Book Review- "Can 'the Whole World' Be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism and Global Jihad", by Richard Landes

What you thought you knew: A study in anti-Israel news reporting and how we got here

There is so much important information contained in this book making a reasonably thorough review too long for a single post. Accordingly, I am presenting it in 2 parts. This is Part 1-

If you are Jewish, or Jewish adjacent, or just care about truth in reporting you may be at your wits end trying to make sense of the aggressively anti-Israel bias in mainstream media (MSM) in its coverage of “October 7” and the resulting war. Anyone who didn’t know better, would almost certainly believe that Israel was randomly waging a genocidal war against the people of Gaza. There is hardly any mention of Hamas and the savage attack on civilians that precipitated Israel’s military response. There is virtually no mention of the hostages held now for some 464 days by brutal terrorists where their treatment at the hands of their captors is the subject of morbid speculation. There was no mention of the near daily rocket attacks that Israelis have been made to endure. In “Can ‘The Whole World’ Be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism and Global Jihad” historian Richard Landes confronts this phenomenon in an in depth, well sourced, assessment of how we got to this place.

Even before 10/7 the MSM has consistently shown blatant bias against Israel. But ever since, there has been an explosion of anti-Israel reporting. Consider this headline in the Washington Post after Israel’s daring rescue of hostages Noa Argamani, Almog Meir, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv by a team of Israeli special forces from civilian homes in Gaza: “More than 200 Palestinians killed in Israeli hostage raid in Gaza." -That was the headline after Hamas stole 250 human beings after first slaughtering 1,200, hid them in civilian homes, and when the rescue team retrieves the hostages, Hamas guards open fire on the rescue team and the hostages and throw grenades at them. They do this even though they are in a crowded residential neighborhood packed with civilians.

How do we address all of the accusations based on “evidence” of Israel’s criminal conduct by way of highly flawed reports by the U.N., Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch who are assumed to be wholly objective and their words accepted as truth? Compound this with the war against Israel by the MSM whose incendiary headlines and selective reporting produce a narrative that aligns with the story the Palestinians want to tell, paying little attention to what the Israelis say unless it can be used against them. We know with every fiber of our being that the smear campaign against Israel is garbage, but this raises a question: If we are right then how is it that the U.N., Amnesty International and HRW countless foreign governments, all agree that Israel is the aggressor in this war?

The “Al-Durah” Case:

Landes opens the discussion by describing a modern-day blood libel by way of the “Al Durah” case which occurred on September 30, 2000. On that date, Charles Enderlin, senior Middle East Correspondent for France2, broadcast footage from his Palestinian cameraman, accompanied by the cameraman’s “eyewitness” account of the killing of a 12-year old Palestinian boy, Muhammad al Durah, in the arms of his father, supposedly by Israeli gunfire. Enderlin was not present at the time of the incident but narrated the footage as if he was, reporting that the bullets that killed the boy came from “the Israeli position”. The cameraman stated under oath that he had seen the Israelis kill the boy “in cold blood.” (a statement he later denied making) The MSM immediately ran with the story without investigation. Sound familiar?

The footage became the global symbol of Palestinian suffering at the hand of Israeli cruelty, triggering an outpouring of violence against Jews in Israel and in Europe. The footage is also said to have precipitated the savage murder, occurring eleven days after the broadcast, of two Israelis who, upon becoming lost and entering the Palestinian city of Ramallah, had been taken into custody by PA police. After the Israelis were beaten to death, the bodies were thrown out the window, mutilated and paraded around in the street. This is the incident that inspired the bloody red hand symbol that celebrities in the U.S. are so fond of wearing, to mimic the bloody hands of one of the murderers as he displayed them in triumph from a window of the police station. While basking in the glory of the murder, they proclaimed “Revenge for the blood of Muhammad al Durah.” Osama bin Laden announced that the murder of al Durah “at the hands of the Jews” must be avenged. The deadly terrorist attack on 9/11 occurred less than a year later. The narrative followed the typical pattern of the blood libel. The footage, “as seen by the whole world” demonstrated the murderous nature of the Jews and justified Muslim violence against them. The al Durah story had a similar effect in Europe, especially in France and England, where the incident inspired comparisons to the Nazis. The media reporting of the incident resulted in violent outbursts against the Jews by Moslems in France cheering on the intifada by holding violent demonstrations, where they were joined by militant leftists, and inflammatory rhetoric proclaiming that Israel kills children. Hence the term “lethal journalism.”

From the outset, however, there were numerous irregularities with the footage that cast doubt that it represented what Enderlin and his camera man said happened. These concerns were ignored by every MSM outlet that reported on the story. After an investigation, it was revealed by a ballistics analysis that the fire could not have come from the Israeli position without “taking a 90 -degree turn”, there was no blood where the boy was said to have been killed, and the boy was sitting behind a barrel and was shielded by his father.

