I post it here as a contribution to the discussion in the course of Infidel Awareness Month this year, especially in the context of post-modern, newsmedia-conveyed, blood libels (Sept 21), in the discussion of the Great Lethal Projection and the Muslim Question (Sept 22).

Moral Schadenfreude and the Postcolonial Replacement Narrative

The reference of UN official and major Oslo “Peace Process” activist Roed-Larsen to losing the “high moral ground” was a widespread meme early in this century.^[1] I remember attending a yearly conference that extended over the late ’90s and early aughts, and every year, from 2001 on, one of my closer intellectual interlocutors kept repeating, “This time, Israel has lost the moral high ground.” I couldn’t figure out how anyone can lose the moral high ground to people who teach their children to so hate another people that they want to blow themselves up amid that people’s children, and sow as much pain as possible. Then I realized: in his mind, Israel had lost the moral high ground not to the Palestinians, but to progressives like himself. Now, he (and Roed-Larsen, and others) could unreservedly dump on Israel from imagined moral heights.^[2]

That’s when I first recognized the phenomenon of moral Schadenfreude, that is, the pleasure one takes in seeing another’s discomfiture when their moral failures are revealed to public opprobrium. Part of the reason that progressives so credulously welcomed Palestinian lethal narratives about Israel was that it permitted them to look down on this irritating people who had a moral claim on them. The eagerness with which people on the left embraced language that compared Israel to the Nazis had nothing to do with empirical reality, nor even much to do with the worst of the lethal journalism. Even the most extravagant claim of 3,000 dead in three weeks at Jenin was a slow day at Babi Yar (34,000 killed in a week)―one might even call that accusation an insult to a country with overwhelming military superiority and three weeks in which to work! Had they wanted, they could have killed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

Rather, comparisons to the Nazis and South African racist apartheid were not descriptions of reality, but contemptuous insults, degradations, acts of shaming and humiliating Israel where it mattered most, blackening her moral face.^[3] The loss of the “high moral ground” at Jenin replicated Nay’s comment about al Durah replacing the Warsaw Ghetto youth: it freed Europeans from their (sense of) moral debt to Jews and Israel, and permitted them to indulge in the old, venerable, Christian (and Muslim) practice of Jew-baiting. This was not about guilt or repentance, but about fleeing shame by blaming those whom one has wronged: as Benjamin Weinthal paraphrases the German Israeli psychiatrist Tzvi Rix, Europe will never forgive Israel for the Holocaust.^[4]

No wonder that those who indulged in this Jew-baiting to the point that they believed their demeaning rhetoric actually reflected reality, ended up fatally disoriented, both morally and empirically, dancing in the streets in mock-suicide belts.

In such a kangaroo court of public opinion, where whatever the evidence, Israeli guilt was assumed, indeed pounced upon, it was apparently easy to get the story very wrong. Meanwhile, the fake news reports of Jews killing Muslim children not only enraged Muslims around the world, but outraged Westerners, progressives, Jews, even Zionists, who couldn’t believe what they were seeing, but couldn’t imagine that the MSNM (full of Jewish reporters and editors) would tell so terrible a collective lie. A massive consensus grew among the cultural elites that Israel was the terrible aggressor, and the Palestinians the innocent victims of their malice, when it was actually a fight between members of a civil society defending themselves from a death cult that ultimately threatened everyone.^[5] This upside-down universe led to one of the most remarkable statements of the young twenty-first century, the very stuff of jokes, when Kofi Anan, then secretary-general of the UN, referring to Israel’s refusal to immediately stop their “murderous” military operation against the first base camp of suicide-terrorist jihadis in the twenty-first century, asked rhetorically: “Can the whole world be wrong, and Israel be right?”^[6]

Seen from the perspective of a “whole world” that prizes diversity and tolerance over uniformity and violent intolerance, Israel was right to fight back against this Hamas death cult that targeted its children, that was part of a larger movement of Global Jihad that targeted the rest of the “whole world.” Had they better understood the players and the stakes, Western observers would have been encouraging Israel to stop this plague before it metastasized. Instead, they paraded in the streets of Europe to show their solidarity with jihadis who target kuffār civilians like themselves.

What would the next two decades have looked like, had they challenged the atrocious logic of death cult promoters and apologists who repeated idiotic memes to wide assent―Resistance is not terrorism . . . One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter . . . What choice do they have? And certainly, from the point of view of an investigation into what actually happened at Jenin—the tiny number of dead, the even tinier number of civilian dead, the exceptional self-sacrifice of the IDF—Anan and world opinion were wrong. In any fair judgment contrasting what the “whole world” thought about Jenin―the journalists’ lethal narratives―and what Israel said had happened, again, overwhelmingly, the “whole world was wrong,” and Israel was right.^[7]

Not only was Israel right, but the whole world was wrong precisely from the point of view of the nations of the world that Anan represented. Understood from the perspective of a peaceful and tolerant world, in which different peoples and religions and ethnicities live side by side in peace, it’s a no-brainer, both empirically and morally: Israel was fighting for everything the UN stood for in principle; the suicide-terror jihadis, everything a sane world should have opposed.

“Non-Violence,” Sculpture at the UN by Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd,

In a telling irony, moreover, this particular phrasing of Kofi Anan―Could the whole world be wrong and Israel right?―unwittingly replicated and updated a verbal formula already in play at the turn of the twentieth century in Europe. The pogroms that spread through Eastern Europe at that time did so on the wings of blood libels about Jews killing Christian children and making matzah with their blood. So widespread was the credulity about these accusations that when Jews protested that they did nothing of the sort, that eating blood was specifically forbidden to them, the reply came: “Is it possible the whole world is wrong and the Jews are right?”^[8]

That dynamic of credulous malice dominated the public sphere at the turn of the twentieth century in its hostility to Jews and, mutatis mutandis, at the turn of the millennium in its hostility to Israelis. So remarkable a linguistic replication alerts us to common forces at work, suggesting that behind the repeated Western credulity about Jewish evil, human emotions were at work that do not come from the better angels of our nature. Certainly, they indict modern, allegedly professional journalists, as false witnesses to their time, at the very least when it came to Israel’s conflict with Arab Muslim triumphalism. Sadly, from 2020, looking back, it turns out that Israel was only patient-, or rather, victim-zero, of a rising tide of advocacy, narrative-driven, fake news.^[9]

^[1] See above, n34.

^[2] See chapter 9.

^[3] See n100.

^[4] Benjamin Weinthal, “Europe will never forgive Israel for the Holocaust” Jewish Press, June 30, 2010; Landes, “Europe’s Destructive Holocaust Shame,” Tablet, September 25, 2017.

^[5] Citing an editorial from The Sun (“The Jewish Faith is not an Evil Religion,” April 15, 2002), Robert Wistrich commented “Some of the tabloids . . . have a better understanding and more empathy for Israel’s predicament than the so-called quality press.” Lethal Obsession, 1016, n.109.

^[6] Joel Brinkley, “Israel Starts Leaving 2 Areas, but Will Continue Drive,” New York Times, April 9, 2002.

^[7] For a good example of rejecting the evidence of the UN commission which counted only 56 dead, see Peter Cave, “UN Report on Jenin Massacre [sic] Flawed,” Australian Broadcasting Company, August 4, 2002.

^[8] Ehad Ha’am, 1893.

^[9] Matti Friedman, “You’re All Israel Now.” Tablet, July 27, 2020.

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I post it here as a contribution to the discussion in the course of Infidel Awareness Month this year, especially in the context of the impact of NGO researchers unanimous adoption of jihadi war propaganda where it concerns Israel, leading some antizionists to ask “could they all be wrong?” (Sept 9), and in the discussion of post-modern, newsmedia-conveyed, blood libels (Sept 21), in the discussion of the Great Lethal Projection and the Muslim Question (Sept 22).

The real question is: when will gentiles cease need malevolent conspiracy theories about Jews that get it exactly wrong? (The Pattern, October 2)

a

From Can “The Whole World” be Wrong?

Warning to the Reader:

If I’m Right, We’re in Deep Trouble

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

It is addressed to people who have liberal and progressive values, especially those capable of acknowledging that, for all its flaws, Western democracy constitutes a significant and perhaps unique step in the direction of freedom and human dignity. It is addressed to those who wish to preserve and improve that record rather than go all or nothing (perfection or destruction). It is for people who can’t understand why the West seems to be falling apart, torn by a culture war that pits left against right in a winner-take-all struggle that, it seems with every news cycle, has been reaching ever-more terrifying extremes. [NB: written before October 7, 2023. -rl]

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

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

● Since the 9-11 assault by devout Muslims, many more Muslims proudly wear hijabs in the West, and many fewer Jews, out of fear, wear kippahs in public.

● The Jewish people are the only people who are the standing targets of state-sanctioned incitement to hate and genocide, but also the only people who are themselves accused of being genocidal.

● The same people who make heroic efforts to ban hate speech that might offend others, have immense tolerance for hate speech directed at themselves and at their Jewish co-citizens.

● The postmoderns, whose philosophy was to renounce both the illusion of objectivity and the seduction of grand narratives, have produced a political movement that, in the name of progressive values and peace, has adopted a war-mongering premodern grand narrative, and use the rhetoric of “science” and “facts” to promote their cause.

● Vast numbers of people around the world want to emigrate to societies whose own elites have come to consider them the embodiment of evil.

● Western democracies, who had convinced themselves and their Jews that they had renounced Jew-hatred after the Holocaust, may be destroyed by a medieval apocalyptic movement that exploits unacknowledged, Western Jew-hatred.

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

A major step in mainstreaming this previously marginal belief in the West was taken by Nobel-Prize winning author Jose Saramago, denouncing the state of Israel in April of 2002, at the very height of the first-ever jihadi suicide-terror campaign against a democratic nation (chapters 1, 3), during the false “Jenin Massacre” episode of lethal journalism. Outraged by what he had been told were accurate accounts of the Jews massacring Palestinian civilians like the Nazis had killed Jews, he vented his spleen on the evildoers.

Intoxicated mentally by the messianic dream of Greater Israel which will finally achieve the expansionist dreams of the most radical Zionism [that is, Greater Israel, from the river to the sea]; contaminated by the monstrous and rooted “certitude”: that in this catastrophic and absurd world there exists a people chosen by God and that, consequently, all the actions of an obsessive, psychological and pathologically exclusivist racism are justified; educated and trained in the idea that any suffering that has been inflicted, or will be inflicted on everyone else, especially the Palestinians, will always be inferior to that which they themselves suffered in the Holocaust, the Jews endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they show it to the world as if it were a banner. Israeli seizes hold of the terrible words of God in Deuteronomy: “Vengeance is mine, and I will be repaid.” Israel wants all of us to feel guilty, directly or indirectly, for the horrors of the Holocaust; Israel wants us to renounce the most elemental critical judgment and for us to transform ourselves into a docile echo of its will; Israel wants us to recognize de jure what, in its eyes, is a de facto reality: absolute impunity. From the point of view of the Jews, Israel cannot ever be brought to judgment, because it was tortured, gassed and incinerated in Auschwitz.^[1]

This rant contains all the elements of what would become “woke” attitudes of the late teens early ‘20s towards those they deemed morally inferior: indignation, condemnation, scorn, and certainty.

Now replace Israel in this text with those who declare her their enemy:

Intoxicated mentally by the messianic dream of a global Caliphate [i.e., Islam from ocean to ocean], which will finally achieve the expansionist dreams of the most radical Muslims; contaminated by the monstrous and rooted “certitude” that in this catastrophic and absurd world there exists a people chosen by Allah and that, consequently, all the actions of an obsessive, psychological and pathologically exclusivist religious triumphalism are justified; educated and trained in the idea that any suffering that has been inflicted, or will be inflicted on everyone else, especially on the Jews, will always be inferior to that which they themselves suffered in the Nakba, the Palestinians endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they show it to the world as if it were a banner. Jihadis seize hold of the terrible words of Allah in the Quran (8:12): “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore, strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.” Palestinians want all of us to feel guilty, directly or indirectly, for the horrors of the Nakba; Caliphators want us to renounce the most elemental critical judgment and for us to transform ourselves into a docile echo of their will; Caliphators want us to recognize de jure what, in their eyes, is a de facto reality: absolute Muslim impunity. From the point of view of the Muslims, Islam cannot ever be brought to judgment, because the infidel has humiliated it, and because Allah is on their side.

What we have in these two paragraphs is the double inversion so characteristic of twenty-first century public discourse. On the one hand, while both these statements are true of some Jews and some Palestinians/Muslims, the ugly attitudes depicted permeate the mainstream of the Muslim public sphere to a far greater degree, whereas the ones Saramago attributes to Jews, when not outright wrong, inhabit the margins of the Jewish/Israeli public sphere, and only find a voice when things get really bad.

Indeed, at the core of Saramago’s passage lies its inversion of reality. On the one hand, Saramago misreads the Biblical passage―“Vengeance is mine, says the Lord”―and accuses the Jews of his misreading.^[2] On the other hand, multiple Qur’anic passages explicitly call on the faithful to exercise violence on Allah’s behalf; and the number of jihadis who believe they are the agents of Allah’s divine wrath and the tools of his vengeance, outnumber several times over, all the Jews on the planet.

This empirical imbalance in accuracy gets further inverted when it comes to prominent Western thought leaders willing to denounce these two forms of zealotry. Curiously enough, as eagerly as many like Saramago view Israeli Jews negatively, as unthinkingly as they project onto them deliberate malice, as easily as they turn a fringe Jewish phenomenon into the symbol of Jewish being, that’s how few dare to say anything remotely similar about Islam and Muslims. On the contrary, much intellectual effort in the twenty-first century has gone into insisting the jihadi narrative is marginal to Islam, that Muhammad is a “Prophet of Peace,”^[3] and “moderate, peaceful Muslims,” are the “vast majority,” when not 99.9% of the billion plus Muslims on the planet.^[4] As a result, few will utter anything resembling the (largely accurate) paragraph above about Muslim triumphalism, while many feel free to shout the (deeply inaccurate) paragraph about Israelis from the rooftops of Western publications. And in so doing, these Western “thought leaders” have transformed themselves into a “docile echo of their [enemy’s] will.”

In 1897, Ehad Ha’am (Asher Ginsburg) wrote about the blood libels circulating in Europe at the time. Echoing an oft-heard rejoinder to Jewish claims that the stories were libels, he quoted a common dismissal from the gentiles: “Is it possible that the whole world is wrong and the Jews are right?” In 2002, a century later, UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, expressed a similar astonishment at Israel’s denial of massacre allegations at Jenin: “I don’t think the whole world, including the friends of the Israeli people and government, can be wrong.”^[5] And yet, clearly for him the answer was clearly, “No!”

Rephrased from the perspective of this book, the answer to the question: “Could the “whole world” be wrong to side with jihadis against Israel, as at Jenin?” is obviously “Yes.” What sound Western mind, apprised accurately of the situation, would conclude otherwise?

The challenge to you, critical reader of a critical author, is to undergo the following mental exercise: what if . . . you (and the “entire international community” as journalists like to call it)^[6] are wrong about Israel, indeed, wrong about the challenges that face the democratic world in the twenty-first century? What if, in trying to escape from the imaginary frying pan of too much “Jewish control” (they invented propaganda you know), you have leapt headlong into the very real fires of a jihad you do not, will not, acknowledge?

Scholars of millennial movements must imitate Odysseus, tied to the mast in order to listen to the sirens’ song without getting mesmerized . . . fatally. The German government sent Hitler to investigate the Thule Society and its populist front, the German Worker’s Party) in 1919, and he ended up converting to their millennial message, and crashing all Europe onto the rocky shores of a millennial war that, for casualties, dwarfed the just completed “War to End all Wars.”^[7] The millennial scholar dealing with Caliphators must navigate a double danger, between on the one hand, the Scylla of such horror at the monstrosity of it all, that we become the mirror opposite―violent haters of our enemies―and on the other, the Charybdis of such fear of it, that, as a protective measure, we adopt their hatreds against our own societies. It turns out, that’s no easy task.

To meet the challenge, however, you must board the ship and enter the straits of Messina. 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.

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Endnotes

Preface

^[1] Jose Saramago, « De las piedras de David a los tanques de Goliat, ». El Pais, April 21, 2002l, https://elpais.com/diario/2002/04/21/opinion/1019340007_850215.html; discussed in Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: W.W. ּּNorton, 2003), 139-44.

^[2] Indeed, shortly before Saramago’s piece, an orthodox rabbi voiced exactly the opposite opinion: “The Orthodox Jewish viewpoint, across the board, with rare exceptions, is that vengeance is God’s alone. . . . Throughout two millennia of exile and suffering, the Jewish people have never encouraged the exercise of vengeance by human beings.” Charles Radin, “Israel mourns as 10 fall to lone Palestinian sniper,” Boston Globe, March 4, 2002.

^[3] Juan Cole, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires (New York: Nation Books, 2018). Critique: Andrew Harrod, “Juan Cole Invents a Peaceful Islam,” The American Spectator, December 10, 2018.

^[4] The quote is from President Obama: Ian Schwartz, “Obama: This ‘Medieval Interpretation Of Islam’ is Rejected by ‘99.9%’ of Muslims, Not a ‘Religious War,’” Real Clear Politics, February 1, 2015.

^[5] Joel Brinkley, “Israel Starts Leaving Areas, but Will Continue Drive,” New York Times, April 8, 2002.

^[6] Richard Landes, “Everybody Agrees: The BBC and CNN on UNSC Resolution #2334 and Kerry’s Speech,” Al Durah Project, uploaded February 18, 2017, interview, 20:54,

.

^[7] Richard Landes, Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), chapter 12.

Perhaps the most tragic and consequential failure of Y2KMind happened with feminists in Women’s Studies.^[1] Feminism, above all other fruits of civil society, depends on the willingness of the stronger to give up the privileges of superior physical power. Feminism arose, therefore, because some men were willing to respond fairly to their moral claims. Nor was this an easy matter. Men’s limbic captivity to honor, not only in the eyes of their women, but of their male (warrior) peers, makes seeming effeminate an extremely painful experience for males, and, in some cases, can lead to murderous rampages. The urge to use force in order to reassert honor never goes away, and resurges in times of crisis and attendant onēidophobia. In this sense, Western feminism has relied on a powerful, enduring commitment of mature men (I know, not mature enough), willing to accept criticism, some of it quite harsh, without striking back. On the contrary, at least some of these men try to listen and respond. This seems to have elicited from some feminists in the late twentieth century very aggressive behavior, not hesitating to express rage at an intimidated Western “patriarchy.”^[2]

In other places and societies, however, more volatile men, driven by jealousy, envy, and libido dominandi, exploit their physical power to bully women; and both law and mores approve.^[3] The twin phenomena of “crimes of passion” (killing an unfaithful wife) and shame murders (killing a daughter who shames the family) attest to the deadly power of male honor to claim the lives of problematic women. The kinds of complaints raised by #MeToo in the West, however bad by our standards, pale before the threat that such societies present to every female born in them. In the twenty-first century, no culture, and within that culture, no religious movement, has been more zealously misogynist and oppressive of women than Caliphator Islam.

And yet, for reasons both puzzling and troubling, the feminist movement, and particularly its academic manifestation, Women and Gender Studies, so fierce at home, have shown profound respect and loud support for these patriarchs who embodied everything they hated about (Western) men.^[4] Indeed, it appears that Western women writing about Arab and Muslim women, systematically subordinated the Muslim women’s concerns to the red-green alliance in which the West, where women are most free, embodies evil, and anyone “resisting” that evil, is on the good side. This tendency already appeared in the 1980s in UN conferences, but it became a key dimension of Y2KMind.

Beginning in the 1980s/1400s, for example, the more radical circles of Islam sought to impose at least the hijab, if not the burka or nikab on Muslim women, a public marker of Caliphator dominion over Muslims, especially in the West.^[5] Once having taken over in Iran, Caliphator mullahs required the hijab; the Taliban (1996-2001) would throw acid in the face of women who did not wear the most extreme version, the niqab. Since 9-11 throughout the Ummah, including Israel and the West, there has been “a huge increase in the number of women, particularly among young women, who started wearing the hijab.”^[6] When Y2KMinders are told by Muslim women who wear the hijab that it is an act of individuation and principle, they feel compelled to admire their courage. If one interprets the male gaze at a bikinied body as a form of visual rape, the burka becomes a form of resistance.^[7] Obviously it would be tasteless, even hostile, to ask if this newly assumed practice expressed postmodern liberation, or fealty to ancient religious practices,^[8] or submission to the demands of recent Caliphators, including Bin Laden.

How many “zones urbaines sensibles” became the unmentionable no-go-zones because the Muslim women in them had to wear hijabs in order to protect themselves, and infidel women without veils, now rape bait―“uncovered, easy meat”―got out?^[9] And given that being raped in many Muslim-majority cultures (but not only!) is a cause for shame-murder (talk about blaming the victim), women surrounded by aggressive, patriarchal, triumphalist Muslims are strongly advised to wear the hijab at the very least. Y2K feminists, instead, assure us that “most wear hijabs by choice,” not from a fear that not wearing it dishonors the woman and leaves her open to justified male violence like rape. Given the strong link between enforcing hijab compliance and jihad, should not feminists get a bit more concerned about the finer details here?^[10]

Faced with the remorseless insistence of immigrant communities to enforce their violent patriarchal rules on their women, Westerners crumbled, victims of their fears of being called racists, of opposing a “multiculturalism” to which their immigrant communities had no commitment. Describing the shame-murder of one of the girls in her charge as a social worker, Unni Wikan writes:

“Culture” is the coinage used to express and claim minority rights, and it is backed by hard sanctions. Physical force, or the threat of such, may not be necessary to compel compliance. A little word, just six letters long, does the job just as effectively: “Racist!” nor need the word be spoken. It hangs like a specter in the air, palpable if invisible, and frightens people into accepting acts that they deeply deplore. . . . “Racist” has become a “deadly word.” It pierces the heart of the well-meaning Scandinavian, whose cherished identity is world champion of all that is kind and good. . . . But there is a high price to be paid by such high morality, and it is paid neither by those who pride themselves on supreme tolerance toward immigrants, professed as “respect for the culture,” nor by those who cry “racist” to claim or enforce such respect. [The price] is Aisha [dead at 14] and others like her.^[11]

Hard to find a better description of moral narcissism: looking good trumps actual effects on victims one supposedly protects.

The Feminist/Women’s Studies adoption of this inversion shows up sharply in an incident at Brandeis, in the spring of 2014. The school announced that Ayaan Hirsi Ali would get an honorary degree that year. Rapidly professors in various theoretically sophisticated disciplines, with Women’s Studies in the fore, objected vehemently to this honor being awarded an “Islamophobe.”^[12] So, a woman who had endured clitoridectomy, escaped a forced marriage by fleeing to the West, become a successful politician very critical of Islam’s treatment of women, who had been threatened and pursued by patriarchal Islamists all over the world including the US, somehow became an “Islamophobe” for saying things about Islam that any Jew and Christian can say about their own and each other’s religions.

In other words, she was everything that liberals imagined, when they spoke of moderate, peaceful Muslims who enrich the societies in which they dwell. Therefore, she had to go. As Andrew Anthony put it dryly: “she is loathed not just by Islamic fundamentalists but by many western liberals, who find her rejection of Islam almost as objectionable as her embrace of western liberalism.”^[13] Says the oikophobe: I wouldn’t want a friend who wanted to join my club.

The petitioners denounced her “virulently anti-Muslim public statements” that “sent a horrible message . . . to Muslim and non-Muslim communities.”^[14] To document her “unacceptable” hostility to Islam, the petitioners found comments, all from late 2007 when her first book Infidel came out. At that time, she had just been chased out of Holland by Muslims who, after killing her colleague Theo Van Gogh, put a price on her head and made her 24/7 security so onerous, that both the government in which she served and her neighbors told her to leave. Once in America, at the conservative think tank, AEI (no progressive places offered her shelter), she ran into American Muslim leaders who condemned her for her “poisonous and unjustified” statements about Islam, that “created dissension in the community,” and considered that her deliberate “defaming the faith” deserved the “punishment [of] death.”^[15] Reflecting this experience, she publicly voiced her conclusions―based on a variegated experience of Islam (Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Europe, USA)―that Islam is “inherently violent” (the Papal Quotation Scandal); that not just extremist Islam, but “mainstream Islam is fascist,” “totalitarian,” and “inspires jihadism and terror”; and that Islam “cannot be reformed.”^[16]

Now anyone saying similar things about Christianity or Judaism or Western culture would not get such a reception. When, for example, John Carroll wrote his devastating critique of Catholicism and the Gospels, Constantine’s Sword, he received extensive praise for his honest self-criticism, not insistent censure for his hate-filled phobias. It’s hard to imagine the Enlightenment, had the Catholic Church managed to cancel Voltaire from the public discourse of Europe. But here, the petitioning faculty, upon reading such opinions, rather than turning to their Muslim colleagues and pleading with them to “prove her wrong” were “filled with shame at the suggestion that the above-quoted sentiments express Brandeis’ values.” Thus, an African woman who opposed the worst patriarchy extant on the planet, was internationally shamed as “someone who [does not] truly meet the standards and uphold the values of this university.”^[17] The president acceded to the furor and disinvited her.

What were the stakes here for the petitioners? Why the excited language―“virulently anti-Muslim,” “horrible message,” “filled with shame”? Why the imperious commands to rescind the invitation immediately? What was the moral emergency? Why the moral panic at the mere thought that Brandeis might honor this woman?

The petitioners acknowledge Ali’s claim that something wrong is going on in the Muslim world: “We fully recognize the harm of forced marriages; of female genital cutting, which can cause, among other public health problems, increased maternal and infant mortality; and of honor killings.” “Fully” here, however, sounds a bit hollow, especially when the next sentence changes the topic dramatically―one might even say, inverts the problem. And here we find the core of the dilemma that lays bare the betrayal of women suffering precisely from the above list of woes. After this brief acknowledgment of the magnitude of the plight of women in the Muslim world, the petition asserts (brackets my comments):

These phenomena are not, however, exclusive to Islam [despite being disproportionately so at the present]. The selection of Ms. Hirsi Ali further suggests to the public that violence toward girls and women is particular to Islam or the Two-Thirds World [did she say that?], thereby obscuring such violence in our midst among non-Muslims, including on our own campus [?]. It also obscures the hard work on the ground by committed Muslim feminist and other progressive Muslim activists and scholars, who find support for gender and other equality within the Muslim tradition and are effective at achieving it [?]. We cannot accept [!] Ms. Hirsi Ali’s triumphalist narrative of western civilization [?], rooted in a core belief of the cultural backwardness of non-Western peoples.

In other words, hiding behind the assertion that Islam should not be specifically associated with these matters, and attributing to Hirsi Ali positions she has not taken, the petitioners make it clear that they will not allow on their campus, a champion of Western values, someone who makes largely accurate generalizations about the differential treatment of women in the West and in Islam. They will not have a frank discussion about the problems of Islam and Muslim male violence against women, and certainly not with people who even entertain the possibility that these problems are structural, systemic to Islam.

Note how certain and insistent this petition is about the flat-out unacceptability of a “triumphalist” Western discourse. How dare the West claim to have solved some key problems that traditional societies have not, among which is a dramatic lowering of the degree to which women are physically at men’s mercy, and a dramatic heightening of women’s representation in the public sphere. In this case, women prominent in Western academia can make imperious demands on the administration, demanding respect for the honor of societies in which women have little to no role in academia and face violence were they to speak imperiously to male superiors.

The “essentialist” positions that the petitioners explicitly attribute to Hirsi Ali, are actually inverted projections of their own essentialist loathing of the West, that irredeemably bad, enemy of global salvation. And so, the same people who are filled with horror and regret at the suggestion that something negative might be systemic, built-into Islam―“Islam structurally violent? Impossible. Unspeakable!”―are filled with righteous indignation when contemplating the (for them) unchallengeable assertion that the US is a systemically racist society and polity.

By 2006, at least in Women’s Studies, it became impossible to oppose the under-dogma that the West was bad, and the rest of the world must not be judged (certainly not, judged unfavorably) in comparison with the West. Daphne Patai wrote about a Women’s Studies list-serv, which thrashed out some of the principles:

In October 2006 a typical exchange took place on the women’s studies email list (WMST-L) (which has more than five thousand subscribers) about white male violence. Great anger was displayed at the few women who wrote in suggesting there are worse problems among other groups—for example, violence in Muslim countries or the rates of murder and rape among blacks versus whites in this country. The discussion provided yet another indication of how identity politics is being pursued at this time. In academe, in particular, people object to generalizations about blacks or about Muslims or any other group that is nonwhite and non-Anglo. They rush to defend these groups because, as presumably oppressed or formerly oppressed groups, they have identities that nowadays exempt them from criticism [Humanitarian racism: never blame the victim!]. But the same reticent people are free with their generalizations about America being a “rape culture” or confidently assert that white male violence is the primary problem we all have to deal with.^[18]

Just as Martin Amis asked his audience of British glitterati “Who thinks they are morally superior to the Taliban?”,^[19] can anyone with a moral compass not recognize that “we’ve come a long way, baby,” where “we” is Western men, and “the way” includes learning to treat our women with a great deal of respect and a renunciation of our recourse to might makes right. Is it a total transformation? No. Is it better than cultures where women live in radical insecurity that their own family will kill them for “shaming them” . . . for even just seeming to shame them? Yes.

Is it not a moral disorientation of cosmic proportions for a society that provides rape victims with safe spaces lest words inadvertently upset them, to insist that they are no better―nay worse!―than a culture in which families feel community pressure to kill a daughter who’s been raped?^[20] Who can seriously argue that looking at Muslim shame murders “thereby obscur[es] such violence in our midst among non-Muslims, including on our own campus”?

The lines of this capitulation were already laid out in the later twentieth century, when postcolonial “feminists,” often from heavily patriarchal societies, argued that fighting the Western imperialists trumped fighting third world patriarchy. Cultural relativism became the order of the day, along with the we-too-ism it demands: shame murders are just part of the spectrum of domestic violence, found both East and West.^[21] And they certainly have nothing to do with Islam.^[22] On the contrary, some postcolonial feminists argued that Muhammad opposed them, just as he opposed killing baby girls.^[23] Indeed, anyone who suggests that Islamic culture has a high correlation with honor killings (an empirical “fact”) is an Islamophobe peddling fake news.^[24] Preferably, don’t even mention it,^[25] and if you must, disapprove harshly of such misinformation.^[26]

Had feminism stayed true to its moral compass―the superiority of a world of uncoerced intimacy, over that governed by might makes right―it would have quickly noticed in the world after 2000, how many disturbing links there were between how Caliphators treated their women, and the predatory eyes through which they viewed the infidel as harbi. They would have understood the relatively new roles that both the hijab and shame-murders played in policing the border between the increasingly tribal, Caliphator-defined, Muslim communities on the one hand, and the surrounding infidels on the other.^[27] Here a Turkish woman who thinks she can be a German, there a shamed Palestinian who can regain her honor by blowing herself up in an Israeli hospital.

Had women scholars followed such leads, we might have better understood the role that Muslim misogyny plays in Caliphator fear and hatred of the West. Perhaps, had we, with the guidance of feminists of integrity, paid attention to how Caliphators treat Muslim women, that in turn, might have raised the valid question: in what ways is this a harbinger of what Caliphators have in store for those fortunate enough not yet to know their lash? Instead, it all became part of “facts we’re not supposed to know,” the stuff picked up by the garbage trucks servicing the willfully blind. If we don’t look, we won’t realize the importance of fighting Muslim misogyny, or confront what cowards we are for not defending Muslim women even a fraction of how we protect our women.

How did this happen? Phyllis Chesler, after noting the systematic moral inversion, locates a new stage in the Western feminist abandonment of Muslim women in the post-9-11 era, when not only did feminists join in the anti-American assault,^[28] but elaborately avoided anything that might look like it was targeting Islam.^[29] No matter how odious the crime and no matter how prominent the Muslim identity of the male perp, it was somehow the West’s fault. The same pattern emerges in the “human rights” community’s approach to Palestinian violence against their women: blame the occupation.^[30] Palestinian Women’s Lives Matter―one more sacrifice on the altar of the Cult of the Occupation.

The negative consequences of this kind of moral failure appear in very prominent events after Trump’s election. What made it possible for Palestinian “feminist,” Linda Sarsour, and two “women of color” to rise to the top of the nascent wave of the women’s movement responding to Trump? Although Sarsour and friends eventually went too far and alienated too many, they managed to be the leaders of the march for two years, during which they admired one of the most explicit, religious (Muslim) antisemites in the USA, and banned Jewish feminists with even traces of Zionism from the “progressive” movement: “Zionists cannot be feminists.”^[31] By the time they left, little was left. And yet, despite her contempt for Jewish women (one of the main contributors to feminism in its earlier periods), and despite her telling feminists to subordinate their concerns to the Palestinian cause, Linda Sarsour was and remained, a charismatic figure, winning the loyal admiration of activist actors like Susan Sarandon, Mark Ruffalo, and Amnesty International―the beautiful people―for her courage in wearing a scarf.^[32] Despite the eventual resignation from the Women’s March of the anti-Zionist “feminist,” the marriage of “feminism” and the (toxic male) Palestinian cause continued apace in the academy. In May 2021, in response to the Israeli-Hamas exchange of fire, Gender Studies stood at the forefront of solidarity with the “Palestinian Feminist Collective,”^[33] whose priorities are the anti-imperialism of fools rather than welfare of Palestinian women, whose future would look very dim were the current Palestinian leadership to “free” Palestine from the River to the Sea.

But the starkest reminders of the costs in progressive principles and victim-suffering that arise from these mental inversions come when one considers those who do not have “privileged victim” status. The same people who rush to the street to join in a cacophony of voices attacking Israel indignantly for violating Palestinian “inalienable rights,” somehow can’t be found for rallies about Christians being savaged all through the Muslim-majority world, or Palestinians being savaged by their fellow Arabs, or Palestinian women being savaged by their men, or Uyghurs being interned, sterilized and mass raped by Chinese Han. In terms of numbers and suffering, the fate of Palestinians, at least at Israel’s hand, is negligible in comparison with the magnitude and violence Muslims inflict on their Christian populations. On the Y2KMind indignation meter, it’s precisely the opposite, and Zionist protests are mere “what-about-ism.”

Ellen Horowitz, 2012.

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^[1] There may well have been a similar phenomenon in Jewish Studies (see the profoundly unscholarly “Statement on Israel-Palestine by Scholars of Jewish Studies and Israel,” Israel/Palestine, May 22, 2021; James Russell, “Bearing False Witness: On a Statement against Israel,” Times of Israel, May 27, 2021), but since there are 3.5 billion women and only twelve-plus million Jews, the feminist failure is greater and its impact more tragic.

^[2] Lasson, Trembling in the Ivory Tower, chapter 2.

^[3] See chapter 5.

^[4] Yasmine Mohammed, Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam (Hillside: Free Hearts Free Minds, 2019); Phyllis Chesler, “How Many Western Feminists Would March Under a Hail of Taliban Bullets?” Fourth Wave, January 2, 2022.

^[5] For a more detailed analysis of the drift from feminism to anti(Western) colonialism, see Chesler, Death of Feminism, 108-130.

^[6] Shaista Aziz, “Why I decided to wear the veil,” BBC, September 17, 2003.

^[7] Gad Saad, “Niqab Is ‘Freely Chosen’ while Bikini Is Oppressive?” The Saad Truth, 47, June 22, 2015.

^[8] On the origins of wearing the veil in Islam, see Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Moodern Muslim Society (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1987).

^[9] An Islamist preacher referred to unveiled women as “uncovered meat” which cats will naturally eat, “Australian Muslim leader compares uncovered women to exposed meat,” Guardian, October 26, 2006. See also, McLoughlin, Easy Meat.

^[10] Rebecca Vipond Brink, “Why I Refuse to Criticize Islam as a Feminist and Atheist,” The Frisky, October 15, 2014. Giulio Meotti, “Veiling Women: Islamists’ Most Powerful Weapon,” Gatestone, April 20, 2016; Phyllis Chesler, “Ban the Burqa: The Argument For,” Middle East Forum, December 11, 2010.

^[11] Wikan, Generous Betrayal, 25.

^[12] Richard Pérez-Peña and Tanzina Vega, “Brandeis Cancels Plan to Give Honorary Degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Critic of Islam,” New York Times, April 8, 2014.

^[13] Andrew Anthony, “Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now by Ayaan Hirsi Ali,” Guardian, April 27, 2015.

^[14] “Brandeis Faculty Petition Objecting to Granting Ayaan Hirsi Ali an Honorary Degree, 2014,” http://www.theaugeanstables.com/2021/06/27/brandeis-faculty-petition-objecting-to-granting-ayaan-hirsi-ali-an-honorary-degree-2014/. More than half of the first 25 signers are from Women and Gender Studies, not to mention Jytte Klausen in Political Science.

^[15] Robin Acton, “Furor over author Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s visit stirs debate on religious freedom,” Pittsburgh Tribune, April 22, 2007.

^[16] Much of this is a rephrasing of the attack on Hirsi Ali by Deborah Scroggins, “The Dutch-Muslim Culture War: Ayaan Hirsi Ali has Enraged Muslims with her Attacks on their Sexual Mores,” The Nation, June 2005; discussed by Chesler, Death of Feminism, 125f.

^[17] See Zev Chafets, “Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Victim of an honor killing, Brandeis-style,” Fox News, April 10, 2014.

^[18] Daphne Patai, What Price Utopia? Essays on Ideological Policing, Feminism and Academic Affairs (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), 10.

^[19] “Martin Amis and Andrew Anthony: On writing and radical Islam,” Contemporary Institute of Art, October 11, 2007 Amis poses the question “Do you think you are morally superior to the Taliban?” (at 31:10), and is mildly pleased with a positive response from a third of the audience. What he did not ask was “Do you think you are morally superior to Israel?” That, I’m guessing would have been at least two thirds.

^[20] Chesler, “In their own Words: Portraits of Arab, Muslim, and Middle Eastern Women,” Death of Feminism, 131-150.

^[21] Janet I. Sigal, “Domestic Violence and Honor Killings,” American Psychological Association report to UN, https://www.apa.org/international/united-nations/janet-sigal.pdf; Huma Qureishi, “‘Honour’ crimes are domestic abuse, plain and simple,” Guardian, March 21, 2012.

^[22] Aysan Sev’er and Gökçeçiçek Yurdakul, “Culture of Honor, Culture of Change: A Feminist Analysis of Honor Killings in Rural Turkey,” Violence against Women 7, no. 9 (September 2001): 964-998.

