The distinguished historian Richard Landes has been immersed in deconstructing antisemitic and biased media assaults on the Jewish state for over two decades. His new book Can “The Whole World” be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad is the culmination of his painstaking documentation and research of this ubiquitous press phenomenon.
Landes famously coined the phrase “Pallywood” (a conflation of Palestinian and Hollywood) to describe how some Palestinians exploit the mass media to create false information against Israel.
The book’s punchy question-style title captures the oft-repeated rejoinder when Israel denies the fantastic unfounded claims leveled against it. Landes cites the example of former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, who rejected Israel’s denial that it committed a massacre at Jenin.
“I don’t’ think the whole world, including the friends of the Israeli people and government, can be wrong,” said Annan in 2002.
Landes answers the question with a reformulated query: “Could the “the whole world,” including the self-professed friends of Israel, be wrong to side with the jihadis against Israel as at Jenin?” is “Yes.”’
Landes has a charming, engaging style of prose that sucks in the reader to a surgical account of why the world has gone largely clinically insane with nearly always pinning the blame on Israel for its territorial dispute with the Palestinians.
”Insanity, when it becomes epidemic, is called reason.”
Oskar Panizza
To better understand Landes’s account of the topsy-turvy world of the anti-Israeli media, a quotation from German psychiatrist Oskar Panizza (1853-1921) is a good departure point: ”Insanity, when it becomes epidemic, is called reason.” And this form of irrational reason has led many elite journalists to suspend their robust method of verification when filing dispatches about Israel.
Rigorous fact checking, the attempt to move as close to objective journalism as possible, and non-compliance with trite framing (Israeli Goliath versus the Palestinian David, to cite Landes) are abandoned once many foreign correspondents arrive in Israel. The medievalist historian Landes asserts that many journalists report “Palestinian claims (lethal narratives) as reliable until proven otherwise, while treating Israeli counterclaims as dubious, if not false, until proven true.”
Anti-Israel journalistic malpractice
There is no shortage of examples of journalistic malpractice, and Landes analyzes some of the most egregious instances – ranging from Charles Enderlin from France2 and his role in spreading the Al-Dura “Jihadi Blood Libel” in 2000 to the I journalist Riccardo Cristiano (head of public Italian station RAI) serving as a kind of junior public relations department for the Palestinian Authority. Landes masterfully shows New York Times journalist William Orme engaging in key omissions of violent Jew-hatred that unfolded after Palestinians ripped apart the bodies of two Israeli soldiers and dragged them through the streets of Ramallah in 2000.
Is there an explanatory model to capture the seemingly endless examples of shoddy reporting and error-plagued journalism on Israel and the Palestinians? Landes writes: “Some argue that ideology drives this, to which I respond, fine. I’ll even grant you that 20 percent of the news media are so ideological that they systematically falsify the record itself, a scandalously high figure for a profession that specifically commits itself to reporting events, rather than propaganda. But how is it then, that few dissent, and that those who do, are the ones that get pushed aside?”
“Some argue that ideology drives this, to which I respond, fine. I’ll even grant you that 20 percent of the news media are so ideological that they systematically falsify the record itself, a scandalously high figure for a profession that specifically commits itself to reporting events, rather than propaganda. But how is it then, that few dissent, and that those who do, are the ones that get pushed aside?”
Richard Landes
Landes explores another driving factor in anti-Israel bias within major news organizations. He argues that “the scandalously high index of MSNM [Mainstream News Media] compliance with PMP [Palestinian Media Protocols] in the twenty-first century is the smoking gun, the hard evidence for the fear of defying the Palestinians and only secondarily, in many cases as a fig leaf, does some dogged loyalty to the ideology of post-colonial underdogma play a role.”
According to Landes’s ingenious concept of PMP, a kind of unwritten code warrants that “journalists report the conflict as this black (Israel) and white (Palestinian) morality tale.”
My only quibble with Landes’s otherwise powerful explanatory system is the omission of guilt-defensiveness antisemitism to understand the high-intensity assaults on Israel from reporters in many Western European newsrooms. The antisemitic logic at work here, broadly defined, is Europe is largely consumed with pathological guilt in response to the Shoah. The response by many European reporters is to shift the onus of blame to Israel (and Israeli Jews) to purge one’s conscience of their country’s (and family members’) role in the crimes of the Hitler movement.
The idea of guilt-defensiveness antisemitism was also neatly formulated in the 1980s by Israeli psychologist Zvi Rex in a biting aphorism: “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.”
