The Self-Destruction of the Al Durah Faithful

When I first began work on the al Durah affair, I my I knew I was on to a story whose unraveling would reveal a wide range of cultural dynamics at the beginning of the 21st century

•       the dramatic dysfunctions of the Mainstream media’s news reporting,

•       the resurgence of various forms of Judeophobia from the paranoid anti-Semitism of the Muslim world to the gratifying moral Schadenfreude of the European “left”,

•       the mainstreaming of an active-cataclysmic apocalyptic movement in global Jihad and its weapon of choice, suicide terrorism,

•       the cultural vulnerabilities of Western democracies faced with an asymmetrical war so lopsided they cannot take it seriously

•       the pathologies of Jewish self-criticism,

•       the disorientation of liberals prisoner of their cognitive egocentrism, and

•       the moral failure of the “progressive left.”

By any standards this offers a fairly good scope of issues to illuminate with a “thick description” of one single incident, even if it strikes many as what one French friend classed as a “human interest story” (faits divers).

Part of what attracted me to the topic was its quality of “public secret.” Everywhere I looked there were public secrets: from the obvious staging of Pallywood and the stunning complacency in private of the Western media (“oh, they do that all the time”), to uncanny refusal of otherwise rational people to reconsider despite the deeply troubling evidence.  Karsenty calls it the “so what” defense: No blood… so what; no bullets… so what; 55 seconds not 27 minutes filmed of an alleged 45 minutes of non-stop Israeli firing… so what; no “death agonies” that Enderlin cut to “spare the public”… so what; no ambulance evacuation scenes… so what; the kid moves after he’s supposed to be dead… so what; Talal lies… so what; Enderlin lies…

Indeed quite early on, in addition to seeing this story as having strong parallels to the Dreyfus Affair, I began to see it as a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Here the tailors are Talal and his friends who spin their story; Enderlin is the chamberlain who comes back from examining the evidence and announces that the tale is good and true, the MSM are the courtiers to whom he gave both the evidence and the talking points for announcing the great news in order to prepare the tale’s public exposure, the media launch of the icon of hatred, the martyr Muhammad al Durah. And a string of lonely individuals, from Shahaf, to Juffa, to Huber, to Poller, to Landes, to Karsenty, tried unsuccessfully to say, hey wait a minute, this martyr’s narrative robe is woven of wholesale deception.  And each of us were told, as does the father of the child in Andersen’s tale, “Hush child.” Only whereas in the original tale, the “revelation” was that those who couldn’t see the magical cloth were “fools and unworthy to rule”, in this one, those who saw a fake were “far-right-wing Zionist conspiracy freaks.”

Like many such “public secrets,” this tale does not wear well over time.  (The French call them secrets de Polichinelle, secrets like pregnancy that will, eventually, out.) What I did not expect, was how often the defenders of al Durah would reveal the nature of these dysfunctions I was trying to chronicle and explain.  Now Larry Derfner has added his text to the dossier of self-revelatory texts that explain so much about the al Durah affair. He has, as a result, inspired the formal launching of the Al Durah Affair’s Public Secret Dossier.  So in his honor, I propose to go over some of these extraordinarily revealing texts and compare and contrast them.

1)      Letter of Ricardo Christiano to the Palestinian Authority, October 13, 2000

2)     News analysis of William Orme for the New York Times, October 24, 2000

3)    Response of Adam to James Fallows’ Atlantic Monthly article June, 2003

4)    Nouvel Obs Letter of Support to Charles Enderlin, May 27, 2008

5)    Larry Derfner’s 2nd Column on Al Durah in Jerusalem Post, June 18, 2008

Letter of Ricardo Christiano to the Palestinian Authority, October 13, 2000

On October 12 (less than two weeks after the al Durah footage first aired and provoked rioting throughout Israel’s Arab population), two Russian-born reservists took a wrong turn and landed in Ramallah, Arafat’s “Oslo” capital.  Palestinian police took them into custody, but the rumor of their presence spread rapidly. A lynch crowd soon stormed the police station, and in a frenzy, Palestinian men beat the soldiers to death with their bare hands, threw their bodies out the window, and a mob below literally tore apart their bodies, beaten to a pulp, dragging the parts through the street, shouting all the while, “Revenge for the blood of Muhammad al Durah.” 

A number of photographers and camera crews were there that day, and naturally filmed the affair. They were, however, assaulted by the crowds, their footage confiscated, their cameras broken, any resistance calling down blows. Wrote Mark Seager, a journalist who has great sympathy for the Palestinians, who was happy to escape with his life even if his favorite camera was smashed to pieces, in an article entitled, “<a href=”http://”>I’ll have nightmares for the rest of my life</a>”:

It was the most horrible thing that I have ever seen and I have reported from Congo, Kosovo, many bad places. In Kosovo, I saw Serbs beating an Albanian but it wasn’t like this. There was such hatred, such unbelievable hatred and anger distorting their faces.

Only one crew managed to get images out of Ramallah that day, an Italian crew whose Israeli member shamed them into defying the Palestinians.  The Israelis got the footage, ran it on TV, and it shocked the world.

The next day, the head of the Italian public TV news station RAI wrote Yasser Arafat a personal and urgent letter designed to protect his reporters in the Middle East from danger.  In cloying tones – “we congratulate you…” (on what?) – he explained that the people who had brought out the tapes were not from his station, but from another.  “We,” he explained, “always respect the journalistic procedures with the Palestinian Authority for work in Palestine and we are credible in our precise work.” In other words, “we didn’t break the rules and show footage that was detrimental to the Palestinian cause, we would never do that, so please don’t retaliate against my people.” 

The letter is stunningly craven, and reveals the public secret of Palestinian intimidation of journalists who systematically present the Palestinians to the world as they wish to be portrayed – plucky freedom fighters resisting the Israeli imperialist, racist, genocidal hegemon – and mute the ugly but public elements – the industry of hatred, the vicious and deliberate violence (no “collateral damage” here), the profoundly irredentist attitude towards Israel.  As a revelation of the extensiveness of Palestinian intimidation – “journalistic procedures” – the letter is incomparable, and shed light on much more than just Mr. Cristiano’s organization.  Properly understood this letter should arouse in any careful reader to ask alarming questions about  the pervasive effect of Palestinian press intimidation on the quality of news delivery in the West.

Obviously, it was supposed to be a private memo to Arafat to avoid retaliation. Arafat, however, published the letter triumphantly in Al Hayat al Jadida, much to the embarrassment of Christiano. Having got caught red handed revealing trade secrets, he was shunned by his colleagues who, however much they played the same game, were still publicly committed to basic journalistic principles of a free press: to resist and report intimidation to their readership.  Even the Israeli government, normally quite timid, sanctioned him. 

Of course, at this time in the process, very few observers of the journalistic coverage of the incipient Intifada and the stunning unraveling of the Oslo “Peace process” were prepared to analyze carefully, to reconsider this dominant framing of the Arab-Israeli conflict as the Israeli Goliath and the Palestinian David. Indeed, nothing signaled more clearly to close observers the determination of MSM to ignore these issues, than the analysis of William Orme two weeks later in the New York Times.

News analysis of William Orme for the New York Times, October 24, 2000

It turns out that Christiano’s letter was not the only controversial product of the Ramallah lynching.  The following day in Gaza an Imam preached a particularly violent sermon, calling in no uncertain terms for a genocide against the Jews.

The Jews are the Jews. Whether Labor or Likud the Jews are Jews. They do not have any moderates or any advocates of peace. They are all liars. They must be butchered and must be killed… The Jews are like a spring as long as you step on it with your foot it doesn’t move. But if you lift your foot from the spring, it hurts you and punishes you… It is forbidden to have mercy in your hearts for the Jews in any place and in any land. Make war on them any place that you find yourself. Any place that you meet them, kill them. (PA TV, October 13, 2000)

Now to those familiar with the Hadith of the “Rocks and the Trees” about an apocalyptic slaughter of the Jews in which nature itself comes to the aid of the killers, “servants of Allah”, this was not unfamiliar. It has been a favorite trope of Hamas since its inception in 1987.

Israelis, cognizant of the role of Palestinian MSM in disseminating the hatreds that provoked the lynching in Ramallah, retaliated symbolically by bombing the transmitters of the Voice of Palestine, the PA’s official radio network.  William Orme, veteran reporter for the NYT, came to investigate and wrote a news analysis piece two months later entitled, “A Parallel Mideast Battle: Is It News or Incitement?” What could have been a brilliant and illuminating analysis of the real forces of hatred and violence in the region turned into a classic and profoundly dishonest exercise in “even-handed” reporting.  Quoting Palestinians saying, “Every word the Israelis hear on the Voice of Palestine they think is incitement,” and portraying the attack as a blow at freedom of expression, Orme presented the Israeli position as follows:

Israeli officials said the air strike against Voice of Palestine was justified, citing NATO attacks on state television studios in Yugoslavia, where official media were accused of promoting violence in Kosovo.  Israelis cite as one egregious example a televised sermon that defended the killing of the two soldiers. ”Whether Likud or Labor, Jews are Jews,” proclaimed Sheik Ahmad Abu Halabaya in a live broadcast from a Gaza City mosque the day after the killings.

One might forgive the uninformed reader for siding with the Palestinians in this case. The Israelis look like fools complaining about something as petty as this.

Was Orme so morally obtuse that he did not think the genocidal passages that he cut added anything to the “inflammatory” speech he already quoted?  Was he just plain dishonest in his editing? Was he responding to the “rules of journalism” when reporting from the PA that Christiano had just revealed, and of which he made not a mention in his article? Or was it his editor who cut it?  (I doubt the last conjecture, since had he included the full quote, the rest of the article would have had to change.)

Wherever lies the fault, the losers in this astounding omertà surrounding Islamic genocidal hate speech are first, the readers of this disinformation, second, the Israelis whose apparent pettiness here only highlights the accusations of arbitrary violence the Palestinians level against them, and three, the Palestinian people, left in the grip of hate-mongering predatory elites who are strengthened with every such PR victory. 

How many people understood what was at stake, how profound the disinformation, and how dangerous? Not too many in these pre-9-11 days. After all, who would prefer to trust the ravings of right-wing Zionist operations like PMW and CAMERA to the authority of a veteran journalist working for the NYT?

