UPDATE: Ursula Duba, a writer of great integrity and courage has posted the following.

“The sentence “Norway’s justice minister blames Israel for Muslim rape wave” which is posted on Robert Spencer’s wall on FB (the link has been removed in the meantime, even though the headline  is still on Robert Spencer’s wall) and is also quoted on Professor Richard Landes website The Augean Stables should be considered a lie. The statement by Norway’s justice minister was allegedly quoted in a headline in ARUTZ SHEVA by Gil Ronen. From there it spread around the globe like wildfire. I never saw that headline in Arutz Sheva of Dec 5, 2011. As of yesterday or even earlier, the statement attributed to Norway’s justice minister is nowhere to be found in Arutz Sheva, nor does Gil Ronen offer an explanation as to why he altered the headline to “Muslim ‘Rape Wave’ Reported in Oslo” at http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/150378#.TuQadvKa8qM. Without proof as to when and where the alleged statement by Norway’s justice minister was made, the statement itself should be considered as untrue and as slander.

We owe Norway an apology. I herewith apologize to Norway for this slander. I hope that all decent people will join me in a) apologizing to Norway and b) will make sure that any such statements are in fact TRUE. Quoting a sixth or seventh blog as a source is totally unreliable. This is how lies and defamation run amok on the internet. I will have none of it.”

After more than a week of waiting for the people involved in this story to get back to me about what the real sources are, I have come to the conclusion that this is the most appropriate position to take. I apologize to Norway for running this unverifiable approach, and hope that they show the courage necessary to tackle this grave problem of rape.

(There’s a shorter version of this up at the Daily Telegraph. Check out the amazing comments.)

One of my daughters recently wrote me: “I was speaking to a friend of mine who had been dating a very, very, anti Israel activist for about a year. We don’t usually breech the topic but she asked me if most of the Muslim antisemitism in Europe wasn’t based on their dislike of what is going on in Israel and not so much on religion.”

This is a widely held belief among not only anti-Zionists, but among liberals in general. It takes a number of forms, all of which serve to explain the explosive and virulent hatreds of the Muslim world for Israel and the Jews (who support it), as a function of the evil that Israel has done to the Palestinians. It includes the widely held assumption that suicide bombings were a response to the despair that Palestinians felt because Israel denied them independence and dignity. It is also directly related to the problem of “Islamophobia is the new Anti-Semitism,” in which speaking of Muslim anti-Semitism becomes a new form of anti-Semitism.

I won’t so much argue against this approach – it has some data points to deploy – as I will argue an alternative approach to the problem, then discuss the consequences of (mis)reading the situation by either approach, and let readers decide for themselves which makes more sense.

From my point of view (medievalist familiar with Christian anti-Semitic words and deeds, and a student of the current scene), the argument works exactly in the opposite direction: Palestinian anti-Semites have produced the images – icons of hatred – that, through modern media, have spread the virus throughout the Muslim world. The violence that Israel does against the Palestinians – a fraction of the violence that Arab leaders do towards their own people with far less provocation – responds to Palestinian attacks inspired by anti-Semitc propaganda.

Because the Western mainstream news media (MSNM) has mainstreamed some of this propaganda (inexcusably but pervasively), many people, including my daughter’s friend – whose only data points are the TV images of terrible violence Israelis do to Palestinians, and TV images of Palestinian hatred – assume that the hatreds are at least in part justified. The number is legion of French Jews in the early “aughts,” under assault from a wave of hostility, who heard some variant of “no wonder French Muslims hate you, look at what your brethren in Israel do to their cousins in Palestine.”

Of course, let’s grant the news media everything they claim – that Israelis “massacred” hundreds of Palestinians in Jenin (2002), that they devastated Lebanon in 2006, that they killed over 1400 Gazans mostly civilians in Operation Cast Lead. This is nothing in comparison with what toxic Arab dictators do to their own people, the over million Muslims that Saddam Hussein killed in his career, the tens of thousands that Hafez al Assad killed a matter of weeks in the city of Hama (1982), even the brutal behavior that marks the current authorities in the Arab world, despite the watchful gaze of the world. And yet we have nothing resembling the thorough “critique” of Zionism in the Arab world that tackles the far older and more widespread problem of authoritarianism in Arab political culture. In a sense, anyone who “grants” the Palestinians and other Muslims “permission” to hate the Jews “given what Israel does to them,” just reveals their unthinking racism: “I don’t really expect anything remotely rational or balanced from these folks. If you piss them off, you deserve their rage.”

But to return to the main issue, the silence of the MSNM about the pervasiveness of a grotesque hatred: it is guilty in two senses here. In addition to reporting Palestinian lethal narratives bordering on blood libels as news, they did not report the hatreds that lay behind such narratives. In the summer of 2000, before the collapse of the Oslo Peace talks at Camp David, months before the intifada, the PA was blasting hatred of Israel and calls to war on its media. Perhaps the MSNM, like Clinton and Barak, were surprised by Arafat’s “no” at Camp David because they did not listen to – or heed – what he and his friends were saying in Arabic. On the contrary, driven by a (soft millennial) belief that peace was around the corner, they felt that dwelling on such bad news would queer the peace process. I still remember someone in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Jerusalem telling me they would not allow Itamar Markus to present his material (what Palestinians say in Arabic), to the foreign media, “because Israel is officially in favor of the peace process.” As if denying the problem were somehow going to bring peace.

Nor did this change once war broke out. On October 12, 2000, Palestinians shouting “Revenge for the blood of Muhammad al Durah!” tore two Israeli reservists apart with their bare hands and paraded them through the streets. The next day, Sheikh Halabiya gave a sermon calling on Muslims to slaughter the Jews (NB Jews, not Israelis) wherever they see them. Two weeks later, NYT veteran reporter William Orme wrote a piece assessing the Israeli claim that the horrendous violence of the intifada – the attacks on Israelis on both sides of the Green Line – came from the incitement of the Palestinian media. In it he never discussed the al Durah case (which he had specifically covered, and which was the most explosive component in the campaign of incitement, and which his Palestinian informant alluded to when he claimed (dishonestly) claimed that “we have no fabricated pictures, and no fabricated stories”); and when it came time to quote a passage to illustrate incitement, he quoted the genocidal Halabiya as saying, “Labor, Likud, they’re all Jews.” How could a consumer of the MSNM – much less the anti-Zionist media – know any of this?

As a result, the ferocious strain of anti-Semitism in Palestinian irredentism, from the Mufti – who visited Hitler in Berlin 70 years ago today, discussed his contribution to the “final solution,” and pumped the Arab world with Nazi propaganda – to the escaped Nazis who fled to Egypt and Syria to continue their work, to Arafat and his pseudo-secular patter of “national liberation,” to Hamas’ apocalyptic paranoia, has gone largely undocumented and unknown to the average observer of what’s quaintly known as the “Middle East conflict.” Nor is this merely a quirk of journalism, but a widespread practice of the “post-colonial” field of Middle East studies in the wake of Edward Said’s masterpiece of cognitive warfare forbidding Westerners from “othering” Muslims.

Why the Arab/Muslim anti-Semitism? In a book published in the 1986, Bernard Lewis noted that by and large, even though Arabs adopted anti-Semitic material from the worst European sources as part of an anti-Zionist campaign, they remained friendly to Jews personally: 9-5 anti-semitism of the workplace.

No longer. Jews have been driven from places like Egypt, and now “democracy” crowds rallied by the Obama-administration-designated “moderate” Muslim Brotherhood chant, “One day we will kill all Jews.” (As Barry Rubin noted, does that make them “moderate” because they don’t want to do it this week?) Since 2000, Arab and Muslim news media have been awash with gory video depictions of the Elders of Zion carrying out their blood sacrifices of innocent Muslim youth. Specialists disagree over whether this is primarily an import from the worst of European hate-mongering, especially the Nazis, or an indigenous growth with roots in the Qur’an.

From a the point of view of a medievalist who studies millennialism, both these sources share a single genealogy, that of supersessionist, invidious identity formation activated by honor-shame insecurity. Both Islam and Christianity arise as apocalyptic offshoots of Judaism – Jesus and Muhammad were both “roosters” announcing in the former case, the imminent arrival of the kingdom of heaven, in the latter, the imminent Last Judgment. In both cases, early on, the founding prophets included Jews in their scope of those to whom they preached in the hopes of winning them over into apocalyptic time. In both cases their effort to win over the Jews and their prophecies failed: still today, neither kingdom of heaven, nor the Last Judgment have occurred. In both cases, one strain of belief blamed the Jews for the apocalyptic failure.

In both cases, the newer religions developed a replacement theology whereby they did not just become a new and additional chosen people, but had to replace the previous claimant(s). I make myself look bigger by making others (in this case, people I have been directly inspired by) look smaller. I can only be chosen of God if He has rejected you.

In the honor-shame, zero-sum variant of monotheism, one proves the superiority of one’s beliefs by subjecting those who do not share it to humiliations. Christianity took this attitude towards the Jewish minority in their midst (centuries before shariah law of dhimmis, Theodosius forbade Jews to build new synagogues or to have any synagogue higher than the Christian churches); and Muslims took the same honor-shame attitude towards both Christians and Jews under their power. And, not surprisingly, Christians and Muslims fought it out as only imperialist monotheists can do for well over a millennium.

As Gavin Langmuir pointed out decades ago, virulent anti-Semitism (which he distinguished from garden-variety anti-Judaism or dislike of Jews, but rather a demonization of the supernaturally evil Jews) arises when the supersessionist religion has a crisis of faith and becomes radically insecure. This can be provoked by a variety of circumstances – in the case Langmuir studied, it was a theological crises around the high medieval doctrine of transubstantiation (i.e., the wine and the wafer actually become the blood and body of Christ in the course of the mass). In any case, insecurity denied and weaponized can lead to apocalyptic paranoia and its genocidal hatreds.

In the current case of Islam, the realization that the West has far outstripped the Muslim world in technology and power, that Islam stands humiliated in the world scene, that modernity threatens to castrate Islam, and the belief that the Jews stand at the heart of modernity, has led to a virulent strain of not just anti-Zionism – itself the ultimate insult of modernity, a tiny bunch of should-be dhimmi who defeat Arab armies ten times their size – but of anti-Semitism.

Thus the Jewish slap on the faces of the Christians continues, who apparently enjoy and allow this sort of humiliation and attack, and give them their other cheek so that the Jew can continue to slap the Christians—just as we see—ruling them in Europe through the Masons who dig the grave of Western civilization through corruption and promiscuity. The Crusader West continues like a whore who is screwed sadistically, and does not derive any pleasure from the act until after she is struck and humiliated, even by her pimps—the Jews in Christian Europe. Soon they will be under the rubble as a result of the Jewish conspiracy. (Arif, Nihayat al-Yahud , 85, cited in Cook, Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic, 220; discussed in Landes, Heaven on Earth, pp. 455-57).

European anti-Zionist may like their fantasy that their attitude is not anti-Semitic, but in the case of the Arab and Muslim world, the slide from opposing Israel to ranting about “al Yahud” everywhere is effortless.

