish Outreach" was particularly risible. 

Richard Landes describes how American Jewish leadership has exhibited cowardice in the face of the jihadist threat, preferring to partner with their Muslim friends rather than to ever confront them. Of course, this peculiarly Jewish tendency to compromise on principles in order to seek approval from others is not mirrored by the openly pro-Hamas Muslim American leadership, who - if anything - feel empowered to more extremism because the Jews are on their side.

Josh Block describes the failure of American Jewish leaders to push back against Ilhan Omar's antisemitic statements, and this led directly to her emerging from the controversy as more influential than ever. 

Caroline Glick observes that the "two state solution" has become a religion of sorts for American Jewish leaders, and instead of defending Israel they are defending cutting Israel in half and abandoning nearly all Jewish holy sites. 

Naya Lekht notes how liberal Jewish groups have replaced Judaism with "social justice," a philosophy that comes from Stalin's Soviet Union and that is ultimately used against Jews.

The ADL, the AJC, the local JCRCs and Federations, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs - all of them are stridently criticized as becoming part of the problem rather than the solution for the one theme that Jews should unite around, fighting antisemitism. Specific examples from grassroots groups who were stymied by their local Jewish "leaders" abound. 

The only national organization that has held on to its principles of unwavering support for Jews and Israel is the Zionist Organization of America, and its president Morton Klein writes an essay as well demonstrating how the eagerness by other Jewish leaders to make nice with the anti-Israel and ultimately antisemitic progressive philosophy hurts the Jewish community and makes everyone lose respect for their leaders.

One of the most interesting essays is by M. Zuhdi Jasser, of the Muslim Reform Movement, who has tried to partner with American Jewish leaders - only to be spurned because they prefer their partnerships with Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations that are actively antisemitic. His frustration of being abandoned by those who should be his natural allies is palpable.

Jacobs and Goldwasser's own essay doesn't only describe the problems, but offers a ten point program towards solutions - the exact thing that the supposed American Jewish leaders avoid. These pro-active ideas are what real leaders should come up with and implement. 

Betrayal describes outrageous examples of failed and counterproductive leadership. It will make you angry, and it should.

American Jews pour millions into these organizations that have little or nothing to show for themselves. It is time to replace those fossils with real leadership, real ideas, and real passion. The authors of these 22 essays are all fine candidates to be true leaders of the North American Jewish community. 





Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Wednesday, March 22, 2023



Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad is a book that makes you shake your head a lot. You just can’t believe how stupid people are. The stupid things they say and do to make themselves feel better about themselves; the stupid things and the lies they say that allow them to hate Jews and look the other way at the jihadists who target the liars, their loved ones, and their way of life. It’s hard to watch—you want to look away from this slow, global, own-goal suicide. But the author, Professor Richard Landes, has made this work so compelling, you have no choice but to continue reading, even when, as a sane person, it leaves you, the reader, feeling rather queasy. 


Richard Landes

The book takes its title from the words of two men on the subject of blood libels, issued a century apart. There are the mocking words of writer Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginsburg), who in 1897, echoing the oft-expressed sentiment by European non-Jews when confronted with proof that, no. Jews don’t use the blood of Christian babies in the manufacture of matzah: “Is it possible the whole world is wrong and the Jews are right?”

Ahad Ha'am (Asher Ginsburg)

In 2002, little more than 100 years later, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, referring to Israeli denials of a massacre in Jenin that never occurred, said, “I don’t think the whole world, including the friends of the Israeli people and government, can be wrong.”

In this way, antisemitism takes its path. Because there are plenty of Jew-haters in the world. And the more there are, the more they give themselves moral permission to hate. The media, of course, is there to help things along with its own rendition of the modern blood libel. It’s called “lethal journalism.” They use fake footage, knowing it’s fake. They lie, because the lies are what their audiences want to hear. And they demonize Israel every time, because again: it’s exactly what their audiences want to hear.

Landes takes you on a journey, beginning in 2000 with the Al Durah hoax, moving on to 9-11, the phony Jenin “massacre,” and the Danish cartoon scandal (Danoongate). At the end of each chapter, Landes summarizes the stupid things that various figures have said in relation to these events. For example, journalist Catherine Nay said of the faked viral photo of the dead boy in his father’s arms, “This death erases, replaces the image of the boy in the Warsaw Ghetto.”

Every bit as shockingly stupid are the words of George W. Bush, spoken at the Islamic Center of Washington only days after 9-11, on September 17, 2001, “Islam is peace.”

Regarding the fictional Jenin massacre, journalist Janine di Giovanni wrote, “Rarely in more than a decade of war reporting from Bosnia, Chechniya, Sierra Leone, Kossovo, have I seen such deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life," 'Inside the Camp of the Dead,' The Times, April 16, 2002.

And off Danoongate, the French Director of Intelligence speaking in 2005, said, “These riots have nothing to do with Islam.”

Landes has been documenting this astounding stupidity and world folly for more than a decade. The result is this 500-page compendium with its prodigious, painstaking footnotes that leave the reader open-mouthed and astonished. You wonder: “How on earth did we get here?”

But you already know. Landes has connected up all the dots: the lies and lethal journalism, and the way the world gave jihad a pass, while damning the Jews. The facts and the progression of this deadly state of affairs have been amply covered by the author and you begin to understand the depth of the threat to our world, today. 

This a book you want on your shelf. It is not an easy read, but a necessary one if you want to understand how we got here—and how we are to dig our way out of this ugly, Jew-hating, jihadi, fake news mess. I put some questions to author Richard Landes to learn more about his book and its implications for the future:

Varda Epstein: Most writers think about who they’re writing for and gear their writing to that reader. “Can The ‘Whole World’ Be Wrong?” seems to be identifying who the reader is not. The book begins with a warning, but it’s more like a dare, or even a threat—like you’re trying to scare the reader off: “If you feel up to the task . . . turn the page. If not, just sit in your tub tweeting about white, racist privilege, while you bleed out.”

Who do you envisage as your reader? Who is it you’re trying to reach?

Richard Landes: My ideal reader is someone who really does care about liberal and progressive values. I actually lay out my concerns in the introductory chapter by contrasting zero-sum and positive-sum values, and stating my unequivocal preference for the latter, while conceding that the former has an inevitable presence in our lives and warning that those thinking they can eliminate zero-sum are not only fooling themselves with messianic dreams, but ultimately opposed to key life forces.

What I document in the book, however, is a massive shift in what was considered “liberal” or “progressive” in the new century/millennium. By 2003 it became a “litmus test of liberal credentials” to be pro-Palestinian (Buruma in NYT), at a time when the Palestinians were engaged in a suicide-mass murder war against Israeli civilians. By any standards of real liberal values that was a travesty which continues to this day (think Gays and LGBTQ for Palestine). So in a sense, the book is an attempt to go back to the moment this travesty first “took” and rethink how it could have happened so quickly and thoroughly. But since I firmly believe that the willingness to hear criticism and take it seriously is one of the key components of the liberal sensibility, I address this criticism to liberals sufficiently committed to their values to take it seriously.

Varda Epstein: Do you worry you’re preaching to the choir? Do you even aspire to reach the masses?

Richard Landes: Well that’s hard to say. Obviously a 500-page book with notes at the bottom of each page is not for “the masses.” But, between masses and choir lies many a circle of readers. Obviously, the “choir” of pro-Israel people are going to find it congenial. A number of people have written me about devouring the book in one sitting and thanking me: “Someone finally has the words for everything I’ve been struggling to say!” wrote one person. And if it helps them make the point to others, that’s great. But my real audience is what we might call the goats. As shepherds know, if you have about one goat to every ten sheep, then when there’s a problem, the sheep look to the goats. If they’re calm, the skittish sheep settle down. Similarly, I don’t think I’m going to reach some gay guy so caught up in his peer group that he repeats nonsense about being passionately for a political culture that hates gays. But if I can reach the thoughtful ones, then maybe they can explain it to him.

