Richard Landes is interviewed at Quillette. From the transcript.
On Hamas and Palestinian nationalism:
If you look at what Hamas says—and not only what they say, but what they do—they’re not attached to Palestinian nationalism, and they’re not attached to the Palestinian people in any way, shape, or form. In fact, their major strategy is to make them suffer, and then use that suffering to gain sympathy for their cause and hostility to Israel.
And if you listen to their leaders—one of the founders, a leader, recently just said, “We want Islam to rule over all 510 million square kilometres on planet Earth.” You can tell yourself a nice fantasy that this is a nationalist movement, but in fact nationalism has very little purchase in the Middle East. It’s an import from the West. It’s a projection of the West, and it makes us feel good to think that it’s nationalist. And of course, if you’re somebody who wants to side with the Palestinians against Israel, you don’t want to think you’re siding with global jihadis who also have you in their sights. So it’s a convenient fiction to say, oh, this is a nationalist movement and not a jihadi—and in particular, not a global jihadi—movement.
After 9/11:
And so one of the things that happened after 9/11 is that most Americans assumed that at least the democratic world was on their side. George Bush actually told them that the Muslim world was on their side too, which wasn’t true—but it wasn’t true about the Western world either. Le Monde had a very good editorial the first day—solidarity with America, et cetera—saying that anybody who was stupid enough to glorify these people was crazy. And then ten days later they publish a piece by Baudrillard, who’s a French philosopher, who says no one who loves freedom could not rejoice at that blow to the suffocating hegemon that United States imperialism is. Just stunning stuff. Literally people cheering on their own enemies.
So that’s one side of it. And then the other side is this enormous concern for Muslims. It’s presented as: we’re a culture that believes in tolerance, we don’t think we should judge other people by the actions of other people, and so on. But the other side of it is—they don’t want us to talk about this. And so when we say we’re being polite and we’re trying to protect our moderate Muslim population, we’re actually following dictates from the guys who did it.
So one example in journalism is that immediately after 9/11, both the BBC and Reuters—which are not American news agencies—refused to use the word “terrorism” to describe it. And they gave all sorts of reasons: one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter; it’s an emotive word; it would show a lack of objectivity. What it actually did was side with the jihadis. They’re the ones who don’t want to be called terrorists. They are terrorists. They target civilians. They targeted 3,000. They thought they were going to get more. They thought they’d get 10,000 civilians. And for them, there are no civilians. No infidel is a civilian. No infidel is innocent. And when we don’t use the word “terror” and then pretend we’re being objective and not taking sides, we’re actually taking sides with the other side and giving in to them. And that’s happening even now.
Dhimmi journalism:
As far as I’m concerned, I call it dhimmi journalism…dhimmi….it’s the status of an infidel who lives under Muslim rule. So sharia is essentially an apartheid legal system. There’s a completely different set of rules for Muslims than there is for infidels, who cannot bear witness in court, who cannot bring a Muslim to court—and this is true for women as well. So in that system, if you are an infidel, you live in what they like to say is protected status. But they don’t go into what you’re protected from. You’re protected from Muslim violence, as long as you accept your inferior status, and in particular as long as you do not criticise either Muslims or Islam.
And that’s where our journalists have become dhimmi. Hamas is absent from their accounts of what’s going on. They’re talking about the genocide in Gaza, and Hamas is wasting food—and we have evidence that it’s wasting food—and they don’t appear in the story. No: Israel is doing mass starvation on purpose. So in that sense, we’re looking at a journalistic profession which has utterly failed in its commitments to provide its audience with accurate and relevant information.
Plenty more where that came from.
Leave a Reply