Given the power of genocidal anti-Semitic sentiments in the Arab and Muslim world – press and TV, mosques, public officials – one might wonder why the Western silence on the subject. Indeed it is so deafening, so understudied and underreported, that a less-well informed person might think that it doesn’t exist and my complaint is really just paranoia. It’s not enough to point to the degree of intimidation that pervades journalism in the Palestinian territories (and other places where state terrorists dominate the scene), an intimidation that came through loud and clear in the aftermath of the Ramallah lynch affair. Although that explains much of the behavior of journalists on the scene, like NYT reporter Steven Erlanger who waited until he left the region before – at long last – mentioning the problem in an article.

It’s also related to a particularly dangerous form of political correctness, in which speaking badly of Muslims is the new form of Anti-Semitism. As a colleague said to me in Paris, “The experience of the Muslims in Europe today is exactly the same as the Jews a century ago.” Of course, that’s not the case at all: both in terms of the wildly different behavior of the two minorities, and in terms of how the European elites behaved and behave towards them. By that (completely erroneous historical) logic, however, any attack on Islam is immediately comparable to a 19th century attack on Jews. To claim that Muslims want to take over Europe is the same as believeing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; to accuse them of planning terror attacks, is the same as believing in the blood libel. Little matter that Islamists themselves say they want to take over Europe, and they want to bring a holocaust on the European infidel, that they actually do carry out terror attacks. The triumph of the will over reality.

Demonstrations outside Danish Embassy in London over Muhammad Cartoons (February 2006). Police tried to prevent observers from photographing a protestor wearing a mock suicide vest, this 6 months after the 7-7 London suicide attacks.

This problem is everywhere. Even Jewish organizations designed to protect Jews from anti-Semitism spend much more of their time sponsoring inter-religious dialogues, opposing Islamism, and applauding human rights initiatives, than even discussing, much less mobilizing against Muslim Anti-Semitism. In the USA, the once legendary ADL has become a 20th century relic in the 21st century, still pursuing the nice, liberal policy of protecting everyone’s rights in the (dashed) hopes that others will come to their defense when they need it. A recent study shows that only 1.3% of the ADL’s 4269 press releases (1995-present) focused on Islamic extremism and another 1.3% on Arab anti-Semitism. Of the 57 press releases devoted to Islamic extremism, only 13, about .005 were issued in the ten years since September 11, 2001, precisely when the threat to Jews from Islamic extremism dramatically increased. (That’s almost as small as the percentage of Jews in the world, or the percentage of the Arab world “occupied” by Israel – .002.)

In Germany, the Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung in Berlin actually held a conference whose main theme was the close identity of Islamophobia and Judeophobia. Challenged, they replied indignantly that the mafioso tactics of their opponents (public criticism) were intolerable. A German colleague was surprised when I told him that Hamas is much closer to the Nazi attitude towards Jews than the neo-Nazis. These latter are closer to violent but garden variety xenophobes, and Jews barely register on their list of concerns, while Hamas shares the same fevered (apocalyptic) paranoia and genocidal loathing of Jews that the Nazis did.

Which brings us to the dilemma that faces the Western observer, especially the one who believes that moral behavior matters, and wants to support those who behave well and oppose those who behave badly. We are faced with two opposing narratives: one in which the Muslims (especially the Palestinians) are victims who might be forgiven their hatred of the imperialist Israelis, one in which the Israelis are victims, who might be forgiven their violent resistance to Palestinian and Muslim anti-Semitic assaults.

Why not toss a coin?

Because (aside from the fact that in so doing one would greatly increase support for the imperialist Zionists to 50%), there are serious consequences to misreading this situation. If I am wrong, and Palestinian hatred is merely a result of the “occupation”, then concessions from the Israelis should lead to a lessening of Palestinian hatred, and the road to peace. As Stephen Bronner, prominent scholar of Anti-Semitism noted in an article on the Protocols,

Nevertheless, it makes sense to believe that an anti-Semitism that has only grown with the success of Israeli imperialist policy will diminish with a change in that policy.

This is the prevailing paradigm that currently dominates thinking about the Arab-Israeli conflict. It projects a kind of positive-sum rationality on Arab political culture, and assumes that if something’s wrong, it is the fault of the stronger party unwilling to compromise (Israel). It’s the same mentality that gives us the universal and universally wrong excitement of the MSNM about the “Arab Spring” – get rid of a dictator… get democracy. No? No.

Of course, if the Palestinians really are rational, really want their own state (rather than to destroy Israel), then they should, in principle, be amenable to making some important moves towards reconciliation, like, say, cutting off the hate incitement on TV, and building settlements in the land they control (Area A of the West Bank and all of Gaza) to resettle their refugees. No? No.

But if I’m right, if it’s a profoundly rooted anti-Semitism among Arabs today, one that has been “cooking” for over a century, got jacked up on steroids during the Nazi period, and hit a rolling boil in 2000 with the al Durah blood libel, then it’s another story entirely. If I’m right, then “solving the refugee problem” by allowing these poor victims of war to have a real home is not on the Palestinian agenda – even if they got their state. On the contrary, these “refugees” are designated victim-weapons in a war of annihilation.

If I’m right, then every time Israel makes concessions, it encourages further aggressions. Thus, despite what the politically correct paradigm, based on projecting our own liberal mentality on others, anticipated, every time Israel engaged in anti-imperialist activities – like withdrawing from most of the West Bank (1994-2000), all of southern Lebanon (2000) and all of Gaza (including uprooting 8000 settlers) – the result was more and more vicious aggression.

Nor is this merely a problem faced by Israel. (I know there are many anti-Zionists out there who treasure the thought that if only they throw Israel into the maw of the beast, that they’ll be spared, but that too is a piece of cognitive egocentrism in which their imagined distinction between the West (us) and despised Israel (them) is shared by the Jihadis.) Israel is to Europe dealing with Jihadi Islam what the Sudetenland was to the French and English in dealing with the Nazis. The difference is that, thankfully for the West, Israel is armed and refuses to commit suicide – even though that infuriates those who would prefer they do so quietly.

For ultimately, the problem of anti-Semitism is not a Jewish but a gentile problem. Granted the Jews suffer from anti-Semitism, indeed they’re often the first to suffer. But the ultimate price is paid by those foolish enough to either get sucked into the world of hatred and paranoia that anti-Semites peddle, or ignore its presence as a sad but inevitable part of life.  As any historian of World War II can tell you, if six million Jews were murdered, more than ten (!) times as many non-Jews died in that madness.

The Arab world in the latter half of the 20^th century offers a striking parallel to Spain in the 16^th century. Both worlds had expelled their Jews (Spain in 1492, Arabs in 1948); both experienced a flood of wealth (Spain got New World gold and the Arabs got Petrodollars); and both were failed societies unable to parlay that wealth into a thriving culture that made life better for all its people.  As Ruth Wisse put it recently: “Arab leaders do not yet acknowledge that they sealed the doom of their societies in 1948 when they organized their politics against the Jewish state rather than toward the improvement of their countries.” And they’re doing it again, this time not from the top down, but from the bottom up.

In a recent article, Jeffrey Goldberg tried to acknowledge the problem of anti-Semitic sentiments pervading the “Arab Spring” all the while preserving the belief that “The people of the Middle East are finally awakening to the promise of liberty.” But the two are intimately related. The Judeophobia of these alleged “liberty-seekers” isn’t some deplorable but ultimately separate issue. The Judeophobia is not the problem, but the symptom. It’s the conspiracy thinking that blames every problem on the “other”: Muslims attack Copts? It’s the Jews. Police turn violently on the crowds? It’s the Jews. Arab Spring turning into Islamist Winter? It’s the Jews (or, if you’re on the BBC, “outside forces”). How can one possibly inaugurate, foster, and sustain a democratic culture of freedom, one that, the in words of Isaiah Berlin, considers it “shameful not to grant to others the freedom one wants to exercise oneself,” without an ability to self-criticize?

Anti-Semitism is everyone’s problem, especially the Muslims. And the sooner the “progressives” who want to help them, stop feeding their anti-Semitic vulnerabilities by joining them in demonizing Israel, and help them deal with the problem of self-criticism (a virtue to which the “left” could well afford to renew its commitments), the sooner we are likely to see a real Arab Spring, one that benevolent people the world over can sincerely cheer. Of course that would mean that anti-Zionists would have to overcome their own scapegoating fantasies.

He noted: “such narrow minded discussions must be a slap in the face of the bereaved.” Chinlund alludes to the feelings of the Jewish community in 2002 when she calls their policy of not calling Hamas a “terrorist organization” a policy that “infuriates some.”

This reminded by of Chinlund’s piece, and I realized I had never posted my fisking at my blog. So here it is, as preparation for a posting on the issue of using the term terrorism for the Daily Telegraph. I welcome contributions from anyone who has examples of the problem here delineated (e.g., what happened to the BBC after the terror attacks of 7-7, 2005).

The ombudsperson of the Globe yesterday produced what must be the single clearest statement of what is wrong with our media’s approach to the middle east.

WHO SHOULD WEAR THE `TERRORIST’ LABEL?

Author(s): CHRISTINE CHINLUND Date: September 8, 2003 Page: A15 Section: Op-Ed

THE OMBUDSMAN

Who should wear the `terrorist’ label?

By Christine Chinlund, 9/8/2003

WITH THIS WEEK’S 9/11 anniversary comes reflection on all that has changed these past two years. Even our language has shifted; the word terrorism itself casts a different shadow. It has always, of course, been a powerfully negative label. But post-9/11 the word’s potency has multiplied. In the current climate, the terrorist tag effectively banishes its holder from the political arena. More than ever, it condemns rather than describes.

Indeed, newspapers must be doubly careful about how they apply the word. Sparing use is the norm. For example, the Palestinian organization Hamas, whose suicide bombers maim and kill Israeli citizens, is routinely described in the Globe and other papers as a “militant,” not terrorist, group.

Such restraint infuriates some Middle East partisans (most often, but not exclusively, supporters of Israel) who say it sugarcoats reality and that any group targeting civilians is terrorist. I receive regular demands to, as a Chelmsford reader put it, “stop misleading readers with terminology that affords terrorists a false degree of legitimacy.”

What possible reason is there for not unflinchingly applying the word terrorist to any organization or person who targets civilians? It may seem like hair-splitting, but there’s a reason to reserve the terrorist label for specific acts of violence, and not apply it broadly to groups.

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

That said, journalists can not, and should not, be blind to reality. When we see terrorism, we should say so. A suicide bombing on a crowded bus is clearly an act of terrorism and should be so labeled. And it should also be described in all its painful detail. Such reporting is more powerful in its specificity than any broad label.

This approach — call the act terrorist, but not the organization — is used in many newsrooms, including the Globe’s. It allows for variations: The terrorist label can appear in a quote or when detailing Washington’s official list of terrorist groups. But not in the reporter’s own voice.

The wisdom of this approach is, understandably, the subject of renewed debate in the wake of the recent, horrible bus bombing in Jerusalem that killed 21 people. There are good arguments on both sides. But I cast my lot with those who believe the current approach — perhaps imperfect and a bit contrived — best serves accuracy and impartiality, at least for now. It is a necessary accommodation in a complicated world.