Varda Epstein: You write, “In a sense, this book should not have had to be written and I should be able to work on the origins of modern Western civilization in the demotic millennialism of eleventh-century France to my heart’s content.” Why did the “Can The ‘Whole World’ Be Wrong?” have to be written, and why by you, Richard Landes? After all, as you suggest, lethal journalism, antisemitism, and global jihad are not your chosen field.

Richard Landes: Well, actually, global jihad is my field since it’s an apocalyptic millennial movement, and it came on my screen in the mid-90s through the (then) graduate work of David Cook (now at Rice U.). Actually, in the mid-1990s, in my work on the 11th century, I began to work out a model of antisemitism that went in waves starting with philo-semitism, leading to important socio-economic changes that eventually produced an antisemitic reaction. Given that the period after the Holocaust (i.e. my life) was the longest and most philo-semitic period in recorded history (especially in the USA where I grew up), I speculated that the advent of 2000 might mark the reappearance of antisemitism in the West. At the time I thought it would come from the apocalyptic “right” – fundamentalist Christian Zionists disappointed that the Rapture didn’t happen, and Jihadi Muslims who were already openly and ferociously antisemitic. What I didn’t see coming were two linked phenomena: 1) the attraction of the “Left” for the Jihadi apocalyptic narrative that Israel and the US were “Satans”/Antichrists, and 2) the utter failure of liberals, who had a huge presence in the public sphere, to resist. As a result, what I thought would be a wave of Jew-hatred that we could resist, has, over 20 years of astonishing and self-destructive mishandling, become an existential threat not only to Israel (its purported target) but to democracies around the world.

Why did I have to write it rather than someone else? I don’t know. But someone else didn’t write it. It’s such a hard thing to grasp, a history of your own time. Maybe working historians in the early 11th century writing histories of the turn of that millennium made it a conceivable project. Obviously I don’t write about everything (and neither did they). I write in depth about what I think were errors of judgment on a civilizational plane, which continue to be made by very smart people. We all love the story of the emperor’s new clothes, but few of us want to entertain the notion that it’s actually happening. Someone jokingly said that Amazon should bundle my book not with another book, but with antidepressants. It’s dark stuff. Very depressing. Without a deep sense of humor, I wouldn't have been able to keep my eye on this ball over the course of decades.

Varda Epstein: How, if at all, does your work as a medievalist inform your book, and in particular your interest in eleventh-century France? Does your work on the al Durah story, which you mention in your book, have anything to do with that? You cite many French sources and drop French phrases in your book. I’m getting the idea that you’re a Francophile—but not!

Richard Landes: As for the Middle Ages, there are three key issues:

1)      Honor-shame societies: As a medievalist I work on a society in which gaining/keeping honor and avoiding/revenging shame were key components of public life, where it was legitimate, accepted, even required that one shed blood for the sake of honor. Without understanding those dynamics, you don’t understand Arab political culture. Now Edward Saïd made it taboo to discuss these matters (the quintessence of “Orientalism”), and in doing so blinded the West to the cultural dynamics of this region. In my book I show how the Oslo Accords were based on thinking that Arafat and Arab political culture were ready to give up the view that the very existence of Israel was so shameful that it must be destroyed, and go for the positive-sum, win-win, of “land for peace,” to the benefit of both the Israelis and the Palestinians. And how ignoring those dynamics meant that right up to the last second, the peace negotiators thought we were “sooo close.” And still do.

2)      Apocalyptic millenarian: the jihadis are a classic expression of a distinctly (but not exclusively) medieval form of eschatological thinking, namely they embrace an “active cataclysmic apocalyptic scenario” – evil permeates the world and we are God’s agents in destroying it – aiming at a hierarchical millennium – Islam will dominate the world, infidels either accept dhimmitude (subjection), or convert, or die. It’s really hard for moderns to take apocalyptic beliefs seriously because every time in the past that people have been so moved, they’ve been wrong, sometimes disastrously so. (This included modern historians of the Middle Ages.) As a result of this cognitive lapse, and the pressures of political correctness in the 21st century, to avoid anything too negative about Islam (don’t say “radical Islam”), has produced a Western culture that cannot see its enemy (embodied in the absurd formula “war on terrorism”).

3)      Public Secrets: for reasons that I’m not sure about, both my academic career and my journalistic one have found and investigated public secrets, that is, something everyone “in the know” knows about, but when it comes to the public record, they deny any knowledge or existence of the issue in question. In the Middle Ages it was about how Charlemagne was crowned on the first day of the year 6000 from Creation – a millennial date Christian chronographers had been tracking for over 6 centuries – and yet no one who wrote about the coronation, or his imperial period, mentioned it. In this book, the main public secret I deal with is that the Palestinians fake news footage all the time, and that the press is so profoundly intimidated by them, that they run Palestinian “lethal narratives” as news. This unacknowledged, even denied phenomenon, has immense impact on the kind of lethal journalism that we get constantly from our news media.

Varda Epstein: There’s a lot about stupidity in your book—you call it when and where you see it, using exactly that word “stupid” in its various forms. Why is it important to you to use precisely this descriptor and how do you account for the sheer amount of it that exists in the world? 

Richard Landes: First because it’s a technical term in economic and game theory for someone who hurts someone else without gaining any advantage (Cipolla). Secondly because it’s so stunningly prominent in our times. I define “astoundingly stupid” as creating advantages for an avowed enemy. And as far as I can make out, that has been a consistent pattern among the Western opinion leaders – journalists, academics, public intellectuals, politicians, and policy makers – for the last two decades. As Elder of Ziyon put it, my book is a “modern take on the Emperor’s New Clothes.” Then, when I found the comment by Bonhoeffer (which I included in the epigrams)—who also lived at a time when his society was being seized by apocalyptic memes—about the impossibility of arguing with precisely this kind of self-destructive stupidity, I knew I was on the right track. 


Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Varda Epstein: How did you decide on the structure of the book? How does the first part complement the second? Why not have it in, say, two volumes? Oh, and you must tell us about the haikus! That must have been fun.

Richard Landes: The structure wrote itself. The first four chapters are my “history of my time,” namely four incidents in the early aughts (‘00s) that chronicle key moments in the assault of global jihad on western democracies, and the astoundingly stupid way in which the West processed what was happening to them: the outbreak of the intifada and the al Durah affair; 9-11; the “Jenin Massacre”; and the Danish cartoon scandal.

Then, to explain how this could happen, I went through the key players: 1) Shame-Honor driven Arab culture; 2) Apocalyptic-Millennial driven Jihadi beliefs – what I call Caliphators; 3) Liberal Cognitive Egocentrics: people who project their positive-sum values onto cultures that don’t share it; 4) radical progressives who, blinded by Saïd’s assault on Orientalism, end up allying with the most imperialist movement in the world because it’s “anti-imperialist,” i.e. anti-USA and Israel; 5) the lethal journalists who radically disorient their audiences with their Palestinian-compliant “news” reports; and 6) the virtue-signaling Jews who adopt their enemy’s narrative (something an apocalyptic Caliphator predicted in 2001), thereby giving wings to the very kind of exterminationist antisemitism that fueled the Nazi madness.

The last part sketches developments over the next decade and a half (mid-aughts to now), identifying some of the phenomena so striking in our current culture that I think this turn-of-the-millennium seizure helped set in motion – woke, cancel-culture politics, fake news, anti-racism discourse, and what I call pre-emptive dhimmitude, namely the adoption by our information elites of a posture of subjection to Muslim demands for respect which ends up attacking not the invaders of democratic culture, but those (like me) who warn and mobilize against those enemies.

As for the haikus, I’ve been writing them ever since I ran across the form in my youth. The one for al Durah (chapter one) was originally written for Y2K: “We need not have been/ Mouths open inhaling, when/ The sh*t hit the fan.” My favorite is the one for the chapter on Jews against themselves: “Have ever before/ lambs denounced lambs who refuse/ to lie with lions?”