Response of Adam Rose to James Fallows’ Atlantic Monthly article, June 2003

The first salvo of Al Durah criticism came in the Anglophone press almost three years after the event, in June of 2003 with James Fallows ground-breaking article in the <em>Atlantic Monthly</em> – both journalist and publication part of the progressive camp, and thus above suspicion as some kind of “right-wing Zionist” initiative.  Fallows presented all of the deeply troubling evidence available. However, firmly if respectfully distancing himself from Nahum Shahaf’s “staged” hypothesis, Fallows took the prudent, minimalist position that the “Israelis didn’t do it” without further asking what did happen that day.  Making some closing reflections on the tenuous relationship of the Arab world with empirical evidence, Fallows concluded that no matter what the evidence, it was unlikely such findings would make any difference in a culture where Al Durah was a sacred martyr.

The response drew outrage from the progressive community, and a lengthy essay by Adam Rose, a founder and director of Support Sanity, a coordinating web-based organization promoting a “peaceful and sane solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.”  In it Rose criticized Fallows for his failure to understand philosophical “truth” – that what “really happened” did not matter so much as its symbolic meaning. 

In other words, the critical question in an examination of the dynamics of Mohammed al-Dura’s “martyrdom” is not whether the singular “Story of Mohammed al-Dura” is true, but whether the universal “Mohammed al-Dura Story” is true. And the sad, incontrovertible fact is that the universal “Mohammed al-Dura Story” is true.  According to multiple, credible international, American and Israeli sources, Israeli soldiers do kill little Palestinian boys on a regular basis.  Sometimes for throwing rocks.  Sometimes because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time.  And sometimes (apparently) for sport.

Perhaps Rose had not seen the interview that Esther Schapira did with a PA TV official who explained why his team had inserted a picture of an Israeli soldier, firing rubber bullets at a riot caused by the al Durah footage, into the al Durah footage in order to make it clear that the Israelis intentionally targeted the boy in cold blood. His justification was strikingly similar to Rose’s:

These are forms of artistic expression, but all of this serves to convey the truth… We never forget our higher journalistic principles to which we are committed of relating the truth and nothing but the truth.

This splicing became the accepted frame of the incident certainly in the Arab world and much of the European, and its broader meaning: the Israelis deliberately murder innocent and defenseless Palestinian children. It lies at the core of the “blood-libel” quality of the al Durah story. It permits Europeans eager to escape Holocaust guilt to claim that this picture “erases, replaces that of the boy in the Warsaw ghetto,” and compare Israel to the Nazis.

The official’s proud comment illustrates the stark divide between the Palestinian concept of journalism and of mythical “truth,” and the Western empirical one, where no reporter could act in such a way and survive scrutiny. And nothing better illustrates the post-modern dangers of fudging the boundary between empirical evidence and narrative than Rose’s eagerness to embrace this lethal weaponized narrative as “true.”  Without realizing it, well-intentioned Adam Rose has joined the ranks of believers in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion who declare unabashedly that the fact that the text is forged does not discredit it, because it reflects a “higher truth.”

And when he tried to link his “higher truth” empirically to reality, he did so by appeal to organizations and individuals who were themselves products of the PA’s “truth”: reports from MSM journalists like Christopher Hedges and Amira Haas and NGOs who played the same game, and aimed at the same target – Israel’s image.

And in 2003, when Jenin massacre claims had swept the MSM before there was any evidence, and survived empirical disproof even from the UN, when anti-war demonstrations and campaigns of divestment and boycott demonized Israel and glorified the Palestinian resistance, few people on the Left were ready to question their commitment to the kinds of higher truths that supported their world view.  Rose’s article, rather than consider what the alternative “higher meaning” might be – that the Palestinian narrative deliberately attributes malevolent intent to Israelis thus inspiring just that malevolence among Palestinians and destroying any chance for peace – ended up siding with the “higher truth” that permitted him, through some weird calculus, to be even-handed.  And in the end, this peace activist fed the dogs of war.

Nouvel Obs Letter of Support to Charles Enderlin, May 27, 2008

The court of appeals verdict on May 21, 2008 shocked everyone on both sides, and once people read the decision, the shock deepened.  It was a stinging rebuke to France2 and Charles Enderlin which essentially told Enderlin that as a prime time news broadcaster he had to expect scrutiny and criticism from both colleagues and fellow citizens. Furthermore, it remarked, in this case in particular, with its international impact, despite the fact that an accusation of running staged footage in the case of al Durah would constitute defamation were it irresponsible and motivated by bad faith, in this case the inconsistencies (incohérences) of both Talal’s footage and Enderlin’s responses to the court’s questions, meant that Karsenty had the right to make his criticism in the most lively language. 

Enderlin, despite the brave face he put on it – “we’ll appeal, the decision merely found him innocent because they ruled he acted in good faith” – clearly could not have been happy.  On the other hand, outside of the blogosphere, most MSM sources either ignored or minimally reported the event. Alone, outside of the Jewish press, the International Wall Street Journal tackled the issue with both an op-ed by Nidra Poller and an editorial.  Despite how powerful the court’s statement, it looked like, once again, the counter-story would die on the lips of its frustrated tellers.

But then the “friends of Charles” did something remarkable and remarkably foolish.  They put up a letter of support for their colleague that bemoaned the “campaign of hatred and vilification” that had dogged his steps for lo! these seven years… accusing him of a hoax when he told the world that the boy was killed by fire coming from the Israeli position.  The court’s decision, they declared, surprised and worried them: surprised, because the court “granted the same credibility to Karsenty,” a mere civilian, as it had to Enderlin, the veteran reporter “known for the seriousness and rigor of his work, who exercises his profession in sometimes difficult conditions”; worried, because the court’s decision “gives a ‘permission to defame’ journalists, which would permit anyone, in the name of ‘good faith’ and ‘the right of free criticism,’ to strike with impunity at the ‘honor and reputation of information professionals.’” This, they concluded, coming “at a time when the freedom of action of journalists is the object of repeated attacks,” would undermine “this fundamental principle, pillar of democracy” and therefore they “renew our support and solidarity with Charles Enderlin.”

The text is as revealing as the Christiano letter both in its complete indifference to the Christiano letter’s message about the systematic intimidation of the correspondents in the field, and in its publishing a hidden secret.  Never would it occur to the signatories that their “veteran reporter” might systematically misrepresent the “terrain” he knows so well and misreport events because “what would they say in Gaza if I didn’t report that the Israelis killed him?” On the contrary, the petition was written and signed by people who showed no interest in the evidence, who believe that their colleague should be given superior credibility because he is their colleague.  And they clearly think that freedom from criticism by their readers guarantees their freedom of speech. It would be hard to imagine a more blatant expression of a privileged corporatist mentality redolent of the ancien régime. Ben Dror Yemini compares them to the “anti-Dreyfusards, who also stubbornly clung to the first version.”

And that’s how it struck the readership.  The talkbacks to the letter were overwhelmingly negative, so much so that the editors at the Nouvel Obs began censoring the hostile ones and publishing the favorable ones… more evidence of the corporatism that does not hesitate to manipulate evidence in its favor. Once again, the “old media,” the MSM which had grown accustomed to throwing its considerable – video enhanced – weight around with impunity had run into unexpected opposition in the new world of cyberspace, where a public better informed than they “talked back.”  Indeed, even members of the guild, even “friends of Charles,” began to break ranks, Alain Finkielkraut, Elie Barnavi, Ivan Rioufol, André Dufour…

As Andersen’s tale runs:

The Emperor realized that the people were right but could not admit to that. He thought it better to continue the procession under the illusion that anyone who couldn’t see his clothes was either stupid or incompetent. And he stood stiffly on his carriage, while behind him a page held his imaginary mantle.

Even Jean Daniel, stung by the rebuke of Eli Barnavi and the accusations of corporatism, broke ranks with his own letter and called for a committee of investigation that would examine – shock and awe – the evidence!

Larry Derfner’s Second Column on Al Durah in Jerusalem Post, June 18, 2008

Alas, even as the pro-Enderlin forces in France were in disarray, Larry Derfner decided to enter the lists, not so much on Enderlin’s side, as against the the “paranoid conspiracy freaks” who dare to suggest that the original footage was staged. He ran into the same response from his readers as the signatories of the Nouvel Obs letter did: almost universally negative, all better informed than he.  Earnest proponents of the “staged” hypothesis tried to speak with him, met with him, went over the evidence with him. He spoke with Enderlin, with Gabi Weimann, a professor of communications at Haifa who has followed the case for a long time. So he tried a second time, at great length.  This time he began quite explicitly criticizing Enderlin for his claim that the Israelis killed the boy.  So Enderlin, even in Derfner’s relatively favorable account, is still on the hook for contributing to accusation of murder against Israel (i.e., what became, in the hands of the Muslims and the radical left, the first blood libel of the 21st century).

But the claim that the footage was staged… that was — to his mind — simply impossible.  Derfner’s handling of the evidence was only slightly better than the French signatories… at least he looked at it. (I have addressed these elements in detail at my blog where one can look at the evidence as well.) But most of his argumentation is ad hominem, both positive and negative: the “professional, impartial, disinterested…” who (according to him) do not support the “staged” hypothesis, and the “paranoid, right-wing, reflexively pro-Israel/anti-Arab” who argue in favor of the staged hypothesis.  In its own way, it’s as corporatist as the Nouvel Obs petition: professional journalists are disinterested and reliable, free-lancers with no training are zealots and unreliable.

In one case, Derfner is spectacularly wrong. In response to his article, Esther Schapira, the most thorough of the journalistic investigators on his list of heroes, wrote the following (for attribution):

It has been said several times that I didn’t find any hints supporting the accusation that the famous scene at the Netzarim junction was a hoax and this was why I didn’t include it in my film. This is wrong. Indeed even in 2001 I already came across a number of interesting hints indicating that the so-called “killing of Mohammed Al Durah” might be a Palestinian propaganda fabrication… Now, in retrospect with the knowledge of today, I know that it is very justified to question if he did get killed at all.

Schapira extends the arena of press intimidation exposed by the Cristiano letter to Europe in the first years of the 21st century, when contradicting the Palestinian narrative – even only half-way – took enormous courage.

Indeed, Derfner, ignorant perhaps by design of the pressures on various “professionals” like the two French journalist who saw the rushes in Paris in late 2004, cites in his support people whose “caution” was not born of the evidence so much as their concerns for their career.  There is no corporatism without pressures to maintain solidarity.  Before the court decision, the best one could hope for from any of the members of the guild who had examined the evidence – including people like those who attacked the Nouvel Obs letter – was the minimalist position, “the Israelis didn’t do it.”