“The overall approach here is to describe events and present facts rather than to attach labels to individuals or groups,” notes Globe editor Martin Baron. “We particularly seek to avoid hot-button language that has become associated with a point of view . . .”

Baron notes that Middle East coverage is a special concern for many readers. He acknowledges the view of supporters of Israel who “believe we should use the term `terrorist’ to describe militant Palestinian groups that encourage or carry out horrific suicide bombings against civilians” — and of Palestinians and their backers who “argue that theirs is a legitimate struggle over land and freedom . . . (and) that Israeli military killings of Palestinian civilians should be properly portrayed as `state terrorism.’ ”

The debate, he says, is complicated by the fact that some militant Palestinian groups also perform some social service functions.

Best, he says, to avoid attaching labels to either side, instead providing “accurate, fair and honest accounts of specific news events.” That includes calling suicide bombings “acts of terror” and “terror attacks.” (The Globe also routinely points out the State Department designation of Palestinian groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad as terrorist organizations.)

The Globe practice, says Baron, is to evaluate each story individually. In the “relatively rare” instances where the terrorism label is used broadly, he says, “it has been applied to groups that have no clearly identifiable or explicitly articulated political objective.”

Count Al Qaeda as one of those exceptions. In the Globe and elsewhere, it’s called a “terrorist network” — which prompts critics to argue, anew, that if Al Qaeda is a terrorist organization so is (fill the blank).

It’s difficult, given that the definition of Al Qaeda in the United States is almost solely based on the 9/11 attacks, to imagine seeing it as anything else. A more precise definition — “a radical Islamist network that employs violence against innocents” — trumps “terrorist” on grounds of specificity, but it ignores one of our most profound national experiences, 9/11. Given Al Qaeda’s self-definition and its large-scale embrace of terrorism, it has proven itself an allowable exception.

The ombudsman represents the readers. Her opinions and conclusions are her own. Phone 617-929-3020 or, to leave a message, 929-3022. Our e-mail address is ombud@globe.com.

© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

Is stupidity a lesser sin than being accused of taking sides?  Whose side can we be on if we can’t call a terrorist a terrorist?  What have we understood about the nature of civil society if we get paralyzed by the polemical demands of people who defend terrorism.

For more than 1500 years, a conspiracy of clerics and historiographers has worked, with great success, to hide one of the principal features of cultural and political evolution. Now in these latter days it is more important than ever that the truth be revealed, since the failure to take this hidden factor into consideration threatens the survival of civilization, and maybe of the human race itself.

Perhaps this summary slightly overstates the thesis of this book by Richard Landes, professor of medieval history at Boston University. (He was also the principal organizer just before the year 2000 of the Center for Millennial Studies, of which your reviewer was a member.) The book attempts a typology of millennial movements and apocalyptic thinking, illuminated by often fascinating cross-cultural and historical case studies. At the same time, the book argues that historiography and anthropology often do not categorize these things correctly when they appear, and even tend to expunge the millennial elements from the textual record. Unlike most conspiracy theories, this one has the advantage of being true in large part. Neither is the evidence far to seek: the book’s subtitle is a play on the title of the famous study by William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, a work which somehow manages not to treat endtime excitement, though that is very often a conspicuous feature of religious revivals and personal conversions.

“Millennialism” may be taken to be the image of a future state of the world in which there will be peace and prosperity and societal justice, with the sorrowful aspects of the human condition overcome. The term comes from the “millennium,” the thousand-year reign of the saints mentioned in the Book of Revelation, though similar notions occur in other religious traditions. In fact, any model of history that forecasts a happy ending can usefully be treated as “millennial,” at least for some purposes. “Apocalyptic” can mean the sudden transition from ordinary history to the millennial condition. In some models, this transition can be effected solely through divine intervention, in which case the human role is likely to be rather passive. To the extent that “history” is a deep cause for the change, the human role is more active. The extreme case in the activist direction is pure social revolution.

All these possibilities are eschatological, in the sense that they treat of the eschaton (“end”), but they are not the only possible eschatologies. Indeed, as we are repeatedly reminded in this book, the orthodox eschatology for most of Latin Christendom has almost invariably some variation on that of St. Augustine of Hippo (AD 354 – 430). Augustine discouraged, to put it mildly, the unique identification of any historical period or political regime with the fulfillment of eschatological hope. The end, the Second Coming, would not be the product of historical evolution, and it would end history rather than inaugurate a new historical era, however blissful.

Augustine, we may note, had a hard job: he spent a large part of his career arguing that “Now is not the time to panic” during an era when a reasonable man might respond, “If not now, when?” Be that as it may, in the typology of this book, he is an “owl,” indeed the Great Horned Owl of Western historiography. Owls are a perennial class of commentators who argue, not always persuasively, that current disasters do not mean the world is about to end. They do not argue that an end will not come, or even necessarily that there will be no millennium; they are at their most owlish when they quibble about the date of the endtime. Most annoyingly, from the author’s point of view, owls in the aftermath of a millennial moment will retrospectively conclude that there was nothing much to it (the world did not end, did it?) and insist that they themselves were not taken in, not at all. Confusing documents suggesting otherwise tend to go missing.

The opposite perennial figure is the “rooster,” who crows that the night is nearly over, the time is now, and everyone must cast aside caution in the impending dawn. Roosters often get a hearing. Even casual students of history will have run across episodes like the Great Disappointment of the 1840s, or Savonarola’s Florence. On rarer occasions, they take over the barnyard, for a while. Among the case studies in this book are the Taiping Rebellion in China (the biggest war in the 19th century, remember) and the Bolshevik and Nazi revolutions. (The author leans toward the view that the Nazis were working from a largely theosophical model of history.) Millennial movements can follow more than one pattern, but the one that interests the author shares the morphology of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

In this view, the millennial moment starts with the appearance of roosters who announce that some marvelous change is about to occur. They gain so large a following that the skeptical owls are drowned out or silenced, or even converted. Then more and more resources are invested in the change occurring; people who see no evidence of this are forced to silence by social pressure. Finally, some event or counter-propaganda makes it obvious that the roosters were wrong and that it is safe to say so.

The author expresses surprise that this pattern repeats again and again, often in the same region, despite the fact that every millennial movement ends in the disappointment of the little boy pointing out that the emperor is wearing no clothes. To that might say that it is not at all clear that disappointment is always absolute. As the books notes in passing, the Eastern Zhou period of Chinese history was characterized by what in effect was an elite millennial movement directed at imperial unification; when unification occurred in 221 BC, the relevant story for the imperial ideologues may have been not so much “The Emperor’s New Clothes” as “The Monkey’s Paw.”

Less speculatively, we may note that the author suggests that a millennial moment happens when “private transcripts,” views that are often common knowledge but rejected by the elite, became “public transcripts” that can be openly discussed. The more oppressive the public regime is, the more vengeful the private transcripts are likely to be. (Fans of Dune may recall Lady Jessica’s horror when she learns the particular version of the messiah archetype common on Arrakis: “They have that story here? This must be a terrible place!”) At least in the Latin West, however, what may sometimes happen is that perfectly acceptable ideas just shift from type to prophecy. Augustine, after all, did not really dispense with prophecy, but rather turned it into a system of types. These are actually quite useful. Even the most hootfully skeptical owl can still call an oppressive emperor “an antichrist” if not “the Antichrist,” for instance, and there are always slacking congregations that can be tarred with the same brush as Revelation’s Church of Laodicea. Such uses keep millennial ideas in circulation, no matter how many times they are misused.

In any case, the author is particularly interested in two aspects of the Emperor’s New Clothes scenario.

The first is the tendency of millennial proponents to bet more resources on a prophecy being true as evidence of its disconfirmation accumulates. The point is made with sad clarity in the study of the Xhosa Cattle-Slayings of the 1850s. A prophetess in southern Africa (millennialism is a notably girly phenomenon the world over) predicted that the English would disappear and the Xhosa ancestors would return if the Xhosa slew all their cattle. Not all did, but enough did to cause distress. As the situation worsened, the failure of the ancestors to return was answered by the prophetic insistence that not enough cattle had been slain. This created a famine that resulted in the collapse of Xhosa society.

The phenomenon of millennial improvidence is not unfamiliar; the Millerites in America in the 1840s were equally willing to bet their livelihoods on the Parousia, even if they not quite so wholesale about mere destruction. The author argues, however, that a similar pattern characterizes millennial tyrannies when it becomes clear that their political ambitions may have limits. Certainly the famous Anabaptist Munster Commune of the 1530s and the Taiping rebellion became most radical and paranoid as their strategic situation deteriorated. (We may also note that it was only in the closing weeks of the Third Reich that Joseph Goebbels felt liberated enough to implement the Leftist economic policy that has always been dear to his heart.) The issue fades into the book’s other principal interest in the evolution of millennial movements: how do societies handle millennial disappointment.

Not all of them do this badly. Tom Holland’s popular history of the origins of Western civilization, The Forge of Christendom, is based largely on Professor Landes’s assessment of the state of millennial enthusiasm around the year 1000. That book concludes that the major political institutions of Christendom arose in large part as preparation for the impending final struggle against Antichrist. The solid institution-building survived the millennial excitement (much of the direct evidence for which, to Professor Landes’s continuing frustration, has been lost or glossed by pestilential owls). [NB: nicely put, but I call them "bats" - RL.] On the other hand, it is also possible for a millennial regime, if it survives, to simply refuse to acknowledge that it is not Heaven on Earth, and to use extreme measures to ensure that all of its subjects not just say so but think so; this is totalitarian option, which we are given to understand is a system that tries to replace all private transcripts with the Party Line. There is also the possibility of mere nihilism, of a regime that, like Denethor, will have naught if it cannot get what it wants. In this the Taiping and the Nazis may not have been of dissimilar mind.

In some ways, the most interesting and problematical part of the book is the case study of Akhenaton (1353 – 1336 BC) and the Amarna Period, which the author interprets as a brief and unsuccessful exercise in “iconic millennialism.” Millennialism is usually demotic; it is the contemplation by those below of the humbling of those above, whether to replace them or to create a regime of equality (of which more later). It is not unknown, however, for those who are already high and mighty to embrace the view that their situation is not just a happy accident, but an ontological necessity. Thus, it is not out of place to characterize the founding of the Han Dynasty as the establishment of a “millennial empire.” Some church historians made an at least analogous argument about the Roman Empire after Constantine. (Augustine agreed that the empire was providential, but he said it was not the City of God; he wrote a book about it.) Heaven on Earth would have it that Akhenaton’s solar monotheism was similarly an attempt to bring the divine order permanently to earth, based on a theology too exalted to acknowledge death.

Now it is notoriously the case that Egyptian elites after Akhenaton’s death did their considerable best to expunge his deeds and name from the historical record. They almost succeeded; it was not until Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt that it became possible for archeology to recover Akhenaton, who had been known previously only in an abbreviated and garbled form. If ever there were a golden age of owls, it would have been during the attempted erasure of Akhenaton. Still, that probably is not enough to make the millennialism model fit here. The millennium is a kind of narrative closure. If the Egyptians ever had a story about history that needed such a thing, it has not come to our attention. Not even the largest flock of reactionary owls could have expunged it.