Varda Epstein: I so appreciated all the detailed footnotes you included at the bottom of each page (I hate it when writers put them the end and I have to flip back and forth). But that would have been a daunting task! You must have been taking voluminous notes for years on end, as you read, watched, talked . . . does that about sum it up? How many years was this book in the making? 

"A book that keeps writing itself,"
Tat Aluf Yossi Kuperwasser



Richard Landes: Yes, it does sum it up nicely. Thanks to Evernote (I have over 35,000 notes clipped there), I’ve been able to preserve access to articles that no longer can be found online. I’m ashamed to say the book was over a decade in the making. The working title – They’re so smart, cause we’re so Stupid – was inspired by the Fort Hood Massacre (2009) in which a Palestinian-American major in the army, after extensively displaying his jihadi sympathies, shot dozens of his fellow-soldiers, and inspired Mark Steyn to write an article entitled: “These days, it’s easier to be even more stupid after the event.” It’s just hard to write a history book about your own time. As Yossi Kuperwasser put it, “It’s a book that keeps writing itself.” When Shireen abu Akleh was killed, I knew I couldn't include this ongoing, slow-motion train wreck.

As for the footnotes, I feel passionately about a) having many, and b) at the bottom of the page. I took out all the URLs one can find for oneself easily from the hard-copy book, but for those who want to get them, I have them up at my personal webpage for the book: https://richard-landes.com/the-whole-world/

Varda Epstein: There are so many shocking parts in your book still rattling around in my head. For instance, that remark from a peer, “Well, the Jews have been asking for it, and now, thank God, we can say what we think at last.”

Richard Landes: For me it will always be Charles Enderlin, when I pointed out how much faking was going on at Netzarim Junction the day Muhammad al Durah was allegedly shot, saying to me “Oh yes, they do that all the time.”

But the two worst comments by far were a) when a colleague in the history department responded to my bemoaning the suicide terror war of the Palestinians with the comment, “What choice do they have?” and b) the journalist Catherine Nay saying that the image of al Durah “erased, replaced” the picture of the boy in the Warsaw Ghetto. Hard to get more empirically and morally disoriented, and yet people heard these kinds of remarks and nodded knowingly.

What would you say shocked you most about your findings? I’m guessing it’s the stupidity. . .

Richard Landes: That’s one way to put it. Cowardice is another. The way I’d put it, in the ‘90s, I may have seen a wave of antisemitism coming in 2000, and even a wave of Jihadi attacks on the West, but I never dreamed that Western democracies would be so feckless in responding.

Varda Epstein: What do you want the reader to take away from your book?

Richard Landes:

1) that when “the whole world” agrees on something (whether it’s the emperor’s courtiers or the academics and journalists and pundits who think they speak for “the whole world” and are sure they’re right) they can (and have, and are and will) be, sometimes, wrong.

2) that the meanings of “liberal” and “progressive” have been terribly distorted, even betrayed, in the 21st century. 

3) that when the legacy media reports Israel has done something terrible and Israeli sources deny it (or even admit to it only partially) it’s possible that the legacy media is wrong.

4) that we’ve gotten into this mess because a lot of nice and well-intentioned people have allowed themselves to be pushed around, silenced, and cowed by those filled with passionate intensity, and we need to speak up.

5) that to continue down this path spells disaster.

***

Landes, R. (2022). Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad (Antisemitism in America). Boston : Academic Studies Press, 2022. 

(available on Amazon.)



Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Sunday, January 22, 2023

Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad, by Professor Richard Landes, is a hard but important book to read. 
Landes does no less than directly taking on the orthodoxy of the liberal world that regards Israel as one of the worst human rights violators, that regards supporting the Palestinian cause as the archetype of progressive values, that regards the West as Islamophobic and institutionally racist. He challenges the reader - what if everything you have read is wrong, and I am right? 

The first part of the book goes into some detail on four episodes from the early 2000s. 

It is no surprise that one of those episodes is the  Al Dura affair, which Landes is one of the world's experts in. It was indeed the first blood libel of the new millenium, where the media unquestioningly accepted and promoted the idea that Israeli forces murdered the child Al Dura on TV and in cold blood. The French reporter, Charles Enderlin, who spread the libel wasn't there and he trusted the reporting of a Palestinian cameraman. Hours of footage from the same scene showed it was essentially a soundstage, where Palestinians were play-acting injuries. Yet almost no Western reporters questioned the story, as the Arab media ran the footage non-stop for days.

Occuring only two days after Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount in 2000, the incident inflamed the Palestinians and the Arab world. Indeed, it would not be inaccurate to call the second intifada the "al-Dura intifada," as it almost certainly was the spark that kept the brand new riots going.And it was all a lie - it is impossible that the IDF could have shot the child from their position. 

The other incidents that Landes examines from the early part of the millenium are 9/11, the Jenin "massacre" that wasn't, and the Muslim world's reactions to the Danish cartoons of Mohammed. Landes uses each of these incidents as springboards into examining the West's reactions, which often were, as he notes repeatedly, stupid. On page after page, Landes gives scores of examples of this stupidity: the reluctance by media to use the term "terrorism," the constant repetition that Islam is peace, the bending over backwards to find fault with Western and specifically Israeli actions and ascribing them the responsibility for Islamist violence.

It is easy to forget the early aughts of this century, but Landes reminds us that just as today we will see Western progressives justify Hamas rockets by asking "what choice do they have?," the reaction to the tsunami of suicide bombing attacks in Israel during the bloody years of 2000-2004 prompted the exact same justifications by the same crowd. 

The other two major parts of the book examine the key players in pushing the bizarre mindset of Western self-blame and bending to the will of the Islamists (whom Landes terms "Caliphators") and the current outlook on the war between the West and apocalyptic Islam - and how the Islamists are winning the battle by disabling their enemy. On the way, Landes expertly analyzes the honor-shame culture and the zero-sum thinking of the Islamists as well as the stupid western tendency to project our own mindset onto them, even as they use our own strengths of self-criticism against us.

Throughout the book, Israel is the canary in the coal mine. By any objective standard, Israel is the most progressive and liberal state ever in an extended state of war. Its successful integration of a 20% Arab population as equals is far more successful than what we see in Paris or Malmo with a much smaller Muslim minority. Yet Israel is regarded, even by those other "enlightened" progressive European elites, as a "shitty little country" that has no right to exist. 

As I said, it is a hard book to read. The amount of information is sometimes overwhelming - and often infuriating. Landes also often peppers the text with gems that demand to be re-read. Happily, he chooses to use footnotes instead of endnotes so one can dig deeper into his often offhand examples.

I have some nitpicks too. I didn't see that he has a glossary of terms, many of which he created, until I finished the book, so one often sees his coinages like "Y2KMind" or "Caliphator" a hundred pages before he defines them in the text. I'm not as convinced as Dr. Landes of the millennialist component of Islamist thinking.  

The tone of the book is often more strident than objective, but it is hard to fault Dr. Landes for that, since the reader is apt to be upset along with the author. There is ample excuse to get angry while reading it.  And while Landes gives some general advice on what the West needs to do in order to recognize and defeat the enemy of Islamism, I wish it was more actionable. (I have written and spoken about how I think the Arab honor/shame culture can be used to Western advantage.) 

In general, though, this is an important book to read, and even those of us who are immersed in these topics will learn a great deal and see connections that we hadn't thought of before. 

Disclosure: I am friends with Richard, and this site is mentioned at least three times in the book.



Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Tuesday, December 13, 2022

From Ian:

Richard Landes on Why Leftists Embrace Islamist Ideas about the West
Richard Landes, chair of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) and author of Can the "Whole World" Be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad, was interviewed in a December 5th Middle East Forum Webinar (video) by Dexter Van Zile, editor of the Middle East Forum's Focus on Western Islamism (FWI), regarding the left's embrace of Islamist ideas about the West.