“I would never say the emperor is naked… but I don’t think his new clothes are all that beautiful…”

But by far the most revealing aspect of Derfner’s letter comes when he brings in his moral calculus, something he does repeatedly:

I think it’s ludicrous and morally blind to claim that the Palestinian boy’s killing was a “hoax,” a staged event… all the conspiracy theories flying around the right-wing Jewish cyberspace are nothing but Arab-bashing nonsense… if you believe the alternative conspiracy theory… you not only have to assume Palestinians are naturally satanic liars, you have to assume they’re naturally satanic child-killers, too. THE AL-DURA conspiracy theories are wild and irrational, but they’re also more (or less) than that – they’re indecent. To believe that the boy is still alive and that the father was never shot, you have to assume that every Palestinian, from the highest to the lowest, is the biggest liar imaginable, and that when Palestinians work together, they invent hoaxes and cover-ups of inhuman genius and precision. To believe that the bullets never even hit the al-Duras, you have to explain away everything that doesn’t fit your theory about the implacably evil nature of Palestinian behavior by saying: Someone’s lying, or someone’s covering up for a lie.

One could scarcely hope for a more explicit expression of how a “moral” (really political) agenda trumps the evidence.  We cannot say that the Palestinians staged this scene because to do so would be “Arab bashing.” To even think that they might stage so revolting a scene means we consider them “implacably evil… satanic liars.”

In other words, this text exposes one of the most important dimensions in the long and painful process whereby the story of Al Durah remained buried under a wall of silence for so long.  If the Nouvel Obs petition exposes the corporatist omertà that kept the MSM from treating a the critique of a report they had done so much to disseminate, this letter explains why progressives have been so resistant to examining the evidence. It explains the puzzling responses I ran into when speaking of this to my “progressive” friends who not only refused to give me a platform to discuss my work, but would not even respond to the evidence.  “I’ve always been opposed to the settlements,” said one American professor of journalism known for his defense of Israel in the face of media hostility; “If there hadn’t been settlers at Netzarim, there wouldn’t have been soldiers at that Junction,” responded another.

But the problem here is, the evidence leads precisely to the conclusions that Derfner considers unutterable. So his political agenda literally demands that he ignore the evidence on the one hand, and that he assault those who follow it as “Arab bashers” on the other.  In other words, a recipe for stupidity.

Promoting Hamas’ Narrative for Infidels

Isa Soares and As-a-Jew Daniel Levy agree: Israel’s to blame and a cease fire will restore stability to the region.

This one’s a particularly nasty affair where Levy calls the Iran-Hizbullah-Hamas-Houthi axis “the axis of resistance,” and the Israelis as the “axis of Zionist extremism.” The Jihadis could not ask for better.

Two-Dimensional, Morally Disoriented “Reality”

Served up by CNN’s Sreenivasan interviewing Prof. Jason Stanley

Another As-a-Jew offers potted post-colonial anti-Zionism.

Mainlining Hamas Propaganda

CNN’s Zain Asher interviews Shaykh Hisham Hellyer

One of many interviews with a repetitive superficial Muslim propagandist who presents as a scholar (H.A. Hellyer of the Carnegie Endowment) when he’s actually a Shaykh whose first name is Hisham.

Finally a wee bit of pushback from a CNN anchor

Golodryga interviews Hellyer

Just a wee bit of pushback but given the mindless accord between Hellyer and other anchors – Amara Walker, Eleni Giokos, Paula Newton, and Zain Asher, it’s exceptional.

The Journalist-NGO-Hamas Triangle trades in Lethal Narratives about Israel

Isa Soares interviews UNRWA Official Jan Egeland.

And I have yet to post one of the more grotesque of all these, the Christiane Amanpour-Jeremy Diamond Pallywood special on the dead new-born twins in Gaza.

NB: italic text not indented is my paraphrase (translation) of what the paraphrased means.

CNN 27 September 2024 19:28

Israeli official: Nasrallah was target of Beirut strike, Bianna Golodryga interviews H.A. Hellyer, live Athens.

Golodryga: Let’s bring in HA Hellyer a Middle East scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who joins us from Athens.

Imagine introducing him with his real name, Hisham and his title of Shaykh, rather than make him sound like an impartial Western scholar (as if there are lots of those).

So a lot we can’t confirm but we can confirm that the target of this strike was Hassan Nasrallah the leader of Hizbullah, that tells you what about what direction we’ve seen escalate over the course of the last few weeks, rapidly beginning in October 8th when Hezbollah began launching rockets into Israel?

A somewhat confused question, but at least with a mention that this all began with Hizbullah launching rockets the day after Hamas’ attack. But, Bianna, if you expected an answer, forget it. Hisham’s MO is: ‘I’m here to make a propaganda dump, and no matter what you ask, I’ll dump my stuff.’

Hellyer: And thank you for having me on your program. So Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel was at the UN as he began his speech, scores of delegations just walked out. I’m not sure there’s been such a vigorous isolation of any country in many decades, quite frankly.

Israel the rogue country. He especially likes to use “frankly” when he’s dumping his load.

And I think that that isolation is set to continue and deepen. the the images that we’re seeing from Beirut right now are frankly horrifying. 2000 LB bunker Buster bombs in a residential area which flattened 6 entire buildings in Beirut. Beirut, the city where more than 100,000 people have fled the South of Lebanon from Israeli strikes to what they thought was going to be safety in Beirut. And now we see this.

Not the pictures of people all over the Arab world celebrating the death of Nasrallah, in Syria, in Lebanon (Beirut!), in the UAE… but the picture of six building, largely evacuated beforehand, in the area of Beirut that Hizbullah has annexed. No refugee from the south, where Hizbullah had made them targets, took refuge in that neighborhood.

I, I don’t think that this represents anything like a de-escalation that the Biden administration was calling for, like the French government was calling for, like frankly, most of the international community at this point. And it’s deeply concerning to see the spiraling situation go on any further. But unfortunately, without a change of direction from the Israeli government, I suspect we’re going to see more of this and probably more devastation. 

It’s the same old song. France and the US are on board with my program – hold the Israelis back out of fear of regional war. They’re the problem. There’s no room in my universe for preventing Hizbullah from doing what they’ve done for the last year.

Q’: one could also argue there has been no change in direction from Hezbollah over the course of the last year. As we noted, they began launching this unprompted on October 8th, launching rockets into Israel. Israel says that they’ve been trying to go down the diplomatic path with the aid from the United States, and it’s envoy to deescalate. Israel says that that hasn’t been successful and thus we’ve seen the ratcheting up of fighting over the course of the last two weeks. Israel saying it’s escalating to deescalate. To avoid another ground invasion, what is your response to the fact that Hezbollah itself has not been de escalating over the last year?

Good question. Not to Hisham’s liking of course.

A’: So I think we need to frame this a little bit more accurately.

No, we can’t have the Israeli point of view here. That wouldn’t be accurate.

When it comes to Israel’s acts of the past year, you’ve seen 10s of thousands of civilians being killed in Gaza, which is the impetus behind Hizbullah’s…

He’s about to launch into his ‘if only Israel would accept a ceasefire in Gaza I’m sure Hizbullah would stop firing their rockets. But, lo and behold, Bianna interrupts:

(interrupts him) Q’: right but October 8th, the IDF was not in Gaza yet.

Precisely.

A’: I’m sorry, I’m sorry if you allow me to continue. Of course, Hezbullah is a militant group, they can speak for themselves. I certainly wouldn’t be interested in defending Hezbollah, particularly after what they’ve done in many instances around the region.

Although, part of my job is to make them look reasonable when it comes to Israel. As to your pertinent interruption with a reminder of how Hizbullah started rocketing on the 8th, long before Israel went into Gaza (which contradicts my narrative of their bombing Israel to get them to stop bombing Gaza) – I’m not going to address it. It’s Israel’s fault and she must stand down.

But the fact of the matter is, is that the United States has been calling on the Israelis to deescalate. Over the past six, actually 6 to 12 months, the Israelis have sent messages saying, yes, we will and then they crossed that line.

Not one interview goes by without Israel crossing US-imposed lines with impunity.

And even in the past couple of days, as you and your viewers will know, the United States and France announced the ceasefire proposal just for Lebanon. They weren’t even talking about Gaza and. And Netanyahu’s government said that they were supportive of it and then changed their minds almost in mid flight. I, I don’t think that this is a two sides situation. If you’re talking about the number of strikes that have gone across the border, then multitudes more have come from the Israeli side into Lebanon.

That’s funny. So why has southern Lebanon been populated for the last year but not northern Israel. No this can’t be two sides. It’s got to be Israel, the perp.

It’s not comparable to the other side.

Huh? Even though they started it and continue bombing.

I do think that we have to move towards de escalation here and de escalation, particularly when it comes to the use of this sort of weaponry. I mean, the the, the sort of weapons that Hezbollah has been using do not remotely even compare it to any of this, and Hezbollah is not an ally of the United States or of the West, whereas Israel is, and I think ought to be held to a certain standard.

So let’s level the playing field by degrading Israel’s weapons capacity? (Yes, precisely.) Note the double standard. Israel helped by the West must be held to a standard that Hizbullah shouldn’t be (?). But Israel is helped by the West precisely because Hizbullah refuses to be held to any standard…

Q’: So if the goal is to see the return of 10s of thousands of residents, not only Israeli residents there in the north,  but Lebanese residents in the south…

Hisham interrupts (because even the mention of Israeli residents having fled the north is too much for him)

Hisham: and also Lebanese residents in the south, absolutely…

Golodryga: …if I can if I can finish, yes, Lebanese residents in the South, how how would you propose the best solution to getting there is at this point? Do you think it’s the ceasefire that’s being on the table being offered by the US and French right now?

It’s not clear why Golodryga gives him the very answer he wants, rather than asking an open question. It’s a characteristic of many interviewers at CNN – and elsewhere – to ask leading questions, hardly a good sign.

A’: There have been diplomatic proposals offered by the Americans and the French multiple times over the past six months. Those diplomatic proposals were rebuffed by the Israelis, incidentally, very similar to what has been happening with regards to Gaza, where the ceasefire negotiations that were calling for at least even a pause in hostilities were being sabotaged by the Israeli government, as incidentally has been mentioned many times in Israeli media blaming from within the Israeli negotiation team in Benjamin Netanyahu’s own office.