What has come to our attention are the hints that Akhenaton, or rather the garbled popular recollection of him, may have had some influence on the Greek-language Hermetic literature of the first few centuries AD. After a fashion, Akhenaton may be Hermes Trismegistus.

That is a name to conjure with. As the author points out, there is a direct connection between Hermeticism and the Renaissance, and to the more uppity kinds of monarchical absolutism that followed immediately. (“Sun King”? Versailles?! See, it’s all connected!!!) It also, obviously, affected the would-be Hermetic revolutionaries of the stamp of Giordano Bruno of the 16th and 17th centuries. This book does not seem to mention Dame Francis Yates’s The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, which deals with that period, but it does discuss her work about the origins of the idea of technological progress. Unlike Egypt, the West does have a story that invites millennial closure, and into that story the Hermetic material, it seems to this reviewer, fit like a key in a lock. Heaven on Earth suggests that the greatest and chiefest of millennial movements is modernity itself.

How is modernity different from other millennial movements? For one thing, it promotes a species of demotic millennialism that seeks to dissolve what the author calls the “prime divider” between commons and elites. Modern societies tend to favor equality before the law, universal literacy, respect for manual labor, and personal autonomy. The author traces this insistence back to the casteless law codes of the Torah. That is fair enough. We may also note, though, that authors from Tom Holland to Francis Fukuyama say that what really made civil society possible in the West is that the pope and the emperor started arguing in the 11th century about who had the right to appoint the bishops in southern Germany. They are still at it, and so the space between principle and power is still open. That does not mean it will always be, though.

The author notes that there are two important apocalyptic movements in the early 21st century. One is the Global Jihad; the book’s explanation of why 1979 AD (1400 AH) was an important apocalyptic date is as good an explanation as you are likely to find for why millennial studies should play a larger role in political science. The other is Anthropogenic Global Warming, which seems to serve some of its adherents as consolation for the collapse of eschatological Marxism. Many people in the West are very interested in  one or the other, but whoever is interested in one is almost invariably dismissive of the other. In both contexts, postmodernism and its condescension to objective truth (note the lack of “scare quotes”) may be to blame, but it is particularly inapposite with regard to the Jihad, since the jihadis are not at all reticent about truth claims.

In any case, the millennial structure persists. It’s not just a mistake, and it’s not something that just applies to other people.

As I walked through I realized that in some sense, the exhibit was understated. It worked from the assumption that everyone coming here thinks that the Nazi genocide was a shameful, disgusting event that must  never again occur – Nie wieder. But, it occurred to me, if the Nazis were  to take over Germany again, they probably would change little about this exhibit, including its history of racism. What was presented as obviously bad would, by an alchemy of honor-shame dynamics, become a celebration of the heros who began an as-yet unfinished task.

Reflecting a spurious “shame” that Nazis acknowledged in their attempt to cover the tracks of the Holocaust, even as they held it to be a great deed, Himmler commented in a speech given in Posen, October 6, 1943:

This is a page of glory in our history, which has never been written and is never to be written.

Today’s neo-Nazis express the same ambivalence in their combined efforts to at once deny and resume the genocide. Ahmadinejad’s delight in denying that the Holocaust goes hand in hand with his desire to reproduce it, even if nuking six million Israelis means killing millions of fellow Muslims (even some Shiites). 

In a seminal book, Anthony Kwame Appiah, wrote about these dramatic shifts in terms of what the “honor group” considers honorable. The Honor Code and Moral Revolutions addresses three such reversals in which what had previously been considered honorable came to be seen as shameful – slavery in the USA, dueling in England, footbinding in China – and one so-far failed revolution – honor killings in Pakistan.

These reversals in values can be so complete that they become invisible. It’s hard for we moderns, raised in a civil polity, to even imagine what it’s like to think that slavery is an honorable thing (for the slave-owners). Liberal cognitive egocentrism has difficulty conceiving of the zero-sum mentality in which the slave’s degradation brings honor to he who enslaves and degrades him.

Take for example the following comments from Irving Berlin’s essay, “Two Concepts of Liberty” rejecting what Eli Sagan would call the normative political principle of virtually all pre-democratic societies, the dominating imperative of “rule or be ruled.”

This maxim claims respect, not as a consequence of some a priori rule, whereby the respect for the liberty of one man logically entails respect for the liberty of others like him ; but simply because respect for the principles of justice, or shame at gross inequality of treatment, is as basic in men as the desire for liberty.

Berlin assumes that gross inequality of treatment is shameful, that such a sentiment is as “basic in men as the desire for liberty.” But for people who live in the zero-sum universe of “rule or be ruled,” the very point of achieving honor is in subjecting the weaker. I make myself bigger by making you smaller.

The inability to understand this gap in what some historians call mentalité, explains why our journalists hailed the Arab protests as a “Spring,” assuming, like Berlin, that anyone who thirsted for freedom would feel shame at inequality of treatment for others.

And yet today, we view people throughout the Arab world who clamor for liberties, like freedom of speech,without necessarily believing that those liberties be extended to those they don’t like. Thus the freedom of Islamists to protest their (too) secular government (like Mubarak’s, which supported women’s rights), does not translate into a concern for protecting the rights of those who would criticize Islam. The honor of Islam demands (at least for Islamists) the repression of freedom of speech.

This radical disjuncture of pre-modern and modern mentalités, between a modern “honor group” and a pre-modern “honor group” can produce startling splits. One can see the contrast quite clearly in the story of the lynching of two Israeli reservists in Ramallah on October 12, 2000. A savage crowd literally pummeled the two to death and dismembered their bodies, dragging the parts through the streets of Ramallah shouting “revenge for the blood of Muhammad al Durah.” Western journalists present shot footage of the events, only to find their film either confiscated by Palestinian police, or have their cameras smashed by unruly mobs. Instinctively, Palestinians understood that such pictures would damage their cause in the eyes of the West, and feared a loss of favor in the global public arena. Intimidation had long been, and in this case quickly became the method of dealing with a Western press capable of embarrassing them.

But this hardly meant that, within their own “honor group” they were ashamed. On the contrary, they turned these savage murderers into heros, and had kindergarten graduation ceremonies in which little girls dipped their hands in red paint and raised them up to mimic the gesture of one of the lynchers.

For a formal review of the book by Lazar Berman, who used to post at the Augean Stables, see “The Unmaking of Gershom Gorenberg.”

Fisked below.

How to Save Israel
The three steps that could rescue it from endless conflict and international ostracism.
By Gershom Gorenberg|Posted Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2011, at 6:59 AM ET

For Israel to establish itself again as a liberal democracy, it must make three changes.

It’s pretty revealing that Gorenberg thinks Israel needs to establish itself again as a “liberal democracy.” He apparently thinks that the first round ended in 1967. That means that the key moment in a democracy – when an opposition group can be voted into power – which occurred for the first time in 1977, doesn’t even count, along with the in some cases excessive commitment to radical democratic principles of Aharon Barak’s Supreme Court (1978-2006). As will become apparent later on, this schema has a great deal to do with his moral perfectionism and, tangentially I think, his concern for what others think, an aspect of his thought revealed in his concern about “international ostracism.”

The following is adapted from Gershom Gorenberg’s new book The Unmaking of Israel. Read the earlier excerpts about why, exactly, Israel ended up losing most of its Arab population in 1948 and about why a new kind of old-time Judaism has taken hold in Israel.

I write from an Israel with a divided soul. It is not only defined by its contradictions; it is at risk of being torn apart by them. It is a country with uncertain borders and a government that ignores its own laws. Its democratic ideals, much as they have helped shape its history, or on the verge of being remembered among the false political promises of 20th-century ideologies.

What will Israel be in five years, or 20? Will it be the Second Israeli Republic, a thriving democracy within smaller borders? Or a pariah state where one ethnic group rules over another? Or a territory marked on the map, between the river and the sea, where the state has been replaced by two warring communities? Will it be the hub of the Jewish world, or a place that most Jews abroad prefer not to think about? The answers depend on what Israel does now.

For Israel to establish itself again as a liberal democracy, it must make three changes. First, it must end the settlement enterprise, end the occupation, and find a peaceful way to partition the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.

Second, it must divorce state and synagogue—freeing the state from clericalism, and religion from the state.

Third and most basically, it must graduate from being an ethnic movement to being a democratic state in which all citizens enjoy equality.

Proposing these changes provokes several reflexive objections, inside Israel and beyond. First, many Israeli Jews translate any call for full equality of all citizens as a demand that Israel cease to be a Jewish state. The supposed choice is a false one. Israel can be a liberal democracy and still fulfill the justifiable desire of Jews, as an ethnic national group, for self-determination.

The liberal meaning of self-determination begins with the rights of individuals. As Israeli political thinker Chaim Gans argues, it expresses the justifiable desire of members of an ethnic group to maintain a basic aspect of their humanity and personal identity: their culture. To live in their culture and preserve it, they need a place where that culture shapes the public sphere. The natural and must justifiable place for that to happen is their homeland, or in part of it.

But in the real world, in contrast to utopias, individual rights clash. The classic metaphor for this is the man crying fire in a crowded theater: Dogmatically preserving his right of expression robs others of their right to stay alive. Nation-states can be liberal democracies, but each faces the constant challenge of balancing the right of self-determination and other rights.

Israel does not have to give up being a Jewish state. It does need to establish a very different balance of rights. In a country with a significant Jewish majority, it is reasonable for the usual language of the public sphere to be Hebrew. It is reasonable for offices to close on Jewish holidays, because most people would not show up for work on those days anyway. It is also reasonable for the kitchens in government institutions—such as the army—to be kosher, since this preserves the right of Jews who observe religious dietary laws to participate fully in society.  It is not acceptable for the government to favor Jews in allocation of jobs, land, or school buildings, or for it to prevent Muslim citizens from maintaining a mosque in a mixed Jewish-Arab neighborhood. Nor is it acceptable for the government to condition the rights of non-Jewish citizens on their swearing fealty to this particular balance of rights.

A second objection is that creating two states between the river and the sea is no longer possible. Settlements are too large, Israel and the occupied territories too entangled; the tipping point has been passed. All that is possible now is a one-state solution.

Especially outside of Israel, this practical argument often hides a psychological tendency: even progressives sometimes fight the last battle, especially if it was a heroic fight for which they were born too late. One person, one vote was the answer in South Africa, they say; therefore it is the solution for Israel.

In fact, a one-state arrangement would solve little and make many things worse. Imagine that tomorrow Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip were reconstituted as the Eastern Mediterranean Republic, and elections were held. With the current population, the parliament would be split almost evenly between Jews and Palestinians. One of the first issues that the parliament and judiciary would face is the settlements that Israel built on privately owned Palestinian property, whether it was requisitioned, stolen, or declared state land over Palestinian objections. Palestinian claimants would demand return of their property. The problem of evacuating settlers wouldn’t vanish. Rather, it would divide the new state on communal lines.