Landes said Edward Said's 1978 book, Orientalism, had "pretty much taken over academia" with its premise that any criticism of Islam was a form of "Western racism." By 2000, said Landes, Said's ideas had "crystallized into a basic feature of the Western public sphere." In 2001, a further significant watershed in this process was the U.N.-sponsored Durban conference, an international forum purportedly held to fight racism. At the conference, "You had the NGOs ... their sacred theme was human rights ... lining up with and joining forces with some of the most regressive groups on the planet. And so as a result ... And the key thing in that unification was the adoption by both sides .... They had already both more or less developed this thought, but they jointly targeted Israel and the United States as, in millennial terms, the Antichrist. Or in Muslim terms, the Dajjal."

Landes described the alliance formed at Durban, followed three days later by the jihad against America on 9/11, as a "red-green alliance" between the "progressive left and jihadis." He referred to it as a "marriage between post-modern sadism and post-modern masochism." The poisonous seeds of that merger account for the Islamists' marching in lockstep with the left, targeting both Israel and the U.S.

Landes said their joint strategy to undermine the West is "demopathy," i.e., using democracy to destroy democracy. Both groups used their platforms to channel their hostility, often publicized at anti-U.S. and anti-Israel protests in the form of symbolic imagery on placards linking swastikas with the American flag and the Jewish star. Landes noted that Islamist propagandists have grown "bolder and bolder. Initially, they didn't think they could get away with saying the things that they say now, so they couched it in human rights terms." He said that "what's happened over the last 20 years is that they've just seen how foolish Western leaders are and that they can get away with just about anything. But I think they still, by and large, don't openly say in English what they say in Arabic."


Phyllis Chesler: The history of the media intifada against Israel
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.”

“The role of al-Dura as incitement is clear,” Landes writes, “and if the damage was less than the old European pogroms, it’s only because the Israelis could defend themselves as the Jews of Kishinev could not.”

Landes also reminds us that Osama bin Laden used al-Dura in a recruiting video for global jihad and that the first Palestinian suicide bombers featured al-Dura in the videos they left behind.
EU source says anti-Israel measure 'tainted' in wake of Qatar corruption scandal
A source that has been privy to the European Parliament's behind-the-scenes deliberations over an anti-Israel resolution has told Israel Hayom it was problematic to have this measure come up for a vote at this time in light of the recent revelation that Qatar allegedly bribed senior officials in the legislative body in exchange for treating it with kid gloves over human rights.

"This corruption case involving the parliament raises the question of whether this is the right time to vote on this [anti-Israel resolution]," the source said.

The parliament's subcommittee on human rights has been at the center of the scandal and its chair Maria Arena has had to step down due to possible involvement (it is unclear if she is among the four being charged, who include EU Parliament's Vice President Eva Kaili, who was arrested).

Arena, who has initiated the anti-Israel motion, has stepped aside as chairperson in the wake of the investigation and her office has been sealed off, but the subcommittee has continued working on the draft. "This is the same subcommittee that has initiated the effort to hold the vote on the Israel resolution," the source said. "Considering this, perhaps it would be inappropriate to have these measures stay on the subcommittee's docket; perhaps they should be shelved for the time being until the picture becomes clearer."

On Monday, the various elements in the parliament tried to reach an agreed language, but all the drafts currently being circulated are not good for Israel, with some outright hostile. All call for the adoption of the two-state solution. The most pro-Israel draft has been sponsored by the right-wing parties, as it condemns Palestinian terrorism and demands it come to an end. The other resolutions call on Israel to avoid approving new communities in Judea and Samaria and voice criticism over the Abraham Accords, while also coming out against the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of antisemitism.
NGO Monitor: Report: Potential Abuse of German Development Resources by Terror Affiliated Palestinian NGOs
Development and cooperation aid is seen as one of the most effective strategies for promoting democracy and fundamental rights, as well as building sustainable and inclusive societies, particularly in places where these processes are in their initial phases. To be sure, the path to building a democratic society is a political process, traversing existing ideological and social rifts, and subject to passionate debates between different political camps.

Especially in conflict ridden areas, politicization can result in development aid lending a platform to radical voices and amplifying inflammatory, hateful narratives. Such aid is particularly susceptible to abuse by groups that promote radical political narratives.

This is even more pronounced in the Palestinian-controlled areas, including Gaza, where many of the political factions are designated as terror groups by Europe (Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine [PFLP]).

This paper provides a case study that examines the ways that political actors propagate and legitimize radicalized narratives – namely, local Palestinian civil society organizations affiliated with the PFLP terror group, which receive European and more specifically German development aid.

The PFLP is multifaceted, consisting of overlapping functions including militant operations, local partisan political activity, and international advocacy via a “human rights” NGO network. These aspects are complementary, all contributing to the broadening of the PFLP’s sphere of influence and to achieving its goals.

The overlapping character of PFLP activities was illustrated acutely when several senior NGO employees (including those in financial leadership positions) were arrested for a PFLP terror attack in 2019, in which Rina Shnerb, a 17-year-old Israeli, was murdered. A subsequent investigation run by the Israeli Ministry of Defense (MoD) concluded that six PFLP-affiliated NGOs had diverted public funds. Ultimately, all six were designated as terror entities.

Sunday, December 04, 2022

From Ian:

Jeffrey Herf: Islamist Terror; Journalistic Error
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)

The failures of journalism that Landes examines did not begin in 2000 with the Second Intifada. The idea of Israel as oppressor and colonialist interloper and the Palestinians as innocent victims have been central to Arab and Palestinian Arab political culture since the 1940s. In the early 1950s, the Soviet Union, the support of which during 1947–49 was so important to the establishment of the Jewish state, joined Israel’s enemies in maintaining that first Zionists and then the state of Israel were to blame for the conflict. From the 1960s to the end of the Cold War, an anti-Israeli consensus emerged in the United Nations General Assembly. The Soviet bloc, communist China and other communist regimes joined Islamic states, many Third World nations, and the Arab states in denouncing Zionism as a form of racism and Israel as a practitioner of cruelty and aggression.

The description of Israel as an apartheid state began in the United Nations during those decades as well. After the Six Day War of 1967, the radical Left in Western Europe, the United States, Latin America, and Japan joined the anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli chorus, with intellectual ballast provided by Edward Said and other postcolonial writers and thinkers. Support for Israel became incompatible with membership in good standing in the panoply of progressive politics. It was in those decades that the Palestinians emerged as icons of global anti-imperialism, and the journalistic habits that Landes discusses entered international journalism.

Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong? urges us to take a fresh look at the critical months in the fall of 2000, when the idea of Palestinians as the world’s “most honored of victims” entered mainstream discourse in the West’s democracies. It is time, Landes argues, to “reread the Intifada, this time not as an uprising of the oppressed against the oppressor, but as the opening salvo of the Caliphator assault on Western democracies in the twenty-first century.” Landes asks his readers, especially those of liberal and leftist leanings, to recall the liberal nature of the Zionist project and the realities of Israel’s democracy, and to look honestly at the ideology of those seeking to destroy it. His book makes a compelling case that too many prominent journalists, political figures, NGOs, and academics were, in fact, wrong about the fundamental causes of terror. They misunderstood the war between Israel and its enemies, and as a result, they also misunderstood the facts of that war. Landes notes that there were journalists who resisted this consensus, but that they were the exception.

It turns out that, concerning the history of Israel and its secular and Islamist adversaries, the 20th century was a long not a short one. The modern hatred of the Jews, Zionism, and liberal democracy emerged in Europe and the Middle East during the 1940s, persisted into the 1950s, and found global reach by the 1970s and 1980s. The anti-Zionist impulse has drawn from Nazi propaganda, Soviet campaigns during the Cold War, 1960s style anti-imperialist ideology, as well as the traditions of the Islamists. Today, it remains alive and well in the assaults and threats to Israel that Landes examines in this book.