^[23] Brittany Hayes et al., “An Exploratory Study of Honor Crimes in the United States,” Journal of Family Violence, 31 (2016): 303-14.

^[24] Ilisha, “Honor Killings: The Epidemic that Isn’t,” Loonwatch, September 28, 2011. Loonwatch is an excellent site for exploring Y2KMind.

^[25] Naomi Lakritz, “Women’s lives aren’t worth much—even in Canada,” Calgary Herald, July 29, 2009.

^[26] Elise Auerbach, “Sensationalist Film Exploits Human Rights Issue in Iran,” Huffpost, July 25, 2009.

^[27] Jody K. Biehl, “The Whore Lived Like a German,” Der Spiegel, March 2, 2005.

^[28] Chesler, Death of Feminism, 21.

^[29] Muslim women were prominent in the denial: e.g., Miriam Esman, “Canadian Muslims Protest ‘Honor Killing’ Label as Racist,” Investigative Project, October 7, 2013.

^[30] Palestinian Women under Prolonged Israeli Occupation: The Gendered Impact of Occupation Violence, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (2017); Phyllis Chesler, “Lancet Study Blames Palestinian Wife-Beating on Israel,” Pajamas Media, January 24, 2010.

^[31] Collier Meyerson, “Can You Be a Zionist Feminist? Linda Sarsour Says No,” The Nation, March 13, 2017. This is, of course, not limited to feminist “progressivism.” See Blake Flayton, “The Hate That Can’t Be Contained,” Tablet, November 25, 2020.

^[32] Essence Magazine named Sarsour in their list of 100 most woke women, Lauren Jones, “Woke 100 Women,” Essence, April 18, 2017.

^[33] “Gender Studies Departments In Solidarity With Palestinian Feminist Collective.”

This excerpt from my book Can “The Whole World” be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad, chap.1 (2020) deals with a key event at the turn of the century, the Durban World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. It turned into a Hatefest directed at Israel and the US and united both the Global Progressive Left and the Global Jihadis in their focus on those two countries as the embodiment of evil. The Programme of Action offers a blueprint for the next 25 years of cognitive war on the West waged by “Human RIghts” NGOs and the UN. (My discussion focuses on the role of the Muhammad al Durah story which we present as the first post-modern blood libel on Day 23, September 30.)

Al Durah, Patron Saint of the UN Conference against Racism, Durban 2001

Few incidents illustrate the noxious impact of the Al Durah myth on the progressive agenda as clearly as the icon’s role at the Durban conference, a year later. Here, at this massive global gathering, al Durah was a star, the center of attention, especially in the NGO section (separate from the more formal UN proceedings) at Kingsmead Stadium, a magnificent cricket pitch for 25,000 fans.

The body of Muhammad al Durah was paraded in effigy through processions of thousands of angry demonstrators voicing their hatred of Israel (carrying placards of Arafat and Bin Laden). When Israeli activists came up with an alternative t-shirt urging: “Fight Racism not Jews,” the crowds beat them up.^[1] Arafat flew Muhammad’s father, Jamal al Durah, into the conference on his jet, to bear witness to Israel’s deliberate murder of his son. Everywhere, all the time, the cry was “Free, Free Palestine!”^[2]

Palestine’s Images of Hate:

Al Durah carried in effigy (center below), Durban South Africa, August–Sept. 2001

Here participants were issued an “official” T-shirt (with UN logo fraudulently added), featuring a picture of Muhammad al Durah and his father under fire: above, the text reads: “Racism can, will and must be defeated. Apartheid is real,” and below the picture: “Killed on September 30, 2000, for being Palestinian. Since then, over 532 persons killed, a third children.” On the back of the T-shirt: “Occupation = Colonialism = Racism. End Israeli apartheid.” Another flyer, with a picture of Adolf Hitler, read: “What would have happened if I had won? The Good things. There would have been no Israel and no Palestinian’s blood shed.”

Here, a well-prepared war campaign took place that blindsided real human rights activists with a narrative of collective redemption that joined postcolonial and jihadi themes together about the two great Satans: the USA and Israel. Hijacking the conference, the NGO forum obsessed over the crimes of the United States and Zionism, the one for past slavery and twenty-first-century imperialism, the other for their racist, genocidal, colonialism against the Palestinians.^[3] Calls for restitution in the name of racial justice rang out.

Israel, the current active, global villain, was committing genocide against the poor defenseless Palestinians. Angry demonstrations, virulent speeches, indignant resolutions pounded away at a Manichaean message: Israel was the incarnation of evil. Indeed, a medievalist, well acquainted with the workings of relic cults and mass assemblies, might opine that al Durah was the “patron saint” of Durban, the presiding cathartic presence that gave the proceedings their emotional power to bind together activists from all over the world and very varying value-communities.

And so, the Global Progressive Left, in the form of “human rights NGOs” developed a program for a systematic “soft power” (i.e., cognitive) war aimed at rendering Israel a global pariah and destroying her legitimacy. The final NGO’s declaration called for

…a policy of complete and total isolation of Israel as an apartheid state . . . the imposition of mandatory and comprehensive sanctions and embargoes, the full cessation of all links (diplomatic, economic, social, aid, military cooperation and training) between all states and Israel . . . [and condemned] those states who are supporting, aiding and abetting the Israeli apartheid state and its perpetration of racist crimes against humanity including ethnic cleansing, acts of genocide.^[4]

Reportedly, the East European NGOs refused to sign on because they knew totalitarian language when they saw it.^[5] The tragedy was that Western “human rights” giants like HRW and Amnesty International were major players in the moral and empirical catastrophe, even though, in the end, they also did not sign.^[6] (Today, they would without hesitation.)

Bernard-Henri Lévy deconstructed the meaning of “anti-imperialism” at Durban:

If you replace the word America with the word Israel, and put Zionism in place of imperialism (even though the two are indissolubly mixed because the people in Durban . . . never insult Israel without also letting it be understood, or even coming out and saying, just to beat a dead horse, that it was only the plaything, the marionette, of the United States, and never mention the crimes and misdemeanors of the United States without also referring, usually very quickly, to the even more monstrous “American-Zionist Axis” and, therefore, to the diabolical Israel), you see the same kind of vise, the same kind of trap, the same discursive structure, that underlies the concept of Empire―and for which Durban was simply the giant laboratory.^[7]

The Progressive Antichrist: Bay Area Protests against War in Iraq, February 2003.

Credit: Zombietime

Before the conference took place, it was already clear to some, what this Durban hijacking of human rights portended for the global struggle against racism. As the old adage goes, “what starts with the Jews does not end with them.” Durban caused immense collateral damage to victims of human rights violations the world over―in particular in the Muslim-majority world―whose woes were eclipsed by the enthusiastic adoption by the “human rights community” of the jihadi death cult of the icon of hatred.

Standing in Kingsmead Cricket Pitch in Durban, where chants to destroy Israel mingled with cries of Muhammad al Durah, Bernard-Henri Levy commented bitterly on how the obsession with evil Israel literally smothered the voices of real victims the world over:

I thought about—and I still think about, every time I think about that great moment of shame, contempt, and moral failure—about all the activists for all the just causes who had arrived [at Durban] full of hope, persuaded that they finally had a stage upon which to express themselves, and who ended up reduced to silence by the screaming activism of those who wanted, in Durban’s Kingsmead Stadium, to see a single face, that of the little boy Muhammad al-Durrah—and only wanted to hear a single slogan: “Free, free Palestine.”^[8]

Those angry violent demonstrations, led by Muslims, at Durban represent a real, live case of an Emperor’s New Clothes parade. But instead of courtiers following a vain emperor making fools of himself and them, it was alleged proponents of human rights, following in the train of an icon of Palestinian hatred, at a conference allegedly dedicated to fighting hatred.

From Durban to 9-11: A Matter of Days

Only days after the conclusion of the Durban conference, Bin Laden took the new form of global jihadi warfare―suicide terror―to a whole new level: offensive jihad against a nation in Dar al Harb, with which Muslims were not, at that time, openly at war. On the contrary, the US had just recently intervened in the Balkans on the side of Muslims and helped Bin Laden himself in his fight against the Russians in Afghanistan. But Bin Laden did not play by the semi-old rules about defensive jihad and the necessity of a Caliph to permit offensive jihad, much less feel beholden to Western infidels, playing by the Realpolitik rules where “my enemy [USSR]’s enemy [al Qaeda] is my [USA’s] friend.”^[10]

Not at all. The apocalyptic call of a world conquest demanded a blasphemously daring blow against America, the greatest of the enemies that Global Jihad sought to bring low. Most Muslims, especially the cowardly leaders who had some kind of détente with the West, might try to placate the US with denunciations of these acts. But in apocalyptic time, “my enemy’s enemy is my enemy,”^[11] and the blasphemous attack of 9-11 was a brilliant transgression, well worth the prize and the cost.

And its spectacular success, seen the world over in real time, washed away any concerns. The “Magnificent 19” had changed the world by changing the jihadi paradigm. Civilians everywhere―not just in Israel―were legitimate targets in a jihad waged, on the one hand, to avenge the killing of Muslims; on the other, to conquer the world for Islam. “We are the Strong Horse,” asserted Bib Laden.

Al Durah became the signature of a new, open, suicidal, hatred of kuffār. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the al Qaeda operative who planned 9-11, later executed Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl, as a Jew, for the murder, by his people (Israel), of Muhammad al Durah. His videographers edited into their footage of Pearl’s beheading, the footage of the crime for which he atoned: the cold-blooded murder of Muhammad al Durah. It was the first political snuff film, uploaded in the new century, with its millions of downloads, to be followed with Nicholas Berg and a whole industry of snuff videos, whose roots reached back to the Algerian jihad of the 1990s.^[12]

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^[1] David Kramer, “Why I was almost Lynched for the T-Shirt I Wore,” Times of Israel, June 16, 2015.

^[2] Joëlle Fiss, Durban Diaries: What really happened at the UN Conference against Racism in Durban (2001) (New York: AJC, 2008).

^[3] See the background to the conference in Harris O. Schoenberg, “Demonization in Durban: The World Conference Against Racism,” American Jewish Yearbook, 2002.

^[4] NGO Declaration, Durban, September 3, 2001, par. 425.

^[5] David Matas, “Durban Conference: Civil Society Smashes Up,” Zionism- Israel, December 31, 2002.

^[6] Gerald Steinberg, “The Centrality of Human Rights NGOs in the Durban Strategy,” NGO Monitor, July 11, 2006

^[7] Bernard-Henri Levy, Left in Dark Times: A Stand against the New Barbarism (New York: Random House, 2008), 139.

^[8] Levy, Left in Dark Times, part three, chapter 4.

^[9] Irwin Cotler, cited in Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to Global Jihad (New York: Random House, 2010​​), 486n81; see also Anne F. Bayefsky, “Terrorism and Racism: The Aftermath of Durban,” Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Letter/Viewpoints #468, Dec. 16, 2001.

^[10] “Defensive jihad” comes into the Islamic legal discussion after two centuries of constant offensive jihad and Islamic expansion. See Ephraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 62-83.

^[11] Landes, Heaven on Earth, chapter 2.

^[12] Jean Pierre Lledo, Algerie: Histoire à ne pas dire (2008); contemporary scene: Ariel Koch, “Beheading Videos and Their Non-Jihadi Echoes,” Homeland Security, August 16, 2018.

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Land for Peace: The Positive-Sum Formula

The Oslo “Peace Process” illustrates how ignorance of (or ignoring) the shame-honor dynamics mislead Westerners trying to navigate the political cultures of the Middle East. The entire project based its logic on the positive-sum principle of an exchange of “land for peace”: Israel cedes land to the Palestinians (most if not all the West Bank and Gaza) to create an independent state, while the Palestinians bury the hatchet of total war to destroy Israel, since they’re getting the state they want, without the need for war. The logic placed particular urgency on Israel creating a Palestinian state lest they become demographically overrun by Arabs, and either stay democratic and lose control, or create an “apartheid” state.

The accords banked on a Palestinian shift from their charter-defined commitment to regaining Arab and Muslim honor by wiping out the shame that is Israel, to a readiness to accept Israel’s legitimate existence, and a commitment to Western values such as responsible and transparent government: two democracies living in peace side by side. Such a shift depended on their understanding that this promised concession to Israel would bring what Palestinians “yearn for,” namely “the freedom to govern themselves in peace and dignity,” a nation-state.^[1] A win-win solution so obvious, that, as the BBC’s Gavin Esler opined, “it could be solved with an email.”^[2]

William Quandt, one of the school of “liberal internationalists,” insisted on both the readiness of the Arab world for democracy and the linkage between that development and peace in the Middle East.^[3] Imagining anything else―like an Arab political culture fundamentally at odds with democracy―would be Orientalist warmongering and racism.^[4] The underlying assumptions here, shared by many Western analysts including Israelis, even when they disagreed with Quandt on details, reflected one of the most pervasive and deep-seated forms of Western cognitive egocentrism, the cornerstone of (constructivist) Political “Science.”

These political “scientists” might admit that Western categories, like nations, individuals, rule of law, human rights, don’t carry the same weight in Arab culture; they might even tell you of Sadat’s quip: that the only Arab nation was his Egypt, and the rest were “tribes with flags.” But they still thought that under the right circumstances, the Arab world is ready to make the shift. That is, however much they might see the cultural problem, they are so deeply committed to the democratic, positive-sum notions that underlie their culture, that they assume that, given the right conditions to accede to “our way of doing things,” these other people will assent and shift. Avraham Shalom, who ran the Shabak from 1980-86, commented that when the Oslo Accords emerged:

The Shin Bet looked for people to talk to, to understand what motivated the Palestinians. For the first time, some Jews raised the idea of a Palestinian state. I loved the idea, so I went to the Territories with people who dealt with the Palestinians.^[5]

And once the process was engaged, a wide range of people, militating for peace, refused to acknowledge any evidence that these assumptions about Palestinian willingness to give up the grudge might be wide of the mark.^[6] Liberal cognitive egocentrism had become a foreign policy doctrine, and, as we shall see with its abject failure in the summer and fall of 2000, it became a dogmatic assertion. As Edward Alexander notes:

Peres’ recent book shows his inability to imagine that the Arabs are motivated by anything apart from improving their economic condition. He imputes Arab fundamentalism to poverty―“In frustration . . . these people have turned to mysticism and otherworldliness.”^[7]

Even the hard-headed, security-minded, Israelis, like Prime Minister Rabin and the highest people in Intelligence accepted the claim that the PLO had changed direction:

If we ever want a serious chance at solving the Palestinian-Israeli problem, the time is now, and the partner is the PLO, which rid itself of the principles that I despised them for. The signing of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians marked the first time that the PLO officially announced that it had abandoned terror and violence and recognized Israel’s right to exist in peace and security.^[8]

And the Palestinians chosen for negotiation, some of them committed to peace as well, were sufficiently engaged in the process, even Arafat, to give the Israelis, eager to believe, reason to trust their good intentions.^[9]

What the Oslo architects and their Western supporters completely underestimated was the hold that Arafat’s native honor-world and its triumphalist religiosity had over him and his associates, how unready the Palestinians were for this deal.^[10] This not only dominated thinking in Western circles, not put at direct risk by such a gamble, but even Israelis who had much more to lose in case of misreading. Raphael Israeli puts his finger on the mindset:

From the outset, the ill-coached Israeli negotiators [almost completely ignorant of Islamic religious beliefs among their interlocutors, including Arafat], believed that if their intentions were good and their means candid, their Palestinian counterparts would behave similarly.^[11]

This (messianic) confidence in the power of doing good, even pervaded intelligence circles:

[I]t is clear that it was not only Israel’s political leadership that was held hostage by the chimerical conception that an era of peace with the Palestinian Authority had begun: M[ilitary] I[ntelligence] and the Shin Bet security service had trouble liberating themselves from the same feeling. The intelligence officials were not always willing to let facts disturb a rosy perception of reality.^[12]

Just because Western and Israeli analysts failed to pay attention, however, does not mean the laws of honor-shame and triumphalist religiosity ceased to operate.

Honor-Shame Discourse: What Was Taken by Force Must Be Taken Back by Force

After the ceremonious signing of the deal on the White House lawn, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat found himself the target of immense hostility from his Arab and Muslim honor-group for having brought shame upon himself, his people, upon all Arabs and all Muslims. In cultures where, for honor’s sake, “what was taken by force much be retaken by force,” any negotiations are shameful and cowardly.^[13] When Arafat arrived in Gaza in July 1994, Hamas denounced him roundly: “His visit is shameful and humiliating, as it occurs in the shadow of occupation and in the shadow of Arafat’s humiliating submission before the enemy government and its will. It is impossible to present a defeat as victory.”^[14]

Nor was it “merely” the apocalyptic religious fanatics who talked so. Edward Said, proud, secular, ecumenical, postmodern, who claimed to reject any kind of primitive tribalism,^[15] who protested loudly that he opposed “the insouciant nativism and militant militarism of the [Palestinian] nationalist consensus,”^[16] echoed the language of Hamas: the compromises involved a “degrading . . . act of obeisance . . . a capitulation” that produced a state of “supine abjectness . . . submitting shamefully to Israel.”^[17] Thus did the Ur-“postcolonial” intellectual speak the zero-sum, tribal language of Arab and Muslim honor-shame, attacking negotiation as dishonorable.^[18] And Westerners dared not point out the problem of an “Oriental” Saïd, lest they be accused of being racists and “Orientalizing the Orient.”

This was, then, in Arab eyes, a “peace of cowards.” The mood was captured in the poem by one of the Arab world’s most famous poets, Nizar Qabbani, which became an overnight sensation.

Al Muharjiwuud [Those who scurry]

Al-Hayat, London, October 1995

The last walls of embarrassment have fallen

We were delighted

And we danced

And we blessed ourselves

For signing the peace of the coward

Nothing frightens us anymore

Nothing shames us anymore

The veins of pride in us have dried up.

We stood in columns like sheep before slaughter

We ran, breathless

We scrambled to kiss

The shoes of the killers . . .

Oh we dreamed of a green peace

And a white crescent

And a blue sea.

Now we find ourselves

On a dung heap.

Who could ask the rulers

About the peace of the cowards

About the peace of selling in installments

And renting in installments

About the peace of the merchants

And the exploiters?

Who could ask them

About the peace of the dead?

They have silenced the street

And murdered all the questions

And those who question . . .

Palestine saw its picture

Carried on the airwaves,

She saw her tears

Crossing the waves of the ocean

Toward Chicago, New Jersey, Miami.

Like a wounded bird

Palestine shouted:

This wedding is not my wedding!

This dress is not my dress!

This shame is not my shame! (cited by Ajami, 1997, 256-58)

“Kissing the shoes of the killers. . .” is a defeat worse than death to those who should, themselves, be the killers whose feet the enemy kisses. The “dreamed of . . . green peace” has no room for those we tried so hard to kill.^[19] Wedded to our zero-sum vision we will refuse any positive-sum offer and deny any responsibility for what we have done and continue to do.^[20]

Nor was this attitude restricted to the Arab world. Muslims the world over wanted to know what Arafat meant by this volt-face vis-à-vis “the Zionist entity,” his betrayal of the very cause he was to champion―the utter destruction of the enemy state. When he went to Johannesburg for the inauguration of Nelson Mandela in 1994, he visited the main mosque, where indignant Muslims (largely from the Indian subcontinent) demanded an explanation. Arafat responded (assuming this was off the record), by dropping any pretense to the “peace of the brave” that featured so prominently in his English pronouncements,^[21] and instead invoked Muhammad’s Treaty of Hudaybiyyah:

This agreement [the Oslo Accords], I am not considering it more than the agreement which had been signed between our Prophet Muhammad and Quraysh, and you remember the Caliph Omar had refused this agreement and considered it Sulha Dania [a despicable truce, just as you, my audience, view my behavior]. But Muhammad had accepted it [until he felt strong enough to break it], and we are accepting now this [Oslo] peace accord.^[22]

Those attacking Arafat were like Caliph Omar, men of honor―good men, but wrong. Arafat, like Muhammad, understood the situation and devised a deceptive plan for honorable war later.^[23]

This highlights the key honor difference between Fatah (PA) and Hamas at the time: the latter maintained its honor by refusing to deal with Israel and openly declaring the desire to exterminate the Zionist entity; the former agreed to adopt a seemingly humiliating compromise with the enemy, but only insofar as it was a prelude to destroying it.^[24] Were Arafat, through negotiations, to accept the West Bank back and stop there (the Oslo “Peace”), it would be a betrayal of the principle of honor through force. If he got back the West Bank and used it to attack Israel (Oslo Jihad), that might be honorable: if he failed, at least he went down fighting. Thus, from the Palestinian zero-sum perspective, the “peace plan” is actually a war plan, a deceit by those not powerful enough to “do what they will,” in order to take back what they must . . . for their honor’s sake. Land for War.

To the extent that Arabs and the Muslim “Street” were sold on the Oslo process, then, it was as a Trojan horse, not as fairly negotiated concessions to be made for the sake of freedom and peace (good liberal priorities, Clinton’s priorities); rather, as a humiliating but temporary weakness that, if the trick works, will lead to a full and violent victory for the “Palestinian cause.”^[25] A fortiori this rule of violence applies where not only tribal honor, but the Umma’s honor is at stake. Thus, within the Umma, the debate concerned whether one supported the shameful deception in order to get what one could not get otherwise, or proudly rejected it.

To anyone paying attention, Arafat’s speech provided a striking insight into the workings of the Umma in the late twentieth century CE/early fifteenth century AH. Muslims from the Indian subcontinent, not even Arabs, could only be reassured―if then―by the promise that this should not result in an ignominious Oslo Peace, that the Umma would not accept an autonomous state of Jews in Dar al Islam.^[26] The Prime Directive: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Muslim.” And everyone, certainly every Palestinian, knew it and knows it today: the elimination of Israel, one way or another, was a unifying, defining axiom.

The agreement is based on the borders of June 4 [1967]. While the agreement is on the borders of June 4, the President [Mahmoud Abbas] understands, we understand, and everyone knows that it is impossible to realize the inspiring idea, or the great goal [from the river to the sea], in one stroke. If Israel withdraws from Jerusalem, if Israel uproots the settlements, 650,000 settlers, if Israel removes the fence—what will be with Israel? Israel will come to an end. If I say that I want to remove it from existence, this will be great, great, [but] it is hard. This is not a [stated] policy. You can’t say it to the world. You can say it to yourself.^[27]

No Palestinian professed faith in compromise publicly in Arabic; only in the languages of the infidels, to liberals, whether they were Western gentiles, Jews, or Westernized Muslims.^[28] Rabin and Peres may have signed the Oslo Peace Accords, but Arafat signed the Oslo Jihad Accord.

And yet, despite the lessons to learn, by and large Western journalists and policymakers, including the “peace camp” in Israel, and even their intelligence services, ignored Arafat’s invocations of Hudaybiyyah.^[29] Advocates of peace viewed them as antics designed to appease Muslim public opinion (itself a phenomenon worth pondering); and remained confident that, in the end, the more mature call of the international community would sway Arafat to the side of positive-sum reason. Raymond Ibrahim remarks: “Whereas many of the world’s Muslims make the connection and appreciate the continuity of the words and deeds of their politically active coreligionists, the West remains oblivious.”^[30]

In his 800-page memoir on the Oslo failure, for example, Dennis Ross, the US Middle East envoy most deeply involved in negotiations with the Palestinian leadership, has not a word to say about the Hudaybiyyah controversy, despite how consistent it was with his own assessment of Arafat’s most problematic behavior, his “failure to prepare his people for the compromises necessary for peace.”^[31] For Ross, this was more of an oversight, missed by the quixotic Arafat. It was actually much worse than that. Arafat’s sin was not of omission, but of commission: he prepared his people for war right under the noses of the Israelis and the well-meaning West.^[32] While the Israelis in the peace camp congratulated themselves on Arafat’s visit to Rabin’s widow, Leah―only years earlier imagining such a deed on Arafat’s part would have been dismissed as “pure fiction”^[33]―the Palestinian war camp prepared its 30,000 “police” and its youth for a war of extermination.

It apparently did not occur to the Israeli negotiators or Western liberals (or if it did, they immediately banished the thought), that even though Arafat might have violated a taboo by meeting publicly with Israelis, even―shudder―signing public accords with them, he nonetheless never renounced either the desire to destroy Israel, nor his limbic captivity to the shame involved in every meeting. Unquestionably, the accords that let Arafat back in (a huge concession from the Israeli perspective), proved disappointing to Arafat, who probably had not read them. He, in his childish way, seems to have expected Israel to commit suicide, and could not understand―and where possible ignored―the restrictions Israel imposed on his access to full sovereignty . . . his own army and open borders with his Arab neighbors. Palestinians, well versed in demopathic discourse, complained bitterly of Israelis humiliating them gratuitously, for example, over borders, as if there were no reason for Israelis to worry.

The Hudaybiyyah episode also shed light on the international game at play in the Oslo Peace Process. When American commentators discussed the Hudaybiyyah speech (European presses tended not even to mention it; in the US, only the “right-wing” press raised it), they immediately aroused the ire of Caliphator Da’īs. Daniel Pipes wrote repeatedly about the meaning of the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, and the trouble any Westerner who mentioned it quickly encountered when they brought up the subject. Despite being studiously fair to the Muslim prophet on historical grounds, citing as plausible the Muslim apologetic version that the Meccans broke the treaty, and Muhammad never meant a deliberate deception, Pipes provoked furious condemnation and some of the earliest accusations of “Islamophobia” from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim “civil rights” organization with ties to the same Muslim Brotherhood of which Hamas is a branch.^[34]

The Muslim outcry essentially forbade infidel critics from examining evidence relevant to their pressing concerns, a pattern that replicated itself in academia, with Daniel Pipes’ work being banned by some professors as “Islamophobic.” Instead, peace enthusiasts viewed Arafat and the Palestinian leadership, as they themselves insisted they were while speaking English: full-fledged modern players who yearned for their own nation and freedom, and whom one could trust to keep commitments to the “peace of the brave.” When the opportunity presented itself, they believed, Arafat would choose the imperfect, positive-sum, win-win, over the zero-sum, all-or-nothing, win-lose. They “believed” in the Palestinian leadership’s ability to change, and rejected indignantly―even as racists!―anyone who dared to suggest the Palestinian leadership was still captive to their need to bleach their blackened face in blood.

Western journalists and policy experts not only failed (and continue to fail) to challenge such claims, but they ignored the long and troubling list of Palestinian violations of the accords, and pressured Israel to stop harping on the negative, lest they “queer” the peace process.^[35] In discussing the Hudaybiyyah speeches, the New Yorker journalist, Connie Bruck notes:

The speeches were violations of the spirit, if not the letter, of the accords, and, although the Rabin-Peres Labor government rarely acknowledged it publicly, there were many other violations as well. . . . “We had books and books filled with violations,” this person told me, and added, “I saw Rabin and Peres so angry at what they had to eat from the Palestinians.”^[36]

But of course, this was the price of peace . . . letting them violate the agreement without complaining, lest those who so complain, ruin the chances for peace.^[37] Indeed, it was during the Oslo years that the Israeli peace camp first developed the techniques so fatal to the West after 2000, which I describe below as “cultural auto-immune dysfunction”: they attacked those who warned of the coming jihad as “enemies of peace.”^[38]

Thus, even as Jerusalem and Washington prepared for a grand finale to the peace process at Camp David in the summer of 2000, even as Israel’s media prepared their people for peace by dismissing the Hudaybiyyah talk and emphasizing the positive, Arafat’s media prepared Palestinians for war. Palestinian TV featured staged footage of Israeli troops murdering Palestinian children and raping their women―the full panoply of lethal narratives with which the PA incited its people to war.^[39] And none of the key decision-makers outside the Arab world paid any attention.

The Arab Muslim dynamics of maintaining honor (by fighting Israel) and avoiding shame (by not compromising with Israel), doomed the “delusional peace process” of Oslo to failure from the start.^[40] As for the people involved, who thought that they were “so close . . . within reach . . .” and that if only Israel had given more, it would have worked, they got played over and over.^[41] When, at Taba, in January 2001, Saeb Erakat said, “as long as Israel insists on Israeli sovereignty over the Wailing Wall, the Mount of Olives and the Jewish Quarter, there is nothing to talk about,” Israeli negotiator Hirschfeld notes in pain: “From the Israeli point of view, this was equal to saying that there was no place for an agreement.”^[42] Precisely. And that’s how Erakat felt from the start.^[43]

Instead of allowing themselves to understand, a determined school of “peace journalists,” an outgrowth of “Peace and Conflict Studies” that was especially strong in Israel, did everything it could to downplay any Palestinian behavior that might arouse opposition to the “peace process,” while emphasizing as much as possible their contributions―like misreporting the 1996 “amendment of the PLO charter” which never took place.^[44] For the Palestinian decision-makers, on the other hand, it was never close: the best those pursuing the negotiations could do was apologetically claim to their people that it was the first stage of the “inspiring idea,” the conquest of every inch of land from the river to the sea, and complain to outsiders about settlements—when for them, Tel Aviv was a settlement.

Why did Western strategists not consider that a “successful” deal would have led to more war? After all, according to zero-sum logic, the better the deal for the Palestinians—i.e., the “weaker” the Israelis—the more aggression would accompany its implementation.^[45] “What will be with Israel? Israel will come to an end.” Those are the only conditions whereby a current Arab leader can still maintain honor in the Arab public sphere, while engaged in the shameful (weak, womanly) behavior of negotiating with Israel: that is, by negotiating Israel’s destruction.

Thus, in the summer of 2000, while “peace journalism” had Israelis and Westerners feeling they were “so close” to a final resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, “war journalism” in Palestinian circles primed the culture to welcome Arafat returning from saying “no” at Camp David as a hero, and to cheer on the war against Israel as a valorous and necessary move against an enemy that rapes Palestinian women and targets children for death.^[46] And the peace camp in Israel, America and Europe prepared Western democracies for Y2KMind: when the jihadis attacked in 2000, they blamed the democracy

^[1] “Reiterat[ed] its vision of a region where two democratic States, Israel and Palestine, live side by side in peace within secure and recognized borders,” UN Security Council Resolution 2334 (December 12, 2016). In the aftermath of the Sbarro Pizza bombing of July 2001, Clyde Haberman described the Israeli response (seizure of Orient House) as a “direct blow to the heart of Palestinian nationalism” the “government house” a symbol of “their yearnings for a state,” “Israelis Grieve and Strike Back,” New York Times, August 11, 2001; cited in Jerold Auerbach, Print to Fit: The New York Times, Zionism and Israel, 1896-2016 (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2019), 176.

^[2] Gavin Esler, BBC Dateline London,

. On the logic of Oslo, see Ofira Seliktar, Doomed to Failure?: The Politics and Intelligence of the Oslo Peace Process (Santa Barbara: ABC/CLIO, 2009), 7-49; Karsh, Arafat’s War, chapter 7. On the role of progressive Peace and Conflict Studies in formulating this plan, see Steinberg, “Postcolonial Theory and the Ideology of Peace Studies,” in Post-Colonial Theory and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 115-18.

^[3] William B. Quandt, “The Urge for Democracy,” Foreign Affairs, 73:4 (July–August 1994): 2–7; “After the Gulf Crisis: Challenges for American Policy,” Arab American Affairs 35 (Winter 1990-91): 11-19. See chapter 7.

^[4] Kenneth Levin, The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege (Hanover, NH: Smith and Kraus, 2005), 344-57. For a typical example of the racist accusation (from an Israeli), see David Grossman, “Fictions Embraced by an Israel at War,” NYR, October 1, 2002.

^[5] Dror Moreh, The Gatekeepers (2012); script available at Springfield! Springfield.

^[6] Levin, Oslo Syndrome, 343-92.

^[7] Edward Alexander, Jewish Wars (New York: Routledge, 2011), 173; Shimon Peres, The New Middle East, 183. Peres’s book is a compendium of liberal cognitive egocentrism; and Alexander a systematic critique of the problem.

^[8] Yaacov Peri, head of Shin Bet, 1988-94, explaining Rabin’s thought at the outset of the Oslo Process. The Gatekeepers, script.

^[9] Connie Bruck, “The Wounds of Peace,” The New Yorker, October 14, 1996, gives a good sense of the apparent emotional connections even between Arafat and Rabin.

^[10] Adi Schwartz and Eytan Gilboa, “False Readiness: Expanding the Concept of Readiness in Conflict Resolution Theory,” International Studies Review (2021), 1–21.

^[11] Raphael Israeli, The Oslo Idea: The Euphoria of Failure (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2012), 58.

^[12] Yossi Melman, “Don’t Confuse Us with Facts,” Haaretz (Tel Aviv), Aug. 16, 2002; Levin, The Oslo Syndrome, 343-57; see also Levin’s discussion of Ari Shavit’s awakening in late 1997, 403-5.

^[13] The slogan has been attributed to Nasser, specifically in reference to destroying Israel. It appears on the wall behind Muhammad al Durah in the footage shot of his alleged murder. It is commonly invoked in reference to Israel, as in “Jordanian Friday Sermon: The Jews Have No Right to Palestine, Which Will Be Regained Only by Force, MEMRI, March 20, 2017.

^[14] Stephen J. Sosebee, “Yasser Arafat’s Return: New Beginning for Palestine,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Sept./Oct. 1994.

^[15] See chapter 8.

^[16] Appendix to the 1994 edition of Edward Saïd, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 338.

^[17] Said, “The Morning After,” London Review of Books, Oct. 21, 1993.

^[18] “Compromise is understood as humiliation, which is why political agreements between Muslims and other Muslims or non-Muslims are so difficult to reach. That is also why one almost never encounters Middle Eastern leaders who are prepared to compromise. From their perspective, compromise means you have given in, i.e., someone else has dominated you, a fate you must avoid at all costs. Honor goes only to the winner.” Harold Rhode, Modern Islamic Warfare: An Ancient Doctrine Marches On (Washington: Center for Security Policy, 2017), 10.

^[19] On the importance of perceptions of fairness in making peace negotiations acceptable, see Philippe Assouline and Robert Trager, “Concessions for Concessions Sake: Injustice, Indignation and the Construction of Intractable Conflict in Israel-Palestine,” Journal of Conflict Resolution. March 2021.

^[20] Khaled abu Toameh, “Palestinians: No to Normalization with the ‘Zionist entity,’” Gatestone, February 3, 2021.

^[21] Yasser Arafat, “Nobel Lecture,” 1994, Nobelprize.org.

^[22] Audio recording of Arafat speech in Johannesburg, “Arafat compares Oslo Accords to Muhammad’s Hudaybiyyah peace treaty, which led to defeat of the peace partners,” Palwatch, May 10, 1994.

^[23] For a serious discussion of the Hudaybiyyah Treaty as a key to Arafat’s thinking, and speeches in Arabic, see Israeli, The Oslo Idea, 62-69; Efraim Karsh, Arafat’s War: The Man and his Battle for Israeli Conquest (New York: Grove Press, 2003), 178-214.

^[24] Jonathan Shanzer, Fatah vs. Hamas: The Struggle for Palestine (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 37-49.

^[25] See nxx.

^[26] Faisal Husseini, al-Arabi (Cairo), June 24, 2001, in Special Dispatch No. 236, Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), July 6, 2001.

^[27] Fatah Central Committee member Abbas Zaki, “Goal is end of Israel, but ‘you can’t say that to the world,’” Al-Jazeera, September 23, 2011.

^[28] This is a seemingly permanent feature of Palestinian demopathy and Western dupedom: Landes, “The Demopath’s Lexicon: A Guide to Western Journalism between the River and the Sea,” Israel Affairs, 26:3 (2020): 311-329.

^[29] Melman, “Don’t Confuse Us with Facts”; idem, “Wild Card,” Haaretz, Aug. 9, 2002. Arafat was consistent and clear in Arabic and to Muslim audiences about where he stood, literally from before the signing of the Accords in Washington, Levin, Oslo Syndrome, 343-57.

^[30] Raymond Ibrahim, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West (New York: De Capo, 2018), xiv.

^[31] Dennis Ross, The Missing Peace: Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2004), 767-69, 776; similarly it is absent from Charles Enderlin, Shattered Dreams: The Failure of the Peace Process in the Middle East, trans. Susan Fairfield (New York: Other Press, 2002), 5-41; and Cheryl Rubenberg, The Palestinians in Search of a Just Peace (London: Lynne Reiner, 2003).

^[32] Karsh, Arafat’s War, 151–64.

^[33] Bruck, “Wounds of Peace,” 79.

^[34] Daniel Pipes, “Lessons from the Prophet Muhammad’s Diplomacy,” Middle East Quarterly, Sept. 1999; idem, “Arafat and the Treaty of Hudaybiya,” Sept. 10, 1999; idem, “How Dare You Defame Islam?” Commentary, November 1999; idem, “Do I Win a British ‘Islamophobia’ Award?” Lion’s Den, June 26, 2004. Pipes was more generous than Arafat, who, only weeks later, specified that the “treaty with the infidels was torn down two years later” (Karsh, Arafat’s War, 149).

^[35] Ehud Barak’s office prepared a white paper on Palestinian violations of the accord, released November 24, 2000: “Palestinian Authority and P.L.O. Non-Compliance with signed agreements and commitments: A record of bad faith and misconduct,” United Jerusalem. Although published two months after Arafat had opened the Oslo Trojan Horse, it met with much derision both within Israel and especially abroad: Aluf Benn, “White Paper Tiger Unleashed,” Haaretz, November 29, 2000.

^[36] Bruck, “Wounds of Peace.”

^[37] Bruck’s source fingers the fear of public humiliation that drove Peres and Rabin not to admit they were wrong about Arafat. Add to that the enormous (messianic) pressure to get the peace to succeed. See Golan Lahat’s “The Sacrifices for Peace,” The Messianic Temptation: The Rise and Fall of the Israeli Left. [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2004), 96-115.

^[38] Levin, Oslo Syndrome, 361-86.

^[39] Itamar Marcus, “Rape, Murder, Violence, and War for Allah against the Jews: Summer 2000 on Palestinian Television,” Palestinian Media Watch, Jerusalem, Sept. 11, 2000.

^[40] Levin, Oslo Syndrome, ix-xxi.

^[41] Gilead Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 1999-2001: Within Reach (London: Routledge, 2006).