Likewise for refugees. Palestinian legislators would demand that Israel’s Law of Return be extended to cover Palestinians returning to their homeland. Jewish politicians would oppose the move, which would reduce their community to a threatened minority. Palestinians would demand the return of property lost in 1948 and perhaps the rebuilding of destroyed villages.  Except for the drawing of borders, virtually every question that bedevils Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations would become a domestic problem, setting the new political entity aflame.

Issues not at the center of today’s diplomacy would also set the two communities at odds. Israel has a post-industrial Western economy; The West Bank and Gaza are underdeveloped. Financing development in majority-Palestinian areas and bringing Palestinians into Israel’s social-welfare network would require Jews to pay higher taxes or receive fewer services. But the engine of the Israeli economy is high-tech, an entirely portable industry. Both individuals and companies would leave, crippling the new shared economy. Meanwhile, two nationalities who have desperately sought a political frame for cultural and social independence would wrestle over control of language, art, street names, and schools. Psychologically, it would be a country with two resentful minorities and no majority.

Even in the best case, the outcome would be the continued existence of separate Jewish and Palestinian political parties. And even the more liberal-leaning parties of each community would be hard-pressed to bridge the divide to form stable coalitions. Israel would become a second Belgium, perpetually incapable of forming a stable government. In the more likely case, the political tensions would ignite as violence. The transition to a single state would mark a new stage in the conflict. For a harsh example of the potential fluctuation between political stalemate and civil war, Palestinians and Jews need only look northward to Lebanon.

A single state could easily be the result of Israel failing to make any choices. It would not be a solution—even a workable arrangement, which is what politics normally offers in place of solutions. It would be a nightmare: another of the places marked on the globe as a country, in which two or more communities do battle while the most educated or well-connected members of each look for refuge elsewhere.

A third objection to a two-state solution, from the Israeli right and its overseas supporters, is that it requires Israel to sacrifice too much for peace. This reflects an old habit of thought in which territory is the coin that Israel reluctantly pays for a peace agreement.

It’s true that peace is an essential end in itself. But Israel must also give up land to reestablish itself as a state and a democracy. It needs to put a border back on the map. Within that border, the government needs to rule by the consent of the governed. It needs to restore the rule of law and end the ethnic conflict.

Peace with the Palestinians is a means for achieving these goals. It provides the way for Israel to end its grip from outside on the Gaza Strip and to leave the West Bank safely. “Hold too much, and you will hold nothing,” the Talmud says. If the state of Israel tries to continue holding the West Bank, there will be no state.

Mass Pilgrimages:

Voluntary and Prescribed, Yearly and Apocalyptic-Messianic

Richard Landes

I’d like to contribute a problem to the issues raised by this conference on the role of contingency, future, and freedom in pilgrimages by discussing the question of mass pilgrimages. I define a mass pilgrimage in terms of two phenomena: first, that the pilgrimage has already become a massive group on the way. As opposed to more routinized forms of pilgrimage – the overwhelming majority of the cases we find in our documentation – mass pilgrimages have an infectious quality, picking up pilgrims almost spontaneously, gathering steam as they go. Second, that upon arrival at the pilgrimage’s goal, the holy site, there are again massive numbers of participants. All of this is of course relative. Certain pilgrimage sites like the Maha Kumbh Mela at the Ganges and the Hajj at Mecca draw millions of pilgrims over a specific period of days and weeks, either annually or in some regular yearly cycle.

There are, broadly speaking, three major sources for mass pilgrimage: 1) prescribed annual pilgrimages, and 2) apocalyptic pilgrimages, and 3) closely related to apocalyptic matters, “political” pilgrimages – really messianic or what I call millennial pilgrimages. Here the two most obvious traditions are monotheistic. The earliest recorded mass pilgrimages were the Israelite ones to Jerusalem, three times a year, starting, allegedly, in the 10th century BCE. Obviously not all of the three were equally observed (Passover more than Tabernacles and Pentecost), and more by those close than those far away. But this seems to be the earliest example of a religiously prescribed, mass pilgrimage. The still current form of this is the Meccan Hajj about which we have already heard, and to which I will return in my concluding remarks.

What I’d like to do here is explore the second type of mass pilgrimage, what we might call the “spontaneous mass pilgrimage.” Such a pilgrimage is not prescribed – indeed, we will see in one case that it was vigorously disapproved of by the religious authorities – but rather something much closer to a mass religious movement. And accordingly, let me begin with what Carl Erdmann called “die erste religiöse Massenbewegung im Mittelalter,” the Peace of God.

The peace assemblies were clearly – by my definition – mass pilgrimages. Monks and clerics from may sites took relics from their crypts and paraded them – delationes – through the countryside to gather with others at a given open-air site where, before hundreds and thousands of participants, the peace assembly, replete with public vows from the milites not to attack unarmed people – took place. The relics were magnets, drawing huge crowds along the way – peasants, dropping their plows and rushing to the unwonted sight of so powerful a reliquary out of the crypt where, by Carolingian statute, they were jealously kept by their guardians. When these relics and their attendant crowds arrived at the peace assembly, they were so numerous that one hagiographer, writing a generation later, described the scene as if “you were viewing the children of Israel, leaving Egypt and preparing the enter the Promised Land.” In virtually every account of the peace assemblies held from the late 10th to the early 11th centuries, these crowds play a particularly powerful role.

This reference to “entering the promised land” which appears in more than one source on the peace, suggests a millennial theme – that those participating in these events believed that they were ushering in a new and glorious future. Another biblical image invoked in reference to the peace spoke of the coming of the age in which sword would be beat into plowshare and spear into pruning hook. Christian Lauranson-Rosaz has even speculated that for participants, seeing the huge crowds approach the assemblies, surrounding a bier with a larger-than-life bust reliquary of the saint, might well have thought that he witnessed the “resurrection of the saints.”

Thus, I would venture to postulate, an attempt to literally change the future (or bring a distant future into the present) may have empowered many a participant to join these pilgrimages. Indeed, I’d call the Peace of God not merely the first mass religious movement of the middle ages, but the first mass messianic movement of the MA. In that sense, it fits in my category of political pilgrimages: the sites were not intrinsically holy, they were made holy by the temporary presence of relics which themselves had been assembled for sacred political goals.

And yet, we also find an apocalyptic dimension as well: it is not by accident, I have argued, that this happened right around the advent of the year 1000, and peaked in the second millennial year by contemporary reckoning, 1033, the millennium of the Passion. Radulfus Glaber describes what happened:

But at the millennial anniversary of the passion of the Lord… in the region of Aquitaine bishops, abbots, and other men devoted to holy religion first began to gather councils of the whole people. At these gatherings the bodies of many saints and shrines containing the holy relics were assembled. From there through the provinces of Arles and of Lyon, then through all of Burgundy, and finally in the farthest corners of France, it was proclaimed in every diocese that councils would be summoned in fixed places by bishops and by the magnates of the whole land for the purpose of reforming both the peace and the institutions of the holy faith. When the news of these assemblies was heard, the entire populace (tota multitudo universae plebis) joyfully came unanimously prepare to follow whatever should be commanded them by the pastors of the church. A voice descending from heaven could not have done more.

That last remark was somewhat ironic: in fact we know that the bishops of north-eastern France carried “letters from heaven” commanding the peace oaths. Later in the passage, Glaber tells us that the assembled masses raised their palms skyward shouting “Peace Peace Peace” and that in doing so, they thought they were forming a covenant with God.

Interestingly enough, this same year saw a mass pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Glaber describes it, the monk historian Ademar of Chabannes not only wrote about it, but joined it as a one-way pilgrim:

At this time an innumerable multitude of people from the whole world greater than any man before could have hoped to see began to travel to the holy sepulcher of the Savior in Jerusalem. First the order of the inferior plebs then those of middling estate, and after these, the great men, that is kings, counts, marchlords and bishops, and eventually, and this was unheard of before, many women, noble and poor, undertook the journey. Many wished to die there before they returned to their own lands even prayed on the Mount of Olives for Christ to take him up. When a number of people consulted some of the more anxious (sollicitioribus) of the day, as to what so many folk, in numbers unheard-of in earlier ages, going to Jerusalem meant some replied cautiously enough that it could portend nothing other than the advent of the accursed Antichrist who, according to divine testimony, is expected to appear at the end of the world. Then a way would be opened for all peoples to the east where he could appear, and all nations would hasten to meet him, thereby fulfilling that prophecy of the Lord, that even the elect will, if it is possible, fall into temptation. We will speak no further of this matter, but we do not deny that the pious labors of the faithful will be then rewarded and paid for by the Just Judge.

Glaber’s remark that this began with the inferior plebs suggests just the kind of infectious, spontaneous element I think characterizes apocalyptic pilgrimages. The disapproval of the solicitiores, suggests that more conservative ecclesiastical figures did not hesitate to use Antichrist imagery to discourage such a subversive phenomenon.

This kind of apocalyptic pilgrimage to Jerusalem ran through the entire 11^th century and beyond, acquiring more and more acceptance among the ecclesiastical elite. In 1064, a date which for computistical reasons was apocalyptic, the bishop of Bamberg led a large contingent of pilgrims to Jerusalem:

At that time many nobles went to Jerusalem to visit the Holy Sepulchre of the Lord, having been deceived by a popular (vulgar) opinion that the Day of Judgment would occur when Easter fell on the 6th of the Kalends of April (March 27)… Moved by such fear not only the common rabble but also the most honored and noble leaders of the people, from various cities they left their homeland, their relatives and their wealth and followed the narrow path, bearing the cross, they followed Christ.  The leader of this was Guntherus bishop of Bamberg in whose county many of the men, clerical and lay, as much from Eastern Francia as from Bavaria came.

And of course, the most famous of all mass pilgrimages to Jerusalem, again – at least according to some readings of the texts – originating among the masses and this time encouraged by the pope, set out in 1096. Over this century a major mutation occurred, during which pilgrims went from pedestrian penitents to mounted warriors, from the “peace of God” to holy war.

Before concluding, I’d like to say something about mass pilgrimages in modern, politico-millennial movements (what Eric Voegelin called “political religions”). As gatherings aimed at shaping the future, as expressions of messianic dreams, as “pilgrimages” to sites made holy by millennial projects, I’d include both the (rather short-lived) French revolutionary festivals (1791-2), and, still more striking, the Nuremberg Parteitage of the pre-war Nazi period (1929-38). These latter showed all the characteristics of mass pilgrimage, from the growing size of the pilgrims (every year larger), to the collective enthusiasm of participants at the site.

This brings me to a more contemporary phenomenon. The Hajj, which is a prescribed annual pilgrimage has, in recent years, gained momentum. Thanks to modern means of travel, but also, I’d like to suggest, an apocalyptic momentum which was first set in motion in 1400 AH (1979 to we Westerners) by the Shiite Khoumeini, but since picked up by Sunnis, the Hajj has now reached its logistical limits at almost 3 million. As we saw yesterday, plans to enlarge the capacities of the site are now underway, with an architecture redolent – at least to me – of the dystopian totalitarian architecture of the mid-20th century.