Richard Landes is right to call for a rereading of the Second Intifada, and to draw our attention to the way the images and interpretations of those years contributed to misunderstanding the years of terror, and to a new Islamist-inflected species of antisemitism. He makes a convincing case that, yes, “the whole world”—or at least too many very accomplished professionals in the media, public life, and politics—were indeed wrong about the causes of the terrorism directed at the Jewish state in recent decades. Twenty-two years after the Second Intifada erupted, it is time for a rethink.
A House of Lies
The UN in Perspective Israel’s formal acceptance as the 59th UN Member State on May 11, 1949 was consistent with the UN’s original core beliefs. The UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in Paris on December 10, 1948 by the UN General Assembly, was issued in response to the “disregard and contempt for human rights” that resulted in the “barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind” called the Holocaust—the attempt to annihilate the Jews of Europe by the Nazis. [7] Thus the Jewish state and the human rights revolution “were as one in 1948… . There is a clear symbolic—if not symbiotic—relationship between Israel and human rights… and Israel was born of that commitment.” [8]

“On May 14, 1948, Israel’s founders wanted to emphasize to the world that while the Jewish people had been born in Eretz-Israel [??? ?????, the land of Israel], its state was the adopted child of the United Nations” noted historian Martin Kramer. “Israel had a ‘natural and historic’ right to exist,” he said, “and that right had been recognized by the world. Nothing made this point more clearly than the crucial passage of the declaration: “By virtue of our natural and historic right and on the strength of the resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, we hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.” [9]

“Does this suggest that the United Nations ‘created’ the state of Israel?” asked Kramer. “Hardly; if it were within the power of the UN to create states, an Arab state would have arisen in 1948 alongside Israel. After all, the Arabs of Palestine possessed exactly the same recognition of their rights and the same license to act as did the Jews (although not the historiical connection to the land, ed). The difference, to revert to the term invoked by the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), was that the Arabs didn’t constitute a “state within a state….absent a Jewish army, Israel wouldn’t have arisen in any borders, and certainly not in the expanded borders of 1949.”[10]

A Final Note
From their initial UN deliberations, the permanent representatives of the UN understood the gravity of the problems they confronted and how their decisions would affect the future of the world. In hindsight, their remarks were prescient.

Moe Finn, a Norwegian politician, who was a member of the UN Security Council from 1948 to 1949, viewed the UN’s attempt to find a solution as being “very well a test case,” since it “may be decisive for the future of the United Nations.” [11]

Addressing the Special Session of the General Assembly held between April 28 and May 5, 1947, Mr. Quo Tai-chi, Chinese representative to the Security Council, prophetically warned that unless Arabs and Jews “learn to love their neighbors as themselves.” there will be no peace in the Holy Land, or indeed, in any land.” Historical and legal procedures, political and economic considerations will never provide a solution for peace. Until Jews and Christians “return to the teachings of the prophets and the saints of the Holy Land … no parliament of man, no statement, no legal formula, no historical equation, no political and economic programme can singly or together themselves solve the problem.” [12]

For Asaf Ali, Indian ambassador to the United States in 1947, Palestine had “become the acid test of human conscience. The United Nations will find that upon their decision will depend [on] the future of humanity, whether humanity is going to proceed by peaceful means or whether humanity is going to be torn to pieces. If a wrong decision flows from this august Assembly…the world shall be cut in twain and there shall be no peace on earth.” [13]
Seth Frantzman: Has antisemitism in US reached a tipping point?
The main tipping point comes due to the amplification of these views in major traditional media and social media. Twitter has now suspended Kanye West’s Twitter account, which had 32 million followers. This comes after he appeared on Alex Jones’ far-Right InfoWars website and praised Hitler. One video of the appearance on the show has received more than two million views on Twitter. West, who is now called Ye, had posted a Star of David with a swastika inside of it on Twitter before being suspended. News about West was one of the top trending topics on CNN’s website on Saturday.

The news cycle of antisemitism has been flooding people’s homes with anti-Jewish views for two months now, since early October. Whenever a celebrity makes antisemitic comments they are then amplified by media and there are numerous interviews.

It is difficult not to see a pattern here. According to an October 11 report at the The Hill “Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, made several antisemitic remarks… in unaired portions of his recent interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson.”

However, that wasn’t the only major interview. Throughout October and November, numerous hosts on various media sought out the “controversy” of interviewing someone who would say “controversial” antisemitic things.

The tipping point comes because today, antisemitism is the “cool” thing that radio hosts and media people want to have on their shows in order to get maximum ratings and clicks. This is more than just “shock jock” culture.

The reason we are seeing a tipping point is because media isn’t rushing to interview people with homophobic or other types of racist views. There is only one group whose hatred they want to amplify.

Of course, they are “against” antisemitism. However, the most “controversial” antisemitic rhetoric is being amplified daily. How many millions of people who are being exposed to this are now beginning to think that the usual filters they might have can be taken off?

Wednesday, August 24, 2022

 

Life is a supreme Jewish value. So much so that it’s customary to make charitable donations or monetary gifts in multiples of 18: the numerical value of the Hebrew word for life: chai. When we drink in celebration we say, “L’Chaim,” as popularized by the song from Fiddler on the Roof.

We Jews place life on a pedestal not only in times of celebration but in times of mourning too. Anglo-Jews from Britain and communities in the former Commonwealth, for example, are likely to conclude a condolence call with “I wish you long life.”

In Islam, on the other hand, life appears to take a backseat to death. The goriest murders, butchery, death, and suicide seem not to faze Muslims at all. Whereas Jews are preoccupied with life, the Muslim thinks more about death. In a 2004 op-ed, Aspiration not Desperation, Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook detailed the final words of a suicide bomber, describing her joy at the prospect of blowing herself to smithereens.

“I always wanted to be the first woman who sacrifices her life for Allah. My joy will be complete when my body parts fly in all directions.”

These are the words of female suicide terrorist Reem Reyashi, videotaped just before she killed four Israelis and herself two weeks ago in Gaza. What is surprising about this horrific statement is that she put a positive value on her dismemberment and death, distinct from her goal to kill others. She was driven by her aspiration to achieve what the Palestinians call “shahada,” death for Allah. She had two distinct goals: To kill and to be killed. These independent objectives, both positive in her mind, were goals greater than her obligations and emotional ties to her two children. This aspiration to die, which contradicts the basic human instinct for survival, is at the core of the suicide terrorism fervor.

Contrast this with the Jewish concept of dying “al Kidush Hashem,” in sanctification of God’s name. Every Holocaust victim, every Jewish terror victim, is considered to be a holy martyr. But Jews don’t strive for that holy eventuality—we don’t court death for the sake of martyrdom. Which is what all too many Muslims seem to do.

Most people can't stand the sight of blood, but blood doesn't seem to generate the same revulsion in Muslims. Take the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, which commemorates what we Jews still call the Akedat Yitzchak, the binding of Isaac. The Muslim version, which of course postdates Jewish scripture substitutes “Ibrahim” for Abraham, and “Ismail” for Isaac. Jews remember the Akedah by reciting the story from the Torah before the congregation on the second day of Rosh Hashanah. Muslims, on the other hand, celebrate their version of the story with mass slaughter of livestock. So many animals are killed on this holiday, that in 2016, the streets of Dhaka, Bangladesh ran red with blood.

Dhaka, 2016


In The value of life in the Jewish tradition: Towards understanding Jewish bioethics, written in 2009, Professor Michael Barilan of the Sackler School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University, writes about protecting the ability of animals to procreate and bring new life and what we as humans are supposed to learn from this:

Judaism is possibly the only religion that prohibits all forms of castration. This taboo creates grave challenges to pet owners, modern animal farming and scientific research. However, when one becomes aware of the ubiquity of sterilization in the utilization of animals, one may also appreciate the subtle protest Judaism articulates against the mechanical exploitation of animals. The prohibition on sterilization of animals and humans underscores further the special regard in Judaism to the capacity to generate life. According to Sefer Ha’hinnukh, castration articulates a nihilistic attitude towards life. Contemporary scholarship on Judaism and human rights also interpret God’s admonition “Choose life!” as a call for hope and engagement in worldly life, not as a strict refusal to recognize situations in which loss of life is the more dignified and just course of action.