^[42] Yair Hirschfeld, Track-Two Diplomacy toward an Israeli-Palestinian Solution, 1978-2014 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 251. The tendency of Israelis to blame themselves for the failure are extraordinary: in an entire book on how Israeli-Arab peace negotiations can be spoiled, where the overwhelming focus is on Israeli spoilers, the only “spoiling” behavior attributed to Erekat was his taking a nap: Spoiling and Coping with Spoilers: Israeli-Arab Negotiations, ed. Galia Golan and Gilead Sher (Bloomington, 2019), 19.

^[43] See his interview on Al Jazeera on March 27, 2009, in which he makes it clear that the Palestinians―neither Arafat in 2000, nor Abbas in 2009―would nor could make any concession on getting back “every single stone” of East Jerusalem, and getting back to ’67 borders was only “this generation’s goal”: “Chief Palestinian Negotiator Saeb Erekat: ‘Abbas Rejected Israel’s Proposal at Annapolis Like Arafat Rejected the Camp David 2000 Proposal,’” MEMRI, April 14, 2009.

^[44] Wolfsfeld, Media and the Path to Peace, only indirectly mentions this matter. In his discussion of the 1996 elections he makes no mention, despite its role in Netanyahu’s victory (pp. 104-36), and then in a retrospect on the elections, he mentions Netanyahu’s use of the Palestinian refusal as an illustration of Netanyahu’s demagoguery (183). Hirschfeld does not mention it at all (!). Karsh dedicates a chapter to the debacle: Arafat’s War, chapter 4.

^[45] Joel Fishman, “The Delusions of Oslo in the Service of Disengagement,” Makor Rishon, Aug. 20, 2004; Seliktar, Doomed to Failure?; Israeli, The Oslo Idea.

^[46] John Burns, “Hero’s Welcome for Arafat, From Those Who Showed Up,” New York Times, July 27, 2000.

No conflict has suffered more from a critical lack of honor-shame analysis in the last quarter of a century, than the Arab-Israeli conflict. As the result of a confluence of intellectual trends (postmodernism, postcolonialism, anti-Orientalism, peace anthropology) the role of honor-shame motivations in key decision-making in this conflict since the Oslo Accords has been systematically ignored. Indeed, the entire “Peace Process” was predicated on the rational, positive-sum assumption that, offered the right deal, Palestinians will say yes. As a result, scholars and policy makers alike have ignored abundant evidence of a limbic captivity to honor concerns among Arab patriarchal elites, so convinced were these Western analysts that their Peace and Conflict Studies formulas would work.

And yet, the affair turned into a fiasco of immeasurable proportions. As one observer who was in favor of the deal wrote in its aftermath:

It has long been obvious to all but the incurably or willfully blind that the 1993 agreement signed in Oslo between the government of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization was a horrendous blunder on Israel’s part. Rarely in history has a country so foolishly opened its gates to a Trojan horse as Israel did when it welcomed Yasir Arafat and his PLO brigades, handed over to them most of the Gaza Strip and much of the West Bank, and gave them the arms to impose their rule on the local inhabitants. How could such a mistake have been made by experienced political and military leaders, statesmen and generals whose careers had spanned a half-century of managing Israel’s bitter conflict with the Arabs?^[2]

In order to understand the role of hard zero-sum, shame-honor concerns in the attitude of Arabs toward Israel, one must first understand the traditional role of the Jew in the Muslim Arab honor-group. For the 13 centuries before Zionism, Jews had been subject to a political status in Muslim lands specifically designed around issues of honor (to Muslims) and shame (to Jews). Jews were dhimmi, “protected” from Muslim violence by their acceptance of daily public degradation and legal inferiority.^[3]

Noted Chateaubriand in the nineteenth century:

Special target of all [Muslim and Christian] contempt, the Jews lower their heads without complaint; they suffer all insults without demanding justice; they let themselves be crushed by blows. . . . Penetrate the dwellings of these people, you will find them in frightful poverty.^[4]

For more than a millennium, Arab and Muslim honor resided, among other places, in their domination and humiliation of their dhimmi—and when the occasional reformer equalized their legal status, he struck a heavy blow to Muslim honor. John Bowring, a British envoy to Egypt in the early nineteenth century noted the impact of Muhammad Ali’s modernizing reforms which eliminated the dhimma:

The Mussulmans . . . deeply deplore the loss of that sort of superiority which they all & individually exercised over & against the other sects. . . . A Mussulman . . . believes and maintains that a Christian—& still more a Jew—is an inferior being to himself.^[5]

Similar sentiments appeared among Southerners in the US, after the loss of slavery.^[6]

For the honor-driven Arab and Muslim political player, in the twentieth century as in the tenth century, the very prospect of an autonomous Jewish political entity in Dar al Islam constitutes a blasphemy against Islam, and an insult to Arab virility. This is not to say that every period and place of Muslim rule involved deliberate humiliation of dhimmi. Nor is it to say that all Arabs think like this. Triumphalist religiosity, even when dominant, has no monopoly on Islamic practice, and some Muslims prefer demotic religiosity with its dignity and cooperation.

Rather, this kind of testosterone-fueled, authoritarian discourse where Muslims must visibly dominate, periodically imposes its interpretation of “honor” on the entire community, often violently. Thus, while the Arab leadership and “Street” agreed that for the sake of Arab honor, Israel must be destroyed, some Arabs in 1948 Palestine viewed the prospect of Jewish sovereignty as a valuable opportunity, if only for their own independence as well.^[7] Triumphalists, however, viewed them as traitors to the Arab cause.^[8]

For the honor-driven Arabs, however, the situation in Palestine was infinitely worse than the “normal” honor-challenges: the Zionist threat did not come from an historically worthy foe, like the Western Christians, fellow warriors. It came from Jews, traditionally the most passive, abject, and cowardly of the populations over which Muslims ruled. As the Athenians explained to the Melians in the fifth century BCE:

One is not so much frightened of being conquered by a power which rules over others, as Sparta does, as of what would happen if a ruling power is attacked and defeated by its own subjects.^[9]

So, the prospect of an independent state of should-be dhimmis struck Arab leaders as more than humiliating. In their minds it literally endangered Islam. Thus, Rahman Azzam Pasha, the head of the newly formed Arab League, spoke for his “honor group” when in an interview with an Egyptian journalist, he threatened that “if the Zionists dare establish a state, the massacres we would unleash would dwarf anything which Genghis Khan and Hitler perpetrated.”^[10] As the Armenians had discovered a generation earlier, the mere suspicion of rebellion could engender Muslim genocide.^[11]

The military loss in 1948, therefore, constituted the most catastrophic possible outcome for this honor-group: seven Arab armies, representing the honor of hundreds of millions of Arabs (and Muslims), were defeated by fewer than a million Jews, the surviving remnant of the most devastating and efficient genocidal effort in history. Nothing could be more shattering than to fall to people so low on the scale that it was dishonorable even to fight them.^[12] And this humiliating event occurred on center stage of the new postwar global community. In the history of a global public, never has any single and so large a group suffered so much dishonor and shame in the eyes of so great―so global―an audience.^[13]

Thus, alongside the physical nakba (catastrophe) that struck hundreds of thousands of the Arab inhabitants of the former British Mandate Palestine as a result of the war of 1948, we find yet another, much greater, psychological catastrophe that struck the entire Arab world, and especially its leaders, a humiliation so immense that Arab political culture and discourse could not digest it, and from which it has yet to recover, even today. Initially, the refugees used the term nakba to reproach the Arab leaders who started and lost the war that so damaged their lives and a reproach to themselves, for listening to those leaders. One of the synonyms for nakba was “ammā sharnā wa-tla’nā (“when we blackened our faces and left”), i.e., when we followed the instructions of our leaders to disaster.^[14] Initially, nakba meant: “when we Arabs did it to ourselves.”

Constantine Zureiq, the first author to document and name the Nakba of 1948, laid the blame directly at the feet of the impotent blowhards who started the war of 1948 and lost it.

Seven Arab states declare war on Zionism in Palestine, stop, impotent before it, and turn on their heels. The representatives of the Arabs deliver fiery speeches in the highest government forums, warning what the Arab states and peoples will do if this or that decision be enacted. Declarations fall like bombs from the mouths of officials at the meetings of the Arab League, but when action becomes necessary, the fire is still and quiet, and steel and iron are rusted and twisted, quick to bend and disintegrate.^[15]

In a culture more open to self-criticism―what Zureiq was calling for―such observations might have led to the replacement of the honor-driven political elites with leaders more inclined to move ahead with positive-sum relations of the global politics of the world after World War II, the world of the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, the Geneva Conventions. But when appearances matter above all, any public criticism shames the nation, the people, and especially the leaders.

So, instead, in a state of intense humiliation and impotence on the world stage, the Arab leadership chose denial—the Jews did not, could not, have not won. The war was not—could never—be over until Arab-Muslim victory. If the refugees from this Zionist aggression disappeared, absorbed by their brethren in the lands to which they fled, this would acknowledge the intolerable: that Israel had won and was here to stay. And so, driven by rage at, and denial of, this global public shame, the Arab honor group redoubled the catastrophe of its own refugees. They made them suffer in camps, frozen in time at the moment of the humiliation, waiting and fighting to reverse that Zionist victory.^[16] The continued suffering of these sacrificial victims on the altar of Arab pride called out to the Arab world for vengeance against the Jews.^[17] In the meantime, in many places where Muslims held power, they drove their Jews out: both the number of refugees and the amount of confiscated and lost wealth exceeding substantially the damage to Arab refugees from the area now called Israel.^[18]

The Arab leadership’s interpretation of honor had them responding to the loss of their own hard zero-sum game—we’re going to massacre them—by adopting a negative-sum strategy. Damaging the Israeli “other” became paramount, no matter how much that effort might hurt Arabs, especially Palestinians. When another several million Arabs fell under Israeli control in 1967―the Naksa or “setback, or defeat”―the strategy remained the same, “No recognition, no negotiations, no peace . . .”—eventually, no Israel.^[19] Sooner leave millions of Muslims under Jewish rule than negotiate a solution. Sooner die than live humiliated, sooner live in misery than live in equality. As one Arab told the Peel Commission in 1939 why he had rioted against the Jews when their arrival had so greatly improved conditions for everyone: “Better a mat of my own than a shared house. In 1948 that became “better refugee camps than two states between the river and the sea.”

To positive-sum players this negative sum approach seems like the height of irrationality, but it proves a surprisingly durable choice among human game-players.^[20] The zero sum joke becomes negative-sum―“poke out both of my eyes if only I can damage one of my enemy’s.” And alas, the Palestinians were “blessed” with “friends” who approved. Thus, their negative-sum leaders had willing allies among European powers who, behind the scenes, were happy to leave the Arab world stewing in its revenge fantasies, and the state of the Jews in a permanent state of angst.^[21]

By the late twentieth century, in the hands of the genocidal apocalyptic cult of Hamas, the negative-sum formula became, “sooner commit suicide to kill Jews than make peace with them.”^[22] As one Palestinian put it to an Israeli at the height of the Oslo terror war: “For us, victory is seeing you suffer. That’s all we want. The more we suffer, the more you’ll suffer.”^[23] A Hamas leader, in the early, glorious years of the Oslo Jihad, combined fantasies of omnipotence with the necessity of humiliating Israel:

Tomorrow, our nation [Islam not Palestine] will sit on the throne of the world. . . . Tomorrow we will lead the world, Allah willing. Apologize today [you infidels], before remorse will do you no good. Our nation is moving forwards, and it is in your interest to respect a victorious nation. . . . Allah willing, before they die, Israel will experience humiliation and degradation every day.^[24]

Even among the most Westernized Arabs, the wound of Israel’s existence cuts deep, as does the instinct to scapegoat Israel for Arab failures. Ahmed Sheikh, editor in chief of Al Jazeera, consummate professional with children in the best international schools, blamed Israel for the lack of democracy in the Arab world:

The day when Israel was founded created the basis for our problems. . . . It’s because we always lose to Israel. It gnaws at the people in the Middle East that such a small country as Israel, with only about 7 million inhabitants, can defeat the Arab nation with its 350 million. That hurts our collective ego. The Palestinian problem is in the genes of every Arab. The West’s problem is that it does not understand this.^[25]

Based on his blaming Israel for the Arab failure, Sheikh (who is a Palestinian, and may, therefore, exaggerate the extent to which his own people’s complexes permeates the entire Arab world), comes to the conclusion that the way to democracy lies not in ending the irredentist fight with Israel and dealing constructively with the blow to the Arab ego of “always losing” to (modern) Jews, but rather in the Arabs’ defeating Israel, and then they’ll build democracies.

His thinking nicely illustrates a lack of understanding of the kind of demotic values and self-critical learning curves necessary to build democracies. But at least on one point, Sheikh is right: The West’s problem is that, in their deep and unshakeable cognitive egocentrism, they don’t understand this honor-driven onēidophobia in the Arab world when it comes to Israel. As a result, they make catastrophic miscalculations.

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^[1] A more complete version in Landes, “Oslo’s Misreading of an Honor-Shame Culture.” Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs 13, no. 2 (2019), https://www.academia.edu/41012401/ Oslos_Misreading_of_an_Honor-Shame_Culture.

^[2] Hillel Halkin, “Review of The Oslo Syndrome by Kenneth Levin,” Commentary September 2005.

^[3] On dhimmi, see chapter xxx..

^[4] Chateaubriand, Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (Lille, 1869) 275f; in English translation “Chateaubriand on the Oppression of Jews at Jerusalem,” Zion Blogspot, June 26, 2005.

^[5] Quoted in William R Polk, The Opening of South Lebanon, 1788-1840 (Cambridge, MA, 1963), 138. Other nineteenth-century Western observers noted the same Arab-Muslim Judeophobia: Saul S. Friedman, Land of Dust (Washington, DC, 1982), 136.

^[6] Greenberg, Honor and Slavery.

^[7] Cohen, Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917–1948 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009).

^[8] Nashashibi vs Husseini clans discussed in Cohen, Army of Shadows, chapter 2 (“Who is a Traitor”). For a modern update, see the response of Palestinian leaders to Palestinians who either help Israelis hit by terror attacks (“Palestinian who saved Jewish kids after terror attack gets Israeli residency,” Times of Israel, August 7, 2019) or attend the Bahrain conference on economic development (Khaled Abu Toameh and Yassir Okbi, “After Threat from US, PA Frees Businessman Who Attended Bahrain Summit,” July 1, 2019).

^[9] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 5.89.

^[10] The quote has been problematized by some scholars (Benny Morris, “Revisionism on the West Bank,” National Interest, June 28, 2010). Barnett and Karsh argue for its validity: “Azzam’s genocidal threat,” Middle East Quarterly (Fall 2011), 85-88.

^[11] Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi, The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2019); Mark Krikorian, “The Jihad-Genocide of the Armenians,” National Review, April 24, 2015.

^[12] On the dishonor of even competing with a foe without honor, see Pierre Bourdieu, “The Sentiment of Honour in Kabyle Society,” in Honour and Shame the Values of Mediterranean Society, ed. John Peristiany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 191-94.

^[13] Richard Rubenstein, “Defeat, Rage, and Jew-Hatred,” Journal of Antisemitism, 1:1 (2009): 95-138.

^[14] Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod, Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 253f.

^[15] Constantine Zurayk, The Meaning of the Disaster (1948 [Arabic], 1956), https://archive.org/details/zurayk-nakba.

^[16] Mahmoud Darwish perpetuates this suspension in time: “an extended present that promises to continue in the future,” “Not to begin at the end,” Al Ahram Weekly On-line, May 10-16, 2001; English translation, Zahi Damuni, Al Awdah. On refugee camps as a weapon of war and the erosion of Western resistance, Asaf Romirowsky and Alex Joffe, Religion, Politics, and the Origins of Palestine Refugee Relief (New York: Palgrave, 2013).

^[17] Asaf Romirowsky and Louise Ellman, “UNRWA & the Right of Return,” The Henry Jackson Society, June 18, 2012.

^[18] Forgotten Millions: The Modern Jewish Exodus from Arab Lands, ed. Malka Hillel Shulewitz (London, 1999).

^[19] The three no’s of Khartoum. Yoram Meital tries to downplay Arab rejectionism: “The Khartoum Conference and Egyptian Policy after the 1967 War: A Reexamination,” Middle East Journal, 54:1 (Winter, 2000): 64-82.

^[20] For a good example of the way “Right of Return” for Palestinian refugees struck Westerners as irrational, but made perfect sense from the perspective of zero-sum logic, see Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf, The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2020).

^[21] David Pryce-Jones, Betrayal: France, the Arabs and the Jews (New York: Encounter, 2006); John Loftus and Mark Arens, The Secret War against the Jews (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994), 125-324.

^[22] See Oliver and Steinberg, Martyrs’ Square.

^[23] Ami Ayalon and Iyad Saraj, discussed chapter 12 n11.

^[24] Khaled Mash’al, “The Nation of Islam Will Sit at the Throne of the World and the West Will Be Full of Remorse when it is too Late,” MEMRI, February 3, 2006.

^[25] Pierre Heumann, “An Interview With Al-Jazeera Editor-in-Chief Ahmed Sheikh,” World Politics Review, December 7, 2006; analysis, Landes, “Why Israel’s existence prevents Arab Democracy,” Augean Stables December 8, 2006.

September 17. X: Bush’s Speech to US Muslims after 9/11

Let’s begin with the statement, pronounced at the Islamic Center in DC, on September 17, 2001 by then-President George Bush, less than a week after the event:

Like the good folks standing with me, the American people were appalled and outraged at last Tuesday’s attacks. And so were Muslims all across the world. Both Americans and Muslim friends and citizens, tax-paying citizens, and Muslims in nations were just appalled and could not believe what we saw on our TV screens. These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith. And it’s important for my fellow Americans to understand that. The English translation is not as eloquent as the original Arabic, but let me quote from the Koran, itself: “In the long run, evil in the extreme will be the end of those who do evil. For that they rejected the signs of Allah and held them up to ridicule.” The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.^[1]

It would be difficult to fit more folly into so short a speech; indeed, when properly understood, it constitutes a combination of systematic disinformation for kuffār (i.e., for American citizens) and a summons to jihad for Muslims, all delivered by the leader of the most powerful nation in Dar al Harb, just after a massive jihadi assault on his nation and his people. Given both the content and the wooden delivery, one suspects that this was not written by George Bush or even his speech writers, but by, or with strong “assistance” from, a Muslim triumphalist.^[2]

Bush assures us:

Like the good folks standing with me, the American people were appalled and outraged at last Tuesday’s attacks. And so were Muslims all across the world. Both Americans and Muslim friends and citizens, tax-paying citizens, and Muslims in nations were just appalled and could not believe what we saw on our TV screens.

Among the good folks standing next to him was Nihad Awad, a member of CAIR and a vocal supporter of Hamas, and, when it came to Israel at least, a fully committed terrorist (targeting civilians as a right of “resistance”).^[3] If Amir, the fictional, fully-assimilated, secular, American Muslim in Ayad Akhtar’s play Disgraced, felt a tug of pride at 9-11, imagine how someone like Yussuf al Qaradawi, who preached the conquest of the West and cheered on Palestinian suicide bombing against Israeli children, felt at the sight of the Twin Towers coming down? ^[4] Did he see that as a civic tragedy? Or payback to the United States for all the indignities its prominence showered on triumphalist Muslims?

As for “Muslims all across the world,” the number who celebrated wildly was not small, and included not just Palestinians^[5] and other Arab Muslims, but even non-Muslim Arabs, like Lebanese Christians. An Italian journalist who happened to be in Beirut that day was stunned that “90% of Arabs thought America had it coming,” a response heard anecdotally from the celebrators and soon confirmed by an Egyptian poll that put that number at 91%.^[6] Even as the party-run press in Egypt toed Mubarak’s pro-American line, the opposition papers exulted: “Rejoicing is a national and religious obligation.”^[7] The Syrian, Arab Writers Association Chairman wrote: “I felt like someone delivered from the grave; my lungs filled with air and I breathed in relief, as I’d never breathed before.”^[8] Saudi doctors, trained in America (often by Jewish doctors), and their patients, receiving Western medical care, clapped spontaneously at the sight on their TVs of the Twin Towers collapsing.^[9]

Alas, 9-11 was a source of unalloyed joy to anti-Americans the world over, a fortiori to anti-American Muslims, no matter what expressions of sympathy came from diplomatic voices including the Iran ayatollahs.^[10] Only the most fantastic, egocentric, reading of reality could believe that Muslims around the world were “as appalled” as Americans about 9-11. And yet, that is precisely what the jihadis wanted the kuffār to believe, and that is what President Bush assured his people was true. It was also what so many of us, good citizens, wanted to believe: “i think 99% of arab people because they are human beings would be totally against what happened.”^[11] A perfect formula for calling anyone who disagrees a racist, and a classic liberal conflation of human and humane.

On one level, good for us, that we think that way! Yitzhak Katznelson could exclaim about those who went through the Holocaust, “Blessed are we that we could not believe it!”^[12] But we who come after, alas, no longer have the luxury of being unable to imagine collective murderous malice.

Which brings us to the second fantasy propounded by Bush in this speech. “These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith. And it’s important for my fellow Americans to understand that.” In fact, genuine Muslim sources―Qur’an, Hadith, Shariah, and commentaries―take positions that directly contradict Bush’s claims. In the more belligerent versions of this triumphalist discourse, Qur’anic verses and subsequent literature call for violence against kuffār (infidels).^[13] According to one not unpopular opinion among triumphalist Muslims, there is no such thing as an innocent infidel: kuffār by definition “are guilty of not believing in God,” literally (and deliberately) “covering-up” the truth of the Prophet’s message.^[14] That is to say, some Islamic thinking doesn’t even recognize the status “innocent civilian.”

No one gains more from these obfuscations than the very Caliphators who have undertaken this outrageous asymmetrical war, and still need cover while their war is in the covert stage. Westerners may think badly of Bin Laden, but every other Muslim, whether “of good will” or deep admirers of Bin Laden, must not be blamed. Twenty-first-century French talking heads have a favorite expression: “pas d’amalgames”―no lumping. Normally, they use this to mean you can’t lump the violent extremists with the “vast majority of moderate peaceful Muslims,” who should not be tarred with suspicion that they share the radical beliefs of the jihadis.^[15] Ironically, Bush―and the many people who continued this approach―made a massive amalgame of all Muslims (aside from the mad zealots) and presented them and their beliefs as mirror images of modern Christianity. Everybody knows that “no faith teaches people to massacre innocents.”^[16] [Correct. Infidel are not civilians. - rl]

Mousab Hassan Youssef, the former Muslim, son of one of the founders of Hamas, remarked ominously: “When the leader of the free world says Islam is a religion of peace, he creates a perfect climate for terrorism,”^[17] by which he meant that jihadis who prepare their terror campaigns operate most effectively among an infidel population that believes Muslims are peaceful by religious principle.

President Bush then read out a passage from the Qur’an to prove his radically misleading previous statement about the fundamental tenets of the Muslim faith:

The English translation is not as eloquent as the original Arabic, but let me quote from the Koran, itself: “In the long run, evil in the extreme will be the end of those who do evil. For that they rejected the signs of Allah and held them up to ridicule” [Qur’an 30:10]. The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.

This transition from quote to conclusion is puzzling. First, Bush reads, as proof that Islam is a “religion of peace,” a passage from the Qur’an that says nothing about peace, but rather focuses on the punishment, the “evil that will, eventually, befall those who do evil.”^[18] And what evil is this that will be punished so badly? That act that Muslim triumphalists find most unbearably offensive: people who “reject the signs of Allah and mock them.”

In other words, this passage, selected for the president’s recital, might give us insight into the response of people like Nihad Awad to 9-11. It was just deserts for American arrogance, or, as the good Reverend Wright put it in his own burst of Schadenfreude, “America’s chickens coming home to roost!”^[19] As a Saudi doctor explained to a visitng American-trained Muslim doctor: “It’s time you realized: America’s been doing this to people all over the planet. Murder. It was their turn. They deserved this.”^[20]

The verse, cited to illustrate “Islam is peace” has nothing to do with peace, but rather with punishment. The Sura comes, according to the traditional Muslim chronology, at the end of Muhammad’s initial preaching in Mecca (621 CE? = -1 AH), on the cusp of the shift from the Qur’an’s more peaceful (earlier, Meccan) verses to the (Medinan) verses of the sword. The surah is named al rum (Rome) because it begins with prophecies about the fates of the two great empires of the day, Rome (Byzantines) and Persia (Sassanids).

In contemporary Caliphator apocalyptic narrative, the US is the second ‘Ad, the arrogant survivor of the destruction of the great Eastern Empire, the USSR, which fell in 1991, shortly after Bin Laden’s jihad had chased them from Afghanistan in 1989.^[21] It promises that kuffār, especially those who ridicule triumphalist Muslims, will eventually get the punishment they deserve. If this “eloquent verse” has any meaning in the context of 9-11, it is that the attack was a harbinger of those wars of revenge and dominion to come.

So, if the logic of the Qur’anic verse has nothing to do with peace, why bring it up as a proof of Islam’s peaceful nature? Because the Muslim advisors of the speech offered it up, and no one had the presence of mind to point out the problem? And if the logic here is so transparent, why have so many people, left and right, for so long, quoted the speech as if it were a great contribution to progressive principles?

Indeed, almost a decade later, when Global Jihad was far stronger than in 2001/1422, the New York Times ran an op-ed by Samuel Freedman, praising Bush for this speech―one of the few good things he had said during his time in office.^[22] Columnist E. J. Dionne wrote fondly of this “remarkable speech” in which Bush “stood up for the rights of American Muslims when doing so was essential.”^[23] And in response to Trump’s blunt talk about the problems with Islam, Bush’s daughter retweeted her father’s remark as a rebuke.^[24]

One of President Bush’s speechwriters explained why he (and others) thought the response was so apt at the moment―itself a classic formulation of Y2KMind. Presidential statements about Islam as a peaceful religion are not only appropriate but “theologically sophisticated,” because presidents should promote the cause of those who hold values consistent with democratic governance.

Every religious tradition has forces of tribalism and violence in its history, background and theology; and, every religious tradition has sources of respect for the other. And you emphasize, as a political leader, one at the expense of the other in the cause of democracy. That is a great American tradition that we have done with every religious tradition that comes to the United States—include them as part of a natural enterprise and praise them for their strongly held religious views, and emphasize those portions that are most compatible with those ideals.^[25]

The logic clearly strikes Michael Gerson as inescapable: if you want people to be peaceful, treat them peacefully, include them, praise them, and emphasize what you [think you] share in common.

But this is therapeutic rhetoric, designed to draw people into the Western positive-sum world of democracy and a free public sphere, not a realistic description of either triumphalist Islam or many of the reactions in the Muslim community, including Muslims in America. For example, at a rally held at Lafayette Park, Washington, DC, less than a year before 9-11, an advisor to President Clinton on Muslim Affairs, Abdurahman Alamoudi, who was later found guilty of raising funds for terrorist organizations, asked the assembled if, like him, they support Hamas (the creators of Islamic suicide terror). They shouted their agreement, while Mahdi Bray, a black American convert to Islam and major player in the future “anti-war movement,” fist-pumped his approval. Alamoudi then cried out for takbir―the call to acknowledge the faith―to which the crowd responded “Allahu Akhbar.”^[26] While the 9-11 Commission admits that US intelligence did not see suicide terror coming, American Muslim leaders, Caliphators, had publicly promoted Muslim suicide terror targeting infidel (Israeli) civilians for years in the nation’s capital.

In London, on November 18, 2001 (five weeks after 9-11), tens of thousands gathered to protest the coming war in Afghanistan. Later, one of the Muslim participants recalled how the

… the climate of recognition and acceptance was epitomized . . . when the adhaan (call to prayer)―it was Ramadan―was announced over a packed and silent Trafalgar Square to resound in the heart of empire, and so, inscribing another line in the post-colonial history of Britain.”^[27]

Does that mean that in his mind, the respect that infidels paid that day, publicly, in the heart of the (former) empire, prefigured Islam’s integration as another civil religion that has renounced its triumphalist imperialism and any resort to coercion and violence against infidels? Or that it prefigures the former empire’s fall to those imperialists now responding to that call to devotion to Allah?

The therapeutic rhetoric about Islam as a religion of peace and the “vast majority of Muslims” as “moderate,” deliberately ignores the possibility that their strongly held religious views, for which we praise them by projecting our civic mindset onto them, are not so friendly. It ignores how tribal elements are more strongly at play in current Islam―triumphalism, supersessionism, imperialism―than in any other major religion to which democracies have extended the right to enjoy its bounteous (and, historically, extremely rare) public sphere of freedom of religion.

How Muslims interpret the Qur’anic command al wa’la w’al ba’ra―love good and hate evil―for example, should matter to infidels.^[28] Most Westerners, even alleged experts, do not know or do not like to dwell on how often the exegesis of that phrase is tribal, zero-sum: love the good (all your fellow Muslims), hate the evil (unbelievers, all). This interpretation reflects the basic premodern notion of justice, my side right or wrong.^[29] As a religious claim, it is both supersessionist and triumphalist, and interacts badly with civic monotheism; indeed, it destroys any growth of civic monotheism by treating “lax” Muslims as apostates, deserving death.

The blanket extension of the status of “moderate, peaceful Muslims” to all but the most violent jihadis and their open supporters, ignores the possibility that some Muslims are accept to a public sphere in which people―kuffār!―can say things that offend Muslims, rather than show respect, as they must, for Muslim honor. But how many:? It ignores the possibility that such hostile Muslims (again, how many?) will systematically exploit our good will to their imperialist ends, and that the first victim of their power challenges and grabs, will be the weak among their own people, especially Muslim women. They have no protection from the Caliphators in Muslim majority countries, and certainly not from Western progressives, especially feminists, who trip over themselves not to offend those claiming to speak for “the vast majority of Muslims.”^[30] This ignorance constitutes a kind of aggressive naïveté built on a profound denial of even the possibility of bad news about Muslims.

It’s a real-life parody of the cold-war joke: in this updated one, a liberal is bragging to a Muslim about how free democracies are. “Why, I could stand on the White House lawn and say the president of the United States is an idiot, and I could teach from the pulpits of theology schools that the Bible is an historical document, written not by God or his prophets, but many centuries later by political hacks.” And the Muslim responds, “So could I.” When this joke is on you, when you are ready to take that answer as a legitimate defense of Islam, then no matter how smart you are, you cannot identify those triumphalist Muslims who target you even as they abuse their communities, their women, and their children.^[31] Indeed, those so incapable, end up declaring that calling a non-progressive POTUS an idiot is an offense worthy of firing.^[32]

And yet, that is precisely the problem that faced Americans (and, although they didn’t know it, Western infidels all over), in the wake of 9-11. As Zuhdi Jasser, a civic American Muslim, discovered when he tried to rally public Muslim support for the United States, that rare place in the world where all Muslims could freely practice their devotion to Islam in peace (certainly not in the Muslim world), he discovered that much of the leadership in the Islamic community, both religious and lay, not only refused to join, but actively opposed him.^[33] And by and large, the media favored and gave far more attention to these radical opponents of an open society.

The problem goes well beyond a simple contradiction: for example, the fact that the Qur’anic verse about punishment offers nothing remotely like proof of the assertion that Islam is a religion of peace. The real problem concerns whose reading becomes dominant: Bush’s speech makes perfect sense as a strategic demand of da’wah (“summons,” proselytizing) operating as an adjunct to jihad: it asks the infidel to deny that the violence has anything to do with Islam, a “religion of peace” and compassion, even as one makes clear to “mocking kuffār” that “if you want peace, then please Allah and do not offend Muslims.” That’s how to avoid being the target of jihadi violence.

So the president of the United States, the most powerful nation on earth, embodiment of the success of modernity, hegemon of a post-World-War II period of exceptional peace and productivity, center of a vigorous culture that, via technological revolutions in transportation and communications, filled the whole world with its presence, had just responded to a spectacular attack in its heartland by giving a speech that systematically misinformed the kuffār―his fellow Americans―and waved the flag of jihad before triumphalist Muslims the world over.

For statements that literally inverted both reality and the balance of forces between an open and tolerant society (whatever its flaws) on the one hand, and a vindictive and oppressive society (overflowing with flaws) on the other, at least by progressive standards, this speech, written for, and delivered by, George Bush on September 16, 2001, at the Islamic Center of DC, ranks among the most damaging. This was a massive cognitive-war victory for Islam, literally while the smoke was still billowing at ground zero, and a correspondingly damaging loss for the West. One might be tempted to view it as a Nakba for civil global culture, a collapse of democratic culture’s Maginot line. Well intentioned, no doubt; but one does not promote intelligent virtue with such crucial inaccuracies.

Scholars who had learned about Islam in the academy before Said’s postcolonial effect (1980s on), might have responded to Bush’s speech with a loud guffaw, knowing as they did Islam’s long bloody history of both jihad (Muslims killing infidels) and fitna (Muslims killing Muslims), that go back to the prophet’s life and immediately following his death.^[34] Had they done a minimum of Religious Studies, they would know that Islam’s sustained, imperialist warfare over its first centuries surpassed that of any other sustained monotheistic faith.^[35] They also would have known about the impact those violent hostilities towards infidels and heretics had on the very language of the Qur’an, on its exegesis, and on the shape of the bloody Sun’ni-Shi’i split that re-emerges in unthinkable violence today from Yemen to Al-Shams (Levant) and, since Obama’s deal with the Shi’is in Iran, has driven Saudi Arabia towards Israel (!).

Granted, we all wanted, for the sake of the civil society we prize, that our leader calm the waters of vigilante violence against American Muslims, against this small minority, who were not guilty of this terrible act. So, one can approve of the speech as therapeutic rhetoric, perhaps, but not a description of empirical reality. One would have expected our information professionals, who knew better, to host a national conversation in which infidels learned about Muslim triumphalism, the worldview of those Muslims who did attack us, and tried to understand why so many cheered, openly and privately, at such a mighty blow against the kuffār, especially against the most powerful kuffār, the “USA.” One would expect, minimally, that after 9-11, American nonbelievers would learn, from their teachers, their professors, their journalists, their public intellectuals, about Dar al Islam, Dar al Harb, military jihad, various interpretations of al wa’la w’al ba’ra, and the laws of the dhimma.

Not at all.^[36] On the contrary, both academics and journalists, strove mightily to promote Bush’s speech. Even―especially―in the depiction of the attackers in the 9-11 memorial.^[37] And everywhere, from the school curricula to the nonreciprocal dialogue groups, to the strictures of Homeland Security intelligence, one finds the effects of this bizarre assertion that Islam means peace and nothing else. Any violence involved? Can’t be Islam. As Brian Paddick said in the name of the London Police force after the 7-7 2005 attacks: “As far as I am concerned, Islam and terrorists are two words that do not go together.”^[38]

The same trope thus moved from high diplomatic rhetoric on global TV (i.e., face-saving discourse), to security intelligence (i.e., self-defense). What a cogwar victory for Caliphators! Enough to inspire some to believe, that this crazy idea of Islamic global supremacy just might have a chance. One might be forgiven for taking Bin Laden seriously when he claimed to be the strong horse. Of course, if one said so out loud, one ran the risk of accusations of paranoid Islamophobia for suggesting that both the jihadi message had great resonance within the Umma, and the response of those eager to minimize it, served the Caliphators’ ends.

And sure enough, Americans twice elected to office a president who took Bush’s “policy” on Islam still further, arguing that Islam is by definition a peaceful religion and that any violence coming from Muslims has nothing to do with Islam and its teachings, and to say so, is to insult the vast majority―”99.9%” (!)―of moderate Muslims who reject “this medieval interpretation of Islam.”^[39] This led to some grimly comic moments in Congressional hearings, where administration officials sounded like automatons programmed not to think, but to repeat newspeak.^[40] Indeed, in the acceptable public discourse anyone talking about various aspects of Muslim triumphalism―Islamism, sharia, jihad, wala’ w’al bara’―was automatically relegated to the margins of the public sphere; they were Islamophobes, bent on making things worse, hate-mongers encouraging people to dislike Muslims and Islam. They won’t make it into mainstream publications, and so they publish it where “good people” don’t read.

Some mainstream news agencies systematically filtered out any awareness of belligerent Islamic teachings and attitudes. The BBC seemed to implement the policy of keeping terrorism and Islam apart. Thus, when the BBC’s HardTalk host, Stephen Sackur, interviewed radical Islamist Anjem Choudhary in the wake of the 7-7 (2005) London transport bombings, he first found out that according to some Muslims, no non-Muslim was innocent; that infidels were, by definition, guilty of rejecting Islam.^[41] Sackur was stunned. “You mean, when Huzb-ut-Tahrir leader Omar Bakri condemns the killing of innocents in the 7-7 attacks, he’s only talking about Muslims?” Precisely.

Well into the teens of the new century, when I spoke to audiences, whether public, academic, or even members of Homeland Security, most people still did not know what Dar al Islam and the other key triumphalist terms mean.^[42] What more could Caliphator Da’īs hope for than kuffār leaders who disinform their own people about the enemy they face? This self-imposed ban on discussion of “radical Islam” inflicted a critical blindness among Western policymakers and intelligence gatherers; it produced the cognitive disorientation embodied in the meaningless term “war on terror.” It accordingly strengthened the Caliphators and weakened more civil (less aggressive) Muslims whom they targeted as lax if not apostate. This approach continues to generate an ongoing catastrophe in which Western progressives validate the victimizers as (resisting) victims (e.g., Palestinian jihadis) and abandon dissident religious minorities in the Middle East―Jews, Druze, Bedouin, Maronites, Christians, Zoroastrians, Yazidis, Berbers―to the tender mercies of these predatory triumphalists.^[43] Israel alone has successfully resisted . . . provoking moral hysteria in some corners of the West.

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Whence this critical, possibly fatal ignorance about an enemy that has openly declared war on Western society?

There are many answers, most involving some acknowledgment of fear of offending triumphalist Muslims (below, chapter 13), most prominent in the media’s refusal to use the word terror for jihadis who attack civilians. First, I will examine two explanations for the self-weakening attitudes towards Islam that illustrate less the push of the jihadis, than the pull of a peculiar Western folly that Caliphators systematically exploit to assault the West.

^[1] “‘Islam is Peace,’ Says President: Remarks by the President at Islamic Center of Washington, DC,” September 17, 2001.

^[2] Michael Gerson, “Bush, Obama set pattern—condemning Islam is wrong course,” Desert News Opinion, February 10, 2015; Napp Nazworth, “Should Presidents Call Islam a ‘Religion of Peace’?: Two George W. Bush Officials Debate,” Christian Post, Nov 21, 2014. For a belated revelation of how much Muslim Brotherhood affiliated Caliphators had penetrated the White House, see Ryan Mauro, “Bush was to Meet Muslim Brotherhood Affiliates on 9/11,” Clarion Project, April 2, 2005.