It was not until 2003 that a series of investigations revealed that the entire scene had been staged. Landes obtained first-hand knowledge of the unfolding of the story, having watched the raw uncut footage with Charles Enderlin himself. “In scene after scene, Palestinians staged scenes of battle, injury, ambulance evacuation, panicked flight, which the cameraman deliberately filmed. There were even signs of makeup men, producers and directors at work.” There was no footage of the boy dying which Enderlin says he had cut. In fact, the boy was still alive at the end of the film.

“Pallywood”:

It was then that Landes coined the term “Pallywood,” a phrase that captures the practice, with the complicity of the MSM, of shooting fake scenes to back up claims against Israel. As one Jordanian editor put it “fake news has a long and distinguished pedigree in the Arab world.”

Palestinians and western journalists defend this practice as “artistic expression … [that] serves to convey the truth… “In other words, the fake footage is an authentic symbol the Israeli occupation.”

An investigative article by James Fallows published in the Atlantic Monthly, concluded that Al Durah could not have been shot dead by Israeli soldiers. He wrote:

“It now appears that the boy cannot have died in the way reported by most of the world’s media and fervently believed throughout the Islamic world. Whatever happened to him, he was not shot by the Israeli soldiers who were known to be involved in the day’s fighting …The truth about this case will probably never be determined.”

Other case studies are dissected in the book, such as the incident in the Jenin refugee camp in 2002. In response to repeated suicide bombings killing hundreds of Israeli civilians, the IDF raided the Jenin refugee camp which was the epicenter of Palestinian terrorism at the time. The IDF went house to house looking for the terrorists in order to minimize civilian casualties rather than bombing from the air. As a result, 23 IDF soldiers lost their lives. The press accepted the claim of Palestinians that “hundreds” of Palestinians were killed by the IDF with zero physical evidence (one reporter observed that they could not see any dead people but “we could smell them”). When the hospitals turned out to be empty of injured and dead Palestinians, the press concluded that the dead must have been buried somewhere (similar to baseless assertions of large numbers of Gazan civilians being” buried under the rubble”). After an investigation, when it was discovered that a total of 52-56 Palestinians were killed, 40 of whom were combatants, some journalists retracked their reporting but some doubled down, including Andrea Koppel and Janine di Giovanni, who are among the most respected reporters in the field.

Progressivism, Liberalism, Anti-Imperialism and Anti-Colonialism

Modern journalism and academia tend towards liberlism. Landes employs game theory to understand liberalism. Liberal thinking posits that by introducing “positive sum” dynamics in interactions with cultures that operate according to a “zero sum” mentality, we can change their attitudes and behavior. In a positive sum society, adversaries work cooperatively to the benefit of both sides. Thus, the belief that “war doesn’t solve anything.” The “peace process” with the Palestinians was predicated on the rational positive-sum assumption that, offered the state they claimed to want, Palestinians would forebear from killing Israelis and abandon their zero-sum ideology whereby Israel’s destruction is the end-game, trumping even their own economic and civic well-being. But what actually happens in the case of Western liberal interaction with Islamist domination ideology, is that the latter exploits the good intentions of the former. Since liberals are eager to see the best in “other” cultures, they become pawns of the Islamist demagogues. Eventually, refusing to judge human nature as good or bad, caused liberal thinkers to misinterpret signs that the culture was endemically belligerent to the West and no amount of good will can change that. Accordingly, they blame westerners for provoking the violent behavior of the Islamist extremists. A case in point was a riot in Afghanistan which resulted in the murder of seven UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan workers, two of whom were beheaded, in response to a copy of the Quran being burned in Florida. This incident was described by a senior official as “understandable passions.” In a conversation had by Landes with a colleague about suicide bombings in Israel, the colleague asked, rhetorically “What choice do they have?” As if the Palestinians had not just been offered a Palestinian state in 96% of the West Bank with a portion of Israeli territories to make up for the 4% where Jews were living, Gaza and with a capital in East Jerusalem. This was flatly rejected by Arafat and kicked off the second intifada. Landes calls this “humanitarian racism whereby Muslims should not be subject to moral expectations.”

Related to the “positive sum” mentality, is the “postmodern” and “postcolonial” viewpoint that came to dominate leftist thinking in the late 20^th century in response to imperialism by western society that was thought to destroy other “weaker” cultures. This way of thinking rejects the view that western standards are superior to any other. Eager to distance themselves from western imperialism and the guilt they feel, they maintain that all cultures have equal value. Thus, when Palestinians commit acts of terror that should horrify any civilized person, the leftist thinking does not accept that there is something wrong within that culture and immediately assumes that Israel must have done something equally awful to provoke it.