In regard to shedding blood, Barilan writes,

Ironically, the first prohibition on bloodshed is articulated in terms of the death penalty. “Whoso sheds man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed, for in the Image of God made he man.”

The Torah does not tell us directly, “do not kill” the way God proscribed eating from the tree of knowledge. From the story on Cain and Abel we learn that this knowledge is self-evident; every person must recognize it naturally.

Many Muslims, apparently do not. There is ample evidence of the Muslim thirst for bloodshed.

As Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook documented in their aforementioned op-ed, “Palestinian society actively promotes the religious belief that their deity craves their deaths. Note the words of a popular music video directed at children, broadcast hundreds of times on PA TV, which depicts the earth thirsting for the blood of children: ‘How sweet is the fragrance of the shahids, how sweet is the scent of the earth, its thirst quenched by the gush of blood, flowing from the youthful body.’”

Life is so important to Jews that we are allowed to break just about any religious commandment in order to save the life of a human being. Look at that last sentence carefully. There is rabbinical consensus that we are commanded to breach Torah laws not only in order to save Jewish lives, but in order to save the life of any human being in peril.

In Jewish law, human life comes first. We understand how important a man’s life is—any man’s life—by the early mention of the concept in Scripture:

“And God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him.” (Genesis 1:27)

Judaism is life-affirming. Islam, on the other hand, cares little for life, and instead embraces death with a whole heart. More from Marcus and Crook:

PA ideology rejects the value of ‘life’ that other societies hold supreme. As expressed by a senior historian, Professor Issam Sissalem, in a lecture on PA TV: “We are not afraid to die, and do not love life.”

This attitude was echoed by Nidal Malik Hasan in wrapping up a presentation he created for his fellow doctors, two years before he killed thirteen and wounded 29 at Fort Hood: “We love death more than you love life!”

According to the National Post, the sentence originates with “a 7th-century Muslim commander who threatened his enemies with the prospect of ‘an army of men that love death as you love life.’”

The Post then references a 2004 interview with Hezbollah head Hassan Nasrallah. Professor Richard Landes quotes the same interview in Lessons from Kafr Qana:

“We have discovered how to hit the Jews where they are the most vulnerable. The Jews love life, so that is what we shall take away from them. We are going to win, because they love life and we love death.”

Landes, describing Muslim awareness of their own obsession with death, writes:

Even as they deplore it, Arab intellectuals acknowledge the depths of the problem: Wrote Tunisian intellectual Al-Afif Al-Akhdar:

“Why do expressions of tolerance, moderation, rationalism, compromise, and negotiation horrify us [Muslims], but [when we hear] fervent cries for vengeance, we all dance the war dance?… Why do other people love life, while we love death and violence, slaughter and suicide, and [even] call it heroism and martyrdom?”

In Death: a beautiful Gift for a believer (compiled by unknown), the author describes hating death as the provenance only of the “ignorant”:

Hatred towards death and love of the world is the outcome of an ignorant person's mind, who thinks that the happiness of this world is his prosperity and good fortune. The world beset with numerous troubles and anxieties is about to end in misery and does not enjoy eternity, perpetuity and sincerity. A poet has referred to this in the following words - “Do not give your heart to this world, for its example is of an unfaithful bride who has never loved you, even for a night.”

Unknown also writes:

[Hazrat Qasim], the son of [Imam Hasan Al-Mujtaba], when asked concerning death at Karbala, answered: “death to me is sweeter than honey.”

He continues (emphasis added):

Usually, most of the people are alarmed and fearful upon hearing the word `death', and to them, death appears dreadful and terrifying, whereas, according to the Islamic ideology, this terminology or this subject has a different appearance and can be perceived in a different way. Basically it can be said that those who fear death, consider it to be a negative entity.

According to this insight, death is an end of life and a moment of everlasting separation of man with his life. They believe that with death, the compounded substances of the body suffer a breakdown and return to nature and man too, is nothing except this very broken-down body. Hence, with death, everything ends with no hope remaining!

Indeed, with this view and insight, death is darker and more dreadful than every other thing and perhaps, no calamity, pain, sorrow and tragedy can be greater and more painful than the tragedy of death, because death would mean the burial of all the desires, hopes, longings and in short, the termination of all things for man - that man who loved life and eternity very dearly.

Anyway, Islam does not possess such a dark and fear-instilling view of death because according to the Islamic view, death is a positive entity.

The idea of death as a “positive entity” is informative, here--perhaps more than anything else. Jews and incalculable numbers of Muslims stand in diametric opposition to each other when it comes to our most essential and sacred beliefs.

But it is more than that, of course. It’s more than our differing views on life and death, but the gruesomeness of the Muslim culture of death, the horrifying bloodlust that accompanies those beliefs; the nature of the killings; and the lack of even the tiniest drop of the milk of human compassion when choosing their victims.



Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Friday, May 20, 2022

Ali al-Samoudi is the Jenin journalist who was next to Shireen abu Akleh in Jenin when she was shot. He was shot himself. As such, he has been the main source of information as to the circumstances of her death - insisting that IDF soldiers shot them, that the IDF knew they were there and that there were no Palestinian gunmen in the area, and how "We were in a place far from armed clashes with Palestinians, from where we couldn't reach that area as the Israeli forces sealed it off." (So why were they hanging in a place where they couldn't report on anything?)


Nearly 20 years ago, Pierre Rehov made a documentary, "The Road to Jenin," where he documented case after case of how Palestinian journalists create the news they want. 

CAMERA describes one section of the movie:

Underscoring the Palestinian penchant for inventing “news,” Rehov even manages to capture on film the manufacturing of a fictitious news story. On Jan. 25, 2003, he accompanies Palestinian journalist Ali Smoddi of the PA-controlled Jenin television station as he and his crew set out to interview a Palestinian man and his wife whose baby was just delivered by a doctor. In the car on the way there, Smoddi constructs a fictitious story in which the husband was forced to deliver the baby: “I want to emphasize certain elements. The husband has no experience in delivering and in spite of that he’s the one who delivers his wife. It’s the climax of all tragedy.” Smoddi then takes a call from the couple’s doctor, and asks: “You’re the one who delivered her? . . . No, don’t let them go.”

At the hospital, Smoddi’s crew does several “takes” of the father’s account of the birth, each with a different spin. In one version, the father claims that the ambulance they intended to meet was held up at a checkpoint for 15 minutes, and he was forced to deliver his infant son in the car, as the ambulance had not arrived. In another telling, the father says: “The soldiers took me down to the ambulance to check my identification and my wife gave birth in the ambulance and went to the hospital.” In each account, Smoddi prompts the father and makes suggestions about the events. Smoddi then prompts the new mother: “The tank stops you while giving birth. You’re alone in the car, talk about your feelings.”
Here is part of that section, captured in Richard Landes' "Pallywood I: 'According to Palestinian sources...'"


It appears that Ali Smoddi is Ali al-Samoudi: 




They both have a prominent widow's peak in their hairline, the same thick eyebrows, the same nose, both Palestinian journalists in Jenin with similar voices. (Arabic does not have vowels so both names are spelled identically in Arabic.)

Assuming they are the same person, the main witness being quoted in every article is known to have zero credibility and to deliberately make up whatever he wants people to hear that he thinks are best for the Palestinian cause. 

This isn't proof that he is lying now. But it is a strong indication that Ali al-Samoudi is, quite literally, a professional liar, and any real journalist - no matter how sympathetic they are to the death of a colleague - should treat him as one.

(Notice also in the 2003 video clip that the doctor is an enthusiastic participant in the Pallywood creation, directing the new mother to say what Samoudi wants her to say. Pallywood isn't only from journalists: it is part of Palestinian honor/shame culture to present to the West what makes them look as righteous ss possible. It isn't a conspiracy guided by a small group of people; it is a group of actors who know what their roles are when speaking to any Westerner.)