^[3] The career of Nihad Awad offers a fine example of a “moderate” Caliphator, executive director of CAIR, whose sympathies lie with Hamas and Hizballah: “We do not and will not condemn any liberation movement inside Palestine or Lebanon,” Investigative Project Profile. [After October 7, he cheered Hamas on. -rl]

^[4] Ayad Akhtar, Disgraced: A Play (New York: Little Brown, 2013). On Qaradawi, see chapter 6.

^[5] See n120.

^[6] On Christian Arabs in Beirut, see Elisabetta Burba, “An eyewitness to Arab 9/11 celebrations in Beirut,” Wall Street Journal, September 22, 2001; on NY-trained Saudi doctors’ joy, see Qanta Ahmed, In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female Doctor’s Journey in the Saudi Kingdom. (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks Inc., 2008), 395-411. Muslim responses: Tantor, “Muslims celebrated 9-11,” BlackFive, September 10, 2012. In the famous “Dinner Party Tape” (released December 13, 2001) one of Osama’s men described an Egyptian family exploding with joy at the footage, like their team won at soccer: http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/12/13/tape.transcript/.

^[7] “Terror in America (8),” MEMRI, Special Dispatch 274, September 25, 2001.

^[8] Ibid. (9).

^[9] Ahmed, “9-11 in Saudi Arabia,” In the Land of Invisible Women, chapter 37.

^[10] For a list of the dutifully sympathetic diplomatic statements, see “Reactions to 9-11: Muslim World and Middle East,” Wikipedia.

^[11] Comment on Burba’s article in the Wall Street Journal (see n9). Shades of my student who thought Daniel Goldhagen “dehumanized” those German policemen who exterminated Jews because he portrayed them as sadistic, thereby confusing human and humane: Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (New York: Vintage, 1997).

^[12] “We could not believe it because of the Image of God that is in us. . . . We did not believe it could happen because we are human beings” Yithak Katznelson, Vittel Diary (Tel-Aviv: HaKibbutz HaMeuchad, 1972), 83-84.

^[13] David Cook, Understanding Jihad (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 5-31; David Bukay, “Islam’s Hatred of the Non-Muslim,” Middle East Quarterly (Summer 2013): 11-20.

^[14] Steven Sackur and Anjem Choudhary, HardTalk, August 8, 2005, video and transcript: https://keeptonyblairforpm.wordpress.com/2008/09/09/transcript-anjem-choudary-hardtalk-interview-77-london-bombings/.

^[15] On the common use of the amalgam to lump diaspora Jews with the “crimes” of Israel, see chapter 1, n77.

^[16] President Obama, “Transcript: President Obama’s remarks on the execution of journalist James Foley by Islamic State,” Washington Post, August 20, 2014.

^[17] Speech to Jerusalem Post conference, NYC, May 23, 2016, http://www.israelvideonetwork.com/the-son-of-a-top-hamas-leader-just-said-something-that-will-completely-shock-you/, at 07:28.

^[18] Note that three days earlier at the national prayer service in the Washington Cathedral, Muzammil Siddiqi expressed similar sentiments: “but those that lay the plots of evil, for them is a penalty terrible, and the plotting of such shall not abide,”

.

^[19] Jeremiah Wright, “The real sermon given by Pastor Wright,” September 16, 2001,

; Daniel Pipes, “America’s Chickens are Coming Home to Roost,” Lion’s Den, Mar 13, 2008.

^[20] Ahmed, In the Land of Invisible Women, 400.

^[21] David Cook, Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005), chapter 7.

^[22] Samuel Freedman, “Six Days after 9-11,” New York Times, September 8, 2012.

^[23] E. J. Dionne, Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism―From Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (Simon and Schuster, 2016), 199.

^[24] Leo Shvedsky, “Jenna Bush Tweets Dad’s Own Words on Islam to Shame Trump,” Good, February 1, 2017.

^[25] Nazworth, “Should Presidents Call Islam a ‘Religion of Peace’?”

^[26] Mahdi Bray, Lafayette Park Rally 10/28/2000, The IPT, https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=44&v. On Hamas’ creation of the theology of Muslim suicide terror, see Oliver and Steinberg, Martyr’s Square.

^[27] Andrew Murray and Lindsey German, Stop the War: The story of Britain’s biggest mass movement (London, Bookmarks Publications, 2005), 59. For some clips of speeches and comments from participants, see “Anti-War Protest, London, November 2001,” David Wheeler Films.

^[28] Raymond Ibrahim, “When Muslims Betray Non-Muslim Friends and Neighbors: Why Islamic treachery in the Middle East should concern Americans,” FrontPage, July 9, 2015. On the doctrine of al wa’la w’al ba’ra, see Bukay, “Islam’s Hatred of the Non-Muslim”; Harold Rhode, “The Concept of Brotherhood in Islam: How Muslims View Each Other and How They View Non-Muslims,” Gatestone, November 9, 2011; Mohamed bin Ali, “The Islamic Doctrine of Al-Wala’ wal Bara’ (Loyalty and Disavowal) in Modern Salafism,” PhD Dissertation, University of Exeter, 2012, especially chapter 5.

^[29] See chapter 6.

^[30] On the issue of feminism and Caliphators, see xxx-xx.

^[31] The deliberate abuse of Palestinian children for the war on Israel was so unbelievable to Catherine Nay that she attributed her admittedly hasty “Warsaw ghetto comparison” to her outrage at Sharon’s making that accusation (chapter 1, n56). (At the time she made her comparison, Sharon was not yet Prime Minister and this is most likely a retrospective memory.) See, however, Justus Reid Weiner, “The Use of Palestinian Children in the Al-Aqsa Intifada,” JCPA, #441 (1 November 2000); idem, “The Recruitment of Children in Current Palestinian Strategy,” Jerusalem Issue Brief, 2:8 (1 October 2002). For an empathic look at the dilemma of Palestinian mothers, see Flore de Prineuf, “The Children’s War,” Salon, October 18, 2000. For a more recent report, see Itamar Marcus, “The Palestinian Authority’s child soldier strategy,” Jerusalem Post, February 6, 2022.

^[32] David Huber, “Principal allegedly fired for posting conservative memes on social media,” College Fix, November 28, 2020.

^[33] Zuhdi Jasser, A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot’s Fight to Save His Faith (New York: Threshold Editions, 2013), chapter 6.

^[34] David Cook, Understanding Jihad; Michael Bonner, Jihad in Islamic History: Doctrines and Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

^[35] Karsh, Islamic Imperialism.

^[36] These terms often get single, passing mentions, if at all, in the abundant literature for Westerners about Islam after 9-11. E.g., “academic” John Esposito’s What Everyone Needs to Know about Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); more recently, Cole, Muhammad.

^[37] Sharon Otterman, “Film at 9/11 Museum Sets off Clash over Reference to Islam,” New York Times, April 23, 2014.

^[38] British deputy commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Brian Paddick, 7-7-2005. Melanie Phillips, Londonistan: How Britain is Creating a Terror State Within (London: Gibson Square, 2006), 101. See Ken Livingstone’s similar remarks on Yussuf al Qaradawi as a moderate: “Livingstone invites cleric back,” BBC, July 12, 2004; Daniel Pipes, “[The Islamist-Leftist] Allied Menace,” National Review July 14, 2008.

^[39] Michael Oren, “How Obama Opened His Heart to the “Muslim World,’” Foreign Affairs, June 19, 2015. On Obama’s use of “99.9% of Muslims” see above, chapter 1, n4.

^[40] Attorney General Eric Holder and Republican Representative Lamar Smith, May 13, 2010, YouTube; Assistant Defense Secretary for Homeland Security, Paul Stockton and Republican Representative Dan Lundgren, December 13, 2011, YouTube. Analyzed by Daniel Pipes, “Denying Islam’s Role in Terror: Explaining the Denial,” Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2013.

^[41] “Justifying acts of terror?” BBC, August 10, 2005 (n.xxx). On Choudhary, Omar Bakri and the circle of radical Muslims in England, see Jon Ronson, Them: Adventures with Extremists (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), chapter 1.

^[42] Peter Townsend, Arabic for Unbelievers (2014); Nancy Kobrin, The Jihadi Dictionary: The Essential Intel Tool for Military, Law Enforcement, Government and the Concerned Public (Mamaroneck, NY: MultiEducator, 2016).

^[43] For an understanding of what awaits minorities in Muslim-majority lands who, unlike the Zionists, cannot defend themselves, see Raymond Ibrahim, Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (New York: Regnery Publishing, 2013).

This excerpt will also appear in the discussions of Infidel Month. It chronicles the process whereby, after 9/11, the press increasingly adopted the principle that it not use the terrorism word when describing 9/11 and subsequent jihadi assaults. In other words, specifically in response to threats, the western media complied with Caliphator demands not to call Jihadis terrorists. The earliest stage in the grooming of a dhimmi news media.

Day XII. September 19. Failure of 21^st Century Information Professionals III: Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet, no matter how wildly inappropriate the use of this meme by journalists to avoid calling jihadis terrorists, many people in the twenty-first century sagely nodded their heads. While initially a flippant remark meant to épater les bourgeois, the proverb became increasingly adopted as an axiomatic principle in journalism. As we have seen, the first place it was systematically applied was in Western coverage of the Middle East conflict between Palestinians and Israelis in the 1990s, the Oslo years.^[6] Then on the morrow of 9-11, Americans discovered that their attackers might also be freedom fighters. In an in-house memo, Reuters chief editor Stephen Jukes instructed those responsible for news production not to use the terror word to describe 9-11. If someone else used the word, one could quote the person, but for its own journalists, Reuters deemed “terrorism” an inappropriate term:

We all know [sic] that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist. . . . To be frank, it adds little to call the attack on the World Trade Center a terrorist attack.^[7]

Jukes issued a FAQ in October of 2001, which elaborated the argument behind the policy:

As part of a long-standing policy to avoid the use of emotive words, we do not use terms like “terrorist” and “freedom fighter” unless they are in a direct quote or are otherwise attributable to a third party. We do not characterize the subjects of news stories, but instead report their actions, identity and background so that readers can make their own decisions based on the facts.^[8]

For the first time, this principle that so galled Israelis―they called it an inability to distinguish between arsonist and fire-fighter―was applied on a major scale in the United States. Not accidentally, the first agency to formally insist on not using the “terrorist” designations for those “freedom fighters” whom admirers called the “Magnificent 19,” was European―Reuters . . . quickly followed by the BBC, whose Chief Deputy Editor Mark Damazer disingenuously explained:

However appalling and disgusting it was, there will nevertheless be a constituency of your listeners who don’t regard it as terrorism. Describing it as such could downgrade your status as an impartial and independent broadcaster.^[9]

In other words, out of deference to those of our viewers who don’t think of the attacks on the US as terrorism, we will avoid using the term, lest this constituency (who apparently could not care less about impartial and independent broadcasting), think badly of the BBC.

Among American journalists, for whom such “dispassion” would alienate all but the most “universalist” of their audiences, the practice aroused indignation and mockery.^[10] But in the coming years, Reuters’s position became the industry standard, formally adopted by the top US papers: the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Boston Globe (below). When home-grown jihadis hit London on July 7, 2005, the BBC, the Guardian, and Reuters all initially used the word terror to describe the attacks, but quickly “recovered.” The BBC issued a memo formally discouraging the use of “terrorism” to describe the attacks on the London subway by Muslims born and raised in England, and quietly tried to change previous headlines so as to hide their initial “error.”^[11]

This may seem like an academic game of little serious import beyond the hurt feelings of (in this case) Americans, who feel themselves the object of a heinous attack on working men and women and find “activist” and “militant” far too bland to describe the perpetrators. When Jukes noted frankly that “it adds little to call the attack on the World Trade Center a terrorist attack,” he appeals to the obvious―everyone knew it was. But, again as the Israelis had already complained, this terminological policy brought with it more problematic practices, including humanizing the terrorists, and framing their deeds as resistance against oppression and a struggle for freedom.^[12] And sure enough, the doctrine of not using “terrorist” became so deeply engrained among some journalists that some even cleaned up the language of independent sources as well.^[13]

Among the many things this high-minded journalistic discourse obscured (I think, intentionally) was how ferociously the terrorists (jihadis) themselves, and especially their defenders/apologists (da-īs), objected to the use of the term “terrorists” to designate them. Indeed, they apparently felt so strongly about the terminology, that they were willing to kill journalists who called them terrorists, a phenomenon war correspondents in Lebanon knew as early as the 1970s.^[14] Just in case they needed reminding, Reuters’s Gaza correspondent Nidal al-Mughrabi issued a travel advisory for journalists, cautioning his colleagues: “Never use the word ‘terrorist’ or ‘terrorism’ in describing Palestinian gunmen and militants” lest offence be given to locals who consider them “heroes of the conflict, and ideals.” From the perspective of Da’wa Caliphators, the problem was not the crime (terrorism), but how it gave jihadis a negative image, one that reflected badly on both their fellow Caliphators behavior as well as their own emphasis on an exclusively “moderate, peaceful” Islam.

Of course, those who find any public criticism insulting tend to consider them offenses that demand violent retaliation. “Call my jihadis ‘terrorists,’ and I’ll savage you, even if you’re the Foreign Minister of France.”^[15] “Call our religion violent and we’ll riot and kill both infidels and Muslims in protest.”^[16] Playing the enforcer for the jihadis, the Muslim Street that rioted so often in the mid-aughts, insisted that the terrorist label not be applied to their co-religionists.

It mattered not that the accusation of terrorism was true, in a form rarely this unalloyed―deliberately targeting civilians for political advantage. For the Caliphators, the purpose was to remove a deep moral stain (in the eyes of the targeted enemy), to forbid them to express effective disapproval of Muslim terrorists. The media complied, using “emotive” as a neutral term to submit to the jihadi demand: Muslims felt very strongly about journalists depicting jihadi acts as terrorism. [On the other hand, these sensitive Muslims had no scruples about accusiing Israel of everything heinous, and this media, so solicitous of the feelings of Muslims, had no problem running their most emotive accusations as credible claims. -rl] The media avoided the term not to remain “impartial” and “non-emotive” but in order not to emotionally provoke the terrorists and their supporters.

Thus, behind the Western language of peace, impartiality and understanding lay a different set of reasons for avoiding the term “terrorism,” especially when it came to Muslim attacks on infidel civilians: the fear of retaliation. Behind the principled neutral language and the rather problematic insistence on “leveling the playing field” lurked something more disturbing and more shameful for journalists to admit: fear and intimidation. “We don’t want to jeopardize the safety of our staff,” the head of Reuters explains to the inquiring journalist. “Our people are on the front lines, in Gaza, the West Bank and Afghanistan [NB: all Muslim lands]. The minute we seem to be siding with one side or another [sic], they’re in danger.” In the real world, however, journalists are only in danger if their publications seem to be siding with jihadi targets; they are not in danger if they are seen to be siding with the jihadis. In other words, “if we call jihadis who attack civilians ‘terrorists,’ our journalists are in danger from those very terrorists who, closely following how we cover their behavior, will attack us for violating their demands for coverage.”

Apparently―who knew?―“jihadis care what the West thinks of them[NSH1] .”^[17] So much so, they are ready to use violence against journalists to get the coverage they want. So what motivated the Western media’s widely accepted policy on “terrorism”: principles or intimidation? And what were the cognitive consequences of that policy? Over the subsequent years, a distinct pattern emerged: more and more news editors adopted the Reuters principles and rationale for not using the term “terrorism” to refer to jihadis, even as the evidence for intimidation became ever more abundant.

Palestinians Celebrate 9-11 and Intimidate Media into Not Reporting

The intimidation of Western news media by terrorists concerned with their “image” came to the fore in the Palestinian territories in the wake of 9-11. Western film crews based in Israel filmed Palestinians celebrating the event, and openly praising Bin Laden for his blow against the US. This reaction would come as no surprise to anyone who followed the Palestinian media, where the US is only second to the Israelis as a target of hatred, and the celebration of massacred enemy civilians was an act of high culture.^[18] But, in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, with widespread expressions of sympathy for the US coming even from Muslim countries that were openly hostile to the US like Iran, with the POTUS, directed by Muslim advisors, assuring the American people that Muslims around the world were appalled by the attacks of 9-11, these celebrations made the Palestinians look bad. Arafat, sensitive to image as always, shut down the demonstrations and staged a photo-op of him supposedly donating blood to the pulverized victims.^[19]

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

Publicly, AP Chief of Bureau Dan Perry protested somewhat entreatingly: “I ask the assurances of the Palestinian Authority that you will protect our journalists from threats and attempts at intimidation and that no harm would come to our freelance cameraman from distribution of the film.^[20] Privately, he admitted to an inquiring journalist that the AP had to fold: “We are acting to assure the safety of our staff. The safety of our staff is paramount. At this point, we believe there to be a serious threat to our staff if the video is released and we have protested this to the PA.”^[21]

The incident confirmed what the events of the previous October in Ramallah had already illuminated: the al Shabab and PA officials play tough-cop/nice-cop, to control the news media and make sure that any news that might harm the Palestinian “image” in the West does not get out. Here, on the topic of 9-11, the AP’s cautious response of pulling the footage resembles the behavior of journalists covering the Palestinians the previous year: Compliance with Palestinian demands, with a whimper of protest.^[22]

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

The “Responsible” Mainstream Media Adopt Reuters’ Policy on the T-Word

While the Europeans had fewer problems, at least right after 9-11, with avoiding the T-word, both in the case of al Qaeda and Hamas, US papers tended to adhere to peace-journalism’s dogma when dealing with Israel, but deploring al-Qaeda’s attack on the US, as terrorist. After 9-11, the number of suicide attacks on Israeli civilians multiplied at an unprecedented rate, killing and wounding almost ten thousand Israelis, the proportional equivalent in the US of almost half a million people, almost 80% of whom were civilians. After calling Bin Laden and his jihadis terrorists, US papers now faced accusations of hypocrisy, especially from angry pro-Israel readers, for refusing to call this growing, devastating storm that engulfed Israel, “terrorism.”

In September 2003, on the second anniversary of 9-11, the ombudsperson for the Boston Globe, Christine Chinlund wrote her reflections on the problem. Noting the clear negative connotations of the word, she expressed concerns that, “especially after 9-11 . . . the terrorist tag effectively banishes its holder from the political arena. More than ever, it condemns rather than describes.” Invoking a false dichotomy whereby a word cannot both accurately describe and, thereby, condemn a group―the very essence of “terrorism” in civil discourse―she argued it was inappropriate to use the term with a group like Hamas:

To tag Hamas, for example, as a terrorist organization is to ignore its far more complex role in the Middle East drama. The word reflects not only a simplification, but a bias that runs counter to good journalism. To label any group in the Middle East as terrorist is to take sides, or at least appear to, and that is not acceptable. The same holds true in covering other far-flung conflicts. One person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter; it’s not for journalists to judge.^[23]

How does the provision of “some social service functions” by Hamas “complicate” the argument that they are terrorists? What does one have to do with the other? Nazis had lots of social service functions for their own race, even as they exterminated others, and Bolsheviks had a lot of services for their own people, even as they starved ten million Ukrainians.

Like Jukes at Reuters, Chinlund considers not even “appearing” [to the jihadis] “to take sides,” as a highest priority. Like Jukes, she cites as an unquestioned consensus the slogan “One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.” And like Jukes, she misapplies it. For like Al Qaeda, Hamas not only are terrorists, but they are decidedly not “freedom fighters.” According to abundant evidence journalists studiously keep from their audiences, it’s not Palestine they want to build, but Israel they want to destroy; not Palestinians they want to free, but Jews they want to subjugate (at best), or preferably exterminate.^[24]

Two weeks after Chinlund’s Boston Globe piece, the Washington Post’s ombudsman, Michael Getler, contributed his paper’s take on the “terrorist” issue, elaborating on Chinlund’s distinction in order to legitimate calling al Qaeda terrorist, but not Hamas. After going over the delicacy of the issue of the T-word, Getler distinguishes:

Hamas conducts terrorism but also has territorial ambitions, is a nationalist movement and conducts some social work. As far as we know, al Qaeda exists only as a terrorist network. It is composed of radicals from several Islamic countries. The Palestinian resistance is indigenous. Al Qaeda launched a devastating surprise attack on the United States. Israelis and Palestinians have been at war for a long time. Palestinians have been resisting a substantial and, to Palestinians, humiliating, Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza since they were seized in the 1967 war. That resistance has now bred suicide bombers. These are terrorist acts, not to be condoned. But the contexts of the struggle against al Qaeda and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are different. News organizations should not back away from the word terrorism when it is the proper term. But as a rule, strong, descriptive, factual reporting is better than labels.^[25]

Of course, Hamas does not limit its territorial ambition to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but to every last inch of the land between the river and the sea, a goal that existed long before the “occupation resulting from the ’67 war.” Indeed, if one listens, their ambitions extend to the entire world.^[26] Their “social work” involves recruiting for “martyrdom operations”; their “education” involves brainwashing children with genocidal hatred; and their [NSH2] charter eagerly looks forward to an apocalyptic slaughter of Jews.^[27] And yet, their victim narrative, wherein their attacks should be viewed as resistance to a humiliating occupation, now permits American papers to continue to stick it to Israel by not calling her enemies who attack her civilians “terrorists,” even as they get to complain about jihadi terrorists attacking their American homeland.^[28] On such considered reasoning did the Boston Globe and the Washington Post justify their selective use of the T-word for Al Qaeda, but not Hamas.^[29]

Caliphator Intimidation and the T-Word

Claiming the high moral ground, neither Chinlund nor Getler allude to the fear factor. On the contrary, they discuss all this in terms of the highest-minded independence: Getler quotes his paper’s foreign editor David Hoffman, “We should always strive to satisfy our own standards and not let others set standards for us.” In the shuffle, one might miss the key detail: the standards that “others” try to set for them and that they reject here are Israel’s (call terrorists terrorists); the standards they adopt as their own, are those of Hamas (don’t you dare). The WMSNM, in adopting their “principled” stand against the T-word, effectively took the side of jihadis who were the ones objecting to infidel journalists calling them terrorists.

The issue of fear of terrorists as the motivation for not so calling them, emerged clearly in a controversy that broke out the following year. The (conservative) news chain, CanWest, began to substitute the word “terrorist” for “militants, insurgents, activists,” when they published pieces taken from the feed of larger, more politically correct, news agencies. On September 14, 2003 they added the descriptor “terrorist group” to a discussion of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the PLO’s brigades fighting the Oslo Jihad with suicide attacks on civilians. Despite the dead give-away of their name―warriors fighting for Jerusalem’s holiest site (Al Aqsa), committing suicide to kill Israeli civilians (martyrs)―the mainstream of information professionals presented the group as largely secular, insurgent, freedom fighters.^[30]

Alerted to CanWest’s actions, Reuters tried to stop them. In so doing, they claimed, CanWest was “taking sides” (the Israeli side, a “right-wing” thing to do), by describing the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade as terrorists. A spokesman for the AP, the other major international Anglophone news agency, rejected any change like this because it would “make an AP report unbalanced, unfair or inaccurate.”^[31] In other words, “We, the major news outlets, are the authoritative voice offering balanced, fair, and accurate coverage, while you, CanWest, by bringing in emotive words, are guilty of taking sides and fanning the flames of war.”

CanWest fought back:

Terrorism is a technical term . . . a tactic: the deliberate targeting of civilians in pursuit of a political goal. Those who bombed the nightclub in Bali were terrorists. Suicide bombers who strap explosives to their bodies and blow up people eating in a pizza parlour are terrorists. The men and women who took a school full of hostages in Beslan, Russia, and shot some of the children in the back as they tried to flee to safety were terrorists. We as journalists do not violate our impartiality by describing them as such. Ironically, it is supposedly neutral terms like “militant” that betray a bias, insofar as they have a sanitizing effect. Activists for various political causes can be “militant,” but they don’t take children hostage.^[32]

In other words, they countered, when the press uses euphemisms for “terror” (and “jihad”), they fail to properly inform their public, and make “unbalanced, unfair and inaccurate” reports that in fact take the side of the terrorists.

Reuters’s global managing editor David Schlesinger responded with the standard talking point: “Our editorial policy is that we don’t use emotive words when labeling someone. If they [CamWest] want to put their own judgment into it, they’re free to do that. But then they shouldn’t say that it’s by a Reuters reporter.” CanWest responded: “If you’re couching your language in order to protect certain people, are you telling the truth? And if they’re terrorists, aren’t you putting us all in danger by mislabeling them as they demand? And if so, why do it?”

The answer became clearer as a result of some follow-up by Ian Austen at the (still serious) New York Times.^[33] Schlesinger explained Reuters’s concerns to him about any “confusion that might endanger its reporters in volatile areas or situations.” In other words, to spare our journalists retaliation from terrorists who do not want us to call them that, we cannot be associated with the use of the T-word. Shades and echoes of Riccardo Cristiano pointing his finger at Mediaset to Arafat: “Please, oh you dear friends whose reprisals we fear, don’t misunderstand, we here at Reuters don’t describe you as terrorists. It’s the CanWest folk.”^[34]

No wonder Reuters editors above all wanted anonymity. They were ducking. Never mind that, by covering themselves from the fire of those objecting to their self-censorship, “in the name of objectivity and non-emotivity,” they were “perversely hid[ing] a defensible concern for the safety of their reporters behind an idiotic moral relativism.”^[35] Never mind that, in effect, this policy, adopted by many other information professionals, provided a soporific that continued to stupefy the West as things got worse.

To complete his scorn for the public’s intelligence―fully justified given that so few even bothered to object―Schlesinger uttered his notable oxymoron: My goal is to protect our reporters and protect our editorial integrity. In fact, he was protecting his reporters at the cost of his editorial integrity. Rephrased, Schlesinger was saying: “our media do not call a terrorist group ‘terrorist’ because the terrorists threaten our journalists with violence, and that determines our unprincipled editorial policy.” And yet, despite these public secrets being widely known among journalists, neither the New York Times reporter, nor most of the journalistic profession (aside from the “right wing” editors at CamWest and critics like Michael Kinsley and Daniel Pipes) bothered to challenge this counterfactual rationalization.

Nor was the ban on the T-word limited to the news media: it pervaded the information professions even unto Western (infidel) intelligence services. Melanie Phillips argued that the mentality that lay behind this combination of political correctness and self-censorship, had completely blinded MI5 to the homegrown radicalism that eventually produced both Al Qaeda as an international jihadi network, and the 7-7 attacks themselves. And yet, if we cannot, should not, hurt the feelings of violent zealots who target civilians with that “emotive word,” then whose feelings should we offend? Why should we defer to the people who complain violently when we insult them, and dismiss the complaints of their victims as efforts to silence criticism?^[36]

A decade later, the response of the New York Times to criticism that it was the only important US paper in January 2015 not to show the Charlie Hebdo cover with a depiction of the Prophet, revealed the extent to which intimidation lay behind the legacy media’s principled self-censorship, especially in the international news agencies. Mark Cooper, a journalism professor at the University of Southern California, criticized the Times harshly on his Facebook page for its failure to publish a picture of the Charlie Hebdo cover:

Exactly how many people have to be shot in cold blood before your paper rules that you can show us what provoked the killers? Apparently 23 shot including 11 dead is not enough. What absolute cowardice. These MSM managers act is if they are running insurance companies, not news organizations.

Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, pugnaciously defended his paper’s decision not to publish, calling Cooper an “asshole” [!] for claiming it was fear of reprisal,^[37] and insisting that his paper declined showing the publication purely out of concern for the feelings of Muslim readers who might take offense: “But let’s not forget the Muslim family in Brooklyn who read us and is offended by any depiction of what he sees as his prophet. I don’t give a damn about the head of ISIS but I do care about that family and it is arrogant to ignore them.”^[38] Note here the combination of noble concern for the feelings of the hypothetical (and presumably moderate and even patriotic) Muslim family in Brooklyn, bravado about any threats from ISIS, and contemptuous response to the “asshole” critic.

A week later, however, in a follow-up article at the Huffington Post, a former chief editor of the New York Times, Bill Keller, belied such bravado by letting slip the real reason why the Times had censored what everyone else showed.

An editor running a large, high profile, global news organization has to consider the potential consequences for reporters, photographers, translators and other staff. It’s easy for an editor in New York or Washington to take a stand (or strike a pose) but the dangers fall on journalists in the field. If you’ve had a few of your people murdered, as The Times has, this is not a concern you take lightly.^[39]

And apparently, it’s easy for the executive editor of the New York Times to strike a pose of indifference to jihadi threats and abiding concern for local Muslims when the journalists “investigating” are so lacking in curiosity.

On the contrary, Keller’s frank remark confirmed Cooper’s wry (and apparently painful) dig about the New York Times acting like an insurance company. It offers an important key to many controversies over coverage of triumphalist Islam, including the one between Reuters and CamWest: the newspapers hide behind claims of objectivity to concede to the demands of (to side with) the terrorists. And Baquet’s obscenity aimed at Cooper for stating the obvious is a classic response of the honor-driven in the face of accurate criticism.^[40] In all matters of honor, loud and energetic denial is a norm.

The big news agencies, the ones with overwhelming influence on the news we in the free world get, are also the most vulnerable to threats. They are the ones with journalists in unsafe places and hence most likely to bend to threats. Caliphators win, and their useful infidels, trying to justify their compliance, pull the wool over our eyes with their chatter about objectivity, not “taking sides,” and not letting “others” (namely those fighting Caliphators) set their policies.

One person’s coward is another’s “principled” journalist. And, as this pseudo-ethics permeated the information profession, one person’s journalist was another’s propagandist.^[41]

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^[1] I use “terrorism” to designate deliberate targeting of civilians in order to terrify the larger population.

^[2] See chapter 8.

^[3] Martin Kramer, “Terrorism? What Terrorism,” Wall Street Journal, November 15, 2001 (with rejoinder by Saïd).

^[4] See chapter 5.

^[5] 1) False dichotomy: fighting for freedom doesn’t mean one can’t also be a terrorist (i.e. deliberately attack civilians). 2) False identity: terrorists rarely end up freedom fighters. Menachem Begin’s participation in the Israeli democratic process, for twenty-eight years in the opposition, constitutes the exception that proves the (opposite) rule: terrorists rarely bring freedom: see Anna Geifman, “When Terrorists become State Leaders,” Death Orders: The Vanguard of Modern Terrorism in Revolutionary Russia (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), 122-38. See also Gerard Rabinovitch, Terrorisme/Résistance : D’une confusion lexicale à l’époque des sociétés de masse (Paris: Le Bord de L’eau, 2014).

^[6] See chapter 1.

^[7] A Reuters’s employee forwarded it to columnist Howard Kurtz, “The T Word,” Washington Post, September 24, 2001; link broken. For a general discussion of the problem, see Susan Moeller, Packaging Terrorism: Coopting the News for Politics and Profit (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), chapter 1.

^[8] Updated, Stephen Jukes, October 2000. No longer online. For the formal statement of policy see Reuters Handbook of Journalism (April 2008); Tom Gross, “The Case of Reuters: A news agency that will not call a terrorist a terrorist,” National Interest, July 26, 2004.

^[9] Matt Wells, “[BBC] World Service will not call US attacks terrorism,” Guardian, November 15, 2001.

^[10] Michael Kinsley, “Defining Terrorism,” Washington Post, October 5, 2001.

^[11] Tom Gross, “The BBC Discovers ‘Terrorism,’ Briefly,” Jerusalem Post, July 12, 2005; Meryl Yourish, “The T-Word,” Yourish.com, July 9, 2005.

^[12] Shahid Alam, professor of economics at Northeastern University compared the 9-11 attackers to the Minutemen at Lexington: “America and Islam: Seeking Parallels,” Scoop Media, January 1, 2005.

^[13] Dan Pipes, “Calling a Terrorist a Terrorist,” Blog, April 27, 2004. For an example of a rogue editor at the Minneapolis Star “cleaning up” a New York Times story, see chapter xxxn76.

^[14] Zev Chafets, Double Vision: How the Press Distorts America’s View of the Middle East (New York: Morrow, 1985), 127-54.

^[15] “During a trip to Israel, FM Lionel Jospin called Hizballah actions “terrorist.” At Bir Zeit, his car was nearly turned over; he was spit on and hit in the head by a stone. Paul Giniewski, “Jews of France Tormented by ‘Intifada of the Suburbs,’”, and Pierre Haski, « Quand Lionel Jospin qualifie Hezbollah de « terroriste »,” Le Nouvel Observateur, May 23, 2013. See similar incident concerning Colin Powell and Marwan Barghouti, above, chapter 1.

^[16] On the riots provoked by the pope’s Regensburg speech, see chapter 4.

^[17] Bin Laden complained that Muslims like him are called terrorists by the worst terrorists (US): “Transcript of Osama Bin Ladin Interview by Peter Arnett,” CNN, March 1997. Apparently he read the Chomsky he had on his shelves (above, nxx).

^[18] For the footage of celebrations,

. In response to a claim that the footage was fake, David Mikkelson, “Palestinians Dancing in the Street: Did CNN fake footage of ‘Palestinians dancing in the street’ after the terrorist attack on the USA?” Snopes, March 9, 2008. On Schadenfreude as a feature of Palestinian culture, Ian Fischer, “An Exhibit On Campus Celebrates Grisly Deed,” New York Times, September 26, 2001.

^[19] Pollack, “Enderlin: Arafat faked 9/11 blood donation.”

^[20] “AP Protests Threats to Cameraman,” The Associated Press. September 12, 2001; cited in Aaron Lerner, “Interview: AP Bureau Chief on Palestinian death threats,” IMRA, September 13, 2001.

^[21] Ibid. For more on Perry, see chapter 9, nn. 37, 46.

^[22] In the specific case of the Ramallah Lynch (chapter 1), see the behavior of journalists William Orme and Riccardo Cristiano, discussed in chapter 9.

^[23] Christine Chinlund, “Who should wear the ‘terrorist’ label?” Boston Globe, September 8, 2003.

^[24] See the extensive collection of material at Palestinian Media Watch.

^[25] Ombudsman Michael Getler, “The Language of Terrorism,” Washington Post, September 21, 2003. For a rebuttal, Eric Rozenman, Balancing Coverage of the Middle East, CAMERA, September 27, 2003.

^[26] See chapter 6.

^[27] Itamar Marcus and Nan Zilbedik, “PA pays salaries to terrorists and not social aid to families,” PalWatch, April 10, 2013; “Promoting Violence for Children,” PalWatch, http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=844; “Hamas’s Genocidal Ideology,” PalWatch, http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=584.

^[28] On the lack of meaningful distinction between Caliphator jihadis from the infidel point of view, see chapter 6.

^[29] For a response to the Washington Post editorial, Rozenman, “Balancing.”

^[30] The allegedly neutral Wikipedia describes “Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade,” as “a secular coalition of Palestinian armed groups in the West Bank.”

^[31] Ian Austen, “Reuters Asks a Chain to Remove Its Bylines,” New York Times, September 20, 2004.

^[32] Arthur Weinreb “CanWest, Reuters and the ‘t’ word,” Canada Free Press, September 27, 2004, http://canadafreepress.com/2004/media092704.htm.

^[33] Austen, “Reuters asks a chain to remove its bylines.”

^[34] See chapter 9.

^[35] Kinsley, “Defining Terrorism.”

^[36] Chinlund acknowledged that the policy of not designating Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians as terrorism, “infuriated” Israel supporters (“Who should wear the ‘terrorist’ label?”), but apparently the journalists didn’t feel threatened by them, didn’t mind triggering their “emotivity.” On the role of fear of retaliation (or its lack) in shaping the way “progressives” treated Israel vs the Palestinians, see Dan Brown’s cartoon, chapter 3.

^[37] Dylan Byers, “Dean Baquet calls N.Y. Times critic ‘a--hole,’” On Media, January 9, 2015.

^[38] Dylan Byers, “Dean Baquet addresses NYT’s republication of antisemitic cartoons,” Politico, January 8, 2015. See also Margaret Sullivan, the New York Times’s public editor, “A Close Call on Publication of Charlie Hebdo Cartoons,” New York Times January 8, 2015.

^[39] Michael Calderone, “NY Times Only Top US Newspaper not to Publish Charlie Hebdo Cover,” Huffington Post, January 15, 2015.

^[40] Kenneth Greenberg, Honor and Slavery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 20-22.

^[41] After the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, CNN had no problem redefining terrorism in the most expansive way and using it to describe what happened: “This was terrorism. The definition of terrorism is violence in pursuit of a political goal. This was domestic terrorism.” Josh Campbell, former FBI Special Agent. Wolf Blitzer found this term’s use worthy of repetition (The Trump Insurrection, 17:14). Note the expansive definition of “terrorism” as any violence for political ends. Suddenly, it need not even target civilians.

Day V. September 12, 2026. Responses to 9-11: shock, horror, delight, rejoicing.

excerpt from: Can “The Whole World” be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism and Global Jihad, 2022

The day after 9-11, all around the Western world, the shock was palpable, and the sympathy for the victims―some 3000 dead Americans, among them Muslims―was widespread, at least in diplomatic circles. Expressions of condolence and sympathy poured in, even from Iran, even from Yasser Arafat (who, to compensate for his people’s embarrassing celebrations at the sight of the twin towers falling, faked giving blood to help victims who had been pulverized in the attack), only to be scorned by the Arab press for failing to stand with his people, and making a show of himself.^[1]

The notoriously anti-American Le Monde anticipated the later hashtag of #WeAreAll [fill in blank with latest terror victims], with an editorial entitled, “Today, We Are All Americans.” In it, in addition to the obligatory digs at the US for giving birth to this devil (Bin Laden), the editorial noted that any attempt to justify this attack as war on behalf of the poor third world was to

credit the authors of this murderous madness with “good intentions” or of some project where they must avenge oppressed peoples against their unique oppressor, America. It would permit them to claim the mantle of “poverty”―an offense, an injury to genuinely impoverished people the world over! What a monstrous hypocrisy. None of those who contributed to this operation can pretend to want the good of humanity. They do not want a better, more just world. They just want to erase ours from the map.^[2]

Empirically accurate, exactly right level of “us” solidarity (Western democracies), morally acute, in limpid prose. Most decidedly not stupidly pro-jihad. And given Le Monde’s deeply embedded anti-Americanism, quite impressive in its generosity of spirit. When they want to, the French can think grandly and write clearly.

