Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?

A Winner of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa 2023 Bernard Lewis PrizeLandes,a medievalist and historian of apocalyptic movements, takes us through thefirst years of the third millennium (2000-2003), documenting how a radicalinability of Westerners to understand the medieval mentality that drove GlobalJihad prompted a series of disastrous misinterpretations and misguidedreactions that have shaped our so-far unhappy century. These misinterpretationsin 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2005, contributed fundamentally to the ever-worsening moraland empirical disorientations of our information elites (journalists,academics, pundits). So while journalists reported Palestinian war propagandaas news (lethal journalism), they were also reporting Jihadi war propaganda asnews (own-goal war journalism). These radical disorientations havecreated our current dilemma of pervasive information distrust, deep splitswithin 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.