(h/t Irene)




Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Wednesday, May 18, 2022

                                                          Interview with Richard Landes

Shireen Abu Aqleh died in the performance of her job as a journalist. That is an undeniable fact. Just about everything else you’ve heard from the mainstream media, however, is a lie.

The party responsible for Abu Aqleh’s death could not be identified by the official PA coroner, yet the media (and Susan Sarandon) have unequivocally pointed a finger at Israel.


None of this outrage and blame is about determining whether it was an Israeli or an Arab bullet that killed Abu Aqleh in a crossfire. The allegations are far worse: Israel is charged with the deliberate execution of Abu Aqleh, though there is no evidence to back this claim and no reason to believe it is true.

All of which makes this a blood libel.

What is a blood libel, really? It is a false allegation, a cynical use of dead people to smear and foment violence against the Jews. And the media would not serve it up to you on a plate unless the public were hungry for it—unless they themselves hated the Jews as a concept and a people.

In that sense, the Abu Aqleh story is not a fresh news cycle, but an old story. The comparison to the Mohammed al Durah story, in which the shooting death of young boy was falsely pinned on Israel, is obvious. And there is no one better to weigh in on how these two news stories have been handled than Professor Richard Landes.

Prof. Landes documented the blood libel that was the al Durah story. It was Landes who coined the term “Pallywood” to describe the theater put on for the media by so-called “Palestinian” Arabs in their cognitive war against the Jews. The media lapped up the al Durah fakery and more than that, helped to create it.

Pallywood I - According to Palestinian Sources from Israel on Vimeo.

Here, Richard Landes offers his insight on this newest example of Pallywood in regard to the death of Shireen Abu Aqleh, and how the media is helping to amplify this latest blood libel against the Jews.

Varda Epstein: It seems obvious to draw comparisons to the shooting death of Abu Aqleh and that of al Durah. The accusations that Al Durah’s death was at the hands of the IDF turned out not to be true. There was a longstanding attempt to cover up the truth not only by an Arab populace hostile to Israel, but by the media, and in fact, this was a collaborative effort between the two. 

Some recent footage has been aired showing gunmen gleefully stating that an IDF soldier had been shot, after which they began to drag the victim out, presumably to confirm or ensure “his” death, only to discover that the body was that of Abu Aqleh. If this short footage is as it seems, what do the accusations against the IDF signify, and how is this similar to what happened with al Durah? Is there a pattern here?

Richard Landes: The pattern is, above all, the successful accusation of deliberate murder of an innocent civilian carried forward as completely plausible, if not news, by Western news media. We heard immediately about a sniper, and claims by the eyewitnesses of deliberate, cold-blooded murder. There is no way they can know this; and now that we know the caliber of the bullet, sniper fire is out. But the media relayed the accusation (who else would kill her?).

In the case of al Durah, the details are very different. It was staged; and the body that was buried was not the boy who was allegedly shot. But the key accusation, what fuels the blood libel that the IDF deliberately targeted the boy, was not only made by the cameraman (Talal abu Rahmah) in a signed affidavit – which he later withdrew in a private fax – but more significantly by Charles Enderlin in his voiceover: “la cible de tirs venus de la position israélienne” [the target of fire coming from the Israeli position]. He thus became the first self-identified Jew (an Israeli who served as IDF spokesperson!) to spread a blood libel against his people.

Asked later by an Israeli journalist why he spoke of the IDF targeting them when he had no evidence, he replied, “If I hadn’t… they’d say in Gaza ‘How come Enderlin does not say it’s the IDF?’”

The response was so damning (not clear that Enderlin even realized that) that HaAretz removed it from their English version of the article. What on earth is an Israeli (or any) journalist doing taking orders from Gaza in a matter of assessing Israel’s “murderous intentions”?

Richard Landes holding his film, "Pallywood"

Varda Epstein: Did the al Durah episode set certain precedents in the “cogwar,” the term you have coined for cognitive warfare? Can you elaborate on that for us?

Richard Landes: Above all, it confirmed what the Palestinians had long claimed, but Western media was reluctant to believe (given the IDF’s code and behavior), namely that Israel deliberately kills kids and other civilians. From this point on, any claims Palestinians made of Israelis killing kids got ready credulity from the press. More important even than that, it meant that every time the Palestinians attacked Israel and Israel responded, the press led with the Israeli response. So, for example, Jacques Chirac told Ehud Barak on October 4, 2000, in what may be one of the stupider comments of the day: “You will never convince anyone that the Palestinians are the aggressors.”

He thus made it impossible for the West to see the first round of a global jihad which would soon target them as well, not just Israel.

As a result, Palestinian terror became a measure of Israeli guilt – they have “no choice” but to fight back. By 2003, at the height of the suicide terror war against Israel, Ian Buruma commented (as a self-evident aside) that being pro-Palestinian was a “litmus test of liberal credentials.” The very meme now so powerfully embedded in current “progressive” discourse – IDF are child-killers – starts with al Durah.

Varda Epstein: What lessons have the enemy learned from what happened with al Durah? How are these lessons applied today?

Richard Landes: They’ve learned that they can count on the media to promote their war propaganda as news (lethal war journalism), even when it’s against their own interest (promoting the enemy’s war propaganda as news = own-goal war journalism). I put together the eight basic principles of the Palestinian Media Protocols for Western journalists:

Palestinian Media Protocols

1. The Palestinians are the noble resistors - David. 2. The Israelis are the cruel oppressors - Goliath.
3. Thou shalt always portray Palestinians as victims, never as Aggressors. 4. Thou shalt never portray the Israelis  as victims, always as Aggressors.
5. Thou shalt not portray Palestinians unsympathetically. 6. Thou shalt not portray Israel sympathetically.
7. Thou shalt not challenge or undermine Palestinian claims.       8. Thou shalt challenge and undermine Israeli claims.

The compliance score of Western media is so high that even when Palestinians kill their own people they can count on the media to blame Israel. As a result, Hamas has developed a cannibalistic strategy where it promotes casualties among its own people (no bomb shelters, firing from civilian areas, random shelling that often kills its own), and counts on the media to create a massive PR disaster for the Israelis. Some of the compliance comes from ideological/emotional sympathy with those who hate Israel; some (I think most) comes from a fear of retaliation/intimidation.

Varda Epstein: Has Israel absorbed the full significance of the al Durah episode, and developed any significant, responsive strategies going forward?

Richard Landes: Not really. First of all it took over a decade for them to even challenge al Durah (as in not supporting Karsenty in his court cases), until the Kuperwasser commission tackled it, but even that was not promoted as it should have been. There was a brief moment when some took the cogwar seriously, but rather than learn from the people who had been fighting the cogwar for over a decade, they charged ahead without really understanding the dynamics. More broadly – and this may be a hard-wired problem for Israelis – they don’t understand the antisemitism underlining the appeal. They think – as I did initially – that it’s about information. But that’s just the most superficial level, and appeals to the empirical are limited. The Palestinian appeal to the West (alas Western progressives), is the latter’s apparently insatiable appetite for news of Jews behaving badly. Hard to fight that.

Thus, to take the most important issue in Abu Aqleh’s death, the immediate accusations of a sniper deliberately killing her, of the IDF opening fire on the journalists, wasn’t addressed. Instead, they tried to suggest that the Palestinians shot her – very possible – but didn’t immediately counter the “murder” charges (i.e. they focused on the empirical, not the question of intention). And that’s what the media ran with. So, when the Palestinians announced the caliber of the bullet, what should have been a major victory for Israel – it was not a sniper, the “eyewitness” testimony was not honest – became a fight over a joint forensic investigation. Huge opportunity lost.

Varda Epstein: How is world response to Abu Aqleh’s death similar to that of al Durah’s?