And yet, two weeks later, the same Le Monde ran a piece by Jean Baudrillard, a major sociologist and philosopher (two French terms for critical theorists at the cutting edge of academic discourse), in which he articulated precisely the sentiments the editors had dismissed only days before.

All the verbiage and commentaries betray a gigantic abreaction to the very event and the fascination it exercises. Moral condemnation and the sacred union against terrorism match the prodigious jubilation engendered by witnessing this global superpower being destroyed [sic]; better, by seeing it more or less self-destroying, even suiciding spectacularly. Though it is she [the US] that has, through its intolerable power, engendered all that violence brewing around the world, and therefore this terrorist imagination that―unknowingly―inhabits us all.

That we have dreamed of this event, that everybody without exception has dreamt of it, because everybody must dream of the destruction of any power hegemonic to that degree―this is unacceptable for Western moral conscience, but it is still a fact, and one which is justly measured by the pathetic violence of all those discourses which attempt to erase it.^[3]

Here the moral clarity of the editors becomes a “monstrous hypocrisy” of Schadenfreude at America’s suffering, dressed up as a universal sense of moral offense at the American colossus.^[4] (It does have a certain refreshing honesty, though: “everybody rejoiced, don’t buy into the hypocritical pieties of those who express their sympathies.”) At the same time, Baudrillard did precisely what Le Monde’s editors had just warned against: he glorified “freedom-fighting” jihadis who struck a mortal [sic] blow at the suffocating American hegemon (“intolerable power” or what Saïd referred to as the “frighteningly global reach of the last remaining superpower”^[5]). As aberrant as it may strike some sensibilities (those who value empathy and human life), this became a defining approach on the left: One French socialist opined a month after 9-11: “Islam is, after all, the poor. And it pisses [us brave socialists] off (ça fait chier) to [see the US] beat up the poor.”^[6]

It takes a special kind of “malignant desire,” to use Baudrillard’s own term, for someone to be so struck with envy and resentment at the success of another (in this case a historical, civilizational ally/rival in the creation of democratic societies, one that twice within living memory had saved Europeans from their own madness), that one rejoices in an attack like 9-11. To cheer the blow to Americans even when that “hegemon” has been far more beneficent and far less authoritarian toward weaker nations or peoples than any earlier hegemon in history over whom it had a massive military advantage, reflects a staggering self-absorption in which American superiority to France/Europe is more unbearable than massive assaults on “innocent” infidels. An act of mauvaise foi (bad faith) worthy of Sartre’s pen at the height of his useful idiocy . . . the beginning of a genuine huis clos (no exit).^[7]

It seems hard to conceive of such a reaction, when the force (jihad) that struck the blow against one’s civilizational peer (US), also seeks vengeance against your own nation (France), known for its heartless massacres of Muslim civilians in Algeria,^[8] a force that hates progressive iconoclasts more than anyone but Jews. Who attacks one’s friends and supports one’s enemies? The answer, in the world of shame-honor dynamics, is: “the weak.” How does one shield oneself from that awareness? In adopting the foolish syllogism: “Courage is attacking the strongest, and America is strongest.”^[9]

In England, people like Seumas Milne in the Guardian asserted the real “lesson” of 9-11: that Americans, thick-headed fools that they are, can’t understand why they’re hated, why this attack represented “reaping the dragons’ teeth harvest they themselves had sown,” among other things by siding with Israel against the poor Palestinians.^[10] His whole article is wrapped in a serene certainty that this is the only viable reading of world events. Yet another way the Palestinian cause locked the Left into a politics of odium.

And many Americans, especially on the left, agreed. Susan Sontag immediately Westsplained the attack as if its motives should be obvious to all:

Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilization” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? . . . In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards.^[11]

Judith Butler described 9-11 as a “dislocation from first-world privilege, however temporary,”^[12] where “first-world privilege” and “intolerable power” described the same grand-narrative villain. Long-time progressive thinker, Michael Walzer, meditating on the guilt engendered by enjoying the privileges of living in America, listed the emotions that arise in response―“festering resentment, ingrown anger, and self-hate” and then concluded:

Certainly, all those emotions were plain to see in the left’s reaction to September 11, in the failure to register the horror of the attack or to acknowledge the human pain it caused, in the Schadenfreude of so many of the first responses, the barely concealed glee that the imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved.^[13]

Reasonably, Walzer feared that when we indulge these emotions, it “makes it impossible to sustain a decent (intelligent, responsible, morally nuanced) politics.” Salmon Rushdie expressed similar concerns: the US faces “an ideological enemy that may turn out to be harder to defeat than militant Islam: that is to say, anti-Americanism, which already then was taking the world by storm.”^[14]

Given the choice between the moral clarity and grounded empiricism of the initial reaction of Le Monde’s editors on the one hand, and the compulsive, self-destructive, moralizing, Schadenfreude of Baudrillard, on the other, French culture shifted decisively against the US and towards the joys of watching a rival get battered. Noted a French researcher into anti-Americanism:

The fury of the responses testified to a profound horror at the very idea that one could call oneself “American” and thus annul, if only during a crisis, the long work of differentiation between “us” and “them” that has mobilized for over a century, a good portion of French intellectual energies.^[15]

French intellectuals had their own “tribal,” “us-them” instincts, invidious ones, which they indulged to the fullest.

Nidra Poller described the sudden shift after Bin Laden’s attack: if Al Durah sounded the death knell for Zionism in French public discourse, then 9-11 sounded it for the US. Returning to Paris from the US only weeks after 9-11, Poller could cut the anti-Americanism in Parisian society with a knife.^[16] Dinner-table conversations, seminar rooms, street demonstrations . . . le tout Paris indulged in a collective celebration of Schadenfreude over America’s misfortune. Baudrillard, like Catherine Nay, spoke for many when he claimed that we all rejoice when we see so suffocating a hegemon receive such a painful blow. America deserved it. [NSH1]

In 2002, Philippe Roger published a history of Europe’s centuries-long unhappy relationship with America, something he had been working on for many years. He declined to comment on 9-11: “The collection of idiocies (le sottisier) of French reactions remains to be made, but I lack the heart.”^[17] Jean Francois Revel, in a book conceived in 2000, but written after 9/11 has a chapter, “Why so much hate? And why so many errors?” in which he criticizes narcissistic journalists who, to feed their indulgence “in dreams of a factitious superiority,” therefore betray their publics by so dramatically misinforming them about so important a topic as the United States.^[18] In 2004, Paul Hollander published a collection of essays on anti-Americanism globally, with a heavy emphasis on the delirium that characterized its post-9/11 behavior.^[19] Andre Markovits’s Uncouth Nation tells the sad tale of the early aughts in gory detail.^[20]

European discourse was thick with Schadenfreude, fueled by widely believed conspiracy theories about how George Bush and the US government had planned and executed the attack to justify a war against Islam. This hostility to the US in the name of “peace and justice” became emblematic of both European elites and of the movement that called itself the “global progressive left.” For them, American hegemony, the dominance of an (ironically termed) “Eurocentric” worldview, became the great foe of freedom and justice. The postcolonial paradigm, articulated at great length by Hardt and Negri in their book Empire (2000), dominated academic discourse. In this reading of global history, Western imperialism in its global capitalist form is the worst, most intrusive force ever, and the US, the most stifling of hegemons.^[21]

In England, perhaps a bit behind France’s trailblazing anti-Americanism, 9-11 prompted a wave of antisemitism [!]. Petronella Wyatt, a highly placed London journalist noted in December of 2001 that, “Since September 11, antisemitism and its open expression has become respectable at London dinner tables,” with a Guardian-reading peer remarking: “Well, the Jews have been asking for it, and now, thank God, we can say what we think at last.”^[22] As if to prove Wyatt’s comment true, three weeks later, at one of those dinner tables, French diplomat, Daniel Bernard referred to Israel, as that “shitty little country” which was leading the world into World War III.^[23] Jonathan Sacks, then Britain’s chief rabbi, admitted that he had dismissed the concerns about a coming wave of antisemitism that I had shared with him in a meeting in 1999; but that after 9-11 he thought, “Landes was right.”^[24] In an article about the third wave of antisemitism in 2002 (next chapter), Michel Gurfinkiel observed two previous spikes: after the al Durah affair and again after 9-11.^[25]

Markovits, in researching his Uncouth Nation, discovered that European anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism were not, as he thought, “kissing cousins,” but rather “twins.”^[26] And one of their (many) common aspects concerns the virulent―in the twenty-first century the near-hysterical―reaction among Europeans when either of those two countries exercises military force. The crescendo of this open hostility to both Israel and the USA came in 2003, with the anti-war demonstrations that, literally, swept the world.

One plus two plus three: From the extreme Left to the extreme Right, everyone in French politics— simple activists, members of parliament, trade unionists, cabinet ministers, and the head of state in unison— is raving against the intervention in Iraq: “Bush equals Sharon equals murderers” is the chant from the street. “Sharon equals Bush equals disregard for international law” is the pronouncement from the salons. The rise of antisemitism is really not a result of the Intifada, but rather a twin brother of the wave of anti-Americanism that has sloshed up onto the coasts of Europe since September 11 and flooded the continent since the Iraq war.^[27]

I would differ with this astute description only on its chronology. Focusing on America, Markovits missed the prelude to the madness that he, and most of us, only first noticed with the delirious responses to 9/11. But already, since the outbreak of the intifada in the fall of 2000, the Europeans had been engaged in virulent anti-Zionist invective, from the streets to the highest levels of state―Israel had become a pariah state in the minds of many for almost a year before 9/11.^[28] And of course, the USA was Israel’s major (only) supporter.

The madness, having already started on September 30, 2000, struck the major structures of the cultural Maginot Line that defends democratic societies; civic values had already crumbled in France, leaving an ever-widening stain of territories lost to the Republic―neighborhoods, suburbs, schools.^[29] It became a consensus among global progressives at Durban in August-September 2001: there “human rights” NGOs excoriated the US and Israel for racism and slavery in chorus with nations and peoples who still practiced slavery and exuded racist hatreds. The global progressives had adopted the jihadi apocalyptic narrative: US and Israel were the two Satans. This response―blame the US and Israel, side with Muslims, even the jihadis―stood at the heart of the collapse that first started in 2000 and, over the next years and decades, continued to scale the heights of folly.

Alongside Baudrillard, for example, on the same pages of Le Monde, Jacques Derrida, the father of postmodern deconstruction, co-indicted the West as terrorist. “If we can prevent human suffering and don’t, is that not terrorism?”^[30] The simple answer to that rhetorical question is, “No, that would be an abuse of an important term.” What Derrida describes as terrorism is failure to live up to the highest (messianic) human aspirations of lovingkindness for all people, a remarkably high standard, unprecedented in the history of mankind. It’s not targeting civilians.

The American, Noam Chomsky, took Y2KMind one step further. America is not as bad as the 9-11 jihadis, but worse!

The [9-11] terrorist attacks were major atrocities. In scale, they may not reach the level of many others, for example, the bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and killing unknown numbers of people (no one knows, because the US blocked an inquiry at the U.N. and no one cares to pursue it).

Chomsky estimated over tens of thousands of deaths, based on a calculus of who may have died from lack of medication that the factory would have produced (since only one person actually died in the bombing).^[31] Chomsky insisted that this accusation of Americans wantonly killing tens of thousands of Muslims did not justify Bin Laden’s attack. Bin Laden, on the other hand, had no hesitation drawing that conclusion, as did Reverend Wright in his sermon where he cited the bombing of the plant in Sudan, along with his own embellishment that “we killed hundreds of hard working people mothers and fathers who left home to go that day, not knowing that they’d never come home.”^[32] This is not history, it is weaponized fake news.

Chomsky was not alone even among Americans. Indeed, he was widely echoed, either explicitly or implicitly especially in academia. Phyllis Chesler describes her exchange with a feminist professor at an American college: “[A]fter what we did in Guatemala and all our other dirty doings in South America, you can’t say we don’t deserve having this thrown back at us on 9-11. You do understand that America deserves being hated everywhere, don’t you?”^[33] Indeed, the “Why do they [justifiably] hate us?” meme was widespread, especially in postmodern, postcolonial, and liberal Christian circles.^[34] The axis of evil here replicated precisely what Iranian theocrats had insisted since 1400 AH: the great and little Satan, in secular lingo, American imperialism and Israeli colonialism. For these thinkers, the question: “Why do they hate us?” was rhetorical. “Why would they not hate us? [We do.]”

Two days after 9-11, some German intellectuals held a public forum at the Academy of Arts in Berlin to discuss the meaning of events. At one point, a woman in the audience intervened with an extensive critique of the USA for, among other things, “creat[ing] hunger all over the world.”

György Konrad, the President of the Academy of Arts, interrupts her: “And 10,000 people have to be killed because of that? Is that what you’re saying?” The woman responds that they don’t have to be: “I’m not at all for killing people. But children are starving all over the world and I know where the people are to be found who are responsible for that.” The audience apparently knows too and shows its approval with applause.^[35]

To paraphrase Derrida on 9-11: If we can’t live up to messianic expectations, we’re moral failures; if we reduce hunger at rates no society (much less the entire globe) has seen in human history,^[36] that’s not enough; on the contrary, it’s criminal. The West―especially the US―is the world’s misfortune.

QED.

#Y2KMind: when Jihadis attack a democracy, blame the democracy.

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^[1] Al-Wafd, the daily of Egypt’s largest opposition party, was revolted by Arafat’s obsequiousness: Al-Wafd (Egypt), September 14, 2001, cited in “Egypt’s Opposition Press: Rejoicing is a National and Religious Obligation,” MEMRI, Special Dispatch 274, September 25, 2001. On the fake blood donation―Arafat abhors needles―for victims (who had been incinerated and did not need blood?), see Joel Pollak, “Enderlin: Arafat faked 9/11 blood donation,” Guide to the Perplexed, 17 January 2008.

^[2] “Nous sommes tous américains,” Le Monde, September 13, 2001.

^[3] Jean Baudrillard, “L’esprit du terrorisme,” Le Monde, November 2, 2001.

^[4] For the German response, see Clemens Heni, Schadenfreude: Islamforschung und Antisemitismus in Deutschland nach 9/11 (Berlin: Edition Critic, 2011).

^[5] Saïd, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 47.

^[6] Cited by Rénaud Dely, “Les socialistes malmenés par leur base : l’anti-américanisme perdure chez les militants, » Libération, October 16, 2001, 10; similar sentiments from Alain Gresh of Le monde diplomatique, « Les enjeux d’un dialogue. Entretien avec Alain Gresh », Regards 73 (November 2001), 20. Both cited in Pierre André Taguieff, La nouvelle judéophobie, 100n157.

^[7] Sartre, Huis clos (No Exit) in which hell is being eternally stuck dealing with others of bad faith; on Sartre’s bad faith, see Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 153-86.

^[8] Manfred Halpern, “The Algerian Uprising of 1945,” Middle East Journal 2:2 (1946): 191-202.

^[9] French journalists in conversation, February 2003, Landes, “Chiraq-Iraq: Sailing Full Speed in Iceberg-Laden Waters, Paris, March 5-16, 2003, The Augean Stables.

^[10] Seumas Milne, “They can’t see why they are hated.” The Guardian, September 13, 2001. On Milne’s letter as reflective of widespread “liberal” opinion and the powerful echoes in the more “intellectual” London Review of Books, see Andrew Anthony, The Fallout: How a guilty liberal lost his innocence (London: Random House, 2007) 10-16. For a review of “the universal and sound rejection” of Huntington’s thesis, Ervand Abrahamian, “The US Media, Huntington, and 9-11,” Third World Quarterly, 24.3 (2003): 529–544. For Milne as a representative of the anti-imperialism of fools that Saïd so effectively established, see chapter 8, n116.

^[11] Susan Sontag, “New Yorker Writers Respond to 9-11,” New Yorker, September 24, 2001. Response by Charles Krauthammer, specifically addressing the “we’re still bombing Iraq” comment: “Voices of Moral Obtuseness,” Washington Post, September 21, 2001. More broadly, Andrew Anthony, The Fallout, esp. 3-19.

^[12] Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (NY, 2004), xii.

^[13] Michael Walzer, “Can There Be a Decent Left?” Dissent, Spring 2002. For an extensive discussion of the manichaean left and its response to 9-11, see Michael Bérubé, The Left at War (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

^[14] Salmon Rushdie, “Anti-Americanism takes the world by storm,” Guardian, February 5, 2002.

^[15] Roger, L’ennemi américain, 578.

^[16] On Poller’s reflections on the early years of the new century, see Troubled Dawn of a New Century (Paris, 2017).

^[17] Roger, L’ennemi américain, 578.

^[18] « . . . ils [les erreurs] gonflent sans doute ceux qui s’y adonnent d’une illusion de revanche et de la jouissance onirique d’une supériorité factice. » Jean-François Revel, L’obsession anti-américaine : Son fonctionnement, ses causes, ses conséquences (Paris : Plon, 2002), 99-140, citation p. 101.

^[19] Hollander, Understanding Anti-Americanism: Its Origins and Impact at Home and Abroad. See, for example, Adam Garfinkle’s “The Peace Movement and the Adversary Culture,” 301-21.

^[20] Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

^[21] Hardt and Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). Favorable review: Slavoj Zizek “Have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Rewritten the Communist Manifesto For the Twenty-First Century?” Rethinking Marxism, 13:3/4 (2001); critical: Mitchell Cohen, “Un empire de la langue de bois: Hardt, Negri, et la théorie politique postmoderne,” Controverses, 1 (2006). See further discussion chapter 8.

^[22] Petronella Wyatt, “Poisonous Prejudice,” Spectator, December 8, 2001

^[23] Tom Gross, “A Shitty Little Country: Prejudice & Abuse in Paris & London,” National Review, January 10, 2002.

^[24] Jonathan Sacks, “Making the Case for my People,” Standpoint, September 2009.

^[25] Gurfinkiel, “France’s Jewish Problem,” Commentary, June 2002.

^[26] Markovits, Uncouth Nation, chapter 5.

^[27] Markovits, Uncouth Nation, 150.

^[28] Robin Shepherd, State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel (London: Orion, 2009).

^[29] See Atlas des Zones urbaines sensibles (ZUS), https://sig.ville.gouv.fr/Atlas/ZUS/. After the attacks on the Bataclan in November of 2015, the controversy heated up about ZUS as “no-go zones,” or “Sharia-zones.” Some had insisted on their pervasiveness (Soeren Kern, “European ‘No-Go’ Zones for Non-Muslims Proliferating: ‘Occupation Without Tanks or Soldiers,’” Gatestone Institute, August 22, 2011, while others denied their existence (Catherine Thompson, “How Did The Muslim ‘No-Go Zones’ Myth Get Started Anyway?” Talking Points Memo, January 21, 2015). Five year later, undercover cop Noam Anouar published a book about these neglected and denied no-go zones: La France doit savoir: Un flic chargé de la surveillance des Islamistes raconte (Paris: Plon, 2020). Predictions of a future explosion much worse than 2005: Milliere, “France’s No-Go Zones: The Riots Return,” Gatestone, May 10, 2020. Death threats to journalists and residents who expose the shari’a zones: Henry Samuel, “French Left-wing ‘abandon’ journalist who received death threats over radical Islam,” Telegraph, February 2, 2022.

^[30] On Derrida’s essay, see chapter 8, nn23-25.

^[31] Chomsky, “On the Afghanistan War, American Terrorism, and the Role of Intellectuals,” Salon, January 16, 2002. Christopher Hitchens, “A Rejoinder to Noam Chomsky,” in Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays (New York: Nation Books, 2004), 421-29. On Chomsky’s presence in Caliphator reading materials, see below n102.

^[32] Reverend Wright, “The real sermon given by Pastor Wright,” 04:37.

^[33] Phyllis Chesler, ​​The Death of Feminism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 21.

^[34] See also Joyce Davis, “A Minister’s Question: What Have We Done That They Hate Us So?” Martyrs: Innocence, Vengeance, and Despair in the Middle East (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003), chapter 1; Peter Ford, “Why do they hate us?,” Christian Science Monitor, September 27, 2001; approvingly cited by Abrahamian: they hate the US because of its support for Israel, “US Media, Huntington and 9-11.” For a survey of the more outlandish responses to 9-11, see John Leo, “Learning to love terrorists,” US News and World Report, Oct. 1, 2001.

^[35] Henryk Broder, “The Americans are to Blame,” from Kein Krieg, nirgends [No War, Nowhere] (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 2002), translation by John Rosenthal, http://www.theaugeanstables.com/2022/01/03/8156/. Note that Academy President Konrad does not challenge her ludicrous assertion about hunger.

^[36] “In 1820, 94% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. In 1990, 34.8%, and in 2015, just 9.6%.” Alexander Hammond, “The World’s Poorest People Are Getting Richer Faster,” Foundation for Economic Education, October 27, 2017.

NB: The Overton window is a political model describing the range of ideas, policies, and language considered acceptable by the mainstream public at any given time. It distinguishes between mainstream political viability and fringe or radical concepts.

Towards the end of 2000 a series of events provoked an extraordinary transformation of what had previously loosely been called the “liberal” movement in the West, namely a dramatic shift in the Overton Window. Everyone from the millennial generation grew up downstream from this flip, grew up in a world and a conversation unaware of the loss of freedom involved in that flip.

Before 2000, the standard definition of a liberal (at least in the US) was a moderate leftist who believed in the sanctity of life, equality before the law for all, meritocracy and opportunities for all, a public culture of dispute responsive to anomalous evidence. In this sense, even conservatives were liberals in their commitment to shared core principles of freedom and social responsibility to the people and the nation.

Universities and Newsrooms were full of liberals. Some even warned they were “taking over” news networks. The dominant Western theme was openness, whether to “others” or to new ideas. It was a time people thought that maybe the new millennium could usher in a global civil society. Liberals on all sides of the Oslo Peace Process (including liberal Arabs) agreed that a mutually beneficial positive-sum solution could bring peace.

Between 1999 and 2003, something happened. In late 2000, the Second Intifada broke out, and by 2003, it had become a jihadi suicide-terror war targeting Israeli civilians by the hundreds and thousands. These attacks were everything that a liberal - conservative and progressive - finds appalling: the contempt for human life, the tribal us-them hatred, the uncompromising resort to violence, the toxic masculinity.

But not. On the contrary, by 2003 - after the “al Aqsa Intifada,” (2000) Durban and 9-11 (2001), the lethal reporting of the “Jenin massacre” (2002) - at the height of the suicide terror war, Ian Buruma noted in passing (as obvious), that support for “the Palestinian cause has become the universal litmus test of liberal credentials.”

Supporting a movement that conducted terror attacks on civilian populations and taught genocidal hatred was liberal? Since when do liberals have litmus tests and credentials? What real liberal ever heard such nonsense?

Here was a “liberal” completely unrecognizable to a liberal from the previous century. And yet here they were. I don’t think Buruma was being ironic, but nor did he show a trace of indignation. Indeed, the left was riding at the high point of the wave of global progressive demonstrations: from 40,000 1999 assembled at Seattle, where Palestine wasn’t even on the agenda, to up to ten million globally in the anti-war rallies of 2003, where Palestinian war-mongers were everywhere (2 million in London, Nick Cohen). Three years later, incensed by pictures of the Prophet (PBUH), Muslim demonstrators openly promised to rape infidel women in the same streets of London (February, 2006).

The logic involved in this rallying to the Palestinians offered a textbook case of siding with the aggressor and blaming the victim: “each new act of murder and suicide testified to how oppressive were the Israelis. Palestinian terror, in this view, was the measure of Israeli guilt.” There was, apparently, there still is no point where Palestinian illiberalism – teaching hatred, calling for genocide, targeting children – could go too far, and withdraw the “liberals’” support. “The more grotesque the [Palestinian] terror, the deeper the [Israeli] guilt.” (Paul Berman)

And this huge leap from real liberal values on the one hand, to supporting a genocidal jihadi group which violated every humane principle liberals cherish, on the other, was accompanied by another leap, this time of a sober center of liberals and conservatives expressing concerns about open immigration, suddenly transported to the racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, far-right.

For the last 25 years, this Overton Leap of 2000 has held, and has been part of the lingua franca of public pronouncements. People still think of supporters of the Palestinians as “left” and “humanitarian” and people who sound the alarm about growing and radicalizing Muslim neighborhoods are dismissed as right-wing Islamophobes.

It empowered a cancel culture to shut down sane voices (the center banished to the “far right”) and gave voice to insane, self-defeating ones (the newly credentialed “liberal” Palestinianists). Given how harmful the Overton Leap of 2000 has been to the forces of liberty, and friendly to the forces of a foreign theocracy, it’s time to rethink.

As a first step, let us imagine how our enemy, the Muslim supremacists who consider non-Muslims as candidates for conversion, death or dhimmitude (ie, the constant state of subjection or death), look at these same events and deeds. From their perspective, the liberals of the 20th century were enemies whose principles they targeted for destruction. But these liberals of the 21st century, after the Overton Leap, were something new… an ally, someone to translate the jihadi narrative into Westspeak.

From the Caliphator’s perspective, these were pre-emptive dhimmi, who surrender their independence and follow the central rule of subjection: ‘thou shalt not criticize Muslims or Islam, and if you want favor, attack their enemies.’ Some dhimmi infidels did attack, especially Israel, but also the other Great Satan, the USA, and continue to do so enthusiastically. In any case, willy-nilly, our information professionals have been occupied by our enemy’s war narrative, and they our feeding us his war propaganda, targeting us infidels, as accurate news and as scholarship.

The information professions of the West, during the course of the first quarter of the 21st century, adopted the posture and behavior of pre-emptive dhimmi, people who repeat the Jihadi war narrative without, in some cases, even being aware of what they are doing.

If one were to make a four column page, however, with the columns labeled 1) Zionist journalism, 2) Liberal empirical journalism, 3) Western activist journalism since Leap2000, and 4) what the Jihadis want journalists to say, then the overlap of 1 and 2 would be considerable, and the overlap of 3 and 4 considerably larger. About 70% of the legacy media’s coverage of the Land twixt river and sea, gives over Jihadi war propaganda directly, and the remaining 30% avoids implicating Hamas in any nefarious deeds (like killing their own people).

Dhimmi journalism, like dhimmi scholarship - information professionals who report their own enemy’s propaganda as reliable information, are commiting liberal suicide.

This page is dedicated to restoring the status quo ante 2000, before the massive failure of the Western information professionals, back to a time when a three century-long commitment to the humane values that make freedom for all possible, would recoil in horror at global Jihad and its most explicitly genocidal offshoot, Hamas.

The liberal cause is a noble aspiration, and now, after twenty-five years of abuse and depression, in serious danger.

The Muslim supremacists launching this fight for the Global Califate, consider it a Hundred Years War, and we’re at the half-way point losing on almost every front in the cognitive war. Time to wake up our intelligence and pay attention to relevant and accurate information.

We wish to start by bringing to your attention, genuinely liberal voices that tried to speak out and got marginalized over the last fifty years, realistic voices that warned about the supremacist currents in Islam, and errors in dealing with the non-jihadi Caliphators. These are voices that should not have been silenced, yet were. If you will, we offer you a “liberal infidel remedial reading.” (Neighborly Muslims welcome.)

Must reads from the aughts (‘00s):

Brenner, The Lost Territories of the Republic (2002)

Paul Berman Terror and Liberalism (2003)

Phyllis Chesler, The New Antisemitism (2003)

Nick Cohen, What’s Left? (2007)

Andrew Anthony, The Fallout (2007)

Suggestions welcome.

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In the year of the Mujaddid, 1400 Annus Hejira, plans were laid out to invade Western democracies (Dar al Harb) and establish a Global Caliphate (global Dar al Islam).

In 1979 CE and the subsequent decades, when this movement first appeared on Western radar screens (Daniel Pipes, Steven Emerson), it seemed ludicrous. Khoumeini taking over Iran, Sunn’i Mahdism in Mecca produces global Jihad teachings in Western mosques, Muslim Brotherhood plans for infiltrating and conquering the West not by kinetic warfare (Jihad) but by cognitive warfare (Da’wa)… all seemed to Westerners as ridiculously unrealistic. (That is the nature of millennial dreams – outrageous hope – and also the nature of sane people to dismiss them). Those expressing concern, were dismissed as racists and paranoids.

For the first decades the jihad played out in the Muslim majority world and its neighbors, notably in Nigeria (Maitatsine-Boko Haram), Afghanistan (Bin Laden vs Russia), Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988, millions dead), Sudan genocide and slavery, and the Palestinian territories (first intifada). In that first decade of the new, renewed century, key jihadi movements formed (Hizbullah 1982, al Qaeda 1988, Hamas 1988). All of them with an apocalyptic vision of world conquest.

Meantime the infiltration of the West began with both a human migration encouraged by the European elites, and a growing narrative presence in academia thanks to the spectacular success of Orientalism (1978), which effectively aligned Western radicalism with the apocalyptic Caliphator narrative: Israel and US, the two Satans, the Antichrists, who must be destroyed for collective redemption. It also laid down the lines whereby Westerners forbid themselves from criticizing Islam and the Arabs and thereby blind themselves to their enemy.

In 2000, jihadis began directly attacking democracies with suicide terror strikes in their midst, most spectacularly on 9-11, 2001, most recently October 7, 2023. Already three days earlier, the UN Conference in Durban SA, sealed the green-red marriage of the activist progressive left and the global jihadi right around hatred of the USA, Israel, Western hegemony. When Bin Laden struck three days later, the response was jubilation not only among Muslims the world over, but Arab Christians in Lebanon, and among the European intellligentsia consumed by its envy.

The response of the West to this assault has been to fight the jihad in the kinetic theater of war (War on Terror) and lose to the da’wa in the cognitive theater (public sphere). In the cognitive theater of war, the accusation of Islamophobia has operated as an exceptionally powerful weapon in silencing any discussion of the odious (by all Western democratic standards) millennial dream of a global Califate in action. When jihadis attacked a democracy, the information professionals from those democracies, loyal to their commitment not to criticize Muslims or Islam, blamed their own democracies. When Muslims preyed sexually on their daughters, British infidels at the highest level, feared to intervene or even speak about it for fear of the accusation of Islamophobia. (The marriage of pre-modern sadism and post-modern masochism.)

As this hundred-years’ war reaches its midpoint (1450=2028 CE), a sober assessment of the tally in a major study by ISGAP precisely about the hundred years war, finds the Caliphators winning extensively, especially on the cognitive theater war. At this midpoint, we propose to survey the field, assess strengths and weaknesses, and develop a strategy to fight back.

In 2001, when Bin Laden claimed from his cave, “We are the strong horse,” it struck even those watching this millennial movement in action as braggadocio. Today, I think an honest self-assessment views the forces of freedom and democracy as the clear underdog.

In 2026/1448, it’s time for infidels around the world, however isolated from or hooked into the global conversation among 5 billion cell phone users, to wake up to the news that, however little they see a common ground with other cultures and peoples, in the eyes of supremacist Muslims planning a global Caliphate, they are all part of one despised and hated category, kuffar, and that any Muslim who befriends you is viewed by the imperialists as an apostate.

Only by joining forces and committing to the opposite of this hatred and abuse of the “other” can we hope to prevail. We seek a world where all have the chance to take on the yoke of freedom, and grant our neighbors the freedom we want for ourselves.

At this point, a neighborly Islam is not even on the horizon. Perhaps it will appear because we wait, and quietly demand that the supremacists grow up and join the human race rather than throw tantrums of genocidal hatred because they can’t rule it.

And we have a right to demand that.

#Victory2076

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The first recorded case of an invasive cognitive war victory, in which the weaker, on the verge of defeat, convinced the stronger side to bring the enemy’s forces inside their defenses, was the Trojan Horse.

Among the names for our initiative, I suggested The Laocoon Project, in honor of the Trojan leader who told his fellow citizens not to bring in the horse and even threw a spear at its belly, revealing the clang of armor within. At this, two serpents came from the sea and strangled both Laocoon and his two sons.

The citizens of Troy took this as a sign not to listen to Laocoon or consider the empirical evidence they had just heard.

Most people think that Homer tells the tale of the Greek Horse at the end of the Iliad. But it was Aeneas, a Trojan survivor, who tells the tale, with full knowledge of the suicidal folly that gripped his people.

Below is Aeneas’ description to Dido of what happened after the snakes strangled Laocoon and his progeny.

Aeneid, Book II: 228-253 The Horse Enters Troy

Then in truth a strange terror steals through each shuddering heart,

and they say that Laocoön has justly suffered for his crime

in wounding the sacred oak-tree with his spear,

by hurling its wicked shaft into the trunk.

“Pull the statue to her house”, they shout,

“and offer prayers to the goddess’s divinity.”

We breached the wall, and opened up the defences of the city.

All prepare themselves for the work and they set up wheels

allowing movement under its feet, and stretch hemp ropes

round its neck. That engine of fate mounts our walls

pregnant with armed men. Around it boys, and virgin girls,

sing sacred songs, and delight in touching their hands to the ropes:

Up it glides and rolls threateningly into the midst of the city.

O my country, O Ilium house of the gods, and you,

Trojan walls famous in war! Four times it sticks at the threshold

of the gates, and four times the weapons clash in its belly:

yet we press on regardless, blind with frenzy,

and site the accursed creature on top of our sacred citadel.

Even then Cassandra, who, by the god’s decree, is never

to be believed by Trojans, reveals our future fate with her lips.

We unfortunate ones, for whom that day is our last,

clothe the gods’ temples, throughout the city, with festive branches.

Meanwhile the heavens turn, and night rushes from the Ocean,

wrapping the earth, and sky, and the Myrmidons’ tricks,

in its vast shadow: through the city the Trojans

fall silent: sleep enfolds their weary limbs.

In other words, the people, struck with terror, mistake the very agent of their destruction for a holy object which Laocoon, in denouncing, had desecrated. In their enthusiasm to bring the sacralized object into the city, they breach the walls which, for ten years, had protected them from the savage revenge of their enemy. They celebrate and worship that which will shortly destroy them.

Let’s rewrite that in prose, describing the West as Troy and the Global Caliphators as the Greeks.

At the height of jihadi savagery, a strange terror steals through each shuddering heart,

and they say that the Jews justly suffer for their crimes

in wounding the Quran of peace with their sharp criticisms,

by hurling their wicked accusations at that holy book which we honor as part of our belief in a universal humanity.

“Pull the statue to her house in our universities”, they shout,

“and offer articles to Said’s post-colonialism.”

We dropped our standards, and opened up our public sphere to malevolent narratives.

All prepare themselves for the work and they set up their computers and their anti-racism and their DEI

flooding cyberspace and academia with their false idols of hatred, drawing the enemy in with their “humanitarian” passion.

That hypocritical demopathic discourse mounts the walls of our discernment, pregnant with supremacists awaiting the right time.

Around it, screen-addled youth, coarse of tongue, pack shamers,

chant jihadi slogans, and delight in glimpsing the promised land:

Up the hidden army glides and “progressive” Muslim mayors roll into the midst of the democratic capitals.

O my country, O America, land of freedom and equality!

And you, fourth estate, famous in peace, embracing the other, refusing to run your own side’s war propaganda… you now pour forth our enemies’ malevolent lies as news!

Four times and more jihad shows its savage, sadistic face — 9/11, 7/7, Bataclan, Oct7 — and four times we look away from their victims:

instead we press on regardless, blind with frenzy,

and welcome the accursed creature on top of our finest universities.

Even then Pnina and her fellow Jews, who, by the supersessionst decree, are never

to be believed by the true faithful, reveals our future fate with her lips.

We unfortunate ones, for whom that day is our last,

clothe our imaginings throughout the city, with festive certainty that a new and far better day dawns.

Meanwhile the heavens turn, and night rushes from the Ocean,

wrapping the earth, and sky, and the poisoned tales,

in its vast shadow: through the city the infidels

fall silent: sleep enfolds their weary limbs.

Apparently, although separated by almost three two millennia, those who fall dupe to invasive cognitive warfare deceptions, share much in common.

@Ellen Horowitz

Laocoon Project lost to Wars of Perception (which has its own great literary allusion) in the naming sweepstakes. But we’ll have the Trojan Horse in the logo, and in my mind, this effort to wake up those who treasure freedom to the Caliphator danger, will always be the Laocoon Project.

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It began with an op-ed by Nicholas Kristoff entitled “Silence meets the rape of Palestinians.” Oh, I thought, at last a once-serious journalist has the courage to cover the genuinely unreported story of Hamas raping defenseless widows and “marrying” their young girls to jihadis. But no, it was the story shouted about in the Palestinosphere, a ludicrously paranoid tale about diabolically evil Israelis training dogs to rape Palestinians, that had already had plenty of “mainstream” exposure, among others, by Owen Jones.

The response of the Israeli called out the NYT for its appalling publication of one of “the worst blood libels in the modern press.”

In response, Mahmoud Khalil complained:

Everything is a blood libel. The ICJ ruling, a libel. The ICC warrants, a libel. The UN reports, libel. Amnesty, HRW, B’Tselem, libel. Survivors’ testimony, libel. Your own soldiers charged at Sde Teiman, a libel. Chants at protests, libel. The only entity on Earth that never x.com/IsraelMFA/stat…

Jones then introduced Khalil’s tweet with this post:

Here’s why this is so absurd: Medieval blood libel was a fiction. Ordinary Jewish civilians were not going round killing people. Nobody disputes the Israeli state is perpetrating mass violence, or that it has killed (as a bare minimum) tens of thousands of Palestinians!

***

This is a fascinating attempt to deflect even as it reasserts:

The accusation that Palestinian lethal narratives are post-modern blood libels is not a denial that “Israel killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.” Calling it “mass violence” is not the alleged blood libel.

The blood libel is accusing Israel of committing genocide, of mass-starvation of innocent Palestinians, of systematically raping them. Is there evidence for this – yes, although every source of information comes from people doing war propaganda for Hamas. Is there counter-evidence? Does the plethora of Gazan restaurants tweeting out their plentiful wares and their happy thronging customers from the same places at the same time as these reports of starving people, confirm or radically undermine the “famine narrative”? Is the unqualified adoption of the jihadi narrative a particularly dangerous form of journalistic malpractice.

To repeat the accusations of Hamas propaganda without ever mentioning that the systematic rapists and torturers of both Israelis and Palestinians is Hamas; that Hamas has an explicitly genocidal jihadi program, and that when it had 20 hours of power over Jews it engaged in genocidal behavior of unimaginably savage sadism.

Those who repeat these ludicrous accusations and fall silent on the behavior of those who make them, serve the very genocidal sources who project their heinous desires onto Israel and offer them to you Western journalists on a poisoned hook. This precisely the case of Kristof’s trusted “sources,” working with Hamas to frame Israel.

