by Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld
Interview Series: Prof. Richard Landes, Boston Univ., says "The best known conspiracy theory claims that the US itself or the Mossad did 9/11. The postmodern song runs: We are to blame, our enemy is innocent."
“Conspiracy theories coming out of the Muslim world are accompanied by another surprising phenomenon. In the past, conspiracists blamed a malevolent “other” – the Jews, the lepers, the witches, the communists. Now we find Western believers in conspiracy theories which target themselves – for instance on 9/11 – in which they confirm the paranoid accusations of their enemies. Postmodern conspiracy theory’s siren song runs: ‘We’ are to blame, ‘our’ enemy is innocent.”
Professor Richard Landes of Boston University was trained as a Medievalist. He focuses on the interaction between elites and commoners in various societies. He has published many books and maintains several websites including: ‘The Second Draft’[i] and a blog, the ‘Augean Stables.’[ii]
Landes observes: “In the last millennium of Western and Middle Eastern history, the more fevered the conspiracy theory, the more the Jews play a key role— from blood libels and international plots to global ambitions to enslave mankind. Communities terrified by their impotence in the face of the Black Death blamed the Jews, accusing them of poisoning the wells to kill their neighbors.
"Conspiracy theories simplify some people’s moral universe: ‘the bad things that happen to us are not our fault but due to the evil of others.’
“Conspiracy theories demand and justify extreme action. Anything is permitted when struggling for one’s very existence against some agent plotting to destroy ‘us.’ At their worst, they are ‘warrants for genocide.’[iii]
“The book The Protocols of the Elders of Zion for example, is transparent forgery. If readers are impartial historians can document that.[iv] But a rational approach has limited impact on believers who argue, as Hitler did, that even if The Protocols is forged, it represents a higher truth.[v]
"The Shoah offers the most startling example: perpetrated by people in the grip of mass paranoia, who believed in a giant Jewish conspiracy.
“After World War II, Nazi conspiracy theories about the Jews were the beneficiaries of Arab hospitality.[vi] Faced with their humiliating failure to wipe out an independent state of dhimmis in the heart of Dar al Islam, Arabs turned to the Protocols – not a rag-tag army of Jews, but a vast international conspiracy defeated the might of seven Arab armies.
“Since 2000 however, the conspiracy mindset has changed significantly in the Arab and Muslim world. The intensity, variety, and sophistication of the conspiracies’ representations have risen exponentially.[vii] The mainstream media is host to all kinds of conspiracy narratives, from baked goods made by Jews with Muslim boys’ blood,[viii] to elaborate film productions depicting horrendous, bloodthirsty Jewish conspiracies to destroy Arabs and Islam.[ix]
“The content of such outlets – from the Palestinian Authority TV to Al Jazeera TV, to the major Egyptian daily Al-Ahram – reveals a degree of paranoia, hatemongering, and conspiracism with few parallels in history. In the Arab and Muslim world, conspiracy is publicly embraced by elites, including moderate, pro-Western, liberal Muslim circles.[x]
Conspiracy theory is so pervasive in this culture that, as one observer put it: ‘In the Middle East, if you can't explain politics with a conspiracy theory, don’t bother.’[xi] Future historians will probably find that present anti-Semitism in Arab and Muslim societies reached an even higher fever pitch than that of the Nazis.[xii]”
“In the past, conspiracism inspired a certain fatalism among Muslims: who can fight so mighty an enemy? But in the 21st century, these narratives have spurred action. Indeed, they lie at the heart of the ideology behind suicide terror attacks, the bane of our new century.
“Many Western ‘progressives’ embrace these conspiracy theories which target them and the civic polities in which they live. This leads to the marriage of a pre-modern sadism and post-modern masochism. Muslims make paranoid accusations scapegoating the West. Hyper self-critical Westerners accept these as true.
“Organizations such as Hizbulah, Hamas, and al-Qaeda shifted to the offensive at the beginning of the 21st century, with Western cooperation. In particular, they scapegoated Israel, the Jew among the nations.[xiii] The first spectacular success occurred during the outbreak of the Second Intifada, also called the Oslo War, in the fall of 2000.”[xiv] The Palestinians may have lost on the field, but they won the propaganda war.”