Let’s use the freely voiced criticism of Israeli society to blame all this on Bibi. Hamas is willing to make a deal, I’m sure of it. Never mind the kinds of demands Hamas is making for a deal.

So I do think that the the framing here is very important. We have a destroyed Gaza, we have Beirut being bombed with huge tolls for civilian casualties.

As of two days before this interview the count – from the notoriously reliable Lebanese Health Ministry which, like the Hamas ministry of Health, does not distinguish combatant from civilian deaths – was 558 including 58 women (ie 10% of the total, not anywhere near the 50% one would expect were Israel to be bombing indiscriminately. That translates into “huge tolls for civilian casualties” for Hellyer.

And I think that at this moment in time you see the international community, as you’ve seen in the at the UN over the past week, called for de escalation, call for a ceasefire, call for an end to this spiral.

Back to the hobby-horse. Playing up civilian casualties, international outrage, calls for immediate ceasefires, getting Israel not to deal with the problems it faces from enemies dedicated to destroying it. That’s the job of a propagandist operating for the “axis of resistance.”

Golodryga: Yeah, I believe that as you note, the framing is very important. I I don’t believe Hezbollah had accepted a ceasefire yet either. So as we are going to be learning more on who this exact target, well, we know who the target was, but but whether Israel was able was able to assassinate Haniya or anyone around him, we don’t yet know that. We do know that the civilian death toll will likely be very high. And we are ready and they’re ready. Ohh. I’m sorry. Hassan Nasralla. You’re right. You’re right Hassan Nasralla. Yes, yes,

A’: but but also cost of civilians in in such a target. As you well know, collateral damage shouldn’t entail hundreds or thousands of people for a single target. Unfortunately, this wouldn’t be the first time that we’ve seen huge civilian casualties for a single target at the hands of the IDF.

According to the Lebanese Ministry of Health, 11 civilians died in a bombing that targeted not only Nasrallah but the leadership of Hizbullah. It looks like civilian-combatant ratio was about 1:1! Unfortunately this won’t be the first time Hellyer (and so many others CNN seems to love to interview) will make wildly false accusations against the IDF.

Golodryga: Yeah, and we will likely see a significant civilian death toll from this target, again… CNN confirming that Nasrallah was the target.  A.J. Hellyer thank you for your time.

Huh?

A brief introductory note on Hamas propaganda. It’s actually Caliphator propaganda formulated in the promised land. It consists of a “narrative for infidels” that runs as follows:

We are the leaders of a resistance movement fighting for Palestinian freedom. What we do is for liberty. Our enemy is an evil imperial force that oppresses people of color, and deserves whatever we do to them. Israel is to blame for all problems – especially for the human suffering. We are not to be criticized, indeed, we should not be mentioned in any analysis of what the problem is or how to solve it: the pressure needs to be applied to Israel to get them to stand down.

Journalists are expected to communicate to the West all the major themes that support this narrative: Palestinian civilians suffering (with no mention of Hamas); Israeli incitement (with little mention of what they are responding to), the necessity of stopping Israeli military actions. After all, everyone knows, that’s the way to go.

NB: passages in non-indented italics are my paraphrases in the voice of the paraphrased.

Zain Asher: Let’s just talk about what a war, what a wider war would actually mean for Lebanon. Of all places, this is a country that has been reeling, especially economically. Just walk us through what it would mean for them.

H.A. Hellyer: Thank you for having me on your program. So I think that escalation with Lebanon would be, frankly, quite disastrous, not only for the people of south Lebanon, but more widely regionally speaking, because, of course, it wouldn’t just be Hezbollah that would jump into the fray. I think that you you could see an expanding of escalation with the Iranians. And I think that you would not see the accomplishment of, quote, unquote, Israeli goals when it comes to the return of their citizens to the north of the country. It would just be more war, more devastation, more destruction and the risk of wider regional conflict.

In other words, any serious Israeli resistance to Iran’s tightening noose will only make things worse. In all his four interviews on this subject, this is the only mention Shaykh Hellyer makes of the ca. 80,000 Israelis evacuated from the north as a result of Hizbullah bombing that began on October 8. “Quote unquote Israeli goals.” At no point will you hear from CNN the argument that escalation is the way to go.

Zain Asher: And worth noting that Lebanon has, of course, been reeling since that 2020 port explosion which killed 200 people and wounded 7000, right.

Also worth noting that that devastating event was the result of Hizbullah’s reckless endangerment of the Lebanese civilian population.

But let us not tarry on the implications of such an observation for the attitude of Hizbullah for Lebanese civilians. Let’s talk about Nasrallah’s options here.

I do want to talk about what options Hassan Nasrallah has in terms of how he responds, because he has to. I mean, the calculation here is really key. He can’t overreact. He needs to show strength without sort of dragging Hezbollah and Lebanon into a wider war. How does he do that? How does he thread that needle?

One might wonder if Zain’s asking for advice on what Nasrallah has to do to keep firing on Israel and emptying her border towns, without provoking wider war “which nobody wants.”

H.A. Hellyer: Well, I think it’s very difficult for Nasrallah, but frankly, it’s also incredibly difficult for the Israelis.

Well that’s an interesting question, so let me change the subject to the boogey man.

But the Israelis have shown a high degree of recklessness when it comes to avoiding escalation in the region over the past 11 months, over 12 months now.

In other words, blame any escalation reckless, even when that’s from a state under attack by a rogue army that has the neighboring country in its talons, trying to have its citizens return to their homes after 9 months. When the escalations come from Hizbullah or Hamas, they do not register on him, and if they register briefly with CNN (et al.) they rapidly disappear from the minds of his interviewers.

And they’ve just reconfirmed that when it comes to southern Lebanon. And unfortunately, the part of the the reason for this, frankly, is about the United States. The United States has laid down a number of red lines over the past six months, in particular when it comes to Israeli operations in the region, in Lebanon and Gaza. And the Israelis have walked all over those red lines and not face any consequences or accountability for them. So, unfortunately, impunity breeds more impunity. And what we’ve seen over the last couple of days, I think, is the direct result of that.

For him, the problem is that the US is not preventing Israel from dealing with its enemies. That such a strategy, which the Shaykh then takes as a given – certain red lines – becomes the proper US strategy, which, frankly, if they’d just enforce, this operation against Israel could continue. For Israel to act in defiance of this policy is to go unpunished. No one is talking about punishing Hizbullah, say with the enforcement of the 1701 UN Resolution.

Hellyer’s approach blames Israel for fighting back against a situation in which Hizbullah bombs Israel daily, burning her forests, destroying her agriculture, displacing her people. The “axis of resistance” could not ask for a more useful (if to the West, own-goal) diplomacy.

Zain Asher: And in terms of, you know, red lines and retaliations, we have to also talk about Iran, because we’ve been waiting for quite some time for Iran to respond to the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran a few months ago. They still haven’t responded. Obviously, they were holding their horses until they sort of saw what played out with cease fire negotiations. But they see what’s unfolding in terms of Israel and Hezbollah and the attacks on Tuesday and Wednesday this week with pages and walkie talkies. Iran sees all of this and thinks what?

Oh, speaking about the axis of resistance and the red lines Israel crossed by provoking them, what about Iran. Why haven’t they weighed in yet. What do you think?

H.A. Hellyer: Well, I think when it comes to the Iranian retaliation, in retaliation, the Iranian regime doesn’t need to retaliate immediately. And doesn’t need to retaliate in one big blow. The Iranians can retaliate over a long period of time. They define whatever they will consider to be an acceptable response. And what I mean by that is that if they fail to respond in the way that we expect. It doesn’t mean that they will regard it as a failure. They will simply present a narrative that says, actually, we meant to keep them on the edge of their seats for such and such amount of time. And we’re responding over a longer period of time with smaller pinpoint strikes. You know, they can easily turn around and do that.

This is fascinating. Hellyer is saving face for Iran, giving us a scenario in which they’re the crafty long-game players. So…

if you Westerners, in your crude bar-room understanding of the rules of blood vengeance, didn’t get what you expected, that’s no shame to the Iranians. They can just repeat my talking points, and they’ll save face.

Of course don’t expect from me anything on the danger that the Mullahs in Iran run if they lose face in front of their own people.

But let me also take this discussion back to Israel.

But I think that all of these calibrations and calculations that we’ve seen over the past few months, they’re not calibrated because you can’t calibrate the law of unintended consequences. Always supplies if Hezbollah tries to escalate, but only just much if the Israelis think that they can escalate. But only up to a point. Well, they’re not they’re not in control of all the factors that will mean that it will just be up to that point.

Hizbullah appears here as a rational actor with an agenda much like the “whole world” – prevent this from becoming a regional war.

We’re in a very dangerous situation right now. The escalation is really quite paramount as an imperative [to avoid]. But it requires using leverage on the actors involved in order to ensure that they change their behavior. And fundamentally, that’s a D.C. what a Washington, D.C. question for the Israelis.

Surprise! after talking about “the actors,” Hellyer takes us to DC for pressuring Israel… not, say, Paris, for pressuring the Lebanese to reign in Hizbullah, for example. The fundamental principle of Hamas propaganda is: Israel must be pressured; we must not.

Zain Asher: When it comes to de-escalation. I mean, obviously, the key way to de-escalate all of this is for there to be some kind of cease fire agreement between Israel and Hamas to put an end to the war in Gaza. Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah came out and said, listen, we the animosity between Hezbollah and Israel is going to continue as long as the war in Gaza continues. How much hope is that, that there is going to be some kind of a negotiated agreement? I mean, obviously, we’ve seen our hopes dashed multiple times over the past year. How much hope do you have?

Here Zain shows us her party. She speaks in the “we” (ie “the whole world”) of what’s obviously needed, a cease-fire (that leaves Hamas in power). She believes the propaganda line that Hizbullah is bombing Israel only because Israel is bombing Gaza. When Israel stops, they stop. That’s “our” hope. A variant on “linkage” diplomacy.

And “we’ve seen our hopes dashed multiple times over the past year…” Of course it was Israel who dashed our well-meaning, humanitarian hopes.

This is a closed discussion of like-minded folks.

