Can the Whole World be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad.

Join us on Thursday, May 9, 2024 for a conversation with Prof. Landes. Richard Allen Landes, he is an American historian trained as a medievalist at Princeton University (MA 1979, PhD 1984). In 2015, he retired from Boston University where he was a Professor in the History Department where he is currently Associate Professor Emeritus of History. His work focus on apocalyptic beliefs and millennial movements (“Heaven on Earth,” 2011), initially around the year 1000 (“Peace of God,” 1986; “Relics, Apocalypse and the Deceits of History: Ademar of Chabannes, 989-1034,” 1995; “Apocalyptic Year 1000,” 2003). He has developed the concept of “demotic religiosity,” an orientation that prizes 1) equality before the law, 2) dignity of manual labor, 3) access to sacred texts for all believers, and 4) moral integrity over social honor. He has increasingly focused on contemporary movements (“Paranoid Apocalypse,” 2006), especially Global Jihad, and the insufficient response to its challenge, starting with the coverage of the “Al Aqsa Intifada” in late 2000. He made a series of documentaries in 2005/6 titled “According to Palestinian Sources…,” which document the extensive staging of footage (Pallywood), the staging of the Al Durah footage (“Making of an Icon”), and the impact of that fake, broadcast as “news” by Western news media (“Icon of Hatred”). In October 2000, doctored footage aired on French television purporting to show the twelve-year-old Mohammad al-Dura cowering behind his father as he is shot by Israeli soldiers. While a preponderance of evidence subsequently showed that the video is little more than a hoax, Western media largely ignored that evidence. This incident serves as the touchstone of Richard Landes’s book “Can The Whole World Be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad,” (Academic Studies Press, 2022) which investigates such distortions and their effects. In his book he takes us through the first years of the third millennium (2000-2003), documenting how a radical inability of Westerners to understand the medieval mentality that drove Global Jihad prompted a series of disastrous misinterpretations and misguided reactions that have shaped our so-far unhappy century. These misinterpretations in 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2005, contributed fundamentally to the ever-worsening moral and empirical disorientations of our information elites (journalists, academics, pundits). So while journalists reported Palestinian war propaganda as news (“lethal journalism”), they were also reporting Jihadi war propaganda as news (“own-goal war journalism”). These radical disorientations have created our current dilemma of pervasive information distrust, deep splits within the voting public in most democracies, the politicization of science, and the inability of Western elites to defend their civilization, and instead, to stand down before an invasion. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sZXOQGZAqE