#OwnGoalWarJournalism: report the enemy’s propaganda as news to the audience they want to invade. Can’t get more self-destructive.

And you, Owen consistently transmit those deeply malevolent and libelous accusations, meant to justify genocide, to your western audiences as journalistic non-fiction all the time.

That’s what Khalil is complaining about that you found so congenial:

‘I can’t even libel the Israelis without being accused of libeling them.’

But your comment contrasting the medieval blood libel and the current criticism of Israel suggests a valuable “compare and contrast” between what some of us call medieval or pre-modern blood libels and the post-modern ones we claim now circulate in our press. So as a medievalist let me inform you about those “fictions” and why they were so popular.

The medieval blood libel arose in a world where Jews were powerless, and lived among Christians some of whom hated them for religious reasons. It accused them of the most heinous of sins, killing innocents for religious reasons, reasons the Jews abhorred – eating any blood, animal or – even more unthinkable – human blood. It demonized them, making them into the enemy of mankind, an odious enemy driven by deliberate malice. Anyone with a heart who believed it could not possibly side with them. And yet, anyone without a brain could see the projection of clerical insecurities, resentments and hatreds onto the Jews.

Given the Jews apparent lack of power – both Muslims and Christians ruled over them with a strong hand – the malevolence medieval writers attributed to them, so visible among those with power in Christian society, had to lie hidden, Jews working invisibly to do their evil. Hence its ritual nature as a multiplier (eventually giving birth to global conspiracy), and the epitome of willful evil.

The medieval and early modern blood libel, originating in England and France in the 12th century (i.e. after Christians, in the name of Christ, slaughtered thousands of Jews) was periodically revived throughout Europe, and active throughout Eastern Europe as late as the late as 1946. It regularly provoked, as lethal narratives are intended, attacks on Jews, some legal executions and dispossessions, some mob-action (pogroms), in which Jews were raped, looted and slaughtered.

Among the many lethal narratives told about Jews in the Middle Ages – e.g. poisoning wells, desecrating eucharists – this perverted ritual blood libel, which threatened to erupt every year at the advent of Passover-Easter, stands, at least in Jewish memory, as the epitome of anti-semitic hate speech: the blood libel.

The post-modern blood libel is not about religious ritual, but about secular matters, in an age when Jews, on the basis of human right of self-determination, have the autonomy to defend themselves. It is not about hidden things, but about public matters. It is not wild poisonous rumors spreading in a paranoid and ignorant public, but wild poisonous accusations reported as news by journalists who claim to adhere to the professional standards of a free press and report as accurately as possible to their audiences what they see and hear and deem to be accurate. Whereas the medieval appeal of the blood libel was its hidden nature and it was believed on faith, through the medium of journalism, “everyone sees” the post-modern blood libels and believes them on the word of our information professionals.

“Everyone” knows that Israel is committing genocide. Anyone who denies it is the equivalent of a Holocaust denier.

Why are both “blood libels”? Because both, in different cultural environments, tell malevolent and false tales about the Jews as the enemy of mankind.

• They both accuse the Jews of the most heinous things imaginable – in medieval powerless times, of secretly ritually slaughtering Christian boys… in modern times, committing a genocide they had just suffered.

• They both take something Jews abhor – consuming any blood much less human, targeting children much less committing genocide – and accuse the Jews of precisely that transgression.

• They both deploy the most potent of war propaganda techniques, designed to stir up hatred and justify slaughtering, even annihilating so evil an enemy. They are both hate speech in its most lethal form – genocidal war propaganda.

• They both arise in a matrix of religious warfare, part of a discourse that the haters tell themselves to justify their hatred. (In the 21st century, the Arab public sphere became the most active purveyor of medieval blood libels in the world.

• And in both cases, people who want to do the worst, the most heinous deeds, project their evil intent, their malice, onto their designated enemy, the Jews.

• And just as medieval people would soon be the object of these hatreds (the same Church tortured and burned heretics), when Westerners believe these post-modern blood libels are true, they completely misread what’s happening around them, and who their real enemies are.

Certainly by any meaningful definition of genocide as the most heinous of crimes (the purpose of accusing Israel), the tens of thousands of dead you mention killed in two years of war is historically low on the civilian death-toll scale of any urban warfare, and it’s insignificant on the scale of genocide. Had Israel come anywhere near the rate of dead per hour of Hamas on Oct7, they would have killed a million Gazans in two years of warfare, and given their superior fire power, had they the same intentions, all 2.5 million of them. And you’re talking about tens of thousands? And the population of Gaza has increased since 2023?

Look around you for mass slaughters and mass-starvation and mass enslavement in the hundreds of thousands and millions. There’s no lack of them on our wretched globe. Global Jihad kills hundreds of thousands by famine alone in Somalia, in Yemen and, millions in places like Syria, Iran, Iraq, Sudan. Why on earth would one ignore the terrible suffering inflicted on these many other people – Muslim and infidel – and use words far more appropriate when describing their actions to accuse the comparatively restrained behavior of Israel of “genocide”?

Is it racism? - the suffering of brown and black lives don’t matter to you...

Is it cowardice? - you don’t want to criticize jihadis who are doing the killing and starving...

Is it obsession? - the only suffering that moves you is when you can blame the Jews...

***

According to Ehad Ha’am in 1892, when Jews told Christians that the blood libel was a fiction, they responded “can the whole world be wrong and the Jews be right?” You now agree this was fiction.

After 2023, when Israelis say we are not committing genocide, nor systematically raping Palestinians, nor starving the Gazan population to death, “the whole world” responds, ‘Can we be wrong and Israel be right? - No. Impossible. This is fact! Nobody disputes it.’

And there we come to the nub of the problem. You, Owen, and so many other lethal journalists reporting Palestinian war propaganda as news, have corrupted your medium. You have gone post-modern - no to “facts,” yes to “narratives,” and no to “grand narratives” of Western triumphalism. Then you adopted the grand narrative of your enemies – Muslim triumphalism and the global Caliphate – and you return to your audiences in the West insisting that your Palestinian colleagues’ blood libels are news, “facts” that everyone (who’s anyone) knows are true.

Post-moderns invoking their enemy’s fictions as “facts.”

And a new oxymoron is born: “post-modern facts,” aka, spectacularly self-destructive blood libels concocted by the enemy of all the freedoms, fairness and openness the early post-moderns strove for, fed to a disoriented public audience as modern “facts” that everyone knows by people claiming to be professional journalists.

Take the alleged “dog-rape” affair. Nonsense, people say, and decent dog trainers insist it’s not possible. But, no. It is. Look who did it: the Nazis, Pinochet. The most heinous people on the earth… and the Israelis. One of your supporters challenged me: “as a medieval historian, you of all people should know how far people will go.”

Yes, I do, and I know that the Jews are made of other, sterner stuff. For them, manhood is self-control, not killing another man (preferably one who has “insulted” you). They have elaborate rules around not making an animal suffer.

And I do know that the people making the accusations are fighting for the most sadistic genocidal “army” we have yet seen in this new dark age. All those numerous accusations so credited by the NGOs and the journalists, are from a medieval religious culture very similar to those Christians who came up with the blood libel. They are all open projections of what they would like to do to Jews.

So just as genuinely, horrifically documented research comes out (refused by the NYT, accepted by CNN), making clear how sadistically Hamas jihadis raped Israeli women, the NYT covers its pages with an accusation by veteran “human rights” journalist Nicholas Kristof, featuring multiple accusations from Hamas jihadis, accusing Israel of systematically using rape to torment Palestinians. And you triumphantly tweet out your vindication.

Just like Jeremy Bowen, ten days after Oct7, believed Hamas when it told them that a jihadi bomb that hit a hospital parking lot was an Israel airstrike that flattened the hospital and killed hundreds, so you, and Nicholas, and the chorus of lethal journalists, drown out evidence of what your sources (and allies?) do with rape as a weapon of war annd terror, and instead believe what they are saying about Israelis. You ignore what Hamas does and imagine that Israel is doing it. You’ve been hacked by a brain virus.

Because anyone who knows anything, also knows that these folks, these supremacist jihadis who fight for religious dominion (global caliphate) by sword and by word, are not friends of the journalistic profession, and that, were they to succeed, you, or any other journalist who imagines him or herself a free-thinker, and an honest journalist, a socialist, and anti-fascist, will be their immediate targets (as were the communists in Iran in 1979-81). Journalism as you know and think you practice it will not exist.

What I don’t get, is why on earth you would willingly purvey and defend the war propaganda of your enemy, aimed at destroying the very society in which you thrive? I’m not asking you to denounce it (too much), but just to “give it a miss.” You’re clearly not equipped to understand what’s going on twixt river and sea.

But actually, energetically, reporting your enemy’s war propaganda as news is own-goal war journalism. You can’t get more self-destructive, suicidal.

What is your intention in so behaving?

***

Recently, Archbishop Luc Terlinden of Mechelin-Brussels put up a four plaques in English, Dutch, French and Hebrew at St Michael’s and St Gudula’s Cathedral, apologizing for a classic medieval lethal libel – desecrating the Eucharist – which was depicted in his Cathedral’s stained-glass windows.

Theological and social anti-Judaism is in direct contradiction with the Gospel of Christ, which calls for truth, justice, and brotherhood… We ask forgiveness from the Jewish people for the suffering these baseless accusations have caused.

If you don’t want to be another chapter in Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews, then, Archbishop, stand up to the baseless accusations now being leveled at us by your compatriots. You might just help save Belgium from the fate it courts with its current embrace of those baseless accusations, those blood libels, that Owen and Nicholas retail, made by your enemies with malevolent intent. If not for the Jews, for your own people.

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My responses:

This is the mind virus. It is the projection of the global jihadis who are precisely a mixture of Nazi Germany, apartheid, misogynist laws, belligerent bullies who have we Westerners standing down, no matter how grotesque their behavior. (Think of the systematic rape and sexual enslavement of lower class girls in places like Rotherham and even Oxford, which the British authorities - school officials, public officials, police, journalists, politicians - were all afraid to confront for decades!).

Born in 1949, like most of us, I come to the role of Israel in the world with the story of the holocaust fresh in my mind. Jews worldwide were the victims of a horrible crime. Israel is the scrappy democracy. Israel a triumph of pluck and ingenuity. Its success was humanity’s success. Young people experienced entirely different events. They see bomb blasts in Gaza, stories from the West Bank, and yesterday morning they read about celebrations in Israel of new Lebanese cities turned to rubble as Israel clears out a wider border zone.

What they see is carefully filtered by the very people who declared the war and turned the civilian areas they controlled into a military zone, further curated by a Western press that, thinking they are legitimately “criticizing” Israel are actually engaged in own-goal war journalism, i.e., running their enemy’s war propaganda as news.

Maybe Israeli, and American pro-Israel hawks, know exactly what they are doing and are confident that their policies and messages are moral and reasonable. Pro-Israel hawks have an in-your-face certainty, so maybe they know something I don’t know, and I should doubt what I see.

Please read my book. Israel is a democracy fighting as decently as possible against a terrible foe. The “hawks” here are reluctantly waging a defensive war against a war-mongering enemy who, when given 20 hours of power over us, outdid the Nazis in rage and sadism. Few people here are “confident that our policies are reasonable and moral”, but we certainly get no guidance on what we should do (other than stand down) from liberal “allies” in the West.

On the other hand, however, we are confident that our enemy is exponentially more unreasonable and more immoral (by your definitions) than we. And the Arab Muslims who live in Israel, who are the most educated, wealthy, and empowered citizen population in the Arab world, know it well, even though their tribal loyalty should go to their people and their religion. As one of them put it: “we have the best enemy and the worst friends.”

But young people come to this with an entirely different set of assumptions from mine. Israel has lost the PR and credibility war, and Israel and doesn’t seem to care.

To be honest, as someone fighting that PR and credibility war for 25 years (again, please read my book on it), I know many people who gave up in disgust at trying to convince westerners - journalists, “human rights” activists, intellectuals - that they were being duped by our enemies. It’s not that we don’t care; it’s that we feel that it’s useless to fight what seems to be an unquenchable desire to believe the worst of us, a drive that seems to play so strong a role in this PR disaster.

The more generous among us say, ‘we have to keep trying to find a way, if we say it right, they’ll hear.’ The more cynical say, ‘ you can’t fight hate with reason: people who say they dislike us because we’re doing terrible things actually dislike us and therefore believe the stories that we’re doing terrible things. the nastiest bullies are winning. that may come off as if we “don’t seem to care.” it’s far more heartbreaking than that.

They have made belligerence and expansion a virtue

Israel has made a strategy of war against an enemy who will be appeased by nothing but our disappearance, to retaliate strongly to murderous attacks on its civilians, and the creation of border zones on terrain that has been turned by our enemies into above-and underground military installations to attack us. To call that “belligerence and expansion” is to misread the situation: our enemies are the belligerent and expansive ones.

and are trying to sell it as a necessity.

All alternatives are welcome. Just don’t offer up rehashed Oslo liberal positive-sum optimism, Tom Friedman win-win resolutions. That blew up in our faces in 2000 and multiple times since. We are on the front line of a war that Europe and other democracies will soon be fighting. It won’t necessarily look exactly like ours, but mutatis mutandis in different geographical and political terrains it will be the same war, the struggle of Jihadi Muslim supremacy over democracy.

You think our democracy smells bad? I’d hate to have you have to endure what we do and see how well you do under that pressure. My guess, is either you will crumble or you will turn savage against your savage foe.

It half-works for me. It doesn’t work on my daughter or anyone she knows. I suspect Israel and Israel hawks are laying down the seeds for a profound reversal of the U.S. relationship with Israel and in the next decade or two as our generation dies off and the now-young people take over.

I’d rephrase that as, “Progressives and radical woke activists are laying down the seeds of a profound reversal… with their systematic ingestion of poisonous own-goal war propaganda.” And if it happens, it’s not a cause for wringing of hands and tears of regret, it will be the end of their democracy. The alleged progressive “leaders” will have embraced their most mortal enemy’s war propaganda as truth. Suicidal empathy.

When the thirty- or hundred-years’ war of jihadi hatreds is over, every lover of freedom should hope that the flag of Zion yet waves o’er a land of the free and a home of the brave.

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I think what X is trying to say is that your friend - in all due sincerity - has been duped by some very bad actors, who among other flaws,

• are the ones creating the humanitarian disaster your friend thinks he’s trying to alleviate;

• they do so in order to use the suffering they engineer to accuse Israel of their own desires, deeds, and modus operandi; and

• they want to destroy democracies and the rights we all (still) exercise.

Your friend speaks from within a worldview in which he both cannot see who he is allied with and can only see Israel through their eyes (ie adopts their projections). Anyone who knows the situation here, where Hamas and the PA and any political regime dominated by Arab Muslims (Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Iraq) regularly use torture on their own people, laughs in disbelief at the accusations against Israel “torturing” international figures whom they have taken into custody and are about to release. If Israel’s own high principles (elaborate rules limiting torture to imminent danger of terror attack) and our own ferocious self-critics don’t keep us in line, then the intense and hostile scrutiny of the world does.

You can be sure IDF and various security forces here do not behave the way our enemies do, and when good-intentioned western progressives, for reasons everyone should think long and hard about, say things that sound like they are parroting the language of our enemies, the matter speaks for itself.

Neither X nor I know your friend, but I think X would agree with me [he did subsequently] that the best advice he can follow is to find out more about the other folks in the “resistance” he’s working closely with, and whose language - genocide, apartheid, mass famine - he uses thinking they describe reality.

On the contrary, they are being used to invert reality - ie Hamas is openly genocidal in word and deed; supremacist Islam has harsh apartheid laws for infidels and for women; mass famine is what Jihadi forces in Sudan and Yemen use as a weapon in their jihad even on their fellow Muslims.

Ask him if he’d participate in a flotilla of aid to Sudan (where the people who intercept him will use torture).

And please, don’t take offense in this discussion. Real lives (I’d say whole civilizations) hang in the balance of how we figure out what’s happening to us.

Right now, as I see it, the cruelest people on the planet have convinced a broad swath of the “progressive left” that Israel is the vilain, and that eliminating her will somehow “free” the occupied Palestinians and bring world peace. An increasingly dominant part of the democratic party, want to make the use of genocide to describe what Israel is doing in Gaza (and now Lebanon) a litmus test for running on the democratic party ticket.

These are catastrophic disorientations, both moral and cognitive with terrible political consequences. Gad Saad, a Lebanese intellectual who fled not only his homeland because of the Palestinian imported civil war (1975-82; over a hundred thousand civilians killed), and now fled Canada, calls it a brain virus, a kind of suicidal empathy for victims curated for them by their enemies.

Please understand: Israel is not the only target of this merciless global Jihad, and when Western progressives come down on us like a ton of bricks, they are establishing an ominous precedent: violence in self-defense is illegitimate. When jihadis attack a democracy, blame the democracy. It’s a form of pre-emptive surrender, taking on the persona of the dhimmi. The protection it provides is only temporary, and the costs further down the road, colossal.

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Your reference to the Melian dialog, in which the Athenians told the Melians that power counts above all. My concern is that this dialog is often used as an original statement in realist international thought and anticipates the defensive model developed in game theory under existential strategic threat. Since Israel is under existential threat, many scholars have referred to game theory zero sum concepts. The rest of your talk was about ideologically driven extreme irrationalism, not to be confused with rationalist defensive thinking under technical existential threat, such as nuclear threat.”

I distinguish between “normal time” projection (dominating imperative) and apocalyptic paranoid projection (genocidal imperative) which projects one’s own worst devils onto the enemy. Psychologists distinguish between neurotic projections (somewhat rooted in reality even if a form of projecting one’s own shadow) and paranoid ones, where the beliefs have no relation to reality. One’s zero-sum, the other’s so hard zero-sum that it becomes negative-sum.

But my argument (demotic religiosity) is that the Jews are the earliest practitioners of positive-sum relations and have developed its arts extensively (eg the schmooze). They therefore defy even the normal “zero-sum” game-theory norms that people who “live” in that world assume everyone shares, not only on an individual or social level, but now on a national level.

If we judged Israel by the standards of the nations then we would have expected its efforts at a democracy in 1948 to vanish rapidly. After all, unlike the argument all totalitarian regimes use, that the terror they must impose is in response to an existential attack from an monstrous enemy, Israel really did have the surrounding nations bent on its complete extermination, of the revolutionary entity and of the people. Therefore, the zero-sum model for existential threat would expect to see the forces driving towards paranoia and violent authoritarianism and genocidal attitudes towards its enemies. The French revolution took four years to turn from freeing its own people to turning terror against them, dreaming of watering their plowed furrows with the blood of their impure enemies.

In the world of realist international thought, Israel is the Joe DiMaggio of nations. No one comes near its record of continuous democracy while engaged in a permanent war with genocidal enemies. All other egalitarian revolutionary regimes, under less crushing conditions of insecurity, have turned that revolution, when threatened, into an engine of totalitarian control and even megadeath: Revolutionary France, Taiping China, Bolshevik Russia, Maoist China, Khmer-Rouge Cambodia, Islamic Republic of Iran.

So the “defensive model under existential strategic threat” should apply to Israel even more than any other case. And yet it doesn’t. And yet, rather than ask why, scholars insist it will happen, wait for it, and jump on every sign that it is failing, as proof of their fundamental error of judgment - “see Netanyahu and the right-wing religious zealots are destroying Israeli democracy.” Rather than root for the exception, and keep in mind who, from the start, Israel’s enemies are antidemocratic and genocidally paranoid, they somehow need to reduce Israel to their categories.

“Can the whole world be wrong, and Israel be right?” What a dull and dangerous world where that is answered, “no.”

The proof that the Jews are the least paranoid people on the planet, is that: were anyone else to have the reasons to be paranoid that Jews do, they’d be self-destructive and incapable of interacting productively with others, on both the national and individual levels.

Jews don’t want to believe people are out to get them. It’s an admirable trait, but under current conditions, that tendency has gotten Jews into trouble. they have trouble seeing real enemies. It’s a problem they share with (real) liberals.

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In part this reflects and acknowledges the fact that the effort to subsume antizionism as part of antisemitism, as the “new antisemitism,” has not worked. The current public sphere is filled with people who think the antizionist invective is a legitimate criticism of Israel and of anyone who supports her. Indeed, a whole academic field of “Antizionist Studies” has arisen, in close parallel to the “scientific” field of Antisemitism studies in German academia in the late 19^th/early 20^th centuries.

Antizionism, the argument runs, makes its own unique contributions to the world’s longest hatred and needs to be treated as the autonomous phenomenon that it has made a sudden and widespread appearance in the 21^st century, every bit its own and new version of the four millennia-old phenomenon of Judeophobia as, say, Nazi antisemitism in the early 20th century. Indeed, it stands out among all previous avatars by the patent, self-destructive folly of those who embrace it, and as such, it raises a whole new range of scholarly questions.

I want to give you, Andrew, and all those who plow and will plow these fields of knowledge, the following blessing: may the institutions of higher learning that emerge from the current war between Islamic triumphalism and Western democracies be committed to the kind of intellectual integrity that values Critical Antizionism Studies for its contribution to human freedom. May they include this field in their curricula for the new millennium. In pursuit of that new and most useful knowledge, I’d like to focus on what I think is a key dimension of all Judeophobia, but has, over the last centuries, with modernity and globalization, become a key component of a particularly virulent, indeed genocidal, form of Jew-hatred, the role of a psychotic collective gentile projection onto the Jews.

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The Protocols

Let me begin with perhaps the single most revealing document concerning this projection, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Around the turn of the 19^th century –modernism’s famous fin de siècle – agents for various monarchical regimes and their aristocracies, forged a document which purported to be the official protocols of a secret meeting of the “Elders of Zion” at the first Zionist Conference in Basel in 1897. The obviously fraudulent nature of the document struck even those for whom it was intended as ludicrous, like the Tzar whose secret police were the first to publish it. The conservative essayist, Mikhail Osipovich Menshikov, considered it the product of “people with brain fever.”

Much of the response, especially from Jews and liberals including my own early efforts, has been to prove and denounce the forgery, and, more recently in its revival in the 21^st century, to bemoan its inextinguishable appeal.[1] Here I’d like to approach the document in a different manner. When we view the Protocols as the product of non-Jews projecting onto Jews, it offers a fascinating insight into what the authors – and their believing audience – think the Jews are saying among themselves. So let us consider the Protocols as a document that sheds light on its composers.

And the voice that is, through this projective ventriloquism, placed in the mouth of the rabbis, is a familiar one in Western literature. It is the voice of power-politics, a “Machiavellian” voice that does not appear in Jewish sources, but does repeatedly appear over the millennia in gentile ones, even the allegedly democratic Greeks. Thucydides quotes the Athenians (in their increasingly imperial mood) explaining to the Melians, whom they are about to destroy: “It is a law long before us and will be long after us, that those who can do what they will and those who cannot suffer what they must.” Augustine called it libido dominandi, and considered it the driving force behind all earthly governments in this world (saeculum). It is a voice that democracies try to quiet in favor of more productive and egalitarian relations. Indeed, one of the messianic premises of progressivism in our age, is an exquisite concern with removing power from relationships. Foucault managed to explore infinite subtleties in the exercises of power, perhaps blinding us to the presence of its rawest cultural forms.[2]

Eli Sagan in his brilliant book on the origins of democracy, The Honey and the Hemlock, called it the “paranoid imperative”: rule or be ruled. ‘If I don’t establish my rule over you, you will do it to me.’ Or as the Athenians said to the Melians, “You only complain about fairness because you are weak, if you were strong, you would do the same to us.” Remorseless zero-sum relations.[3]

Sagan argued that democracies – free societies – could not exist without overcoming this paranoid imperative, and that this mindset is so deeply wired in humans, and set in the political dynamics of complex societies, that it is nothing short of a secular miracle that it ever happened at all. These relentlessly zero-sum political principles ruled the relations between kings and kings (spring, the time for war) and between kings and their people (aristocratic empires), for millennia – since the advent of the plow, the sword, and the pen transformed society. Given this lengthy, normative status, I think we should call it the dominating imperative, while acknowledging with Sagan, the presence of a systemic projection of bad intent onto the other.

The everyday version of this imperative is do onto others before they do onto you. Again, a hard-zero-sum attitude: ‘I can only win if you lose, if you even win a little (positive-sum), I lose. In any case, I assume the worst of you, my neighbor.’ The tale is told of a peasant plowing his field who turned up a bronze lamp. As he cleaned off the mud, out came a genie and offered him any wish, on the condition that his neighbor get it twice. “Then poke out one of my eyes,” replied the peasant, thereby raising himself up, according to the proverb, In the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed is king.

In its apocalyptic version – the final battle dawns – the dominating imperative becomes the paranoid: exterminate or be exterminated. Here the stakes become at once cosmic and urgent, which includes a strong genocidal urge. In the world that the Protocols allegedly documents, the power-hungry Jews are on the verge of closing the circle, Moses’ brass serpent of seizing its tail, the gentile world, humanity, teeters on the edge of utter, humiliating subjection. The earliest publications of the Protocols presented them as the work of the Antichrist, now being unleashed before the very eyes of its readers. Everything – salvation – was at stake.

In normal time – the longue durée of ten millennia – the dominating imperative has the inside discourse among the power-elite – ‘how we think.’ When Machiavelli gave the Prince some choice advice based on this violently zero-sum, authoritarian thinking, he only made public what everyone in the ruling elite said among themselves, or, to use Stephen Pinker’s formulation, he only made that cruel attitude, “common knowledge.”[4] It is not by chance that the voice of the Jew in the Protocols is actually verbatim drawn from an imaginary dialogue published in 1864 (in which Jews play no role), in which Machiavelli appears as the spokesman for the dominating imperative, a promoter of tyranny, with its violent, a-moral, zero-sum approach and its plentiful victims.[5]

The Protocols reads as an amalgam of Plato and Machiavelli. “Everyone knows,” as Plato taught, that democracy is a recipe for anarchy and inevitable tyranny. So, reasons the Machiavellian mind, the only reason the Jews could be pushing democracy, was to create an anarchy in which they could become global tyrants. This analysis certainly accorded with an observable and disquieting phenomenon: everywhere there was liberal (positive-sum) activity – publishing, newspapers, arts, theater, markets, academia, revolutions – there were assimilated Jews energetically participating. That must, then, give us, the gentile aristocracy, a clue to the greater plan to dupe the masses into throwing off their natural rulers (us), thus making all of us easy victims of the Jews’ plan for mass – global – enslavement.

The Russian critic Mikhail Osipovich Menshikov, despite being a conservative nationalist and hostile to Jews, immediately noted the tell-tale source of the rabbis’ voice, observing that indeed this kind of thinking characterized many elites of the day, the pan-Britainism, pan-Germanism, pan-Slavism, pan-Turkism, all of which strove for global domination. He did not need such a cheap fake to dislike the Jews (which he indeed did); indeed, he saw its global conspiracy-thinking as a product of “brain-fever.”

For the “brain fever” of the Protocols is not the normal, everyday, projection of the rule-or-be-ruled, dominating-imperative. In the Protocols the paranoia knows no bounds. The most heinous ambitions are attributed to the Jews, they hate mankind, whose utter enslavement they gleefully plot. They are the worst, most deplorable, loathsome people on the planet. Understood as a projection, as a self-description, this text offers up a terrifying expression of what Nietzsche denounced as the will to power in its ugliest most heinous form, ressentiment, the worst angels of our nature.[6] Those who lust for power cannot allow that lust to become common knowledge among over whom they wish to ruthlessly exercise that power….

Thus, the public secret must be kept. Everyone on the inside (here, the “gentile aristocracy”) knows that jungle rules apply; but they deny it in public (‘it is for their own good that we rule over the masses’). Normally, the sword-won incumbency of the gentile aristocracy did not demand much effort to impose that public secret. James Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance documents the disparities that underly the dramatic differences between public and private transcripts, between ruling elites and commoners. But now, around the turn of the 19^th-20^th century, this dominant elite was feeling the need to project the most heinous version of their own predatory mentality onto the Jews openly.

Which brings us to the most remarkable aspect of this lethal projection: it bespeaks a great fear of the Jews, an almost awestruck appreciation of their covert power, of their extensive world-wide influence. As Andrew Bostom jokingly put it, the first reaction of Arab Muslims to the Protocols was surely astonishment at the “preposterous temerity” of their grand scheme! Those who believed the Protocols were genuine, saw Jews as the shapers of Western history, the puppet masters of a millennium-long conspiracy to enslave them through creating and directing “democracy” to their nefarious ends.

This perception of Jewish power and influence contrasted significantly with the mainstream consensus among the liberal Westerners, who congratulated themselves on discovering democratic principles all on their lonesome. Up until the time it lost its relevance (ca. 2000), Western political thought began with the Greeks, not the Hebrew Bible. Those manning the revolutionary institutions viewed the participation of the Jews in their free societies as a generous favor to a needy, somewhat ossified, cousin.

The paranoids, on the other hand, attributed a central role to Moses’ teachings and noted with alarm Jewish participation in the flourishing of their great and growing enemy, democracy. While liberal gentiles thought they were doing the Jews a favor, the paranoids saw the Jews manipulating them. The liberals were playing checkers, the Jews three-dimensional chess. Around 1800, after two egalitarian revolutions, the aristocracy, now on the defensive, thought the Masons were the drivers of the global democratic conspiracy against their rule. After a century of democratization and Jewish equality, the paranoids of 1900 identified the Jews as the real power behind the scenes. The Masons and Nietzsche and Darwin were all their duped puppets.

It is as if the authors of the forgery said to themselves: if we had the power the Jews have, we would conspire to enslave mankind.

Before watching this theme play out in history, I want to establish this central point: those who believe in the Protocols tell us some very disturbing things about themselves.

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The Bolsheviks and the Nazis

The Protocols’ remarkable act of ventriloquism by which the gentile aristocracy made clear their attitudes, found eager audiences in some circles, despite the emerging consensus in the public sphere that these were forgeries. As a projection, the work weaponized scapegoating. Unconsciously, those who believe it can deny their own guilt by punishing others for it. It sparked pogroms in the East (Kishinev) and spread conspiracy-thinking in the West.

Neither the Bolsheviks nor the Nazis used the Protocols in their official statements – it was too obviously and internationally known as a fake, but they both fully manipulated the lethal projection of their own designs and desires onto their targeted enemy. Lenin, the master of conspiracy, never ceased accusing the Capitalists of conspiracy (without dwelling on the Jewish role). But he never cites the Protocols – they were after all a right-wing favorite, published by his enemies, the Okhrana, and his revolutionary movement, full of Jews, was seen by them as proof-positive of the conspiracy. But he was also a master of the great projection which he systematically used both strategically and for propaganda to seize power. As a result, notes Daniel Pipes, “conspiracism for the first time became the ideological platform of a powerful state. The conspiracist mind-set pervaded the political culture of the Soviet Union.”[7] A generation later, twenty million Russians and Ukranians were dead. At a later point, the Soviet propaganda machine would embrace the Protocols, placing it at the center of a global propaganda campaign that featured the “Palestinian” cause.

The Protocols showed its greatest visible impact on Germany where the Nazi party viewed the Protocols, which even they knew were forged, as representing a higher truth: the great lethal projection. In 1925, Hitler wrote in mein Kampf about the key revelation of the Protocols whether forged or not:

What many Jews may do unconsciously is here consciously exposed. And that is what matters. It is completely indifferent from what Jewish brains these disclosures originate; the important thing is that with positively terrifying certainty they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate final aims.

Hitler had every reason to recognize this mindset in his foe: his own bastardization of Nietzsche embraced precisely these principles. In reading it he looked in a mirror: his own heinous power-mongering self, projected. As Daniel Pipes points out, part of the appeal of the Protocols among Germans was admiration, “a fascination in learning from the Jews how to extend German power.”

A German publication urged the public:

It is the duty of each German to study the frightening admissions of the Elders of Zion, to compare it to the today’s boundless misery and draw the necessary conclusions, but also to take action and to be sure that this work reaches the hands of every German.

Die Juden sind unser Unglück, and if we defeat them, our good fortune will return.

Leading Nazis realized The Protocols was fraudulent, and it rarely featured in Propaganda Ministry material for the press. The legal decision in a court in Berne in 1934 that the Protocols were a forgery, made it difficult to openly cite the document in international circles. German antisemitism scholars rarely cited it, not because they didn’t believe in an international Jewish conspiracy, but because they “needed no such proof to persuade themselves… but rather found the forgery useful to illustrate a conspiracy… in which they already believed.”[8]

But domestically, this had no impact on the incessant use of the projection of their own desires to become omnipotent merciless enemies of mankind, onto the Jews. Dismissing the question of forgery, another Nazi publication insisted on the “higher truth” of the projection itself.

What is important is the ‘intelligible content’ of The Protocols, which is Jewish in every detail and has the characteristics of the Talmudic world and life view and the stamp of genuine Jewish thinking.”

‘They, the Jews, are humanity’s enemy, not we. Look where I’m pointing, not at my hand.’

The memes of the Protocols were thus everywhere in Nazi propaganda: the Jew, plotting, dastardly, malevolent, enemy of mankind, who controls the media and the markets, who destroys gentile youth with alcohol, who gets gentiles to fight their wars for them, who plans the genocide of the German master race… Among a population eager for scapegoats in a time of crisis, the Nazis raised up the worst angels of their people’s nature with a paranoid image of the Jew so hateful and terrifying, that they successfully turned German society as a whole, actively and passively, to undertaking a systematic, technologically advanced, extermination of the Jews.

The German people had allowed themselves to be duped by paranoid maniacs into a course of action which, within a matter of years, led to the death of some eighty million people worldwide, the vast majority of whom were civilians, including over 12 million Germans. The great lethal projection fueled a deliberate genocide of those upon whom it had been projected and brought megadeath among those duped by it.

This assertion that in the 1930s and 40s, the German people were duped into self-destruction does not exonerate those who so acted, and the culture in which those acts arose. On the contrary, it gives us important information about the kinds of fears and unspeakable desires that, when cultivated in a culture, can lead an entire people to believe the lethal projection, and to ignore the predatory inclinations of the folks selling them this poisonous lie. And so they joined those who conspired against them and attacked people who did not.

And certainly, the Germans were not the only people to fall prey to systematic projection of malice onto an enemy. Hutu leaders urged their people to exterminate the Tutsis in the midst by applying the principle as a doctrine: AiM (Accusations in a Mirror). “Imputing to enemies exactly what they and their own party are planning to do.”[9]

I repeat: those who believe in the Protocols tell us some very disturbing things about themselves, and we need to listen to them carefully.

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The Arabs and Palestinianism

The Protocols enter the Arab public sphere at a moment of immense cognitive dissonance in the Umma. In 1924, the secular ruler of Turkey, Kamal Ataturk, in coordination with Western nations, abolished the Ottoman Caliphate, officially putting an end to 1300 years [!] of a continuous Caliphate. Religious leaders in the Umma expressed shock and dismay at what they then called Nakba, this catastrophe that modern times had inflicted on Islam.[10]

Translated in 1925 and again in 1927, it circulated openly among British and Arabs; extracts were printed by an Arab daily paper in Jerusalem. British and Arab intellectuals would regale each other with analyses of how the Jews got the gentiles to fight their wars for them. In the Muslim world, the revelation of the Jews’ role in a democratic conspiracy to enslave mankind (and for triumphalist Arab Muslims, to destroy their faith) came just at the right time. The Protocols offered a terrifying explanation for their current disarray: the Zionists had orchestrated this Nakba to Islam through their agents, the western powers. Zionists were a rapidly growing political power, the tip of the Crusader spear aimed at the heart of (their triumphalist) Islam.

As with the Nazis, Arabs knew about the accusations of forgery, but viewed the document’s revelations as speaking a “higher truth.” Fake or not, it was useful in bringing the truth to light. But the shorthand was universal. In the Arab public sphere, the Protocols are a genuine text, part of their canon of world literature. Some eighty years after its introduction, an exhibitor at the Alexandria Library placed a copy of the first edition of the Arab translation of the Protocols alongside a Torah scroll in a display of books sacred to Jews. At least the Egyptian intelligentsia, even if indignantly saving face (i.e. the public secret), acknowledged the Protocols’ status as a forgery.

More disturbingly, the appearance of the Protocols in the Arab public sphere prepared the ground for the reappearance of a long dormant hadith promising the miraculous extermination of the Jews before the Day of Judgment. In 1937, at the height of the Arab Revolt of 1936-39, Haj Amin al Husseini published a fatwah: “Proclamation of the Grand Mufti to the Islamic World.” In it he depicted, in much the style of the Protocols, the inherently dishonest, scheming, malevolent nature of the Jews, whose influence was becoming alarmingly great. He ended by invoking the genocidal hadith.

The last hour will not come until the Muslims fight against the Jews and the Muslims kill them until the Jews hide themselves behind a rock or a tree and the rocks and the trees call out: O’ Muslim, o’ servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him.

Even nature conspires to wipe out the Jews.

This malevolent projection was not just a quirk or glitch of Arab Muslim culture, it is, so far, a feature, not only of religious groups but of allegedly “secular” ones. It underlies the entire “Arab Nationalist” discourse from its religious origins in the 1920s under al Husseini, to that of his nephew Yassir Arafat who, with crucial help from the Soviet propaganda machine (also big fans of the Protocols), secularized the now “nationalist” mission with the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization. For infidel consumption (in public), this was a secular democratic resistance movement, among Arab “nationalists” and Islamic supremacists (the public secret), this was a war with the Jews for world dominion.

This paranoid view of the Jews made (and makes) any compromise impossible, and aligned closely with the triumphalist, supremacist religious need for visible dominion over others. These needs (libido dominandi), constitute the central and adamantine core of the conflict of Israel with her neighbors: If Israel exists, the paranoids fervently believe, the entire structure of Islam falls. (And they may be right about triumphalist Islam.) Israel’s existence is then not negotiable to triumphalists. Two-states? inconceivable. ‘If they, the Jews, win even a little, we, Arab Muslims lose everything (i.e., dominion, the victor’s honor).’ To triumphalist Muslims, to the Caliphators, Israel is an unacceptable autonomous infidel entity; for the sake of Islam’s honor, it must go – at any cost, even the cost of the lives of their own people… unwilling perhaps, but still martyrs to the true cause. “We will use the flesh of our children as shields.”