H.A. Hellyer: I’ll be honest with you, I haven’t had hope for these negotiations for months. And the main reason for that is, frankly, Israeli media. The Israeli media have leaked multiple times that Israel’s own negotiating team is incredibly unhappy with their own prime minister for being a spoiler in these negotiations time and again. Incidentally, these are not ceasefire negotiations. These are negotiations for a pause in the fighting to get the hostages out with the explicit and with the explicit demand that the path be laid open for returning to war by the Israelis. I mean, looking elsewhere to this many time, unfortunately, I don’t have much hope for this negotiation because I don’t think that there’s a genuine trust and commitment to actually moving towards a ceasefire.

It’s Bibi not Hamas that’s holding up negotiations. Let me not mention that any agreement that gave back all the hostages (which is probably what Zain thinks they’re about), would never get Hamas approval. For her, any deal is better than this, and Israel’s the one that needs to stop.

Zain Asher: Actually, a lot of Israelis don’t necessarily believe that Netanyahu is serious about any kind of temporary cease fire either. Live for us there. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Let me confirm your comments about (self-critical) Israeli society blaming Bibi… Thank you for your narrative dump. Much appreciated.

The impression this interview gives is one of a propagandist from the “axis of resistance” (ie Caliphators) talking to a journalist who is smart enough to master the “narrative for infidels,” but obviously not enough to question it or even notice its anomalies. She clearly receives extensive approval for her talents.

On the other hand, at times she approaches “Otto” academy award quality for looking smart while saying incredibly stupid things.

Hari Sreenivasan: Right now. We’ve also had, you know, polarization and polarization of the protests that are happening on campuses while simultaneously there is also an attack on the types of material that is allowed to be taught on college campuses. We see. You know, maybe it’s economic reasons. Maybe it’s cultural reasons and maybe a lot of factors. But we also see kind of an attack on just the idea of the humanities or liberal education.

Well we know where the journalist stands. And, surprise, his guest could not agree more.

Jason Stanley: So let’s begin with the attack on universities that is the canary in the coal mine of fascism.

Or, at other times (like Germany in the 1930s), the universities become the center of fascism. Right now, some would argue that the control that DEI and Woke Cancel Culture have exercised over who gets hired, who gets invited to speak, and who gets promoted, gives an awfully authoritarian cast to universities that claim to promote “progressive” values. Today, attacks on DEI and Cancel Culture are both dismissed as “right-wing fanaticism” (as with Stanley), and the cause of great alarm. But as Umut Ozkirimli puts it:

It is telling that most ‘progressive’ commentators who purportedly reject cancel culture [ie deny it exists] are also its foremost practitioners when it comes to debates over trans rights, leading cancel campaigns against women, lesbians and, yes, transgender people, for raising concerns about certain aspects of trans-rights activism, or even the definition of the term ‘woman’.

The same people who dismiss the “fear mongering” and “reactionary moral panics” of the anti-DEI-Cancel Culture warriors on the right, engage in precisely the same kind of fear-mongering and moral panic when it comes to the many matters about which they are sure they are right. This has led them to ally with a death cult that embodies the most toxic aspects of right-wing fascism. Thus, adopting this right-wing fascist antisemitism into their language, the DEI-Cancel-Culture Left protested aggressively against Israel and Jews at the most prestigious schools in the US and Europe starting on October 8. They not only protested dead Palestinians, they celebrated dead Israelis.

None of this makes a dent on Stanley. On the contrary, he went on Mehdi Hasan’s relentlessly propagandistic new station Zeteo, and told Rula Jabreal (dating Roger Waters) that claims of antisemitism in campus protests are nonsense. Given his commitments to the rights of others as-a-Jew, his post-October 7 persistence in defending Hamas promoters should ring alarm bells.

Here he lays out the global vision of the one-eyed Left.

Central European University was ejected from the country of Hungary by Viktor Orban for teaching gender ideology. We’re seeing this imitated point by point by American autocrats like Ron DeSantis. So autocrats know that dissent and critique comes from universities. They know that student movements are often central parts of social movements for democratic change.

Autocrats know that dissent and critique comes from universities, but since the Nazis and the Bolscheviks, democrats also know that universities can produce very dangerous, authoritarian, even totalitarian, ideas which, when enabled to dominate the public sphere (DEI) through cancel culture, can give wings to their autoritarian tendencies. How does one fight those ideas – DEI, Gender Studies, Critical Race Theory – all now arguably “left”-wing movements with fascistic tendencies, without registering in morally simplistic minds as “right-wing fascism.”

Look at Bangladesh. What just happened in Bangladesh? A student protesters overthrew the autocratic leader of Bangladesh. That’s the kind of thing that autocrats, authoritarians, those who want to build a one party state are afraid of. They’re afraid of student movements. What we’ve seen is we’ve seen nonviolent student protests, protest testing, American funding of a genocide in Gaza, protesting Israel’s aggression in Gaza.

Nothing says support for genocidal right-wing religious fanatics than calling Israel’s action in Gaza “genocide.” Embrace their great Projection. Stanley illustrates, embodies, the radical moral disorientation of self-proclaimed progressive academia.

These are anti war protests, so just like the Vietnam anti-war protests and then we have moderate liberals joining the right wing authoritarian forces and cheering on police, militarized police going on campus and confronting antiwar protesters.

Anyone who can’t tell the difference between the ideals of the anti-War movements of the 1960s and the dark embrace of a death-cult – we love Hamas! – of the 2020s has so flattened history that real live experiences become mere slots for his two-dimensional paradigm. As a result, he sees “moderate liberals” joining “right wing authoritarian forces, cheering on the militarized police (because these protesters are putting flowers in the gun barrels), without a clue as to why liberals who choose life might finally say, enough.

And this concerns me greatly because when the left and the center last and the liberals are separated and at each other’s throats, then the autocrats and authoritarians when history tells us this.

Disagreements between liberals and radicals register for him as “at each others’ throats,” creating an opening for the authoritarians to surge. Instead, presumably, the liberals should follow the left into their embrace of a death cult. He clearly has no idea of what the liberal objections to his reading of the situation consist.

So what we have here is an attack on universities, egged on by moderate liberals, egged on by newspapers like The New York Times.

This is astonishing. The NYT is one of the most compliant of progressive newspapers, notorious among many – not only those sympathetic to Israel – as riddled with misinformation. Readers, for example, would never read reporting on the genocidal sermons of Palestinian imams. If Stanley views the NYT’s few dissents from the Left narrative that these protests are peaceful and legitimate, and idealistic just like the ’60s, as evidence that they’re egging on the fascists, then his Overton window stretches from The Nation far left to al Jazeera right.

And that is exactly what authoritarians want. If you look at India, for example, in 2019, more large scale student protests for Muslim equality against the citizenship Amendment Act. These were nonviolent protest, supporting Muslim equality. They were represented as anti Indian. And there was a harsh militarized reprisal to these protests.

Actually no. Despite some demonizing and violence, both the courts and the police operated effectively to limit violence. On the scale of third-world democracies, I think India deserves merit for how their political institutions dealt with what could have become either a descent into civil war or the kind of authoritarian society that Stanley depicts as already there.

So, so this idea that universities critique that universities make of of patriotism and nationalism and student movements for equality are somehow anti-national, is very familiar from authoritarian movements. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing here.

But it is possible that student movements for equality can (and have) become anti-national , even Oikophobic (repelled by their own culture) and since, currently, that ecumenical move on the part of university culture makes the job of the Caliphators so much easier, that’s a legitimate concern not so much for nationalists as for patriots who recognize that, so far, only the nation-state has protected citizen right.

Who’s the Islamophobe here? The person who (justifiably) fears triumphalist Islam? Or the person who so fears the disapproval of triumphalist Muslims (CAIR, SJP), that they not only won’t criticize them, but they’ll take their side?

We’re seeing a wind up, too. What if Trump wins the use of militarized force against protest?

Watch out. Our enemy’s victory will be our inability to continue protesting on behalf of genocidal death cults.

We’re also seeing a very developed attack on the greatest university system in the world. The United States has the greatest universities system in the world, and the Republican right is dismantling it with the help of what Martin Luther King called the “moderate liberal.”

Of course, this Republican right is responding to a sense that the radical Left has occupied academia over the last generation, deeply corrupting two of its greatest contributions to world culture – humanities and social studies – with a subversion of language, a substitution of merit for a combination of ethnic diversity and homogeneity of thought… To the point where a tenured and chaired professor at Yale, specialist in both linguistics and propaganda, can call the claimed death of 40,000 civilians in urban warfare a “genocide,” and think that “the whole world” will (or at least should) agree with him just as does his interviewer.

Florida has essentially dismantled tenure. Ohio and Indiana are essentially dismantling tenure with politicized tenure review.

As if tenure review has not been politicized for decades. Why do you think academia is overwhelmingly liberal-left? When I was a graduate student in the late 1970s, it was already clear in a field like Near-Eastern studies, that certain minorities were no longer welcome (and would end up in previously WASPY think-tanks). Shortly after 9-11 2001, a Princeton graduate student in Middle Eastern Studies was advised not to study Jihad because he’d never get a job in academia (he did, and he did not and he too ended up in think-tanks).

The AAUP, the American Association for University Professor, report on Florida is terrifying. And let me conclude by pointing out a fundamental element of authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is all about creating a culture of fear, and that’s what these attacks on schools and universities are doing. They’re creating a culture of fear and intimidation for anyone who criticize, criticizes the nationalist ideology that the far right is promulgating.

It would be hard to find a more impressive combination of lack of self-awareness – the “fear and intimidation” that the Woke cancel culture has inflicted for decades on anyone deemed insensitive – together with projecting one’s own techniques – moral panics – onto one’s foes: “the nationalist ideology that the far right is promulgating.” As if there were anything on the right (much left the far-right) to compete with the sophistication and influence of progressive ideologies like CRT and Queer Theory.

If this is the quality of teaching at Yale, then the critics of the universities are right. This is bland, flat, mediocrity. And Stanley has published a great deal on propaganda!

If the fate of democracies depends on the quality of its public sphere conversation, then we’re in serious trouble.

Isa Soares

Daniel, great to see you. Look, this is clearly a region on edge as it braces for Iran to… oh, and all proxies, I should say, to retaliate. We’ve heard from Iran. Their message is clear. They saying that blood vengeance is certain. How do you think Iran may respond here? Will it be solo? Will it leverage proxies in the region?

