Richard Landes | American Historian and Author Specializing in Medieval Millennial Thinking

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Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?

Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad

Mosaic Magazine

The Failure to Understand the Jihad against Israel Led to the Failure to Understand the Jihad against the West.

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 Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad, which investigates such distortions and their effects.

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Richard Allen Landes is an American historian and author who specializes in medieval history and millennial beliefs. Until 2015 he taught at Boston University; and he is now an independent scholar and historian in Jerusalem. His current interests include shame-honor culture, news media malfeasance, and various forms of apocalyptic and millennial beliefs.

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Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?

Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad

Landes, a medievalist and historian of apocalyptic movements, 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.

Few observers of present-day antisemitism have been as tenacious and tough-minded as Richard Landes in identifying the ideas and people responsible for the upsurge of Jew-hatred in recent years. Placing this hostility within the broader context of illiberal thinking and militant anti-democratic movements, Landes plunges readers into the midst of a high-stakes intellectual and political battle. Written by a knowledgeable, sharply judgmental, and deeply committed combatant in today’s ideological debates about Jews and Israel, this book will rouse strong feelings as well as offer bold and provocative insights into matters of great historical and contemporary consequence.

ALVIN H. ROSENFELD, PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND JEWISH STUDIES AND IRVING M. GLAZER CHAIR IN JEWISH STUDIES, INDIANA UNIVERSITY

“If you stay awake pondering the insanity of woke culture, particularly in its virulent form of Israel derangement syndrome, Can ‘The Whole World’ Be Wrong? is likely to give you even more reasons to despair. Opening with a warning “If I’m Right, We’re in Deep Trouble”, Professor Richard Landes provides readers with a guided tour of 21st Century obsessions, from ‘liberal cognitive egocentrics’ to demopaths armed with post-colonial kryptonite. At each stop, the meticulously documented book systematically exposes the facades of the intersectional self-righteousness and pseudo-morality of NGO propagandists and narrative journalists.”

Gerald M. Steinberg, Professor of Political Studies, Bar Ilan University, and founder, NGO Monitor

Richard Allen Landes is an American historian and author who specializes in medieval millennial thinking. Until 2015 he taught at Boston University, and then began working at Bar-Ilan University, where his current interests include defending the politics of Israel in the light of what he calls media manipulation by Palestinians…

Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History

Encyclopedia of Millennialism and Millennial Movements

Few observers of present-day antisemitism have been as tenacious and tough-minded as Richard Landes in identifying the ideas and people responsible for the upsurge of Jew-hatred in recent years. Placing this hostility within the broader context of illiberal thinking and militant anti-democratic movements, Landes plunges readers into the midst of a high-stakes intellectual and political battle. Written by a knowledgeable, sharply judgmental, and deeply committed combatant in today’s ideological debates about Jews and Israel, this book will rouse strong feelings as well as offer bold and provocative insights into matters of great historical and contemporary consequence.
Alvin H. Rosenfeld, Professor of English and Jewish Studies and Irving M. Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies, Indiana University

“If you stay awake pondering the insanity of woke culture, particularly in its virulent form of Israel derangement syndrome, Can ‘The Whole World’ Be Wrong? is likely to give you even more reasons to despair. Opening with a warning “If I’m Right, We’re in Deep Trouble”, Professor Richard Landes provides readers with a guided tour of 21st Century obsessions, from ‘liberal cognitive egocentrics’ to demopaths armed with post-colonial kryptonite. At each stop, the meticulously documented book systematically exposes the facades of the intersectional self-righteousness and pseudo-morality of NGO propagandists and narrative journalists.”
Gerald M. Steinberg, Professor of Political Studies, Bar Ilan University, and founder, NGO Monitor

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