The Palestinian antizionist discourse systematically applies AiM at every step: ‘We target children? So we accuse Israeli snipers of targeting Palestinian babies. We want to wipe out the Jews and rule over everyone else? So we accuse them of genocide and imperialism.’ Indeed, the al Durah fake literally documented this projection, “proof” for “the whole world to see” that the IDF targeted “in cold blood” a twelve-year-old boy in his father’s pleading arms. A standard “Palestinian” practice here formally projected onto the IDF, distributed world-wide by a criminally negligent legacy media, to the immense benefit of the Caliphators and haters around the world.

At times these projections can become parodic in their detail. Just one of many examples: it was a technique of the second intifada to set off two bombs, one to kill anyone around, another delayed kill the people who came to help. On October 18, 2024, the Washington Post ran an article based on a doctored Palestinian video (Pallywood), with the narrative that Israel bombed Gazan civilians twice to get those (bad actors) who came to the rescue.

Most prominent and terrifying among these projections of malice, is the accusation of Israeli “genocide.” In comparison with its minor role in Nazi propaganda,[11] genocide plays a central role in Palestinianist propaganda, ever more prominent the closer they come to being able to commit it. Today, the most implacable, hate-driven practitioners of this great lethal projection are the (kinetic) jihadis. In its charter Hamas invokes the Protocols as a proof text and quotes the genocidal hadith as a pious aspiration. Unlike the Germans who made their attempt at genocide a public secret, and unlike German ministers and priests who, no matter how much they loved Hitler and hated the Jews, Jihadi preachers openly call for the extermination.

Indeed the same sentiments are being preached in diaspora mosques the Western world over. This accusation of genocide plays an important part in a larger discourse and project, namely the “utopian” (really apocalyptic) goal of a global Caliphate (which, for infidels, is dystopian). For these Caliphators, for these triumphalist Muslims insulted by the modern world’s egalitarianism, the globalization wrought by the West and its technology, was actually unwittingly preparing the way for the imposition of Islam upon all mankind. Just as Eusebius argued that the Roman Empire unintentionally created the world in which Christianity might spread – the Praeparatio evangelii, so the Caliphators view Western globalization as the Praeparatio Caliphatae.

Of course, Caliphators who talk with infidels (i.e., extra-Ummaic da’wa) will not admit to any of this, i.e., that “everyone knows” it’s a religious war that necessitates the extermination of the Jews; that Caliphators hold progressives in special contempt for their spineless, self-indulgent promiscuity.

To appeal to Westerners, Caliphators disguise the language of the Islamic public sphere. They maintain the secret in the Western public sphere, where they are heavily outnumbered, with a demopathic discourse that depicts their efforts as a struggle for human rights, for equality, as resistance to imperialism, and depicts their enemy, Israel and the Jews, as the embodiment of their own ruthless, genocidal, power-politics. Lest anyone draw attention to the less flattering aspects of their culture and its deeds, lest anyone try to make their intentions “common knowledge,” they mobilize the language of tolerance and acceptance by accusing those who point out these aspects of Islam as racist, “Islamophobes.” Currently, accusations of Islamophobia act as a paralytic on the ability of demotic polities to defend themselves and their people.

Thus, Caliphators come in all forms, from the Jihadi extreme (ISIS, Hamas, Hizbullah, Taliban, IRGC, Houthis, Boko Haram) who wage outright and deliberately terrifying war on infidels and heretics, to the Da’wa “center” (CAIR, SJP, BDS), where they wage cognitive war (Da’wa = summons) on Western democracies, using democratic principles to prevent the West from defending itself.

When I am weaker than you, I ask for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I will take away your freedom, because that is according to my principles (Herbert, Children of Dune).

Already in 1995 Yussuf al Qaradawi, one of the most prominent Muslim preachers in the 21^st century, told American Muslim youth: “We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America! Not through sword but through Da’wa.” In reality, though, Caliphators work with a combination of the two approaches: tough cop, Jihadi terror and assassination, and nice cop, Da’wa and cognitive warfare, the “moderate Muslims” who explain to terrorized infidels the rules of the dhimma, explain to them how they should behave around Muslims.

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The Western “Left”

But what about the antizionist left that insists it maintains progressive, non-violent principles and has allegedly high standards of critical analysis (deconstruction). They are not the German lower middle class, increasingly informed only by the totalitarian propaganda of their conspiratorial “leaders.” Nor are they useful idiots, so deeply committed to their messianic hopes in the worker’s paradise that they deny the horrors and keep the public secrets of the dealers in megadeath like Stalin.

How can today’s progressives look at the Palestinian movement and not see the great lethal projection at work? How can they fall so readily dupe to Palestinian demopathy and believe that “Free! Free! Palestine!” means a democratic state, and “Globalize the Intifada” means non-violence. It is within their reach to know that “From the River to the Sea Palestine will be Free,” in its original and still-operative formulation ends with “will be Arab (i.e. Muslim).” How can sane, intelligent people not see how this plays into the larger project of Global Caliphate whose capital, at least to some, is Jerusalem, and whose dominion targets Western infidels? How is it equivalent if the Jews also claim “from the river to the sea,” if, when stated by Zionists, means they claim .2% of the territory in the Arab World, whereas in the hands of “Palestinians” it means they claim 100% of what they insist was and must be Dar al Islam. Every grain of sand in it.

It’s hard to imagine a more resounding “no!” to the “other,” so prized by post-moderns with their exquisite sensitivity to micro-aggressions against the “marginalized and underrepresented other.” Do they not recoil before such a brutal attitude towards “infidels,” among whom they find themselves?

Instead the Western peace camp pushes for having a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem and trust the Arabs who teach them that Palestine will be liberated through “bravery and love for land….”[12] Instead, an entire academic industry has arisen, proving, documenting, endlessly reformulating the great lethal projection as objectively true, often in the most abstruse, post-modern terms. This antizionist scholarship, itself a dogmatic application of “Post-colonial” studies pioneered by Edward Saïd, provides a major source of documentation for the critical study of the phenomenon and its addiction to the great lethal projection. (The legacy media and their attraction to lethal journalism offers yet another.) Instead, a whole generation of thinkers has adopted the demopathic Caliphator invocation of progressive values of compassion, love of life, freedom, justice, resistance to empire. Progressives have played the determined, dedicated dupes of this strategic demopathy.

For decades, I and my comrades in the wave of cognitive war against the Antizionists that took so sharp a turn in their favor in the early aughts (‘00s), tried to explain that the Palestinians and triumphalist Muslims did not have the “good intentions” religiously imputed to them by the Oslo Peace Camp, that they were pretending moderation and appealing to fairness and empathy in order to strengthen their drive for dominion. We all hoped when finally faced with the irrefutable proof of real “Palestinian” intentions, they would draw back in horror from their folly.

The Oslo Jihad in 2000 – the first apocalyptic war of suicidal jihadis against a Western democracy – was not enough. The peace camp blamed Israel: if only it had given more, then the Palestinians would have accepted… A whole industry of “Humanitarian NGOs” cleaved to a narrative which paid scant attention to jihadis but focused fiercely on the Israelis as the heartless victimizers, and the Palestinians, as their unbearably suffering victims.

A peak moment in Hamas’ embrace of this genocidal projection – and therefore its full, undisguised public revelation – came in October, 2023. On the 7^th – sabbath, simchat torah – Hamas (and a substantial following of Gazans), openly and jubilantly engaged in a sadistic orgy of genocidal violence. So proud were they of their deeds that they posted them online. And immediately began a campaign to accuse Israel of genocide. The projection was fully a malevolent projection of their most cherished, now open desires. And the lethal journalists, informed by “Human Rights” NGOs, jumped on the bandwagon. And soon thereafter, the international court brought proceedings against Israel.

With this slaughter’s widespread justification by allegedly non-violent Palestinian and Muslim Human Rights groups, one might have thought that in parallel with October 8 Jews, there would be October 8 liberals, who swore of the imperative his colleagues adopt, to believe Palestinian claims about both themselves and Israel. One might have expected western journalists to show some caution when believing the totally false claims from these public mass-murderers that Israel had bombed a hospital and killed over 500 people. But no.

With the widespread and coordinated actions of various groups and protesters, the “progressive left” came out aggressively in support of Hamas, the “resistance movement” whose heroic intifada should be globalized. ‘Resisters of the world unite! Globalize the Jihadi hatred of the Jews!’ The hate-object of Islamic supremacist power-lust was designated the scape-goat to be offered by useful infidels on the altar of their own subjection to the global Caliphate. University presidents and administrations stood by while the Caliphators led their dupes in chants about Palestinian victory and globalizing their intifada. A more horrifying collapse of the Maginot line of the kind of moral and intelligent decency upon which all civil societies are founded, could not be imagined. (But that’s what I thought in 2000).

The unwillingness of the West to see this religious dimension of the conflict, has made it vulnerable to the Muslim projection at its heart. In part it is what I call liberal cognitive egocentrism: as if to say, ‘I refuse to believe something so nasty about another people.’ People who think like that tend to call those who draw attention to the role of shame-honor dynamics and supremacist religiosity in Arab culture, “racists” (despite the explicitly cultural argument) and “Islamophobes.” In part it’s an unacknowledged sense of impotence when dealing with either culture or religion: ‘If it’s cultural it’s immutable’ (itself a racist argument), ‘if it’s religious, then there’s no solution and I refuse to believe that.’ But in ruling out culture and religion one makes the conflict insoluble.

Such attitudes make it hard to acknowledge the existence of real, tangible, widespread malevolence, all of it embedded in the great lethal projection. The liberal cognitive egocentrist says: ‘We don’t want to believe a culture could be dominated by the malicious attitudes that the Protocols project onto the Jews. Maybe some crackpot conspiracists Jihadis might be like that, but not an entire culture, not a religion.’ (Somehow it’s easier to accept a narrative we know is false – ‘Israel genocidal maniac of nations’ – and hope it won’t do too much damage, than to acknowledge that in the Umma, a burning ambition to dominate at any cost has come to life, and that its most prominent manifestation today, at least in the West, is Palestinianism. Sometimes it’s easier to think that the Israelis deserved it, than get indignant about Muslim slaughters.)

By ignoring the apocalyptic zeal of the jihadis even as they adopt their cause, Palestinianists have unknowingly entered a religion, what Matti Friedman in 2015 called the “cult of the Occupation,” and Izabella Tobarovsky a decade later called “the cult of antizionism,” a poison which is, disastrously, currently gaining adherents. The history of millennial movements records many a time when the apocalyptic meme can ride its hosts (the true believers) to death in pursuit of its own destiny.

Over the last two years, the world has been inundated with images of war-related, Palestinian suffering. Many of these images come from Palestinian cameramen who weaponize them to accuse Israel of everything that Palestinians do and want and play on (angry) Western compassion for the innocent victims of Israeli cruelty. And they are dutifully distributed by social media and legacy news agencies who speak rarely of the endless pre-strike warnings provided by Israel to Gazan civilians and the open insistence of Hamas that Gazans are, and should be, human shields.

And so just as Hamas leaders triumphantly declare, the West is filled with a flood of their propaganda, their great lethal projection – Israeli genocide, with its corollaries, deliberate mass famine, targeting hospitals, killing babies plastered everywhere. It’s hard to imagine a journalistic failure more grotesque, than broadcasts like CNN’s Jeremy Diamond on the terrible Gaza famine, just as Gazan restaurateurs tweet out their plentiful wares and their fat thronging customers.

Nothing could be more obvious than the absurd inclusive redefinition of the term genocide in order to make the accusation against Israel; and nothing could be more pertinent, than the fact that the people claiming they are the object of a genocide are certifiably genocidal by the real definition of the word. And yet, with the help of the UN and its agencies and Humanitarian NGOs, and the occasional but loud radical Jews who can even loathe their own land of birth, the term has become widely used to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza. To Palestinianist hijacked Wikipedia, that’s an established fact, while the accusations that Hamas committed genocide on October 7 are “allegations.”

Indeed, the use of the word genocide to describe Israel’s Gaza campaign has become something of a shibboleth of belonging to the “progressive” camp. It serves as a unifying theme – we good people who care about others cannot bear the poor Palestinians’ suffering. For some activists in the democratic party, it should be a requirement of running for office: “I do not think that a democratic candidate can be elected unless they acknowledge that there is a genocide in Gaza, refusal makes you unelectable” opines Joy Reid on Mehdi Hassan’s Zeteo (to applause). In other words, the “democratic majority” that these people want to see, is one willing, on the basis of its deep compassion and sympathy, to limit its candidates to those willing to adopt Hamas’ genocidal projection as a key, “real-world” truth. Not a good prognosis for a healthy polity.

Palestinianists today, are walking, talking, fools, dupes on principle of the demopathic projection, represented by academy award winning actors like Susan Sarandon, Mark Ruffalo, and Oliver Stone, who wear keffiyehs, who use the g. word freely, who embrace every part of Hamas’ narrative for infidel consumption. Could Caliphators ask Allah for more compliant victims? For a more useful infidel?

The conspiracist tale Palestinianists swallow whole tops the list of destructive luxury beliefs and suicidal virtue signaling: here harming Palestinians and Israelis O! so many thousands of mile away, while strutting one’s moral credentials on the world stage. The very people who are incensed by Israel’s collateral damage, have no problem with the collateral damage of their own deeds. And, the global Caliphators, who benefit immensely from this suicidal strutting, have nothing but contempt for their legions of useful “progressive” infidels, dupes on the global stage.

But unlike the Germans of the 1930s, who were duped by their own people and seduced with overtures of racial superiority, or the Western communists whom the Soviets seduced with utopian equality in the 1920s-50s, the current highly educated round of self-destructive useful idiots are being duped by people driven by a foreign, deeply hostile, misogynist, homophobic, ferociously imperialist, religious supremacism. They actually believe the “moderates” who improbably promise them full participation in a future just and free society. As if under the Caliph we will have the rights to dissent that we have under the “Nazi-fascist” Donald Trump, as if Khoumeini welcomed the Communists to share the public sphere in his new “Islamic Republic.”

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The accusation of Israeli genocide, which the Left now considers a shibboleth of belonging to the party of the good guys, is indeed a litmus test: anyone who believes it and repeats it tells us he or she is dupe to a malevolent deception. Those who make the charge of genocide against Israel bear witness to the radical moral disorientation of people who claim that morality matters so much. It represents the complete ingestion into one’s world view of an alien invasive species of totalitarian thought (what Gad Saad calls a parasitic mind virus) that targets the very health of the body-politic. It is the functional equivalent of Trojans convinced they should breach the walls of the city and take the Greek horse inside.

In their silence on Hamas’ deeds, in the Hamas-orchestrated hysteria about Israel, (and then in their silence on the IRGC deeds in Iran), the progressive camp showed extraordinary – to some of us, astonishingly open – fealty to Jihadi war propaganda. In so doing, they adopted a partisan support for sadistic violence: resistance by any means, globalize the terror intifada, crush ruthlessly citizen protest.[14] In its lamentable cognitive processing of available information, 21^st century gentile antizionism, which has spread throughout the information professions, displays self-destructive levels greater than any previous form of Judeophobia ever recorded.

And in this sense, Antizionism’s astonishing vitality in the face of danger, has contributed a new range of questions to the puzzle of the longest hatred. In twentieth century, the people who swallowed the great lethal projection onto the Jews were manipulated by their own leaders, mesmerized with utopian promises. Now they attack Jews at the behest of a merciless enemy who invades via the soft-underbelly of their antizionist folly. In other words, in the public sphere of democratic nations who currently exercise hegemony over the global community in the early 21^st century in the West, a new and virulent strain of Judeophobia that is more openly self-destructive than ever before has gained serious traction. The response to dead canaries is shouting louder.

What role does self-hatred play in this self-destructive path, both among Jewish Palestinianists and their “liberal” allies? What dark desires lurk behind this thrall to the great lethal projection? Are some Palestinianists purely unconscious fools, good people who refuse, on principle, to even imagine much less recognize that people can be so bad as to want to conquer the whole world and subject its peoples to their religion’s dominion? But then, somehow, that principle suddenly vanishes when faced with the Caliphator demand that they vilify the Jews? Suddenly, what these good people refuse to believe about the Palestinians, they now, on the say so of those same Palestinians, believe about Jews. They follow the lead, the instructions of the Da’wa Caliphate, they mouth the Caliphator narrative for infidel consumption: Islam is peace, Free Palestine, Resistance is not Terrorism, Rape is Resistance, Israel – i.e., Jewish autonomy – is mankind’s enemy.

I suspect such a moebius strip of patent self-delusion has occurred in the past history of Judeophobia and its deeds, but I don’t think on this scale.[15] Here, this suicidal antizionist discourse occurs in an information field where all the necessary evidence to identify the projection is available. It’s not some Big Brother hauling us off to torture that has progressives lining up with Jihadis (most visibly in the recent appalling silence – and worse – on the Iranian demonstrations; it’s the Great Lethal Projection, the mind-virus.

The impressive ability of Palestinianists to ignore the information relevant to their own well-being, and so not deal with the cognitive dissonance its recognition would bring, offers a major field of inquiry for Critical Antizionism Studies: on the relations between Judeophobia and Thanatos, the death instinct Freud identified after WW I. What other expressions of self-harming and self-hatred flourish in the Palestinianist cult? And what light might they shine on the perplexing attraction among progressives, among “Sad Radicals,” for a cult of death like Hamas.

Let the Western public sphere reject the term “genocide” as a term to describe Israel’s campaign in Gaza, simply as a recognition of that accusation’s role in the “Palestinian’s” Great Lethal Projection, so that even those convinced that whatever happened in the Gaza war of 2023-25 was awful, and by some stretched definitions possibly a form of “genocide,” would forgo using the term in reference to Israel as an acknowledgment of the common knowledge that Hamas is an openly genocidal organization using the Great Lethal Projection in their war on the Jews… as a principled refusal to parrot their patently malevolent accusation, as an acknowledgment of the terrible role such projections play in spreading violent hatreds. It would mark an important turn towards a sane demotic public sphere, starting in the West.

Pipes summarized the crippling impact of conspiracism on its believers:

Conspiracism encourages a vortex of illusion and superstition. Like paranoia, it “is the watery plaster that seals over the gaping cracks in unsound reasoning.” By reducing complex developments to a plot, it obstructs an understanding of historical forces. It shifts blame for all ills to outsiders (“We didn’t lose; they cheated”), preventing an accurate assessment of causes and thereby prolonging problems. It causes people to fear and hate what does not harm them, while not fearing or hating what does harm them. It directs them to waste their attention on the irrelevant and ignore the significant.[16]

Walk away from it. It would be as if Laocoön’s party had won and the Trojans left the Greek horse with its warriors to bake on the Augean beach.

Those who adopt the language of conspiracy, who believe the projection, cannot usefully contribute to a discussion of how we deal with our problems and, when possible, how we make this a better world for our grandchildren.[17] It doesn’t mean we have to ban them, just make clear how problematic their illusions and how much more productive the discussion when they do not browbeat us with angry indignation.

As long as it remains a part of our discourse, however, as long as Democratic activists can talk about making it a litmus test of candidacy, we, living in democracies that try to grant and preserve their citizens’ rights (itself the oh so rare exception in the many millennia of societies and civilizations in thrall to their libido dominandi…), we are in serious danger. And the people who really want to do progressive things for this world, we children of Western progressive culture that both Jihadis and Palestinianists revile, will continue, either to labor in vain like Sisyphus, or, through Palestinianist activism, pave the way to a Caliphator dystopia. The fight for the world Orwell depicted in 1984 is still on.

And, therefore, with due acknowledgement of the terrible if predictable sufferings inflicted on Gazans during a war started by their elected leaders and cheered in their streets, we must find a way to say to the Muslim Arab world and their demopathic spokespeople, “we cannot tell you what to think or say, but you also cannot stop us from judging what you say and claim according to our own standards of moral and intellectual integrity; and you certainly cannot expect us either to join your paranoid discourse, or to take seriously those who do. Here it is in German.

To say, “no” to the poison propaganda and its pipeline, to antizionism studies and lethal journalism…

To identify, rather, the workings of the Great Lethal Projection in their discourse, with its appetite for violence and hatred…

And therefore, to recognize the danger such beliefs pose to any free, humane society…

that I submit, is the task of Critical Antizionism Studies: to make a malevolent public secret common knowledge and free those in the West from its lethal thrall.

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[1] At the time I first encountered this text (Society of Fellows, Columbia, 1985) and urged we publish an edition so that people could become familiar with its memes (which appeared often in the public sphere). The response was, “you think you’re inoculating, but you’d just be spreading the infection. Within a decade, the internet rendered such a cautious approach meaningless.

[2] And this, despite having flirted heavily with one of the great mega-death revolutions of the modern age, Khoumeini’s Iran.

[3] Note this feature in the ZioNazi thesis here, recently repeated (hopefully unwittingly) by Mandy Patinkin: now that the Jews have power, they’re doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to them.

[4] It was an emperor’s new clothes moment that the republican Machiavelli did with the intention of doing damage (Wolin, Grafton).

[5] Dialogue in Hell (1864). Jews are never mentioned. The author uses Montesquieu to express the liberal, and Machiavelli to represent, quite nakedly, the dominating imperative that drove the feudal aristocracy.

[6] And beneath it, a self-loathing evident in the expectation that the public would despise people who thought the way they depicted the Jews, but actually depicted themselves.

[7] Pipes, Conspiracy, chap. 5, n. 67.

[8] Randall Bytwerk, “Believing in the Inner Truth”

[9] Kevin Marcus, “Accusation in a Mirror”; Des Forges, Alison (1999b). “Propaganda And Practice”. “Leave none to tell the story”: genocide in Rwanda. Human Rights Watch (HRW).

[10] I cannot find this reference immediately.

[11] Hitler made allusion to Jewish plans to exterminate the German race, but mostly through their manipulation of gentile armies – the Axis powers doing the Jews’ dirty work.

[12] Day of Resistance Toolkit, National Students for Justice in Palestine, 8 Oct. 2023. Here, a reverse projection, a claim to embody the traits of the hated enemy.

[14] In one stunningly open embrace of repressive theocracy in the name of counter-hegemonic activism, Tim Anderson, the Director of the Center for Counter-Hegemonic Studies in Sydney, wrote “Why this non-Muslim supports the Islamic Republic of Iran” Al Mayadeen, 25 Feb 2026.

[15] In 1010, King Robert of France ordered the first slaughter of Jews in European history, and in 1022 he executed the first heretics in European history. But 12 years separated the two events and it only struck religious dissidents. Here, in the 21^st century, everyone is targeted.

[16] Pipes, Conspiracy, chap. 9.

[17] Or, in the words of the president of the American Anthropological Association after it voted to boycott Israel for its apartheid academia (sic), “to forge ahead, united in our commitment to advancing scholarly knowledge, finding solutions to human and social problems, and serving as a guardian of human rights.” Not any of the above.

Dear classmates,

Last month there was a discussion of why the progressives who demonstrated quite volubly, aggressively, and persistently for the Palestinian cause, and even in favor of Hamas as a resistance group ,have largely fallen silent on the Iranian protests and their brutal suppression by the Iranian regime. In order to avoid insulting anyone and thus falling afoul of the moderators of this list, rather than respond directly to the somewhat apologetic posts that tried to explain this silence as understandable delays in adopting a new cause, I will just lay out what I think the evidence suggests.

Much time has now passed since the massacres with which the IRG put down the demonstrations against the regime (demonstrations I might add that were considerably less violent and much more popular than some pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Western democracies). By now the evidence of its brutality is now firmly in. In a matter of days, 20-35,000 civilians murdered by the IRG in a matter of days in ways that make even the worst accusations against Israel look mild. Not even, as Hamas and its journalistic allies are wont to say, “the vast majority” were civilians… no all of them civilians.

Even back in late January the argument about “turnaround time” was thin. The 56 organizations that came out with a collective statement excusing Hamas’ massacre as resistance to Israeli injustice, needed less than 24 hours to swing in action after the October 7 massacres, and then lead a movement of “serious and thoughtful” demonstrators that intrusively occupied campuses, including Harvard and its libraries, for months. Getting people out for a worthy cause, whether BLM or Palestine or fighting ICE is not a problem for the intersectional left.

The weeks since the massacres confirm that this silence is no benign oversight. Not just the students and street demonstrators moved by their compassion for victims, but the “human rights organizations” (HRW, Amnesty), the UN Human Rights organs, the celebrities who stand up for humanity, the journalists who report so indignantly on Gaza. The progressive organizations and influencers have resolutely remained silent on Iran.

Here an Iranian-American who lives and work in an “extremely liberal environment” goes over the excuses given by his pro-Palestinian friends who, when confronted with information on Iran showed “complete indifference.” “Oh I don’t know what’s going on… it’s so far away… it has nothing to do with us…” Versions of the lame excuses and lack of empathy repeatedly invoked on our listserv: “Oh, America isn’t supporting the regime, so what good will it do?” Oh, it takes time to adopt a new cause… Oh the left is not really organized on global issues…”

It’s hard not to see a pattern here and it’s disturbing. The beautiful people seem to take their cues from the Jihadis. Not one activist influencer at the Emmies had a word for the Iranian protesters. Instead those assembled loudly cheered Billie Ellish’s for saying “No one is illegal on stolen land.” Nothing better illustrates how luxury beliefs are for others than this brave, revolutionary statement from one who dwells in a gated community. Life imitates parody. Surely these are not among the more “thoughtful and serious” among us.

More disturbing, the very people who thrive on the progressive left’s compassion by flooding it with images of Palestinian suffering, who enjoy full support as an oppressed people at the top of the chart of intersectional victims, who teach the “thoughtful and serious” westerners to shout “Globalize the Intifada” and to chant in Arabic “From the river to the sea Palestine will be Arab” (conveniently translated as “will be free”), the Palestinian camp did in fact have something to say on Iran. It supported the regime. For them, being on the right side of history meant siding with the Islamic theocracy, whose bloody slaughter further globalized the intifada.

Again we run into the problem of competing vocabularies: Progressives work from translations that invert meaning. The Palestinians claim to the non-Muslim world that they are freedom fighters resisting colonial-imperialism, that their uprising in 2000, and again in 2023, were driven by despair at Israel’s unbearable cruelty. Intifada, they claim, means uprising, (mostly) non-violent advocacy. In the intersectional playbook this allies them with all those black and brown people around the world who have suffered at the hands of Western imperialism.

The Israeli experience of the Al Aqsa Intifada whose globalization was the cry from our campuses after October 7, was quite another thing. After having made unheard of concessions for peace (dividing Jerusalem), Israel found itself the victim of a Jihadi suicide terror war. To us (and to the jihadis) Intifada means Islamic supremacist Jihad “struggling” for the dominion of the Caliphate, fed by a genocidal teaching of apocalyptic hatred, deliberately targeting innocent civilians in a democracy. To anyone who pays attention to triumphalist Muslims, the sight of progressive, in most cases utterly secular, westerners cheering on a genocidal war for world religious supremacy that targets them, is alarming.

And yet, precisely that misunderstanding prompted venerable gay-rights activist Peter Tatchell to join in the support for Khameini’s bloody crackdown, thinking thereby that he was on the right side of history: his sign read “Globalise the Intifada: Non-Violent Resistance. End Israel’s Occupation of Gaza & West Bank.” The perfect moebius strip of cognitive egocentrism – Peter projects his own liberal values (non-violent resistance, Israeli withdrawal) onto those for whom violence is a weapon of choice in a bloody batttle for supremacy (imperial-colonialism in its ugliest form). When the jihadis project malevolent intention onto the infidel, and infidels project honest peace-seeking onto jihadis, the jihadis win. As a result, Tatchell joins Billie Ellish, as a cautionary tale of suicidal luxury beliefs.

The feminists and their academic allies in Gender Studies toe the same line: they subordinate the cause of women’s liberation in Muslim lands to the (misogynist) Palestinian cause. Hence, even as Iranian women get mutilated, raped, imprisoned and murdered for not wearing the proper, suffocating dress, feminists stand tall with the Palestinian men and fall silent on Iranian women (as they did about Israeli women).

After documenting the stunning indifference to the protests and their bloody repression in Britain’s press, Clarissa Hard concluded:

A generation of activists has developed a reflexive anti-westernism, which presents almost any foe of America, Israel or the West in general as virtuous. This can lead them to take the side of Islamists, rather than the people who suffer under Islamic rule. Confusion reigned supreme in Washington this week, for example, where anti-Khamenei Iranians clashed with a group of pro-Hamas white liberal women. As John Cleese remarked, it could be straight out of Monty Python.

Life imitates parody, again.

At least as far as I can make out, the response to what happened in Iran among the bien-pensants seculars in the West took its cue entirely from the Palestinian (i.e. jihadi) branch of the Global Left. Non-Muslims deferred to their fellow comrades in the movement. If the Palestinianist camp is displeased with demonstrations that overthrow their ally, then best not to upset them by cheering on the protesters. The silence on victims of Jihadi terror speaks volumes on this compliance with Jihadi cogwar directives. So, when the bloody reprisals actually came, some compassion-driven peace activists joined in openly cheering on the forces of jihadi oppression.

You can say these are just some extremist examples where militants lost their way and that these cases do not represent of the vast majority of the compassionate left, ‘simple people who want to leave a decent world to their grandchildren.’ On the contrary, these are mainstream attitudes, reflected in the legacy news media itself, whose coverage has extensively complied with the Palestinian Media Protocols when it comes to Iran: ‘thou shalt have no other suffering before you.’

Not only selective attention, but selective credulity. CNN reported statistics from the Gaza Health Ministry immediately as news; when reports came from Iran they were suddenlhy “unverified.” The relative attention given to Iran vs. Israel in the legacy media replicates the “disturbing selective” focus of advocacy NGOs. Certainly if one were to do a correlation between news coverage of the two battlefields and deaths per day, it would reveal the obsession with Israel and the deep indifference to Iranians.

Would we be this complacent if our news and social media feeds flooded us with pictures and reports of Iranian suffering and IRG atrocities? If feminists and gays loudly denounced a regime that executes gays and women who won’t wear hijab? If people who claim to be cosmopolitan and support causes the world over that strive for human dignity and equality, were to show even a fraction of the empathy that they shower upon Israel’s now-canonical “genocide” victims?

Instead, the cognitive war on Israel goes on. The new (Hamas-originated) orthodoxy: Israel is committing genocide. Few word crimes do so much damage to the term they hijack as this accusation. Not only does it rob the term of any substantive meaning rendering it useless for serious analysis (anyone by these standards is guilty), and ignore real-world evidence, but it uses the terms innate moral opprobrium with redoubled intensity in a cognitive-war campaign against a designated enemy.

And ominously, it constitues one of the most toxic of the lethal accusations that jihadis project onto their enemies. And yet, this inverted narrative becomes a new orthodoxy, certainly in academia, where those who criticize its use to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza, can suffer severe consequences.

This goes right to the top of the progressive political movement. One of the narratives asserted with conviction, here articulated by Joy Reid, views it a litmus test of electability in the Democratic Party to adopt the language of genocide to describe Israel’s behavior in Gaza, and attributes Kamala Harris’ loss in 2024 to her failure to do so.

This would be a remarkable imposition on the Democratic voting public to restrict their candidates to those who accuse Israel of genocide, thereby subordinating American voters’ concerns to the demands of Jihadis. And yet, an unofficial version of this veto, along with a sharp increase in hateful rhetoric, was clearly at work in Kamala Harris and her advisors’ considerations of Josh Shapiro as her VP.

Such a litmus test bespeaks a party being purged of its diversity and free thinkers by the imposition of a credo. Nothing could be more harmful to a party of the people, than to have it become a party of a revolutionary vanguard. Still worse, unlike past revolutionaries, the credo these “progressive” politicians now want impose comes from the war propaganda of religious supremacists who despise their democracies, their parties, and their people. If you ever wondered how the Trojans could have been stupid enough to bring the Greek horse into their city, look at how the Democratic party has adopted Palestinianism.

Twenty years ago Judith Butler formally welcomed Hamas and Hizbullah – explicitly jihadi groups – as part of the “global progressive left”. Two decades later the Palestinianists want to make adopting jihadi cognitive-war accusations a litmus test for candidacy in the Democratic Party. The hostile takeover is visible. We should not be surprised that the jihadis called the shots among progressives on the Iran protests.

But we should, I think, be troubled by it. It should give good people pause. The activists in the movement for a decent world for our grandchildren, described sympathetically by one of our classmates, have given themselves to the Cult of the Occupation, in which Palestinian liberation will somehow free the whole world. Even global climate change takes a back seat to this solidarity.

From where I sit (one of the major battlefields of global jihad), it looks like the global progressive movement, which has given birth to so many efforts to make the world a better, more peaceful place, has been hijacked by a war movement that targets the very infidels who join it. “War is peace” isn’t totalitarian mumbo jumbo, it’s the cognitive war weapon of an invading army: Islam is peace as so many of our scholars and influencers and politicians remind us.

How could good people, caring people, allow themselves to be manipulated by people who show no empathy or compassion for others? How could good people take their cues – outrage at Israel, silence on Iran – from people who represent everything they abhore? Connor Barnes’ essay Sad Radicals draws an arresting portrait of the post-modern apocalyptic mindset, revolutionaries deeply committed to the most sensitive concern for others, horrified at the evil their own culture has committed, which they hold responsible for all the unbearable ills of the world. They naturally attract abusers:

However, radical communities also attract people looking for an excuse to be violent illegalists. And the surplus of vulnerable and compassionate people attracts sadists and abusers ready to exploit them. The only gatekeeping that goes on in radical communities is that of language and passion—if you can rail against capitalism in woke language, you’re in.

If you accuse Israel of genocide, you’re in and you get to shout, shoulder to shoulder with the real resistance.

The Caliphators systematically exploit the vulnerabilities of the progressives (for whom they have contempt not only for their values but their suicidal credulity): the marriage of pre-modern sadism and post-modern masochism.

The silence on Iran is a massive demonstration that the “anti-war” movement is driven not by the compassion it so loudly emotes on behalf of Gazan victims, but by an alliance with Jihadis against the enemies of Jihad. (NB: the alternative explanation is deep-seated Judeophobia.) When Iranians once again broke out in protests against a theocratic regime that spent the national wealth on its global jihadi ambitions even as they immiserated their own people, they were doing what Gazan civilians cannot do: objecting to their rulers sacrificing them for the cause of Jihad and a global Caliphate. Apparently for the progressives, that’s too close a comparison with their favorite resistance movement for comfort.

If the Palestinianist movement were, as it claims and Gay and Feminists and “Gender-fluids for Palestine” believe, a non-violent movement for Palestinian rights to live in a free, hence gay and women-friendly society, then they would find the behavior of the Khameini regime and the IRG unacceptable; if it were a militant movement pretending to be progressive and anti-war, but waiting for the right time to break out in war, then they would side with their fellow jihadis. Can the progressive camp recognize that the Palestinianists sided with the jihadis on Iran in 2026, the way they did with Hamas in 2023? Can they recognize the degree to which they take their lead from these enemies of all they hold dear?

Is it possible you’ve been duped? – your compassion, hijacked; your grand capacity for empathy for the other, truncated. Somehow, Iranian dissidents and Israelis – two movements resisting global jihad – fall far outside the ring of your now weaponized empathy: the passionate compassion of “the whole world” now exclusively riveted by Palestinian suffering. One of you reads credulously an accusation against Israel in a propaganda news organ (Al Jazeera) and yet another wants to know when the International Court will go after Israel. It’s almost instinctive.

Do you really think that handing the land from the River to the Sea to Arab Muslims with a highly articulated Jihadi supremacism and a genocidal hatred of Jews, is a way to create a better world for your grandchildren? And if not, then what do you think of all those thoughtful and serious people who do?

Would that we had thoughtful and serious people on the progressive left!

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Posted on August 3, 2016 by Richard Landes

Somewhat predictably, Ha-aretz has published a piece by two American Jewish scholars on why they have “left Zionism behind.” Although they claim to be historians (and in their chosen fields they may be), their argument is much more based on myths – Palestinian myths – which they have allowed to colonize their minds, and which they regurgitate without any critical thinking at all.

Apparently being critical of one’s own people is enough to qualify as “critical”, even when the assertions they make have virtually no grounding in any historical reality. On the contrary, what we seem to have is a blanket, counter-empirical application of a Post-Colonial paradigm and the “virtue signalling” that lets everyone know what good, “Righteous Jews,” they are, Jews who show their virtue by taking sides against their own people.

Part of what’s so shocking about their piece, which has already solicited five indignant responses, here, here, here, here, and here, is their open revulsion at Zionism and any Jew who supports Israel. Here we find a strong echo of what Edward Alexander calls “anorexic Jews” – Jews so ashamed of their body (politic), namely Israel, that they turn against their own corporeal self.

Fisking below.

We’re American Jewish Historians. This Is Why We’ve Left Zionism Behind

Our connections to Israel flourished, faltered and finally ended even though we grew up, live and work in the heart of the American Jewish community.

Hasia Diner and Marjorie N. Feld Aug 01, 2016 11:46 AM

Hasia Diner: The Israel I once loved was a naïve delusion

When I was asked to run as a delegate on the progressive Hatikva platform to the 2010 World Zionist Congress, I encountered my personal rubicon, the line I could not cross. I was required to sign the “Jerusalem Program.” This statement of principles asked me to affirm that I believed in “the centrality of the State of Israel and Jerusalem as capital” for the Jewish people. It encouraged “Aliyah to Israel,” that is, the classic negation of the diaspora and as such the ending of Jewish life outside a homeland in Israel.

That’s impressive, and impressively insecure. It’s not like it demanded Aliyah, just encouraged it. But somehow even that is too much (how dramatic is “my own personal rubicon [sic]”?). The idea that Israel and moving there, represents somehow a negation of the diaspora is an astonishing leap of logic. It sounds a lot like more like Diner’s notion of Diaspora (see below) is a negation of Israel. This is Judith Butler talk, nicely characterized by Edward Alexander as illustrative of

…Orwell’s view that some ideas—like the virtue of Jewish powerlessness—are so stupid that only intellectuals can believe them.

QED.

The “Jerusalem Program” also asked me to declare that I wanted to see the “strengthening [of] Israel as a Jewish, Zionist and democratic state.” As to democratic, I had no problem, but the singular insistence on Israel as a Jewish and Zionist state made me realize that, at least in light of this document, I could not call myself a Zionist, any longer. Does Jewish constitute a race or ethnicity? Does a Jewish state mean a racial state?

No. Anyone who’s been to Israel knows how wide the variety of races (and that’s just counting the Jews). Reading “racism” in “Jewish State” is an internalization of the heinous accusation that “Zionism = Racism.” Any good historian with a handle on what real racism is (as presumably a historian of real Apartheid), would know what nonsense it is.