“Blood vengeance is certain…” [no pause]. This illustrates the way Jihadis can defeat Israelis. No one expects the Jihadis (no matter how “moderately they’re otherwise portrayed in the same segment) not to play by the rules of blood vengeance. But if Israel does it, that’s a blow to her moral standing. In a Reuters story about the October 7 attacks which tries hard to make the Palestinian operation look like a military attack on Israeli soldiers, with no reference to the civilians targeted and slaughtered, the headline runs: Israel vows “mighty vengeance” after surprise attack. Part of the Jihadi cognitive war is merely smearing Israel with the mud (by liberal-progressive standards) in which they operate.

Daniel Levy: Well, of course, Israel has carried out these assassinations, these extrajudicial killings. In fact, off the back of ten months, over 300 days since an attack on October 7th, which can’t be excused since the mass killing of civilians, the devastation, the causing of humanity in catastrophe, 40,000 Palestinians dead, the 15,000 children. If you wanted to dial this down, you have to put an end to that.

Note the rapid shift from the “inexcusable” October 7th to “humanity in catastrophe” in the Gaza Strip, using Hamas-supplied statistics, highlighting the 15,000 children. “If you want to dial this down” (which, of course, any sensible and humane person would want) is another way of saying “cease-fire,” which is precisely what Hamas wants, on its terms. And it is perfectly willing to have Gazans die and fill their outraging statistics, further fueling their campaign to have the West intervene to save them. Daniel Levy is a major proponent of that desire.

And were America were the Biden administration to have a diplomatic strategy to de-escalate? That’s what they would have to lead with using their leverage to get a cease fire in Gaza, an end to those attacks so that one could have the possibility of a regional de-escalation. They haven’t done that.

In other words, ‘Allow me to play a role in granting Hamas what it wishes, and will, despite what I say, prolong the misery of the region while Hamas continues to target Israeli civilians and sacrifices their own people… a sure-fire formula for “regional de-escalation”.’

What we saw in April after an Israeli assassination in an Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus was a measured Iranian response, which showed they had capacity, which was broadcast in advance, which allowed Israel to be tols: Don’t now ratchet things up. Will Iran go for something similar and will Israel respond similarly? Because what we know now for sure is that Prime Minister Netanyahu sees political benefit in an open ended war. The Biden administration has been unwilling to use its leverage to prevent that. And so we are at a crossroads and at a time of great unpredictability, as you said.

Iranians are rational and play by international rules… Israelis are irrational, led by a man who prefers war to peace for political reasons. No one listening to this analysis would have the faintest idea of the role Iran plays in the disruption of the region – Jihad thrives on chaos. It is Israel who must be restrained. Hidden in this seemingly logical analysis is the core driver of the conflict, Islamic imperialism.

Isa Soares: Yeah. And looking on going back to that attack in in April, of course, when just remind our you as Iran launched, what, 300 or so projectiles a heads up I believe Daniel was given right given how embarrassing the strike was in Tehran. I wonder how aggressive you think there will be, because the risks here as [inaudible] we heard him saying are not just huge, but so dangerous at this juncture.

Soares seems to have her eye on the ball more than Levy. Iran played by international rules and got humiliated. But does she understand the stakes behind not retaliating in a shame-honor polity? Or, when she speaks of the risks is she invoking the fear of regional war (to which the policy they promote contributes)?

Daniel Levy: Exactly. Look, assassinations, extrajudicial killings, Israel has a long history of carrying these out. It assassinated it killed the founder of Hamas, Sheikh Yassin. It killed many of the Hamas leaders, a massive skill that it assassinated the leaders of Hezbollah Mughniyeh in 2008. Hezbollah is still there, stronger. It’s the Americans took out Kassam Soleimani in an extrajudicial killing the the Iranian revolutionary Guard supreme commander. Iran is still strong. So these actions do not shift the strategic equation or the military equation, but they can sap morale and they can generate a response.

He knows the impact of assassinations and they’re nil. Classic trope of the appeasers: don’t upset them, it only makes things worse. If you just don’t provoke, things will get better. Promise.

And the question here is, do either Israel or the U.S. has to have a strong tag that goes beyond the military? Now, Netanyahu shows no interest in politics or diplomacy.

And Hamas does, of course, show interest in politics and diplomacy. It was obvious to observers, outside the misinformed “whole world,” that Hamas had no intention of actually negotiating something Israel could accept without making Hamas “winners” in the eyes of their win-lose, so often lose-lose, Palestinian culture, and assuring yet another round of violence. Even the Biden administration woke up (very late).

Another problem is that, according to Biden administration officials, Hamas makes demands and then refuses to say “yes” after the U.S. and Israel accept them.

That was a pattern already clear when Levy made his remarks.

Does the Biden administration show an interest in those things? Because if the signal Iran is receiving is that Israel continues to have a green light to do anything, then Iran may draw the conclusion and Hezbollah may rule that this is going to end in a regional war. So we might as well set out all. There is quite a consensus, as you know, all of this closely, that the escalatory actor, the unpredictable, dangerous actor is not primarily Iran and the axis of resistance.

Now that’s impressive, especially the use of the term “axis of resistance,” which is of course how they want us infidels to see them (and how, apparently, Levy sees them). The only way to avoid regional war is to rein in Israel. To say that Hamas (part of the “axis of resistance”) is not a – the – primary escalatory actor, the unpredictable, dangerous actor, who triggered this whole crisis with its savagery on October 7th, is an astonishing piece of misinformation.

What he really means is: in the scenario in which we get a cease fire (and Hamas survives), Israel is the actor whom we cannot control.

It is primarily Benjamin Netanyahu and the axis of Zionist extremism. And I think it’s correct to call it that. The US has to decide whether aligning with the Arab states have to make that decision or whether they’re going to wind this down. That’s next.

Nice. So we know the Iranians and their Jihadi allies, Hizbullah, Hamas, and Houthis, by their demopathic tag, specially created for useful infidels “axis of resistance,” and we identify the Israelis by the tag that the “axis of resistance” would most like useful infidels to use: the “axis of Zionist extremism.” For Hamas Media Protocol Compliance, this is an A+. A Hamas spokesman would have no problem whatsoever with this “analysis.”

Isa Soares: Very quickly, Daniel, I seen The Daily Telegraph just over the weekend quoting a senior Israeli source said that Joe Biden’s decision to quit the presidential race has emboldened Benjamin Netanyahu to take bolder action against Iran. I mean, what do you make of that comment? What do you make of the timing of some of these assassinations, even if Iran even if Israel says it’s not behind it?

Let me have you beat your drum some more…

Daniel Levy: I do think this is part of the calculation in the equation. But it’s not Biden quitting the race that has emboldened Netanyahu. It is that America has been dishonest with its own public, with the world, perhaps with itself by saying the only problem was Hamas and the axis of resistance and not acknowledging that they have leverage with Netanyahu. They haven’t used it. They continue to send the arms.

So now we find out that saying Hamas is the problem is lying. America doesn’t understand that it can force Israel to stop and that therein lies a cease-fire and regional stability. And while it would be hard to find an Israeli who doesn’t think the US has used arms shipments to twist its arm, for Daniel it’s nothing.

We would not be where we are today if the US Biden administration had not allowed this to happen, had not indulged and given Israel a green light, and it’s humiliating. The thing that they think they can use is to leak stories to their favored media outlets – I’m not referring to you here – that, “Hey, I was tough with him on a phone call. That’s not serious. That’s American weakness. That’s humiliation.

Still in high register. Not only is Biden weak, but he’s to blame for the terrible situation we’re in because of his not restraining Israel – as if restraining Israel would improve the problem. But then, for Levy, Hamas is not the problem.

Perhaps what’s most interesting aspect of this last ejaculation on his part is the invocation of the shame-honor tropes – weakness and humiliation. Israel is humiliating America by defending itself; America is humiliated until it forces Israel to let Hamas survive and take over the Gaza Strip again. Own-goal diplomacy asserted with passion and authority. And by an as-a-Jew.

Isa Soares: I’m glad you clarified that you’re not looking at me. Appreciate, Daniel. Good to see you. Daniel Levy there. Thank you very much.

Well, I would never humiliate my own side by suggesting we’re being used as tools.

I wonder whom Daniel is thinking of, if not CNN? Fox and the Biden Administration fooling the American public?

This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

At a memorial service for victims of the 9/11 terror attacks held just six days after al Qaeda murdered nearly 3,000 Americans, Brown used the occasion to point the finger at the United States in remarks that, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, “set a lot of people’s teeth on edge” and “left politicians stunned.”

“America, is there anything you did to set up this climate?” Brown asked the audience. “Ohhhh—America, what did you do?”

“America, what did you do two weeks ago when I stood at the world conference on racism, when you wouldn’t show up?” Brown continued, referring to his participation in the United Nations World Conference Against Racism, which the United States and Israel boycotted citing concerns about anti-Semitism.

In my book on the transformations of the Western public sphere at the turn of the last century /millennium (Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism and Global Jihad, Boston: 2022), I wrote about the relationship between the UN Durban Conference that concluded on September 8, 2001, and the 9-11 attacks that occurred three days later:

Did the global triumph of demopathic hatred targeting the US and Israel at Durban have anything to do with 9-11?

Not causally. The triple attack plan had been afoot for years. But given the atmosphere at Durban, Osama had every reason to expect that his spectacular deed would resonate both inside and beyond the Muslim world: in his mind, an act of world conversion. When he gave the green light, he took the hate-fest of Durban to new levels, aligning the Muslim and the Progressive narrative of world redemption as a fight against the twin Western evils, the “Big and Little Satans,” the US and Israel. Just as Arafat basked in the eager approval of the world press, so Bin Laden had good reason to expect he too would gain widespread approval (p.49).

Had I known the case of Reverend Amos Brown, I would surely have cited it, since it illustrates my points about precisely the dynamic whereby Durban prepped global opinion to welcome 9-11.

Brown was at Durban and apparently participated with great enthusiasm in the hate-fest against the US and Israel. His remark about America not “show[ing] up” at Durban reflects precisely the view from Kingsmead Cricket Pitch, where radical NGOs demonized the US for slavery 150 years earlier while ignoring among their allies, actual current slavery in the Arab-Muslim world. The US refused to face their condemnations.

Both the US delegation and the Israeli delegation, when they realized how systemically the conference had been packed against them, withdrew in protest. And Amos Brown was there, challenging the US to stand before the dock of this kangaroo court. When he spoke the following week in (already woke) San Francisco, accusing the US of deserving the blow, he illustrated perfectly my conjectured link between Durban and the reaction to 9-11: Durban assured a global audience that would rejoice in this blow against the evil, suffocating hegemon. From British journalists to French “philosophes,” to American radicals, the cry went up: the US had it coming. Bluntly put, Durban had groomed progressives to welcome and celebrate their Jihadi enemies in their most atrocious deeds committed against them. (They had already been doing it about Israel for almost a full year, already.)