What we can and should make of this phenomenon is unclear. Video footage that I wanted to show you today but was taken down from Youtube yesterday, shows pilgrims circumambulating the Kaaba, chanting prayers that embody a kind of angry and invidious supersessionism:

O Allah, vanquish the unjust Christians and the criminal Jews, the unjust traitors; strike them with your wrath; make their lives hostage to misery; drape them with endless despair, unrelenting pain and unremitting ailment; fill their lives with sorrow and pain and end their lives in humiliation and oppression; inflict your tortures and punishments upon the unjust Christians and criminal Jews. This is our supplication; Allah, grant us our request!

Are we witnessing a politicization – Wahabbization – of a previously a-political annual prescribed pilgrimage? I, for one, would argue this is something that bears close attention.

Let me present the following thoughts in conclusion:

1)   Apocalyptic time – a sense that the end is near – can have a galvinizing effect on pilgrimage. In the Christian tradition, the eschatological role of Jerusalem makes it a natural magnet for Christians who think Jesus is returning to his holy city. In Islam, the prescribed tradition of Hajj to Mecca makes that a natural magnet.

2)    Similarly, a sense that one’s participation is linked to future events of import for one’s society, or all mankind can inspire mass pilgrimage. Millennial movements gain momentum with mass numbers. Only under conditions where the sense of participating with others in a vast project, can millennial hopes seem attainable.

3)    At certain critical levels, the mass phenomenon becomes infectious and draws in people who would ordinarily not participate, join in. One might think of this as a kind of tipping point. Once achieved, the momentum can lead to astonishing (and often extremely destructive) deeds.

4)    In both the messianic and the eschatological cases, disappointment is an inevitable dimension of the longer-term results. In the case of the 1033 pilgrims, we know of some who died in Jerusalem, who, when Jesus did not descend, prayed fervently that they be “taken up.” We have two extended reports of the “failure” of the holy fire to descend in the church of the holy sepulcher – 1033 and 1100 – both, I’d argue, narratives about apocalyptic disappointment.

5)    Freedom is a mirage: every free choice brings new constraints and is subject to contingency. Every imagined future turns out to be different from the one ardently hoped-for. All too often utopia becomes dystopia, glorious Parousia becomes bitter disappointment. A day before the greatest of all Parteitage – ironically dedicated to the theme of Peace – Hitler invaded Poland, and to all those German pilgrims who had already set out for a Nurnberg prepared – at huge expense – to receive a million participants, he issued a laconic announcement: “According to the press offi ce of the NSDAP, the planned party rally from September 2 to 11 this year will not take place. Whether the meeting will be held later depends on political circumstances.” The party never held another.

6)    But free actions – spontaneous deeds that break with routine, e.g., peasants leaving their plows to follow relics and crowds, whether to political gatherings or one-way pilgrimages – can have a decisive impact on cultures. In exercising their freedom to go to holy sites in vast numbers, the masses actually step on to the stage of history. In the 11th century, the masses in Western Europe went from “Peace Peace Peace” in 1033 to “Deus le volt” in 1096. In their own minds at least, they were God’s chosen people, the center of salvation history, performing God’s deeds: Gesta dei per francos.

Nor was this the only “stream” of religious enthusiasm unleashed by the outrageous hopes and profound disappointments of the Peace of God. The disappointment of the pilgrims to peace assemblies in France in 1033, that story is, at least in my view, the story of the 11th century in France and some of Western Europe and of the 2nd millennium in the Western world.

The world has not been the same ever since.

In what I hope is part of the last gasps of the disorienting moral relativism that marked so many intellectuals during the aughts (’00s), Bruce Crumley was given the pages of Time Magazine to spin out a now classic critique based on the internalizing of “Islamophobia” as proposed by Muslims who want to avoid public criticism, something approaching the level of a dogma in journalistic circles. In response to the Charlie Hebdo firebombing, Crumley not only blamed Charlie Hebdo for the attack, but those political and intellectual figures in France who condemned the bombing.

[N]ot only are such Islamophobic antics futile and childish, but they also openly beg for the very violent responses from extremists their authors claim to proudly defy in the name of common good. What common good is served by creating more division and anger, and by tempting belligerent reaction?

It’s yet to be seen whether Islamist extremists were behind today’s arson, but both the paper’s current edition, and the rush of politicians to embrace it as the icon of French democracy, raises the possibility of even moderate Muslims thinking “good on you” if and when militants are eventually fingered for the strike. It’s all so unnecessary.

But that seems more self-indulgent and willfully injurious when it amounts to defending the right to scream “fire” in an increasingly over-heated theater. Why? Because like France’s 2010 law banning the burqa in public (and earlier legislation prohibiting the hijab in public schools), the nation’s government-sponsored debates on Islam’s place in French society all reflected very real Islamophobic attitudes spreading throughout society. Indeed, such perceived anti-Muslim action has made France a point of focus for Islamist radicals at home and abroad looking to harp on new signs of aggression against Islam.

Crumley has here made the classic moral inversion so characteristic of HRC: he treats Muslims as a force of nature, and not as autonomous moral agents. In his analogy, the “burning theater” corresponds to the increasing hostility of Muslims towards the West. He identifies it at the end of his article:  ”a climate where violent response—however illegitimate—is a real risk.” In other words, since Muslims are prone to (increasingly) violent responses, we must avoid “gratuitously” provoking them, and in the process (still more gratuitously) “offending millions of moderate people as well.” In short, we can’t say to them: “This is the minimal level of criticism in our culture. If you want to participate in public sphere of a civil society, you have to learn to live with it. We all have.” We have to infantilize them.

And yet, what kind of Muslim would be insulted by this cartoon? Unlike many of the Danish ones which were not even critical, this one is actually quite sympathetic: a smiling Muhammad “threatens” 100 lashes if you don’t die laughing.” What’s offensive here? Would a Christian find a picture of Jesus saying this offensive? Personally I think the “vast majority” of European Jews would find such a cover with Moses and the text, delightful (decided relief from the genuinely antisemitic cartoons that grace European newspapers).

The offensive part here is not the content, but the depiction itself. Muhammad, we are told, must not be depicted. But of course, that’s according to (some) interpretations of Sharia (Muslim law), and in principle, enforceable only in  dar al Islam. Jews may disapprove of Christians claiming a man became (or was born) divine, but that’s their practice, and it would never occur to a Jew to insist that non-Jews observe his or her divinely-imposed restrictions on picturing God. What Muslims should not do in principle does not apply to non-Muslims.

(One could also argue that the 100 lashes was a swipe at the more violent and regressive aspects of Islamic “justice.” But then that’s also an Islamist desire. Indeed, for the people who bombed the office, the cover should read: “100 lashes if you dare laugh.” If the implied criticism of lashing in Islam is offensive, what are we, who find lashing offensive, to do?)

Thus, what drives the anger and insult at the depiction of an even sympathetic Muhammad is the desire to impose Sharia on infidels, indeed to enforce a particularly rigorous interpretation of Sharia. It is, in short, like its predecessor incidents – Salman Rushdie, Danish Cartoons, Pope’s remark — an expression of a Jihadi worldview in which the non-Muslim world is Dar al Harb, the world of the sword, the world of the as-yet unsubjected infidel, a world in which Salafi Mujehaddin now assert the millennial project of, to paraphrase Freud, “where there was dar al Harb, there shall be dar al Islam.”

Do we really want to identify as “moderate” people who so share this point of view that a sympathetic cartoon about Muhammad insults them?

If the “vast majority” of moderate Muslims were to say to us, “we will listen to serious criticism about Islam and not assault those who engage in it, but please don’t gratuitously mock us,” I’d say, “fair enough.” But that’s not what’s going on here. This is not a small peccadillo in the otherwise mature attitude of “the vast majority of moderate Muslims,” but rather a sign of how pervasive their sense of insecurity, how desperately fragile they are, and how they turn that fragility into aggression.

Let me give this an “honor-shame” analysis of Crumley’s reaction. Crumley is protecting the thin skin of Muslims who, in contact with the rough and tumble verbal sport of modernity, find themselves at once humiliated and frustrated. Coming from societies in which the ability to assault people whom uttered statements one considered insulting to Muhammad or his divinely founded religion, was taken for granted, Muslims have enormous trouble navigating a public sphere in which much that they consider blasphemous (as did earlier Christians), is commonplace. Freedom of speech means above all, the right to criticize. Public criticism is anathema in an honor shame society where being criticized – even worse, admitting to fault – is a sign of weakness and an invitation to aggression from others.

Cromley is fully aware and highly sensitive to this thin skin. But he would consider saying so openly a form of Islamophobia. He constantly worries about insulting and offending Muslims. For him, Charlie Hebdo has “mock[ed] an entire faith… creating more division and anger… tempting belligerent reaction.” What happened to the “highly variegated” Muslim world? They all respond the same way? What an Islamophobic, essentializing reading of Islam.

On the other hand, the belligerent reaction he expects conforms quite nicely with my definition of an honor-shame culture where it is allowed, expected, even required to shed blood (or intimidate) for the sake of one’s honor. Is he – unconsciously of course – admitting that Islam is overwhelmingly an honor-shame culture.

Now I think I agree with Crumley in principle. Gratuitous insult is not exactly what we need. Much better purposeful, serious criticism (i.e., to Muslims, insult). If Crumley really embodied the maturity he pretends to – puerile Charlie Hebdo grow up! – then he’d have a hefty toll of serious challenges to Islam to his credit. That would certainly give him the weight to chide CH’s juvenile humor. That would certainly attest to his readiness to treat Muslims as adults, capable of listening to as well as proffering criticism, to his faith that “the vast majority of Muslims are moderates.” For example, is it “gratuitously provocative” to denounce the genocidal hatreds spewed by Muslim preachers? Has he done that? Or has he passed over this – to us deeply shameful behavior – in silence?

But if he is primarily trying to spare Muslims’ feelings, if he secretly believes that they are incapable of playing by the minimal rules of civil society, that they are not far from sympathizing with Jihadis for whom violence is a legitimate response to any form of criticism of Islam (including the insult of not converting to Islam), if he’s afraid of provoking Muslims by asking them what’s going on with their hate-mongering preachers, then he is unconsciously admitting that Muslims are overwhelmingly touchy, primitive, violent people who must be – at all costs – appeased. His anger at Charlie Hebdo for provoking them may not only come from his (Islamophobic) fear of a predictably violent Muslim reaction, but also his displeasure at having his fantasy of moderate Muslims demonstrably disproven.

His anger and disgust with Charlie Hebdo and its supporters bespeaks embarrassed anger,  the hostility that people who believe that appeasement will win over “moderate Muslims” feel when their effort to make friends with the beast get interrupted. And, not uncharacteristically, in his anger he indulges in a bit of (Muslim-sympathetic) Schadenfreude:

We [!?], by contrast, have another reaction to the firebombing: Sorry for your loss, Charlie, and there’s no justification of such an illegitimate response to your current edition. But do you still think the price you paid for printing an offensive, shameful, and singularly humor-deficient parody on the logic of “because we can” was so worthwhile? If so, good luck with those charcoal drawings your pages will now be featuring.