As for the questions mal posées – “Does Jewish constitute a race or ethnicity? Does a Jewish state mean a racial state?” – the answers are a) neither, and b) no.

The death of vast numbers of Jewish communities as a result of Zionist activity has impoverished the Jewish people, robbing us of these many cultures that have fallen into the maw of Israeli homogenization.

What is Diner talking about? “Vast numbers of Jewish communities dead because of Zionist activity”? This sounds like a description of Nazi and Arab activity, not Zionist. How can historians make such stunningly wrong-headed assertions. And where is Ha-aretz’s fact-checking (or does that only kick in when the sentiments are counter the “narrative”)?

@Ostrov_A @JeffreyGoldberg @Jerusalem_Post Let’s say we have opinions that you hate.

— Amos Schocken (@AmosSchocken1) August 2, 2016

Israeli “homogenization”? Again, what does that mean, given the vast variety of life-styles, races, ideologies, and opinions that characterize this tiny state? If the previous statement sounds like a description of the Nazis, this one sounds like a description of the American academic scene today – much “racial” and “ethnic” diversity, appalling homogeneity of opinion.

The ideal of a religiously neutral state worked amazingly well for the millions of Jews who came to America.

As Havig Rettig Gur puts it so nicely:

Indeed. So it is unspeakably tragic that when millions of Jews needed refuge from annihilation, the doors to that ideal America were sealed shut.

Indeed, it was just the kind of visceral distaste for fellow Jews demonstrated here by Diner and Feld that dominated the “liberal” circles of American Jews who systematically ignored the plight of European Jews. Anyone who thinks that it’s uniquely the NYT that ignored the Holocaust, think again. As Ben Halpern put it:

The history of our times will one day make bitter reading, when it records that some Jews were so morally uncertain that they denied they were obligated to risk their own safety in order to save other Jews who were being done to death abroad.

—Ben Halpern, “We and the European Jews,” Jewish Frontier, August 1943

Now, behind the smokescreen of accusing the Jews in Israel of “harsh” treatment of people who embrace exterminationist anti-semitism, these American “Jews” replicate the sins of their not-too-distant forebears: sacrificing their fellow Jews for the sake of guaranteeing their “amazing” well-being as American Jews.

And not to pull an old chestnut out of the fire, but that sense of amazing well-being is just how the assimilated Jews of Germany felt in the early 20th century, and just how the same kind of Jews of France and England felt in the late 20th century. This is the kind of “Orwellian” romanticization of Jewish powerlessness that Alexander derided.

The socialist Zionism of the Habonim youth movement was central to my early years, providing my base during the 1970s when the Jewish settlement of the Occupied Territories began. I need not belabor the point that from that date on, the Palestinian land that has been expropriated for Jews has grown by leaps and bounds and that the tactics used by the State of Israel to suppress the Palestinians have grown harsher and harsher.

Here comes the uncritical adoption of the “Palestinian narrative.” The “expropriation” of “Palestinian land,” is a pre-emptive grant of that territory to “Palestinians” who have repeatedly rejected having that land at the price of giving up their claims on Israeli land. It’s a commonplace among “liberals” to imagine that if only Israel gave them the “Occupied Territory” (with a capital O and T), then everything would be okay – a fantasy that people in the diaspora are free to indulge in at no cost to themselves.

But what’s really going on here is the assertion of a four-dimensional Jew/two-dimensional Palestinian mentality. Jews are guilty of hurting the poor, innocent, Palestinian victims. The irredentist, vicious, racist, genocidal hatreds that Palestinian leaders – religious and secular – inculcate in their hostage-victim people, plays no role in this calculus. Not a moment’s thought to the sad reality that when Palestinians talk about “occupation” they mean the shore line not the green line.

There is here the strong odor here of what Manfred Gerstenfeld calls “humanitarian racism.” Palestinians have no moral agency: they are only victims of Israeli malevolence. They do not act, and especially, they do not act badly. Heaven forbid! How could a good Jewish progressive criticize POC (people of color)?

Nor do I need to say that the exponential growth of far right political parties and the increasing Haredization of Israel, makes it a place that I abhor visiting, and to which I will contribute no money, whose products I will not buy, nor will I expend my limited but still to me, meaningful, political clout to support it.

“Haredization”? What are they talking about? The increasing strength of religious Jews?

“Abhor”? What tolerant people! What an embrace of diversity!

Presumably, given the far greater religious radicalization of Muslim society, they would genuinely abhor visiting almost any Muslim country on the planet. Indeed, I don’t think they’d be comfortable anywhere but the NE Corridor and SoCal. Unless, of course, other people’s religious fundamentalism doesn’t produce a gag reflex, only her own, or as Seth Frantzman puts it so well: “they educated themselves to hate themselves and love what they hate about themselves in the other.”

I have read too much about colonialism and racism to maintain what I now see as a naïve view, that only the events of June 1967 changed everything. The Israel that I loved, the one my parents embraced as the closest approximation to Eden on earth, itself had depended well before 1967 upon the expropriation of Arab lands and the expulsion of Arab populations.

And just what has she been reading on imperialism? The anti-imperialism of fools? Has she read about Islamic imperialism? Is she aware that the population of the land between the river and the sea has increased tenfold since the Zionists have come? That the Arab population has more than quadrupled since 1900? Is she aware of how radically different from imperialist colonialism the Zionist settlement of the land? What other project of settlement is not preceded by a conquest?

The Law of Return can no longer look to me as anything other than racism.

Mind totally colonized by her people’s enemy’s propaganda, or as Jonathan Sarna puts it: she has “replaced utopian myths with demonizing ones.” Racism here is a completely inappropriate word. Religious discrimination? Perhaps. But nothing in comparison with the religious apartheid of the most implacable enemies of Diner’s people.

I abhor violence, bombings, stabbings, or whatever hurtful means oppressed individuals resort to out of anger and frustration.

You know what’s coming after the obligatory throat clearing… But!

And yet, I am not surprised when they do so, after so many decades of occupation, with no evidence of progress.

So why are the Tibetans such laggards?

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And since when is there no progress? Gaza is in the hands of Hamas, Area A in the hands of the PA, they control their educational system which they use to abuse their children. They have widespread international recognition. “No progress?”

All this assumes that the progress they seek is a state of their own to the East of the Green Line, and their frustration drives them to violence.

The lack of surprise here replicates the folly of the Jenny Tonge and Cherie Bler, both of whom have made the list of #ASSO21C (Astoundingly Stupid Statements of the 21 Century), namely the projection of Western positive-sum norms onto Palestinians (all they want is a state of their own) to justify their morally repugnant behavior (slaughtering civilians).

Implications are clear: Israelis are frustrating their “legitimate” desires, they, in desperation, react understandably. Reality quite otherwise: Israel frustrating their illegitimate desires to destroy it; their terrorism a reflection of their genocidal desires: Aspiration not Desperation.

I feel a sense of repulsion when I enter a synagogue in front of which the congregation has planted a sign reading, “We Stand With Israel.” I just do not go and avoid many Jewish settings where I know Israel will loom large as an icon of identity.

Wow. This is an acute case of what some psychologists call “psychogenic paralysis, conversion disorder,” in which one’s own limb is experienced as alien and its attachment to the body terrifying. It’s what Alexander calls Jewish anorexia.

Marjorie N. Feld: The moment I began my reeducation

In all facets of my very Jewish upbringing I was immersed in Holocaust education. It was made absolutely clear to me that only Israel could prevent the concentration camps, right-wing anti-Semitism and genocide, from reappearing. Friends and I travelled throughout Israel on a summer high school program in 1988, hitting the Jewish tourist spots (Masada, the Western Wall) that reinforced both Jewish nationalist triumphalism and the co-constitutive invisibility of Palestinians, their history, the violence and ethnic cleansing that created the Jewish state.

More of the internalization of her people’s malevolent mythology. The ethnic cleansing (precipitated by massacres on a vast scale) was the goal of the Arabs who invaded in 1948. For someone attuned to the Holocaust, how could she miss the fact that this accusation – like the Nazi one about the Jews wanting to enslave mankind – was a projection? How could she be so fixated on white right-wing anti-Semitism that she missed brown, “left” (really right)-wing anti-Semitism.

I now call it my propaganda tour, but I learned this language only later. From non-Jews I met in liberal and left organizations in college, I first heard strong critiques of Zionism as Western colonialism, as a militarist project, as racism. Very smart friends of mine were articulating these critiques, and they made me terrifically uncomfortable.

A feminist scholar I met at a conference asked me directly if I considered myself a Zionist, and I gave an indirect answer. Her anger became palpable.

Here we go. The roots of the “left”‘s homogenization. Angry that someone disagreed.

She nearly shouted: “You’ve read Chomsky, haven’t you?” I had not yet read Noam Chomsky’s writings on Israel, I confessed.

Which are staggeringly bad – inaccurate, misinformed, dogmatic, and largely malevolent in the same way that Feld has become.

As I recall she turned away and didn’t speak to me again that evening. That might be hyperbole, or more likely my own sense of shame.

Precisely. The guiding motive here is shame, not guilt. The reason the left is ludicrously homogenous on Israel (like the Arab/Muslim world, if not worse) is because of the workings of honor-shame dynamics that work hard to maintain external conformity. This essay is, in fact, a good example of what I call an “Proxy Honor-Killing.”

I reeducated myself, stopping to look at all of the facts that I had bumped up against for years. The 1948 radio broadcast of the votes at the UN that declared the Jewish people had a home and would never face genocide again: I had listened to this recording and this interpretation dozens of times in the sites of my Jewish education. Now I interpreted it anew. The founding of Israel was the Nakba, the great catastrophe, for Palestinians, with ethnic cleansing, destruction, and no right of return.

Classic replacement of utopian myths for demonic ones. The term “Nakba” was only briefly used by the refugees to refer to the catastrophe brought upon them by the Arabs who promised them victory and failed to deliver. It has become an indictment of Israel in subsequent decades as a propaganda tool, designed to equate it with the Holocaust. As the Hamas guides for journalists put it:

Avoid entering into a political argument with a Westerner aimed at convincing him that the Holocaust is a lie and deceit; instead, equate it with Israel’s crimes against Palestinian civilians.

In fact, the Nakbah is above all a catastrophic humiliation for the Arab world. They publicly announced to the world they’d wipe out the Jews – a people with no history of warfare for almost 2000 years, the bottom of the honor-shame ladder – and they lost, bigtime. Here Feld is, in the words of the Left she so identifies with, the “running dog” of Arab ego failure.

In short, I no longer found common ground with those who saw an anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist bent, or even conspiracy, on the left. I saw that that Israel fit neatly into my broader understanding of Western colonialism. How could Israel be the antidote to genocide when it was the product of imperialism and ethnic cleansing?

Like Hasia, I often feel marginalized. I travel across several towns, driving past many other synagogues, to my synagogue precisely because I too refuse to enter to any institution that flies the “We Stand with Israel” banner.

Not surprisingly. You’ve brainwashed yourself to hate your people and you’re surprised they don’t particularly like you?

‘Before’ and ‘after’ Zionism in the U.S. Jewish community

Our journeys from “before” to “after” identifying with Zionism have been painful, and we’ve searched for allies and institutions. We have both found Jewish Studies a difficult space in which to criticize Israel, to stand against the Occupation or even Zionism.

Try being an Arab Muslim and supporting Israel. On the other hand, there are lots of folks in the Jewish “scholarly” community who cheer you on. Try the Jewish Studies Department at Vassar who co-sponsored Jasbir Puar’s vicious rant against Israel, and after hearing the PoMo-PoCo anti-semitic lunacy, had nothing to say. Try Berkeley’s Daniel Boyarin, or Indiana University’s Shaul Magid. The list is almost endless.

Though we certainly do not claim to speak for all American Jews, as scholars we know we are a part of something much larger, something that, we assert, should be shaking the foundation of American Jewish leaders.

In other words, you want to speak for all Jews. As scholars you participate in the massive failure of information professionals in the 21st century: the substitution of one (malevolent) myth for another (life-giving including Palestinians) myth, or as Edward Alexander puts it so eloquently:

…the creation of the State of Israel was one of the few redeeming events in a century of blood and shame, one of the greatest affirmations of the will to live ever made by a martyred people, and a uniquely hopeful sign for humanity itself.

You, on the other hand, belong to that elite company of self-loathing “Jews against themselves,” who resemble the Israeli intelligentsia described by Aharon Megged:

Since the Six-Day War, and at an increasing pace, we have witnessed a phenomenon which probably has no parallel in history: an emotional and moral identification by the majority of Israel’s intelligentsia with people openly committed to our annihilation.

You think you’re the moral cutting edge, you’re actually more like what Alexander calls “anorexic Jews,” ashamed, cutting your body (Israel) to signal your virtue to people who rejoice in your suicidal folly.

Closing down all conversations on Israel/Palestine, demonizing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, marginalizing or silencing those who dissent from the Zionist “consensus”: there is a growing gap between these leaders and the people for whom they claim to speak.

If anyone is shutting down dialogue here, it’s the folks who get angry and revolted when their own people defend themselves against the malevolent violence of enemies with whom they perversely side.

And you call yourselves historians, when you’re just own-goal propaganda hacks.

Hasia Diner is a professor of American Jewish history at New York University. She is the author of “We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust” (NYUP, 2010).

Marjorie N. Feld is professor of history at Babson College and the author of “Nations Divided: American Jews and the Struggle over Apartheid” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

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Bibliographical Addendum:

Critical Responses to the Diner/Feld piece.

Haviv Rettig Gur, “When ‘Israel” matters – but Israelis don’t,” Times of Israel, August 1, 2016

Elder of Ziyon, “Haaretz anti-Zionist historian seems surprisingly ignorant of history – but has lots of hate, Elder of Ziyon Blog , August 1, 2016

Jonathan Sarna, The American Jews Who’ve Exchanged Their Utopian Myths About Israel for Demonic Ones, Ha-aretz, August 2, 2016

David Wolpe, “Anti-Zionist Historians Are Wrong about Israel, Time Magazine, August 2, 2016

“Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg stirs storm after tweeting he might stop reading Haaretz,” Jewish Telegraph Agency, August 2, 2016

Yisrael Medad, “When Historians are Ignorant of History,” Jerusalem Post, August 2, 2016

Noah Efron, “American Jewish historians shouldn’t succumb to crude clichés about Zionism,” Ha-aretz, August 3, 2016

Ben Sales, “Does an American Jewish historian’s rejection of Zionism signal broader trend?” Times of Israel, August 3, 2016

Edward Alexander and Paul Bogdanor, “New Jewish Apostates,” http://www.algemeiner.com/2016/08/03/new-jewish-apostates/The Algemeiner, August 3, 2016

Thane Rosenbaum, “Israel, it’s not You — it’s them,” Times of Israel, August 4, 2016

Jerold Auerbach, “Another ‘Ashamed’ Jew Bares her Soul,” Times of Israel, August 4, 2016

Vic Rosenthal, “How Zionism left them behind,” Abu Yehuda, August 5, 2016

Rafael Medoff, “Permanent Link to Jewish Historian Renounces Zionism, But at Least She’s Honest,” Times of Israel, August 5, 2016

Carlo Strenger, “Jewish liberals must reject the Zionist/anti-Zionist dichotomy,” Haaretz, August 5, 2016

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Pessin, Ironic Prophet: The Liberal Emperor’s New Clothes of Humanitarian Racism →

The greatest lacuna in Western knowledge about the current Middle East and the movements and populations that come out from there and into western democracies, is the depth of the hatred Global Jihadis feel for the Jews, especially when they believe it is the Endtime. It mimics and surpasses the apocalyptic Nazi paranoia about the Jews. There is no place on the planet where the dark heart of genocidal Jew-hatred beats more fervently and openly than the Jihadi millennial vision of world conquest. One would think that in the West at least, with its battalions of information professionals, if such a dangerous and hostile force had been activated by a group claiming to want to defeat the West, to destroy our rules and governments, and to subject us to the rule of their discriminative religious law (apartheid by every formal definition), that our information professionals would have reported it to the public that they, as professionals, serve.

And yet, for some reason, most people are – at best – vaguely aware of such issues. There has been an near-inexplicable ignoring of this phenomenon among the dominant voices in the public sphere. And as a result, this hatred enters our public sphere, not only unimpeded, but openly adopted by people who would loudly deny any personal tendency to antisemitism.

How does this happen?

On one level, through the alchemy of anti-Zionism. Post-moderns translate these mad, medieval hatreds into modern narratives and “facts,” that make sense to the progressive mind and do not trigger in those consuming it, a sense of the medieval hatreds they convey: jihad of conquest becomes “resistance”; resistance to jihad becomes “provocative colonialism”, jihadi dominion becomes “liberation”. There are three major mainstream channels whereby this narrative alchemy enters the Western public sphere – “post-colonial” academia, Human Rights NGOs/UN global axis, and the legacy news media, the authoritative journalistic outlets like BBC, NYT, Reuters, AP, France2, CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, Le Monde, The Guardian, Ha Aretz, etc.

Here I want to focus on the role of legacy media in conveying the Jihadi narrative as “facts” that “the whole world” sees and thereby knows to be true: Israeli crimes in Gaza are unprecedented in modern times, there was a famine in Gaza before the return of the hostages, the IDF carried out a genocide. Everyone saw it. If one lines up the narrative that Hamas explicitly demands of journalists with the journalistic performance, one finds an overlap of 85-90% in a Venn Diagram.

This compliance occurs at every stage of news production, from

· the filming of the “action”

· to the editing and shaping either into a specific accusatory stories – Israel targets babies, killed new born twins, kills civilians coming for food – or B-roll to accompany claims of dozens and hundreds and thousands killed by the IDF,

· to the experts brought in to help analyze the situation,

· to the obsessive programming.

The sudden drop in quality occurred in tandem with the activist turn in journalism of the Middle East to advocacy. When Jeremy Diamond tells the horrendous tale of Palestinian starvation, he does so in the conviction that he needs to “tell the world” the terrible news.

Among the many aspects of news reporting that has dominated the Western “profession” since the turn of the century I want to focus on one specific mechanism whereby these hatreds are delivered into the Western public sphere: Pallywood.

I first discovered Pallywood by accident. I was investigating the first successful blood libel in the West since the Nazi era, the alleged murder of a twelve-year-old Palestinian boy cowering in his father’s arms. During the investigation I got the chance to see more than two hours of raw footage shot by Palestinian cameramen using Western equipment (Reuters, AP, France2). What I saw astonished me.

People were standing around, right in front of the Israeli position showing no concern for their well-being, and every so often someone would feign getting shot by the Israelis, they then got swept up by a groups of standers-by and thrown into ambulances conveniently standing by… all in front of rolling cameras catching the fake actions. What was clear was that this faking was public knowledge: everyone knew the rules of the game, everyone took them for granted. The culture of the Palestinian “Street” was this impromptu, sometimes scripted, staging of footage of their ”narrative” that they were bravely resisting and being victimized by evil people. No one felt the need to conform to medical practices: the rough handling of the “victims” were they truoy wounded could only worsen their condition.

That was only my first astonishment. When I got a chance to view this kind of footage with a Western journalist, his response to my astonishment was to dismiss it: “Oh yes, they do that all the time, it’s a cultural thing.” Two months later, his bosses in Paris, looking at the same footage with French journalists who expressed their astonishment at the staging, repeated the sentiment: “Oh, you know it’s always like that.”

Then I understood: it’s not just a Palestinian “public consensus,” it’s also a journalistic “public secret.” Rather than toss out the obviously staged stuff, Western journalist sifted through looking for the most believable clips in order to tell the accompanying story, all of which articulated some aspect of the Jihadi war narrative: the Israelis target children; the Israelis slaughter innocent civilians, the Israelis starve people to death, the IDF is committing genocide, Palestinian people are suffering unbearably. As one of the briefly independent Parisian journalists who had viewed the staged footage replied: “you may know it’s always like that, but the public doesn’t.” It was a public secret.

Indeed, the story of Muhammad al Durah was itself an explosively powerful example of scripted Pallywood, from the people who cleared the scene while the father and son remained, to the young boy who couldn’t stop looking at the camera so he was told to hold his hand over his eyes rather than clutch his fatal wound, to the bloodlessly bullet-riddled father, to the angle of the bullets striking the wall, to the open lying of the cameraman and other witnesses, to the cut last scene (i.e. after he was declared dead) of the boy deliberately raising his elbow and looking out. As soon as the PA had footage of an Israeli soldier firing at rioters incensed by the staged footage of the boy being killed, they edited that sequence back into the al Durah footage, so that viewers saw the Israeli soldier shoot the boy. It was pure, malicious, falsification, an icon of hatred.

Exactly what didn’t happen, was twisted into what “the whole world saw.” And all choreographed to retell in a new and heart-rending idiom the Judeophobes’ libelous fear: Jews deliberately kill gentile children. Now we have proof that they shot him in his father’s arms. “The whole world saw it.” It became a logo to the “anti-war” movement of the early aughts.

In that sense, even though no one in the Western mainstream press cites al Durah, we still struggle (so far in vain) in the universe Al Durah created: namely the decisive assertion of holocaust inversion.

Opined one of France’s more authoritative journalists to nodding heads, “this death [sic] erases replaces the one of the boy in the Warsaw ghetto.” The “anti-war” International ANSWER site published this holocaust inversion.

So this highly dubious footage of 12-year old boy being allegedly shot by Israel in a cross-fire, erased an image symbolizing the deliberate hunting down, transporting and murder of over a million children. Western progressives, and especially Europeans who then considered themselves the most progressive (Moral Sweden), essentially said: ‘Our shame for the Holocaust is now replaced with Israel’s shame at their holocaust against the poor suffering Palestinian people.’

After the tremendous success of the Jenin massacre narrative in 2002, a plurality of people in several European countries believed that Israel was committing genocide against the Palestinian people. A quarter century later, many scholars and pundits, considered it an indisputable “fact.” For them, anyone who questioned Israel’s Holocaust of the Palestinians was a Holocaust denier. And very few who disagreed cared to challenge these loudly asserted word crimes.

Pallywood consists of the extensive use of staged scenes to tell lethal narratives about Israel. In the production line, Palestinian cameramen film a range of impromptu and scripted scenes which they send on to the Western journalists reporting on the conflict twixt river and sea from the American Colony Hotel, who scour the footage for the usable clips which they string together as they turn the Palestinian narrative into news for their home audience back in the democracies. This has occurred repeatedly in the decades since, every time Israel clashed with one of their Jihadi neighbors - 2002, 2006 Lebanon, 2008/9, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2021, 2023 Gaza.

The jihadi version of this lethal narrative is pure genocidal rage: constant drumming the call to exterminate every last Jew –

The end of days will not come until the Muslims rise up and kill the Jews and the Jews will hide behind the rocks and trees and the rocks and trees will call out: “O Muslim O servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me. Come kill him.”

If you do not know to what I refer, then, as Bill Maher says, your news feeds betray you. The jihadis do precisely what the Nazis and the Inquisitors did: they project their unspeakable, evil desires – dominion and genocide – on the very people they want to exterminate. Hitler seduced his people with this delirious projection and close to 100 million died including millions so seduced.

The sanitized version consists of accusing Israel of genocide (using Pallywood) and not mentioning what an extraordinary projection that is from people whose leaders preach genocide from the pulpit, and who, when given 24 hours of total power, enact some of the most horrendous and sadistic genocidal rages on record. I asked a journalist about the apocalyptic hadith and he responded: “that’s not apocalyptic, they say that all the time.” Another public secret. “So why don’t you tell your readers about it?” “They don’t really mean it.”

And the Pallywood story is always a variant on Israel targets civilians, the IDF is merciless, the Palestinians are innocent, terrified civilians. This narrative matched closely the post-colonial take whereby the Palestinians are indigenous people and the Israelis, Western imperialist oppressors. But willingly or unwittingly, this “progressive” paradigm also built in the deeper, pathological hatred that drives the “indigenous” yet jihadi narrative – the Jews deliberately kill gentile children – the core fantasy and horror of the medieval blood libel, and its secular version, Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Pallywood therefore was the perfect product for spreading Muslim delirious Jew-hatred (as per Hamas’ charter) to a generation addled by post-modern moral relativism (‘who are we to judge?’). The makers of this grotesque and malevolent distortion need only challenge: ‘who are you to question the Palestinian narrative of suffering at the hands of the Jews?’ And the Westerner, even the friend of the Jews, even Jews and Israelis themselves, will stand down.

So the resounding Western answer to this industry of lies, despite the damage that it has done by pounding the drums of war and hatred globally, especially among 1.6 billion Muslims who form the Jihadi’s recruiting pool, has been to embrace Pallywood, to defend it from the mean people with no compassion, who question its veracity. ‘Palestinian suffering is a fact; the accusations against Israel are true; the whole world sees it and knows it.’

This credulity begins with the journalists who know the public secret of their cameraman filming fake scenes all the time, and still use the material, still defend their Palestinian journalists’ professionalism, even give them prizes. Indeed, the credulity of the Western professional press, their ready acceptance of Palestinian sources, became so reliable a factor in the conflict, that Hamas could fashion a successful war strategy based on their cooperation that has worked with great success for the last two decades.

By provoking Israel to retaliate and exposing Gazan’s to Israeli military strike – there are no civilian bomb shelters among the 600! miles of tunnel beneath Gaza – Hamas created the horrendous real-life settings for Pallywood journalism to do its work. In every military conflict between Hamas and Israel since 2005, the main storyline in the Western press is the suffering of Palestinian civilians caused by Israel, precisely what Hamas wants from them. The ensuing international outrage forces the IDF to stand down (cease fire), sparing Hamas and spreading the hatred of the “Jewish state” around the globe, and giving the journalists a sense of agency in ending Palestinian suffering.

One would think that a reasonable person weighing this narrative (we are, after all, here to judge, just do so fairly), would find it deeply suspicious. People (Hamas, PLO, Islamic Jihad) who celebrate targeting civilians, who slaughter and execute people whenever they can, who snipe babies, who preach genocidal hatred to their own people, and sacrifice their lives as a war strategy, are not exactly reliable sources for accusations that look a lot like projection.

When one adds self-preservation to the list, one finds what might seem like an airtight case for Westerners, infidels, paying attention to these matters. The Palestinians are part of a global jihadi movement whose openly declared goal is to spread Dar al-Islam to the entire world, or to quote a Hamas founder, “the entire 510 million square kilometers of planet Earth.” Spreading their propaganda is spreading the propaganda of the most extensive and brutal imperialism on the planet, one that targets democracies for destruction. What could be more counter-indicated? When riots were erupting throughout France in the Fall of 2005, her prisons held a strong contingent of jihadis radicalized by what they saw on TV. A Parisian cabbie from Tunisia explained that Muslims back there were not antisemitic, but that they were radicalized in France by the media, I asked, “You mean al Jazeera and al-Alqsa,” he responded, “No: France2.”

One would think that if it was widely accepted in the 2010s – Obama, Clinton, NSA, HLS, CIA – that one should not speak of “radical Islam” lest one affirm the Jihadi narrative that “the West is at war with Islam,” the last thing any Western press would want to do is pump out tales and videos of Muslims suffering at the hands of cruel infidels, arousing jihadi rage among Muslim populations already living within their own leaky borders. And yet that’s precisely what they did. Thus, a double win for Caliphators: their religious war goes unmentioned, and their war propaganda gets global distribution as news.

If in the 1990s, the Caliphator dream of world conquest, starting out from the caves of Afghanistan, looked like a ridiculous pipe dream that no one – Muslim or infidel – could possibly take seriously, then the extensive impact it now has, especially in Western Europe, is in large part due to the recruiting power of videos of Muslim victimization at the hands of infidels, in the words of Osama bin Laden, at the hands of al yahud (12.34)

So even if one can explain the early failures of the Western media to challenge the Palestinian narrative – sympathy for the underdog, post-colonial ideology, cognitive egocentrism, ego-frisson of Jew-baiting… - it’s hard to explain why they would persist in this folly. After all, when the Trojans believed their enemy’s narrative, their city fell to Greek pillage, their daughters and wives taken as slaves. So whence this “own goal war journalism,” i.e. reporting your enemy’s war propaganda as news? Who would do that consistently for now 25 long years? Surely there’s some dissent out there.

Those of us who diagnosed the problem relatively early (late 90s, early ‘00s) figured that at some point the broader realization would set in that this form of using Pallywood videos to tell the jihadi war narrative as news, this “lethal journalism,” was terribly destructive even as it violated all the principles of professional journalism. We thought time and again, that something dramatic enough would occur and now people will understand! Some awaited the moment of awakening, others, like Oriana Fallaci, shouted in deaf ears. The “whole world” Palestinian cause was national liberation, the Israelis were to blame.

Few imagined that if “Palestinians” engaged in a sustained genocidal rage, which they then broadcast over social media, that they would meet with widespread enthusiasm, not only among Palestinian groups claiming to play by “civil society” rules (CAIR, BDS), but among the whole range of liberal and progressive supporters of Palestinian liberation. One imagined that when the wolves themselves tore off their “human rights” sheep’s mask, that, finally, the cognitive tide would turn. Progressives, people who care about human rights and human suffering could then clearly see in these videos the fevered murderous, sadistic minds whose hatreds fuel this conflict. They could even consider that when Palestinians accused Israel of genocide, they were voicing their own aspirations. They might even understand that when a democracy is attacked by jihadis, it’s suicidal moral lunacy to blame the democracy, a principle with serious implications for their own democracy’s ability to resist jihadi attacks.

And yet October 7 happened, and the opposite happened. Radical professors and Muslim “Human Rights” leaders exulted; Palestinianists justified it by “filling in the vacuum” with Israel’s decades of intolerable cruelty, student activists took over campuses shouting “We love Hamas!” and aggressing Jews, while administrators looked on, at best, impotently. Supporters of Hamas and the Palestinian cause became assertive at new levels. In Europe in particular, the demonstrations were calls to Muslims to claim more of the European Street, to show their strength.

And the media played a crucial part by using Pallywood to run Hamas propaganda as news. In early evening of October 17, 2023 in Gaza, ten days after Hamas’ genocidal slaughter, a stray jihadi rocket landed in the parking lot of al Ahli Hospital, leaving a crater, seriously damaging some cars, breaking some hospital windows and possibly killing dozens of people.

Hamas claimed the Israelis had bombed the hospital which was full of both patients and refugees from the Israeli bombings of their homes, that they had killed hundreds with more under the rubble. The very people who had massacred over a thousand Israelis ten days earlier and bragged about it, were suddenly reliable witnesses as far as legacy media was concerned to a tragedy in Gaza. In the US, the evening news cycle was just getting underway, and for the next 12 hours – until dawn revealed the truth – Western journalists seized upon this accusation and ran it as a headline. 500 dead in Israeli strike, blared the NYT. For their B-roll to accompany this lethal war narrative CNN used Pallywood footage: short jerky scenes of the alleged explosion, chaos and damage, body bags, nothing that could be identified. No pictures of the site of impact in the parking lot, no pictures of a damaged hospital. Western journalists neither needed the evidence nor requested it. The BBC’s Jeremy Bowen told his listeners that “the Israelis flattened the hospital.”

When Israelis correctly claimed it was a jihadi rocket, Jake Tapper was so convinced by the descriptions of things he had not seen in photos, that he replied, “you can’t believe that kind of damage was caused by one of their rockets.” CNN filled its reporting with compassionate and indignant descriptions of what did not actually happen, repeatedly anticipating an even greater death toll when the bodies were dug up from the non-existent rubble.

The next day, in the cold light of dawn, the pictures of a dent in a parking lot and a few cars badly damaged came to the media. The hospital was undamaged; there was no rubble hiding further victims, there were no pictures to even suggest hundreds dead. Somehow our legacy media, whose professional job is to screen out false claims from their news, especially those that incite to violence, was mesmerized by the claims of people who had shown themselves to be genocidal maniacs only ten days earlier. The entire episode was a collective media spasm of lethal journalism based entirely on deliberate jihadi lies.

But there was no reckoning. Bowen was openly defiant when asked about his “flattened hospital”: “oh I was wrong on that, but I don’t regret it.” And no one at BBC made him regret it; he remained “International Editor of BBC News.” Behind closed doors, some higher-ups fumed, but the radical staff resisted: the bosses were trying to silence the Palestinian voice of suffering. None of the Palestinian sources who had openly lied to their Western colleagues were fired or let go. On the contrary, like the Palestinian cameraman who staged the al Durah affair, they got journalism prizes. Western journalists continued to use the narratives and numbers and video footage supplied by Hamas controlled sources, the news media continued to turn Pallywood’s post-modern blood libel – the IDF targets children – into news. When Biden who shared in the “next morning’s revelation,” went back to the US and pointed out the obvious, that one could not believe Hamas’ figures, CAIR (i.e. those who celebrated October 7), accused him of Islamophobia. Biden stood down and the media went to town.

The reason the grotesque accusation of genocide against Israel has reached the point where important, educated, and influential people think it is an established “fact” and that to question it is a form of “holocaust denial,” is not just because the Palestinians claim it: but rather because activist NGOs and advocacy journalists, by running Pallywood lethal narratives as news, by flooding the West with pictures of children emaciated by congenital diseases as representative victims of a widespread and terrible famine, they make the idea that Israeli is committing genocide not just believable but an conclusion difficult to escape.

When an official claimed that a UN study predicted that 14,000 babies going to die in the following two days, the legacy media, rather than checking the report, reported the claim as credible. To anyone who believed this news, it sure seemed like Israelis were doing to Gaza what the Nazis did to the Warsaw Ghetto: starving an entire population to death.

Once the mis-citation and the absurdity of the claim revealed, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour helped the source restore his credibility, and helped him repeat (without invoking the ridiculous and invented 14000), the grand, projected, hate-mongering message: Israel was starving Gazan children to death on a massive scale. Typical of lethal journalism: massive errors unexamined… onto the next lethal narrative. The Israeli counsel general warned such reports were like blood libels (which in the late 19^th century provoked pogroms), and the next day, two of the consul’s people were gunned down in public outside an event his office had sponsored by a man who shouted, “Free free Palestine!”

When CNN’s Sara Sidner interviewed a witness of the murders, he compared the killer to the demonstrators he had dealt with at Columbia the previous year. She instinctively defended the protesters: “But they did not create this horrific shooting. They did not, you know, sort of – they didn’t shoot.” How far away are she and her colleagues from the realization that not just the shooter and the demonizing demonstrators, but they, the media, the journalists, contribute to creating the mindset of those who pull the trigger. Their advocacy invisible to them, they think they are merely reporting the facts, not engaging in incitement.

As a result, both the pro-Hamas progressive left and the journalists chose to narrate the propaganda of the most imperialist, misogynist, jew-hating movement on the planet, as news, rather than deal with the deplorable situation in which the legacy media (CNN, NYT, PBS, BBC), all report the news concerning Israel, Hamas, and Global Jihadis news in a manner eerily similar to that of the shooter’s manifesto and Hamas “narrative for infidel consumption.” And so this poisonous pipeline of Jihadi, apocalyptic, anti-semitic propaganda pours into the Western public sphere as news and animates an increasingly murderous activism.

Among the many problems here, the palpable fear of the gatekeepers of being called Islamophobic, leads decision-makers to refuse to publish material that might alert the public to a threat to the democratic body politic – what the Greeks called the demos, the people to whom they fancied themselves giving rule (cratos). Like some haywire white blood cells, the post-colonial intelligentsia – scholars, NGO researchers, journalists – attack the sane white blood cells that appropriately ring out danger, and instead they welcome in the invading bodies as brothers and sisters in some fevered anti-imperial quest. Own-goal war journalism is a virulent case of a cultural auto-immune syndrome.

Auto-immune can be fatal. The cultural version began with the narrative of the west as the most terrible hegemon that world has ever seen. It marries post-modern masochists and pre-modern sadists in a new grand narrative on Western evil. No sooner had the post-modernists rejected the “grand narratives” of modernity – objectivity, science, fact, truth – than the post-colonialists adopted a new and much cruder grand narrative of First-World original guilt and Third World innocence. Historical “events” went from facts to narratives and then, suddenly, came back as (post-modern) “facts,” this time established by an inverted and perverted grand narrative that accepts the genocidal projection as true: Israel is committing genocide. Unwittingly or not, all these folks are either the disciples of, or dupes of, antisemitic paranoia; all, willingly or not, certain inheritors of the mega-murder to which Nazi-projected paranoia gave rise, megadeath that did not spare his own foolish people. Read not: Israel is committing genocide; read: the West is committing suicide.

At least, Hitler was a nationalist, and tried to appeal to his own Volk; and so millions of “Aryans” could feel this was their victory. Today we face a venerably old religious enemy, one that has tried to convert or subject infidels and been at war with Christianity for 1400 years. Its values and goals are profoundly different from and hostile to the liberal and progressive values and tolerance of the West. And yet rather than confront the enemy on the battleground best suited to liberal values – discourse, dialogue, debate – the thought leaders and administrators in the West are allowing this enemy to dupe us into siding with jihadis against the very state whose democratic existence in the heart of what should be Dar al Islam, challenges their supremacist narrative.

Indeed, so little do Western analysts understand, that even as Global Caliphators clamor for Jerusalem as the capital of the global caliphate, Western policy-makers insist on giving the “Palestinians” a capital there. In the name of rejecting supremacism and treating the “other” fairly, they conform to the behavior of dhimmis for almost one and a half millennia, yielding before the other’s supremacism.

So, I don’t think this is a matter of in-course corrections. The instinct to avoid conflict with Muslims is so firmly in place in public discourse today, that the mere act of behaving professionally and questioning Palestinian sources and examining their evidence triggers huge protests. CNN’s staff, NYT staff, work in a strong peer culture of foundational hostility to Israel and to any Jew who defends her… mean girl stuff, cancelling, bullying. You, Jew-who-plays-by-the-rules-of-civil-society, you can’t play with us anymore.

When, after a fiasco like al Ahli Hospital fake, instructions come from management to clean up the act, the staff are quick to complain of Islamophobia and silencing Palestinian voices. The Palestinians have a right to have Pallywood taken seriously. Journalists should not question them. Not surprisingly, these lethal journalists project onto serious journalists whom they fear and denounce, like Bari Weiss, their own original sin: turning the news into a vehicle for “partisan advocacy.” More power to Bari Weiss and may she use it wisely in these perilous times. By attracting the intelligent center with real, professional news, she could start the necessary turning in journalism which will have to start with the professional training of reporters prepared to cover a war-zone.

Suggestion: The Journalism school at the University of Austin should have a segment on Pallywood.

The 21^st century is witness to new category: Civilizational Darwin Awards.

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