Landes concludes; “Any progressive or liberal who wants a vibrant multi-cultural, civic society in the twenty-first century, needs to confront the compulsive scapegoating of the Muslim world.
"We should say to them: ‘Learning to live in peace with Israel is part of belonging to a mature global community. As long as you treat your own commoners as sacrificial victims on the altar of avenging your lost honor, do not complain to us about how ‘they’ oppress ‘you.’”
[iii]. Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).
[iv]. For the relationship between the Protocols and its inspiration, the mid-nineteenth-century Dialogue in Hell of Montesquieu and Machiavelli, see Cohn’s appendix to Warrant for Genocide. See also, Paranoid Apocalypse: One Hundred Year Retrospective on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (NYU Press, 2011).
[v]. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 307-08; David Redles, Hitler and the Apocalypse Complex: Salvation and the Spiritual Power of Nazism (New York: NYU Press, 2005), Ch. 3.
[vi]. Kenneth Timmerman, Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War on America (New York: Crown Forum, 2003).
[vii]. For the best archive of this activity, see MEMRI’s collection of anti-Semitic material in the Arab media (www.memri.org/antisemitism.html).
[viii]. www.adl.org/Anti_semitism/arab/saudi_blood_l.asp.
[ix]. http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP62703. Horseman without a Horse
[x]. Tariq Fatah, “MCC Expresses Relief at Arrest of Alleged Terror Cell,” Press Release, Muslim Canadian Congress, 3 June 2006, www.muslimcanadiancongress.org/20060603.html.
[xi]. Tom Friedman, “Mideast Rules to Live by”, New York Times, December 20, 2006, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A06EEDE1031F933A15751C1A9609C8B63; Daniel Pipes, The Hidden Hand, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998).
[xii]. Matthias Küntzel, “National Socialism and Anti-Semitism in the Arab World,” Jewish Political Studies Review, Vol. 17, Nos. 1-2 (Spring 2005), www.jcpa.org/phas/phas-kuntzel-s05.htm.
[xiii]. See the discussion of pre-2000 activity in David Cook, Understanding Jihad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 128-61.
[xiv]. On the Second Intifada’s impact on global Jihad, see Richard Landes, “How French TV Fudged the Death of Mohammed Al Durah,” New Republic Online, 17 October 2006, www.tnr.com/user/nregi.mhtml?i=w061016&s=landes101706.
Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/11361#.T10O7FFvIi4
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
1 comment:
Shelby Steele seems to have the answer in the Stonegate blog in a talk he gave about the fictional canon or "Narrative of Perpetual Palestinian Victimhood". He said it was a "poetic truth", explaining that:
"Poetic truths like [Palestinian victimhood] are marvelous because no facts and no reason can ever penetrate. Supporters of Israel are up against a poetic truth. We keep hitting it with all the facts. We keep hitting it with obvious logic and reason. And we are so obvious and conspicuously right that we assume it is going to have an impact and it never does.
Why not? These narratives, these poetic truths, are the source of their power. Focusing on the case of the Palestinians, who would they be if they were not victims of white supremacy? They would just be poor people in the Middle East. They would be backwards. They would be behind Israel in every way. So this narrative is the source of their power. It is the source of their money. Money comes from around the world. It is the source of their self-esteem. Without it, would they be able to compete with Israeli society? They would have to confront in themselves a certain inferiority with regard to Israel – as most other Arab nations would have to confront an inferiority in themselves and be responsible for it.
The idea that the problem is Israel, that the problem is the Jews, protects Palestinians from having to confront that inferiority or do anything about it or overcome it. The idea among Palestinians that they are victims means more to them than anything else. It is everything. It is the centerpiece of their very identity and it is the way they define themselves as human beings in the world. It is not an idle thing. Our facts and our reason are not going to penetrate easily that definition or make any progress.
The question is, how do they get away with a poetic truth, based on such an obvious series of falsehoods? "http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2586/palestinian-victimhood-narrative
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