Here’s where Crumley and I part paths: he treats the Muslims as animals or little children – enfants terribles – and he assumes that he can win them over with carrots. The stick will just mess everything up. So he finds Charlie Hebdo’s behavior “childish, futile, Islamophobic [sic!]… inflammatory… obnoxious, infantile… offensive, shameful… a singularly humor-deficient parody… outrageous, unacceptable, condemnable.”

I’d rather than treat Charlie Hebdo as a teaching moment, as a shibboleth for detecting what Muslims genuinely are “moderate” by modern standards and not “in comparison with Jihadis.” Even if some of us would not have published the cartoon – I would not – and even if we think it’s a tasteless provocation, now’s the time to teach to our Muslim co-citizens what we learned in grade school: “sticks and stones may break our bones but names can never hurt us.” If we can’t imagine and find moderate Muslims to whom we can turn and say, “this is the minimal level of criticism for modern civil society, and your learning to get past the implied/imagined insult  constitutes a minimal adherence to principles of reciprocity,” then what does it mean to carry on about “moderate Muslims”?

This reciprocity is especially significant, given how virulently critical of infidels many of the most vocal Muslims are. They have as little difficulty expressing their freedom of speech criticizing – indeed demonizing – others, as they have difficulty listening to criticism from others.

This radical (and pre-modern) asymmetry of “us” and “them” reflects one of the most disturbing – and to liberals, incomprehensible, unimaginable, principle of Wala wa bara - “loyalty to Muslims and enmity for infidels.” It constitutes the exact opposite of the modern principles that underly civil polities in which citizens are guaranteed “human rights.”

Crumley believes that the right of “exercising free speech in Western nations… no longer needs to be proved.” This is classic “liberal cognitive egocentrism“: we Westerners don’t need that proof. But does he really think that Muslims don’t need some remedial education? Does he really think that both the extremists who engage in violence to silence speech they find offensive, and their potentially sympathetic “moderates” who are in danger – depending on how we act – of sympathizing with these extremists, consider “the exercise of freedom of speech” a “good” that no longer needs to be proved? If he does he’s a fool. If he doesn’t, how does he propose we explain to them what it’s all about.

The key element of freedom of speech is not being able to say anything you want, or even criticize everyone you want. The key lies in reciprocity: each “free” individual not only gets to exercise freedom to criticize, but also must endure the exercise of that freedom by others who may want to criticize you. This reciprocity was at the core of the modern meditation: In the Encyclopedie, Diderot definedined natural law (read here the law of civil polities) as

…in each man an act of pure understanding that reasons in the silence of passions about what man may demand of his neighbor ( semblable ) and what his neighbor has a right to demand of him.”

In Islam there is a similar principle, what some Muslims call the “Great Jihad,” the internal struggle. According to one of Muhammad’s hadiths, redolent of both Christian and Jewish demotic millennialism, Muhammad warned his disciples:

You will never enter paradise until you believe, and you will never believe until you love one another (tahabbu) and make peace widespread between yourselves, loving one another, and not one of you will ever believe until his neighbor is secure from his injustices .”

Now for Muslims to enter the modern world, they not only have to apply this to their fellow Muslims (a huge task in today’s world), but to non-Muslims. In other words they have to renounce the invidious, tribal principle of Wala wa bara.

If Crumley wants serious people to take him seriously, let him come up with more sober ways to establish the importance of reciprocal freedom of speech rather than blithely assume that this most difficult of freedoms is already a fully acquired “right” of everyone in the 21st century.

When the pope said “Islam is inherently violent,” Muslims around the world rioted violently, essentially saying, “How dare you say I’m violent.” When the Western intelligentsia, dominated by the kind of thinking so amply demonstrated by Crumley, blamed the pope for “provoking them,” the joke was on us. It’s time to show some sanity by getting a sense of humor. Crumley, lighten up; and Muslims, grow up. Just because no one (or very few of us) are laughing, doesn’t mean the joke isn’t on you.

Richard Landes, Boston University

ASMEA Conference, Washington DC, November 4, 2011

I’d like to make two arguments. First, that the image of the IDF as child-killers is the product of a constant campaign of Arab/Palestinian cognitive warfare in which the Western mainstream news media has played a critical role in conveying this disinformation as news; second, that such a state of affairs has had a devastating impact on our ability to understand the conflict and leading to serious errors in judgment.

Let’s take what I would argue is at once a paradigmatic case, and, at the same time, the most terrible case, that of Muhammad al Durah, the 12-year old Palestinian boy who became the icon of the second intifadah, even as he should be an icon of the destructive incompetence of the MSNM.

On September 30, 2000, Charles Enderlin of France2 received the following footage from his long-time cameraman in Gaza, Talal abu Rahmah.

It was accompanied by the following narrative from Talal:

• The boy and the father took cover during an exchange of fire.
• The Israelis fired for 40 minutes at the boy who was hit and lay bleeding for 20 minutes while the Israelis fired – bullets like rain – at any ambulance that tried to take him away.

• They targeted and killed the boy deliberately.

Let me present what I think Charles Enderlin should have done were he a serious journalist merely on the basis of what he had before him. There are at least three issues that should have aroused his doubts.

1)    The wandering red spot and the lack of blood[2]

2) The behavior of the boy, from when he was “shot” in the stomach to take five – stretched out, raising elbow to look out[1]

 Still from “take 4.” This is the first take in which the boy has been allegedly shot. There is red visible on his right leg (which was one of the wounds reported by the hospital). Enderlin’s voice-over declares the boy dead.

Still from “take 5″ after Enderlin has declared the boy dead. Why would someone allegedly hit in the stomach be holding his hands over his eyes and stretched out rather than balled up and clutching his stomach? Note that there is no longer any red on his injured leg (by now the blood from a bullet wound should have spread, and the red is around his stomach, does not spill onto the ground in front of him.

Still from “take 6.” This take was cut by Enderlin in his broadcast and drew audible gasps from those in court when it was shown. Again, why would a boy who has been bleeding out from his stomach according to Talal be holding his hand over his eyes, again stretched out, and apparently looking out from under his arm?

3)  the angle of the bullets[3]

From “take 1.” This is one of the two bullets that one can identify hitting the wall during the footage shot by Talal (hardly bullets like rain). The round dust cloud kicked up indicates that it came from head-on, not from the -30 degree angle from which a shot from the Israeli position would have come. Later ballistic tests confirmed that both bullets came from the Palestinian side.

4) No shot of the ambulance evacuation

Given how high a premium cameramen place on shots of ambulance evacuations, and how important the evacuation of the “dead” boy and his “wounded” father would have been, it seems most bizarre that Talal did not have any footage of the dramatic event. The driver late claimed to Esther Schapira that he had to scoop up the guts of the dead boy from the pavement. Talal’s claim that his camera was running out of batteries does not explain why he has footage of a distant, later ambulance evacuation, far less dramatic than one of bleeding father and dead boy.

Given the potential violence and hatred such footage might – and did – arouse, Enderlin (known to his colleagues as “Scoop” had to choose between breaking the sensational “news” or showing some professional restraint. According to his own testimony, he didn’t hesitate.

In doing so, Enderlin cut the final footage of al Durah.

He remarked in his 2010 book: “j’ai coupé quelques secondes de la séquence du petit Mohammed afin d’éviter toute dramatisation inutile.” Earlier he had referred to it as “the unbearable ‘death throes’ of the child” which he wanted to spare the viewer.

However uncertain he might have been the first day, had he waited until he got “all” of Abu Rahmah’s footage the next day, his doubts would have been confirmed: from the pervasive “staging” evident in abu Rahmah’s other footage, to the lack of blood behind the barrel, to the lack of bullets (and bullet holes in the wall) from the alleged “rain of fire from the Israeli position.” If I were a professor of film, critiquing a student’s work, I’d give this an F for realism. At least give the kid a bag of blood to burst when he’s allegedly hit.

This was a photo taken the next day. Note that the blood that we see is bright red, even though, had it been exposed to oxygen and sunlight for 15-20 hours would no longer be bright red. Furthermore, the blood is where the father was, but where the boy allegedly bled out from his stomach for 20 minutes (circled area), there is no blood.

Subsequently considerably more evidence has arisen, including the fact that the boy photographed in the hospital is not al Durah, and that the injuries the father allegedly suffered from Israeli bullets were scars from an operation an Israeli doctor carried out after Jamal had suffered a knife attack from fellow Palestinians.

And yet, this accusation of faking strikes most people as so implausible as to sound like a conspiracy theory. When I began working on this in late 2003, I’d tell people, there are five possibilities: Israelis on purpose, by accident, Palestinians by accident, on purpose, and… The vast majority couldn’t imagine staged – the father? The red cross? The assumption that the boy had been killed so dominated perceptions that there was no imaginative room for a fake.

But in examining the raw footage, both Talal’s (with Enderlin) and two hours from another cameraman there working for a major Western news agency, I was struck not merely by how many scenes were faked, but their pervasiveness: there were directors, sets, and bystanders for whom it was a public secret that this is how it’s done.

Here’s my favorite example, from another Palestinian photographer present at Netzarim Junction on September 30, 2000.

[4]
Enderlin describes this and other scenes as “For many minutes he filmed classic scenes of the Intifada: young people throw rocks and Molotov cocktails as the Israeli position, they shoot back from their bunker with rubber bullets and tear gas pellets. The wounded are evacuated by other youth towards ambulances ready to take off. These scenes are identical to those that I shot in Ramallah.
Everyone remembers the faked funeral scene from Jenin recorded by an Israeli drone.

Many of these fake scenes, in order to mimic the urgency they want to convey, brutalize the alleged injured.

The best example I saw from Talal, a comic scene of a fat man who fakes a leg injury and when only kids come around – who cdn’t possibly lift him up and carry him past the cameras to the ambulance – he shoos them and walks away without a limp, I can’t show you because Enderlin cut it from the edited version he presented to the court.

But I can tell you that when I first viewed it with Enderlin, I commented that a lot of this was staged, he responded, “oh yes, they do it all the time; it’s a cultural thing.”[5]

With this piece of unreconstructed Orientalism, the second shoe dropped: it was not only that the Palestinians produced these largely shoddy fakes, but that the Western media found no problem with such “journalism” – they just scanned through them and took out the most believable sight bytes. As several French journalists explained to me, “c’est les armes des faibles” weapons of the weak. This has translated into the following epistemological approach: Believe what the Palestinians say until proven wrong; doubt what the Israelis say until proven right; and when that happens, fall silent and move onto the next Palestinian lethal narrative.

Not only was this approach taken by news agencies openly hostile to Israel like the Guardian and Le Monde, but by Israeli journalists at outlets like Ha-Aretz, and even among professors of journalism who tried to be even handed. Here Gadi Wolfsfeld discusses the Al Durah footage and compares it with the footage of the “lynching” at Ramallah twelve days later:

Perhaps the most macabre is the ongoing contest for visual supremacy in the presentation and promotion of pain and suffering. The early stages of the Second Intifada produced two very powerful images in this realm. The first was the dramatic pictures of Mohammed el-Dura being shot and killed [sic] as he and his father attempted to shield themselves from the crossfire. The second were the scenes of Israeli reserve soldiers being lynched by an angry Palestinian mob in the city of Ramallah. Each of these scenes became powerful icons for the two societies; leaders from both sides attempted to exploit these images in an effort to demonstrate the enemy’s brutality.

