Mick Hartley

Via a comment on a Jerry Coyne post about the Nicholas Krystof affair, here’s an interesting Quillette article from Dec 2022 by Jeffrey Herf, reviewing Richard Landes’ book Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad:

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….

Landes writes that, as a result, much Western reporting of the Arab-Israeli conflict came to follow a four-fold approach. First, it reframed the conflict as one of an Israeli Goliath vs a Palestinian David rather than a tiny liberal democracy surrounded by theocratic and autocratic enemies. Second, it reported Palestinian claims as reliable until proven otherwise “while treating Israeli counterclaims as dubious, if not false, until proven true.” Third, it reported “as little as possible about the religious culture of genocide and terrorism that flourishes in Palestinian-controlled areas.” And fourth, it corrected “errors that result from this approach as slowly and inconspicuously as possible.”…

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.

How much more this analysis applies now, since October 2023, when an act of extraordinary barbarity has been twisted by so many western apologists into some kind of heroic anti-colonial resistance.