“The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.”
Zvi Rex
I would argue that Rex’s concept has expanded to the point of mainly Western Europe will never forgive the Israelis for the Holocaust. All of this helps to partially explains the inordinate amount of news attention devoted to the Israeli-Palestinian territorial dispute, one land conflict among over one hundred across the world.
One of Landes’s central points centers on the utter failure of Middle East journalism is “reporting as little as possible about the religious culture of genocide and terrorism that flourishes in Palestinian controlled-areas.”
Lethal antisemitism and jihadi ideologies animate many Palestinians to carry out terrorism and incite Jew-hatred.
In footnote 96, Landes writes, “The closest The New York Times ever got was a piece by [Steven] Erlanger after he left the ME [Middle East ] in which he blamed Hamas alone, absolving the PA [Palestinian Authority ].”
Erlanger’s article was titled “In Gaza, Hamas’s Insults to Jews Complicate Peace.” Erlanger’s dispatch was a big anomaly. To his credit, he set a precedent and reporters can, if they wish, advance Erlanger’s reporting.
Making matters worse, at a conference I attended in Washington D.C., the University of Maryland historian and expert on antisemitism, Jeffrey Herf, asked then-New York Times reporter Scott Shane why the Times fails to report on antisemitism in the Islamic world. Shane responded that antisemitism in the Muslim world is common knowledge for the readers.
Yet, to state the obvious, such insights as the Austrian-Jewish Holocaust survivor Jean Amery, who Landes quotes, are not common knowledge: “Anyone who questions Israel’s right to exist is either too stupid to understand that he is contributing to or is intentionally promoting an über-Auschwitz.”
Amery was quite prescient. In the late 1960s, he wrote “anti-Zionism contains antisemitism like a cloud contains a storm.”
After reading Landes’s marvelous book, the famous quote from America’s greatest social and political philosopher, Sidney Hook, popped into my head. “Stupidity is sometimes the greatest of historical forces.” The stupidity of many important news organizations is contributing, as Landes demonstrates, to lethal attacks on Jews and a rise in antisemitism.
From a journalist’s perspective, Landes has penned one of the most authoritative books on the collapse of journalism in its coverage of Israel and Palestinians. One hopes that his landmark book will be translated into Arabic, Persian, Turkish and European languages. ■
Benjamin Weinthal is a Writing Fellow for the Middle East Forum.
In his own words
Richard Landes spoke passionately at the launch of his book, concluding his address with these words:
Just because “the whole world can be wrong” about Israel hardly means that getting it wrong can’t have terrible consequences.
The apocalyptic analysis of what destroyed the Second Temple runs as follows: In the run up to an apocalypse that will not happen (the world goes on), the mutual hatreds and hostilities have cosmic import. Only in the massive destruction that follows, does it appear to those who survive, as sinat chinam, baseless hatreds. Today, Israelis and Jews around the world are being torn apart by the folly-driven tensions I am describing, which manifest not only in fights among Diaspora Jews – the revolt against the woke behavior of the current Jewish leadership – and between Diaspora Jews swept up in the woke wave and Israel, but also now in developments within Israel. Some diaspora Jews no longer say the prayer for the state of Israel, about which “we no longer can be proud.” People speak in ominous tones about “the death of democracy,” and the polarization intensifies.
Whether we support, oppose, or don’t know what to think about the proposed actions of our elected government, let us never lose sight of the fact that voting in Israel is deeply influenced by the massive hatred that surrounds us, a hatred “the whole world” including many Jews, refuse to acknowledge. It took the French revolution three years to melt down into a paranoid terror that ate its own, and the Soviets and Maoists even less time, and all told, over a hundred million died from the madness of the last century. Israel is now 75 years into a revolutionary egalitarian state, beset by murderous enemies, resisting that meltdown into mutual paranoia. But I can guarantee that if these internecine hatreds, framed in apocalyptic, all or nothing terms – what Irwin Cotler characterized euphemistically as “counterproductive” – succeed in destroying Jewish solidarity and, God forbid, Israel, the survivors will look back on these conflicts as another tragic tragic example of sinat chinam.
This book I have just published is my small contribution to both the voice of child in the crowd revealing the folly of those culture leaders who think the whole world cannot be wrong in its charge to world-redemption, and a call to arms in a civilizational war that I truly believe we can still win. Let us, this time, not come out of this much sadder and wiser. Let us become wiser now and come out glad later.