In terms of apocalyptic millennial dynamics, Durban marks the formal marriage of Caliphators (those activist Muslims working for the global Caliphate in our day), with the (radical) progressive left, in which both millennial movements, despite their fundamentally opposing visions of the millennium of peace to come differed, joined around a key element of their apocalyptic scenarios, a major boost to their (now joint) revolutionary power. They had both identified the apocalyptic enemy: the two Great Satans that Khoumeini had denounced some twenty years earlier), the US and Israel.

Eric Hoffer wrote in the early 50s:

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.

This unholy alliance married pre-modern sadism and post-modern masochism: scapegoating Jihadis could shout: You, the US are the embodiment of racist evil; you, Israel, guilty of genocide.’ And the oikophobic West, emphatically agreed to this attack on their culture. ‘You’re right: our imperialism and racism are the worst in the world and in history. We deserve your hatred.’ In my book I refer to this as Y2KMind: When jihadis attack a democracy, blame the democracy.

After 9-11, many proponents of this approach came out, some penitential – ‘What did we do to provoke their hatred?‘ and some triumphantly aggressive – ‘“America’s chickens are coming   home to roost.” When Reverend Brown said, “America, is there anything you did to set up this climate?” he placed himself squarely in the camp of those who “blame the democracy” for the savage hatred of the Jihadis in quest of a global Caliphate.

But in addition to insight into the participation of Brown in the Durban Spirit of apocalyptic mobilization, we have precious information here on the way apocalyptic memes – radical by definition – make their way into the mainstream. Here he was speaking publicly in the USA, among people horrified at what had just happened to their fellow citizens, and uttering the apocalyptic memes in which the US deserved what the Jihadis had just meted out. Under normal circumstances, the grown-ups in the room (what in the Middle Ages was referred to as those saniores mentis – the sounder of mind) would have shut him down and shunned him. But these were not ordinary times. On the contrary, the assembled crowd at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium cheered him on and the alleged grown-ups, Feinstein and Pelosi, spurred to act by a man whose friend had died fighting the jihadis on UA93, left in silent protest.

Explained the politician and LGBT Rights activist, Thomas Ammiano: “What can you say? It was largely a lefty and pro-peace crowd, and Amos was playing to the house.” So here, an LGBT Rights activists assumed that a pro-peace crowd would cheer on a misogynist, homophobic Jihadi attack that killed 3000 civilians. This erratic and explosive history of the “anti-war movement” of the following three years maps perfectly on this Orwellian semantic switch.

But Durban wasn’t just about the US. The other great Satan – Israel – was in for even greater abuse. For those today, in 2024, somewhat bewildered by the seemingly sudden spread of virulent antisemitism after October 7, 2023, consider here its first open expression in progressive circles. Noted Canadian jurist (and then Minister of Justice) Irwin Cotler who was present:

Durban became the tipping point for the coalescence of a new, virulent globalizing anti-Jewishness reminiscent of the atmospherics that pervaded Europe in the 1930s.

He did not refer here to “mere criticism of Israel” but to the melding of Nazi and Jihadi antisemitism in, for example, the poster/tee-shirt that circulated freely:

Here also, the first blood libel since the Holocaust to have widespread success, the lethal narrative of the IDF’s cold-blooded murder of an innocent boy in his father’s arms, dominated the discourse. Muhammad al Durah, carried in effigy by angry crowds was the patron saint of Durban. It was here that the progressive radicals from the West joined in alliance with the Jihadis (who actually did target children) against the “child-killing” Israelis.

Protesters march through the streets during the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, Friday Aug. 31, 2001. (AP Photo/Obed Zilwa)

The sign would more accurately read “Palestine’s Images of Hate” given the status of Al Durah as the still-uncontested icon of hatred of the 21st century. These same crowds bore aloft posters with Arafat, Saddam Hussein, and Bin Laden.

Here we find the major conduit of Nazi-mimetic, Muslim-apocalyptic Jew hatred into the Western public sphere. Copious copies of Mein Kampf handed out including Arabic translations.

Mein Kamp in Arabic taken into Israel by Gazan on October 7, 2023.

It was the emotional charge – we have seen the enemy! – and the sine qua non of the alliance with the Caliphators: anyone who defended Israel – including all those liberal Jews – were enemies of the revolution.

Apocalyptic Movement Goes Public

One of the most important moments in the life of an apocalyptic movement is when it first goes public. For a long period beforehand the movement grows, spreading its radical message among true believers willing to run the risks of embracing such radical goals and ideals. This happens all the time, in every generation, people trying to make apocalyptic sense out of the “unheard of” events of the day. Most die when they go public, either killed by authorities (Jesus), publicly mutilated (James Naylor), hung up at the city gates to die and to remain there as a permanent message to potential radicals singing a (coming) apocalyptic epic.

Those rare millennial movements, which, upon “coming out” and going public, speak to receptive audiences, and gain strength in the public sphere… they have a potent future as a player at least for as long as apocalyptic time prevails. Indeed, these movements have the possibility of “taking” like a forest fire, and then the flames must run their course, riding the human believers to destruction. And in 2000/2001, the voice of Jihad stormed into Western discussions, on the wings of the Palestinian narrative of freedom, demanding respect.

From 9-11 on, the term Islamophobia became an increasingly demanding insistence on silencing any criticism of Islam. What’s good for the goose among oikophobic progressives (their own Christian past), is most decidedly not good for the gander (the Islamic “guest-workers”). Imagine the French committee planning the opening of their Olympics with a depiction of Mohammad on his steed at al Aqsa dressed as a rodeo cowboy. That’s actually less offensive than the anti-Christian depiction they went with, and as unthinkable (with all those threats of terror), as the attacking Christianity was delectably daring.

Here around 2000, a sharp turn in the meaning of our political language “took.” Revolutionary memes entered the public sphere. It was no longer taboo to call Israel Nazis; it was no longer intellectually dishonest to accuse the Israelis of genocide; it was required journalistic practice not to call 9-11 “terror.” It was now permitted, even encouraged, to articulate an apocalyptic discourse that promised salvation once the apocalyptic enemy is destroyed. At the same time there was a massive shift in the Overton window: “liberal” suddenly meant someone who supported a movement whose most prominent feature was Jihadi suicide attacks on civilians.

Later this new approach, like all the zero-sum memes of Palestinian “liberation,” strove for hegemony in public discourse, banning Islamophobic challengers with Zionist tendencies and took over major world organizations like the ICJ in the Hague and the UN, as well as many “human rights” NGOs. And so it has gone worsening in Western “progressive” circles: banning and canceling dissent, for the last quarter century. In the history of 21st century internet cancel culture, Israel is the first and most continuous target of such attacks.

Then came October 7, and the revolutionary forces did not play their Westsplaining role a brave freedom fighters, but rather that of mass executioners competing with the Nazi extermination squads for sadism and malevolence. They revealed the face of the revolutionary forces of the Caliphate in all its beserker glory, amplified by their social media accounts. This revolution will be televised.

Western progressives, after years of insisting that the Palestinians are fighting for dignity and freedom, rather than dominion and genocidal revenge, proved impervious to a reality the Israelis (and many Jews) could not longer ignore. What insued was a catastrophic collapse of civil society in response to the savage violence of Jihad, in which people claiming to be “progressive” engaged in public displays of malice, of moral sadism against Israel and the Jews who support her. It’s now acceptable to treat Jews as if they deserved no empathy, and should get only belated mercy when they are crushed and penitent.

So in 2023, instead of drawing back in horror from the horrible revelation, Western progressives, led by academics, celebrated it, praised it, militated for it. They looked an active cataclysmic apocalyptic movement (historically capable of megadeath, of bringing on the death of tens of millions of people), and many, too many, gave a thumbs. As a movement, they chose a death cult over a culture of life.

And, like Feinstein and Pelosi, those who disagreed with this sudden, startlingly aggressive discourse, silently left, unwilling to directly confront this new and weaponized narrative. So, it has grown. In the years right after 2000 (al Durah, Jenin) some liberals would challenge a claim that compared Israel to the Nazis – a morally sadistic accusation if there ever was one – had entered the public sphere. Today it’s tweeted by global diplomats.

And with such verbal folly, comes the Jew-hatred which has lingered for the longue durée in both derivative monotheistic cultures, always waiting for an excuse to hurt Jews.

Kamala and her Pastor

What to do here? Kamala Harris knows Amos Brown as a wonderful, spiritually inspiring individual. How much did he inculcate his hatreds in her is not, at least at this point, very clear (or even documented). As for him, is he dupe or demopath? Does he really believe that this coalition of Jihadi and progressive forces will indeed have a salvific effect and that when it’s time to take over, the Caliphators will convert to the progressive vision (“Imagine”) rather than regress to the power-politics of the 7th and early 20th centuries?

Or does he recognize the aims and desires that animate his ally, which spell doom for the Jews and the democratic West, and he’s just helping the process take place by talking in Newspeak. Jihad means peace so why wouldn’t peaceniks cheer it on?

But one thing is certain, if Kamala wants to go down in the great history of the ages – and the times have placed her on center stage with a chance to do so – she must extract herself from the cosmopolitan hostility to the US-as-a-nation that at once informs so many around her, oikophobes urging a self-destructive foreign policy on the one hand, and supporting the program of the sworn enemy of the USA as a democracy on the other.

Otherwise, one shudders to think how she will be remembered or who will do the remembering.

Prospects? Not great. But one can always hope. Maybe Emhoff will realize he’s Esther.

Bartov and the Wrong Genocide: A Millennial Analysis

In a highly controversial piece in the NYT, Israeli historian and professor at Brown University, Omer Bartov expressed alarm at the inflammatory remarks by Israeli leaders after 7/10 that, to him at least, suggested both genocidal intent and even actions. Many have criticized Bartov for focusing exclusively on angry Israeli reactions to 7/10 and not mentioning the consistent record of openly genocidal statements uttered by Israel’s neighbors for now three generations.[1]

To overlook this other, genocidal, explicitly antisemitic, discourse grossly misreads the available historical record. This genocidal discourse, of which Hamas is the current reigning activist, belongs to a distinct category of millennial movements: active cataclysmic apocalyptic. The “true believers” consider themselves the (divine) agents of the massive destruction that clears the way for the coming millennium: Destroying the world to save it. This genocidal discourse is found in other such movements that focus on an arch-enemy (Antichrist, Dajjal), with their attendant violent paranoia, scapegoating, projection, and cult of death).