How could an outsider expect to understand the fearful asymmetry of these to images from this Israeli professor dedicated above all to the meme “both sides” (with admitted variants). Indeed, when presented with the evidence of staging, Wolfsfeld responded:

“So what? According to reliable statistics, the Israeli army has killed over 800 Palestinian children since the second Intifada. So what difference does it make if this case is staged or not?”

Well, for one thing, Al Durah was deliberately staged in order to arouse hatred and incite violence, while Israelis accepted guilt for the event. And for another, after al Durah, the media and the NGOs (including Btselem which he is citing here as reliable) believed virtually anything they were told by Palestinians. In addition to the figures being inflated, once one removes the large majority of “children” aged 16-19, and ask how many children like al Durah (12 and under, not combatants), the figure drops dramatically. The point of al Durah is to declare the IDF child-killers.

And Israeli journalists and academics are only too happy to accept the guilt. As one Israeli journalist remarked to me: “Meah huz hayisraelim hargu oto.” [100% the Israelis killed him]. Gideon Levy, when presented the evidence for a fake did Wolfsfeld one better with the same statistic: “We’ve killed 800 Muhammad al Durah’s.”

On the other hand, in the Ramallah lynching, the crowd that savagely dismembered the reservists yelled “revenge for the blood of Muhammad al Durah,” and the Palestinians, both police and crowd, used violence to destroy any footage of the actual violence. No Palestinian (or Arab) journalist reported on what happened at Ramallah. This is hardly a world of “both sides” don’t listen to the other’s narrative. On the contrary, it’s a perfect illustration of the marriage between pre-modern sadism and post-modern masochism.

Bob Simon, referring to al Durah, remarked, “In the Middle East, a picture can be worth a thousand weapons.” And a number of journalists agreed with me when I said I thought their attitude was, “the Israelis have all the weapons, we can level the playing field by giving Palestinians victories in the media war.” Gadi Wolfsfeld, professor of journalism at Hebrew U. presented this situation thusly:

One of the most powerful roles the news media can play in such conflicts is when they become “equalizers” by allowing the weaker party to enlist the support of third parties. This was certainly what happened in the first Intifada in which the Palestinians were extremely successful at placing their plight on the international agenda.

It’s probably worth noting that one of the first Western journalists to give Palestinians cameras to film footage during the first intifada was Charles Enderlin, and that his collaboration with abu Rahmah goes back to this time (1988). Indeed, I would date the first “heyday” of Pallywood to this period.

This Israeli effort to be even-handed at once masks and illustrates a radical difference between Israeli journalism and Palestinian. While Israelis like Wolfsfeld try, in some cases bend over backward, not to be too patriotic, to give the “other side” its due, Palestinians engage in cognitive warfare. Take, for example, the way the PA doctored the footage of Al Durah in the days after the event.

When asked to explain this obvious breach of journalistic ethics, one PATV official explained:

This is, by Western standards, not journalism but malevolent propaganda. (Hitler and many others used and use the same argument about a “higher truth” to validate the Protocols.) For Palestinian “journalists” news production is part of the “people’s struggle” and concern for “objectivity” or impartiality is at best an afterthought. As Talal said while accepting an award in Dubai: “I will continue to fight with my camera.”

Anyone, therefore, who treats the products of Palestinian journalism as “true until proven otherwise” (which is the standard operating procedure for most journalists in the area) out of some misguided political correctness, betrays their journalistic standards. They also end up, like Enderlin, admitting off record that “Talal and the rest always stage things,” while publicly exclaiming how Talal “is never unprofessional, one of the most credible sources.” Those who ignore the public secret end up accepting lethal narratives as true stories: As one Israeli journalist remarked to me: “Meah huz hayisraelim hargu oto.” [100% the Israelis killed him.]

The impact of the al Durah footage was spectacular. It went viral before people knew what that term meant. It triggered violent Arab riots inside Israel, it fueled a hatred among Palestinians that astonished sympathizers. Describing the Ramallah lynchings where the crowd shouted “Revenge for the blood of Muhammad al Durah, one very pro-Palestinian photographer wrote:

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. I thought that I’d got to know the Palestinians well. I’ve made six trips this year and had been going to Ramallah every day for the past 16 days. I thought they were kind, hospitable people. I know they are not all like this and I’m a very forgiving person but I’ll never forget this. It was murder of the most barbaric kind. When I think about it, I see that man’s head, all smashed. I know that I’ll have nightmares for the rest of my life. I love this country, I’d love nothing more than to see Israelis and Palestinians sharing an argalah or waterpipe but, after the hatred that I’ve seen in the past few days, I don’t think that will happen in my lifetime. Look how many years that they’ve been talking peace – since 1993. Then, within just a couple of weeks, they are at each other’s throats. It seems that it’s easier to hate than to forgive.

After he published the piece, he was told by “friends” that he should leave the Palestinian territories as it was no longer safe for him.

Al Durah became the icon of the intifada, both in Palestine and in the Arab world where Al Jazeera was first becoming a household name with its constant coverage of the intifada.

Al-Jazeera ran repeatedly the clip of the boy being shot, and for several days the picture of his dying became the network’s emblem of the Intifada. This had a deeply galvanizing effect on the wider Arab public. Arabs everywhere became desperate for bulletins from the Occupied Territories, but state-run Arab news providers were slow to give good coverage … from the very start Al-Jazeera’s live coverage from the front line far outstripped any other network’s coverage.[9]

The PA made al Durah into an icon of martyrdom and used the footage in every way possible: one of the most popular Palestinian singers made a video with Muhammad beckoning other youth to join him in martyrdom.

As one Israeli official noted ruefully, if you want to predict the levels of violence the next day, just calculate MDPH, Muhammad al Durah images per hour, on PA TV.  Within months of the event, Osama Bin Laden came out with a lengthy recruiting video for his global Jihad, in which Palestine, and Muhammad al Durah, played a central role in appealing to a desire for revenge, and – note the allusions in the text of the poetry he plays – the impotence of current, corrupt Arab regimes to do their duty.

Two years later, al Qaeda-linked Pakistani Islamists executed Daniel Pearl in front of a video camera with an image of al Durah behind him, right after he admitted that he was a Jew, and that Jews killed children for pleasure.

Perhaps even more disturbing, European Muslims broke out in a widespread low-level assault on Jews, literally the day after the footage showed. “The very next day, on his way to synagogue, our rabbi was attacked in the street by Muslim immigrants,” noted Joel Rubinfeld, a resident of Brussels, “The anger was palpable, and immediate.”[10] The resurgence of anti-semitism in Europe began in October 2000 – Black October – and most of the violence was done by European Muslims.  Indeed, Chirac publicly humiliated Barak on a visit to Paris four days later (in an effort to calm the violence) with the public statement, “ce n’est pas une politique de tuer les enfants.” Two days later, on October 6, 2000, exactly a week after the incident hit the news, a large rally in Paris filled the Place de la République. Crowds of angry Muslims shouted: “Death to the Jews! Kill the Jews!”

Place de la République, Paris, October 6, 2000. The al Durahs are to the right with the legend “Ils tue les enfants aussi” [They also kill children].

This became a major trope of the “left” both radical and (allegedly) non-radical. It became so central to the image purveyed by the “human rights” NGOs that one could fairly describe Al Durah as the “patron saint of Durban”, a gathering which constituted the most grotesque hijacking of the laudible cause of anti-racism into paroxysm of anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism.

Durban, South Africa, August 2001; UN Conference against Racism. In the foreground, below the poster with Al Durah, the youth in the Keffiya holds the bier on which an effigy of Al Durah is paraded through the streets. Given what we now know, the sign should have read “PALESTINE’S IMAGES OF HATE.”

The wave of hostility surprised many observers. Every register of anti-Judaism shows a sharp rise in both verbal violence (e.g., calling Jews Nazis), and physical (attacks on property and people).[12]  Taguieff reported from France:

From October 1 2000 to the beginning of November 2001, about 2000 attacks on Jews were declared [cf. 9 in 1999].  From the autumn of 2000, the power of images plays against the Israelis once the unbearable footage of the death, filmed live, of the young Mohammad plays and replays on all the television stations.[13]

This hostility to Jews became a primary feature of both Islamic teaching from pulpit, street, café and school talk.[14] One can date the emergence of the New Anti-Semitism[15] from this specific moment – September 30/October 1.[16] Five years later, defending a speech in Paris that invoked the genocidal hadith about killing Jews, a local Muslim leader showed the picture of al Durah on his phone to a crowd of Muslims, drawing their instant approval.

Nor was this virulence limited to the Muslim world. Present at the rally in Place de la Republique were all the major leftist groups, allegedly committed to fighting racism. And the opprobrium went mainstream, especially the identification of Israel with the Nazis, which had, until then been a trope of extremists. In a remark that is staggering for its moral imbecility, and uncharacteristic of an otherwise highly respected journalist, news anchor Catherine Nay opined on Europe 1, “with the symbolic power of this image, the death of Muhammad annuls, erases that of the Jewish child, hands in the air in front of the SS in the Warsaw Ghetto.”

The image is taken from the website of Ramsey Clark’s International ANSWER, a major “anti-war, anti-racism” movement of the early 21st century. It symbolizes the close alliance between the “progressive” left and anti-Zionism. Apparently this image struck home on two fronts: it aroused a global Muslim furor at the same time as it offered Europeans a “get-out-of-holocaust-guilt-free” card. Why it would enthrall American progressives is still an open question.

I think that historians, looking back at the first years of the 21^st century will wonder, as did some contemporaries, at the deraison morale that characterized especially the European intellectual scene. This moral disorientation was on full display at Durban where the “human rights” NGOs allowed the greatest global haters to hijack a UN gathering allegedly convened to fight racism. Arafat brought Jamal al Durah, and one could fairly describe Muhammad his son as the “patron saint of Durban.

In conclusion let me quote from Taguieff’s extended study of the al Dura affair

The icon “Al Dura”, the image of the Palestinian child supposedly “killed by the Zionists” imposed itself as one of the principle vectors of the new anti-Jewish propaganda that developed in the course of the 21st century… It is not just a simple image. The icon al Dura only exercises its fascination because it incorporates an explanatory commentary which, giving it its polemical sense, incorporated it in a series of mythic events, linked to the theme of cruelty and bloody desires attributed to Jews, and especially to Zionists. Behind the media icon, there’s a recurrent anti-Jewish stereotype which inscribes itself in what must be called an archetype, a structural or organizing form that one should understand less as a “primordial image” or “theme” which repeats, than as a dynamic cognitive scheme containing a affective charge which one notably encounters in myths and legends. The archetype is that of the homicidal Jew, the image of diabolic evil… which draws its inspiration from Christian anti-Judaism and which, via this icon, spread globally, taking its place in the “global culture.

In the cognitive war, whose main theater is the public sphere, Al Durah was a Palestinian nuclear bomb; and the news media, with its unremitting if possibly unconscious collusion, was the detonator. We are all – Israelis, Palestinians, the Arab and Muslim world, and the global community – the poorer for this.