A Winner of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa 2023 Bernard Lewis Prize
Landes,
a medievalist and historian of apocalyptic movements, takes us through the
first years of the third millennium (2000-2003), documenting how a radical
inability of Westerners to understand the medieval mentality that drove Global
Jihad prompted a series of disastrous misinterpretations and misguided
reactions that have shaped our so-far unhappy century. These misinterpretations
in 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2005, contributed fundamentally to the ever-worsening moral
and empirical disorientations of our information elites (journalists,
academics, pundits). So while journalists reported Palestinian war propaganda
as news (lethal journalism), they were also reporting Jihadi war propaganda as
news (own-goal war journalism). These radical disorientations have
created our current dilemma of pervasive information distrust, deep splits
within the voting public in most democracies, the politicization of science,
and the inability of Western elites to defend their civilization, and instead,
to stand down before an invasion.