The greatest overlap of millennial details appears when comparing the apocalyptic narratives of Hamas in the 2020s and the Nazis in the 1930s.

• Both seek world conquest and the subjection of the “other” – for Nazis non-Aryans, for Jihadis, infidels.
• Both view the apocalyptic scenario leading to collective redemption as calling for cataclysmic destruction and consider themselves the agents of that destruction.
• Both target the Jews as especially dangerous enemies of their project who must be exterminated in order for it to reach fulfillment.
• Both project onto the Jews their own unavowable desires and accuse them of world conquest and genocide.
• Both embrace a cult of death which, if empowered, can bring about megadeath on the scale of tens and hundreds of millions.

Aside from the observation that one was allegedly anti-religious and racist, and the other is zealously religious and theocratic, the movements are remarkably similar.

Herf and Goda, two of Bartov’s earliest critics, make a key historical point in this context of his ignoring the more serious source of genocidal discourse and intent at play in the land twixt river and sea.

As it happens, there is an interesting and challenging connection between the current Gaza war and Nazi Germany, but it is not the one Bartov proposes. It concerns the relationship between a terrorist dictatorship and the population over which it rules. Historians have long debated why Germans fought to the bitter end of the war, why the army never overthrew Hitler, and why there was no popular revolt against the Nazi regime. The famous term Volksgemeinschaft or “people’s community” captures the mixture of terror on one hand and popular consensus on the other that allowed Hitler’s regime to survive. The relationship between the Hamas dictatorship and ordinary Gazans raises similar questions. After 17 years of Jew-hatred preached from Gaza’s mosques, taught in its schools, and beamed into its television sets, is it any wonder that so many civilians in Gaza seem to support Hamas?

For example, rather than ignore such a parallel, one might imagine that an historian (a fortiori an historian of the Holocaust) would explore the kind of electric enthusiasm that Hamas’ deeds inspired in some in the West. What comparisons can one make between Hitler’s mesmerizing power to enthuse the German Volk, and the kind of excitement Hamas’ savage assault inspired. Professor at Cornell University and Black Lives Matter spokesman, Russell Rickford,exclaimed at a rally supporting the Palestinians: “It was exhilarating! It was exhilarating! It was energizing! I was exhilarated!” And that exhilaration comes from his identifying his “revolutionary” desire to “challenge the monopoly on violence” with Jihadi savagery.

Could there not be a potential path here whereby this kind of excited sympathy for people rejoicing in their slaughter of human beings, might lead to the kinds of mass enthusiasms the Nazis so ably choreographed? Bartov finds such a line of inquiry both incorrect and racist. Along with fellow “holocaust scholars,” he rejects even the very suggestion.

Israeli leaders and others are using the Holocaust framing to portray Israel’s collective punishment of Gaza as a battle for civilization in the face of barbarism, thereby promoting racist narratives about Palestinians. 

This is post-colonial rhetoric at its most threadbare. The perspective he formulates in the least attractive way possible, has nothing to do with real racism since all the players involved embody not race but ideological and cultural phenomena. Calling it by the inflated term “racist” impoverishes the historical debate and crams our vision into 75-year old struggle for Palestinian rights, not an 85-year old marriage of Nazi and Palestinian Muslim eliminationist antisemitism. If such accusations carry weight, we cannot discuss the role of Hamas since 1988 in carrying that millennial aspiration into an active apocalyptic phase, where the first aspiration is to kill a Jew.

In what historical seminar studying movements such as these, say, of the Annales school, would someone analyze a case where two such unusually dangerous movements appear two generations apart, and share such striking similarities, without discussing the many connections and parallels? Who would begin an historical reconstruction of the later movement in the three years after the defeat of their predecessors and allies in 1945, and begin with (their own failure in) 1948 when Israel deprived Palestinians of their rights, rather than the late 1930s, when Jihadis and Nazis first joined forces? What historian of mentalités would discuss the rise of multiple, genocidal Jihadi cults in the Muslim world in the subsequent generations, without examining their relationship to the double genocidal failures of the 1940s? Not any seminar I or Omer attended back in the years before Orientalism took over.

If “civilization” arises from the organizational treasuring of life, then is this conflict not a civilizational battle with a death cult, which even Muslims find alarming? And is that cult not showing alarming strength? There are historical cases when an active cataclysmic apocalyptic movement “took” inside a given civilization. And none have happy endings.

And just as it is appropriate to see the two world wars of the 20^th century as one “thirty-year’s war” with a brief respite, how much the more likely, in the perspective of an historian, is it to see this battle over the land twixt river and sea as the only, still active, battle front of World War II? Or, worse, the opening of the next round of a global struggle with totalitarian cults of hatred and death that is, apparently, far from over.

Back in the 1990s, when people began to warn about Caliphators (Jihadis, Islamists), about a religious war brewing between the agnostic West and the zealous Middle East, most of us who heard that these true believers were fighting to take over the world and create a global Caliphate, dismissed it as ludicrous fantasy, or, especially after 9-11, dangerous “Islamophobia.” And the only way a millennial historian could respond to that incredulity was to point out that in millennial movements, wrong does not mean inconsequential. Look at the damage done by twelve years of the Tausendjährige Reich.

Now, a generation later the landscape looks more menacing. While we slept…

One of the key moments in the history of all movements that, as millennial analyst Henri Desroche put it, “take” like a forest fire, is the moment they show their real face in public. In most cases, the public gaze repels them and their radical, impossible ideas, sometimes violently. But in the rare and famous cases where “going public” sparks excitement and enthusiasm, the movement gains public authority and a path to taking and exploiting power.

7/10 was the day of revelation. Faced with the savagery of their brethren, the civil-society, human rights Palestinian community cheered. And they were joined by people who, in principle, supported them according to their progressive claims. What is the meaning of these demonstrations on our campuses and around the country. Are those who call BDS a cult, correct? Is this a new religious movement? It was certainly clear to Eric Hoffer in the 1950s that “mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.”

These celebrations of savage sadism, with their attendant cries of “revolution” and accusations of “genocide,” bode ill for the liberal societies in which they appear. They hail a death cult.  

One would think that was bad enough… that there was no need, like Freud claiming the Jews killed Moses as the Nazis held their rallies, for Bartov and his Jewish colleagues, to give their imprimatur to the grand projection of the Jihadis: the Jews are committing genocide!” And then turn around and forbid us our “racist” discussion of Jihadi hopes and dreams. I can only hope historians of the next generations will understand and teach how Bartov’s essay, far from contributing an historian’s perspective, confounded our understanding with its ahistorical and misguided attempt to contribute to (a disastrous) history.

[1] Responses, Amnon Lord, “The Great Failure of the Holocaust researchers,” Israel Hayom, November 20, 2023; Jeffrey Herf and Norman Gona, “Holocaust Historians, the Genocide Charge, and Gaza,” Quillette, November 23, 2023; Dina Porat, “Charging Israel with Genocide in Gaza is Inflammatory and Dangerous,” Haaretz, November 28, 2023; Ingo Elbe, “Missbrauch der Holocausterinnerung? – Eine Kritik an Omer  Bartov und anderen,” MenaWatch, November 28, 2023.

One of the great unsolved mysteries of the 21st century is why, given what a catastrophe it proved to be, anyone, much less a whole phalanx of politicians, diplomats and “peace-makers,” have tried repeatedly to negotiate a peace settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Given that the initial plan (Oslo Peace Process) was predicated on Arafat and the Palestinians renouncing their drive to destroy Israel, thus permitting a positive-sum, win-win solution to the problem, and that the Palestinians have clearly not renounced that drive, either formally (unchanged PLO charter, no Arabic text recognizing Israel) or in practice (terror attacks, genocidal incitement from the pulpit), the positive-sum possibility is blocked: Palestinians won’t agree to the conditions Israel needs (flexibility on border settlements, renunciation of “right of return”); while Israelis will not make crucial concessions (uprooting all the settlements) in return for what seems like it will bring more war under worse conditions.

And yet, repeatedly since the Oslo Jihad in late 2000, efforts have been made over and over to reach a settlement. Partly this was because Western, positive-sum-minded negotiators, convinced of the superiority and reasonableness of their approach, could not believe that it would not work. “We were so close,” they told themselves, “if only we get Israel to give more, then the Palestinians will agree.” Hence Barak’s efforts to win a peace in the teeth of war at Taba in January 2001; and Olmert’s even greater concessions in 2008.

Obama was the last one to take this seriously and he and his Secretaries of State, after announcing imminent breakthroughs (one year, 9 months), crashed and burned. And everyone knew, but no one would say, that the Palestinians refused to make the concessions Israel needed to take the gamble. On the contrary, “the whole world” (in an act of global bad faith) knew it was Israel’s fault. In so doing, they complied fully with the Palestinian negotiating strategy of “land for war.”

The Palestinian game was simple: demand concessions that Israel could not meet (withdrawal to ’67 borders, uprooting all settlements), refuse concessions that Israel needed (renounce right of return, change the PLO charter, stop genocidal incitement), and blame Israel for the failures to reach agreement. The Foreign Language Palestinian position is:

we have made all the concessions necessary, we have accepted the state of Israel; we agree to a two-state solution; we are willing to settle for 22% of historic Palestine; we fight for freedom and dignity. It is Israel, with its settlements on and occupation of that 22%, that are the impediments to peace. When Israel meets those minimum demands, there can be peace. Therefore, in the name of peace, force Israel to concede what we rightfully demand.

Of course, there’s a rather different read of this discourse. First, it’s not matched by similar statements in Arabic. On the contrary, just like Arafat’s Hudaybiyya speech to South African Muslims promised “temporary truce while we are weak to be broken later,” contrasted with his Nobel Prize speech about the “peace of the brave,” so this English “narrative” (read: cogwar narrative for infidel consumption) has no presence in the Arab language public sphere. On the contrary, in Arabic, the cogwar narrative for the faithful makes it clear: Land for War.

Note the open admission of double-talk and a public secret: everyone knows what the inspiring idea and great goal are, but don’t say it to outsiders. Note also the calculus: the