Richard Landes: The immediate acceptance of the accusation of deliberate murder, the ferocious attention to the event (as opposed to the 487 other journalists killed in war zones in the last two decades, none of whom have received this kind of attention). And, of course, many on the Palestinian side try to make the comparison. Certainly, in terms of how angered the Arab world is at this news, it’s comparable. Vic Rosenthal, one of the most astute bloggers on these issues put it this way:

If the production called “the death of Muhammad al-Dura” is the Gone With the Wind of Pallywood,* then the recent extravaganza starring Shireen abu Akleh is on its way to becoming its Star Wars.

Varda Epstein: Israel has stepped up with an offer to work together on the investigation of Abu Aqleh’s death, and the PA has refused to cooperate, yet world leaders are condemning Israel. Why? Why is the Biden Administration taking sides, and pretending that both sides are refusing to cooperate in an investigation, when only one side is doing so, the PA?

Richard Landes: The Biden administration is in the hands of people who have bought the Palestinian line. They don’t even have to be in the radical pro-Palestinian camp (like Tlaib and Omar); they just don’t understand the stakes and the rules of the game. So while supporting the Palestinian “narrative” of suffering at the hands of Israel has them thinking they’re siding with the underdog freedom fighters against the colonial oppressors, they’re actually siding with the global imperialists trying to wipe out Israel and subject the rest of the world to the Caliphate. The height of the folly came two years later when Europeans, responding to their news media’s lethal journalism about a “massacre” in Jenin, cheered on suicide terrorists who would soon target them.

Varda Epstein: What do you think of the police response to protesters trying to abscond with Abu Aqleh’s casket, against the wishes of her family? Was the response appropriate? Does it matter what the world thinks of what happened, or how they rush to judgment based on the footage aired by those aiming to demonize Israel?

Richard Landes: Classic and typical. Assume that the Palestinians are a single unit and the Israelis are yahoos. The thought that the (Christian) family might object to jihadis hijacking their funeral doesn’t even enter their minds. The Israeli police was caught in an impossible catch 22 situation; whatever they did, they lost. This cartoon from the Arab side illustrates nicely how they won this round.


Varda Epstein: Why is the Biden Administration seemingly so ready to weigh in on the Abu Aqleh shooting while it refrains from pressuring King Abdullah to extradite Ahlam al Tamimi? Abu Aqleh was an American citizen, but so were Malki Roth and Shoshana Greenbaum. Shouldn’t Biden act on these much older murders of American citizens before pointing a finger at Israel, America’s supposedly greatest ally, for this new incident, especially since the investigation of Abu Aqleh’s death is incomplete?

Richard Landes: The basic rules of the game have to do with whom you want (or don’t want) to cross. No one in the West wants to cross Arab Muslims. Say no to Israelis and at most they whine; say no to Arabs and there’s no end to the problems that can ensue. Same thing with antisemitic cartoons like the one Dave Brown did of Sharon as Chronos devouring Palestinian babies which got an award from the British Political Cartoon Society because it outraged the Israelis and got so many hits. When Martin Himmel asked why not a cartoon of Arafat eating Palestinian babies? the head of the BPCS said:

Maybe [because] Jews don’t issue fatwas . . . if you offend a Muslim or Islamic group, as you know, fatwas can be issued by ayatollahs and such like, and maybe it’s at the back of each cartoonist’s mind that they could be in trouble if they do so . . . if they depict an Arab leader in the same manner . . . they could suffer death, couldn’t they? Which is rather different. [smiles disconcertingly].

With the Roths’ case, I think it’s not so much that the US fears the king’s retaliation, but that the king will be fatally compromised by their forcing him to side with Western infidels against a fellow Muslim considered a “heroine” by so many. It says a lot about Jordanian society, not surprising, but rarely stated: the “alliance” we have with our allies in this part of the authoritarian world is not very deep (in contrast to Israel). If Westerners had understood this better, rather than pretending all cultures are equal and the same and the Arabs (according to the post-Orientalists) are on the verge of democracy, we would not have named the events of 2010-11 the “Arab Spring.”


Varda Epstein: How legitimate is it for the Arabs to claim Shireen Abu Aqleh as a martyr when she was not even a Muslim?

Richard Landes: Not at all. But that’s only in a world where real definitions and identities matter. Palestinians will say anything that works. If calling her a martyr galvanizes their world, what’s the problem with that?

They can easily make three radically different assertions serially: 1) the holocaust never happened, 2) the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews, 3) we want to finish Hitler’s job. In the Arab Muslim world, each of these appeal for a different reason, and they all have a great deal of power. The pathetic part of the story is that Westerners don’t see through it, and so deplore them for saying 1), accept their claim of 2), and ignore 3).

Same with their claims about the media. On the one hand they can relish political cartoons like the one above, while on the other, claim that Israel controls the media. If it feels good – builds “us” up, tears “them” down – go for it.

Varda Epstein: Many have said Israel should not be mourning the death of Abu Aqleh considering she worked for Al Jazeera, and independent of working for an antisemitic, anti-Israel outlet, had views in line with those sentiments. Is this a relevant consideration, in your opinion?

Richard Landes: I don’t know her work, but clearly the Palestinians thought she was on their side (hardly surprising for someone who has worked for a propaganda outlet). I certainly understand Israelis who do not mourn the death of someone who regularly engaged in Palestinian lethal journalism. The irony of course, is that the Palestinians insist that the Israelis shot her because of her journalism, which is a perfect projection of what they’d do to any journalist who had the nerve not to comply with their protocols.

Varda Epstein: How hard do the Palestinians have to fake it until they make it? Does the media question the Pally side of things? Does the public? Is the death of Abu Aqleh convenient as an opportunity for the media, kind of like a supply and demand situation for material that demonizes Israel in the public eye? If so, why does the public so desire this type of “news?”

Richard Landes: They don’t have to try too hard. The original title of the book I’m publishing in October was They’re so Smart cause we’re so Stupid. Partly it was inspired by how cheap the al Durah fake was, and how eagerly the media and “progressive” public snatched it up. In the case of Pallywood, for example, the Western news editors take obviously faked footage and turn it into believable sight-bytes.

My friend David Deutsch has a theory about a kind of social constant (he calls it “The Pattern”) – the need to legitimate hurting Jews. This kind of lethal journalism that feeds Palestinian propaganda into the Western (dis)information stream serves that need.

Put in psychological terms, I think there’s a moral rivalry here between the “progressive global left” (in USA, “woke”), who feel they’re at the cutting edge of global morality, and their only serious competitors are the first and oldest claimant to that moral title, namely the Jews. As a result they’re involved (largely, I think unconsciously) in a kind of supersessionism – we replace the Jews as moral leaders – and therefore, like the Christian and Muslim supersessionists before them, they revel in news that makes the Israelis look bad. As a result, the most progressive nation – by far, by light years – in the Middle East appears on the progressive screens as the worst violator of human rights, fascism and racism, while the most right-wing, imperialist, misogynist, genocidal movement on the planet appears on their screens as part of a global left anti-imperialist alliance.

They then open the door to an even more insidious form of replacement theory, the projection onto the Jews of a notion of chosenness which is a) not Jewish, and b) often gentile supersessionist, namely that being chosen gives the chosen the right to treat the non-chosen as subhuman (hence the appeal of the blood libel). That of course, thrives on descriptions of Israelis massacring Gazans and is impervious to any evidence that Hamas is killing Gazans.

Varda Epstein: Did Israel take the right steps, following the death of Shireen Abu Aqleh? What more could Israel have done to respond to this event?

Richard Landes: As I said, the focus should have been immediately to counter – nay ridicule – the accusations of deliberate murder. Even if we did shoot her, we didn’t do it on purpose. By focusing on this issue, the validity of Palestinian claims could have been undermined early on.

                                                          ***
Richard Landes is a retired medieval history professor, living in Jerusalem. His next book, entitled: Can “The Whole World” be Wrong? A Medievalist’s Guide to the Troubled 21st Century, is due to be published in October by Academic Studies Press.



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