By: Phyllis Chesler

Last evening, I was overjoyed by a visit from my longtime pal and fellow cognitive warrior Dr. Richard Landes. We remained deep in conversation for three hours. Richard came here despite icy streets in this, our current Ice Age. He came here all the way from Jerusalem and from a new place in the far North of Israel, where he can more easily do his work in silence and where the sunsets on the beach are “magnificent.” (Actually, he came here after a visit to Providence, R.I., and to Philadelphia, PA.) Still, the Ice Age.

Richard is an American, a man who not only made aliyah to Israel, but is also a world traveler; he often visits Europe, especially France, the UK, and Germany, as well the United States. Over the years, I’ve been on many panels and at countless conferences with him. We have both met with and written about major cases in which American professors have been persecuted for their support of Israel (Dr. Andrew Pessin, for example), and we have both written about Philippe Karsenty, in France, a man who is otherwise known as our modern-day Dreyfus.

What did Richard and I talk about? As always, we discussed our work, our ideas, what’s happening right now, what we both “knew” would happen, what our own work and that of our colleagues have taught us. Deftly, oh so carefully, we avoided talking about what we should do–collectively, individually, as Western Civilization erodes even further and as Israel and Jews remain under the most profound attack.

Richard singlehandedly coined the phrase “Pallywood” and analyzed the Al Durah case as the blood libel that it was–and still remains.

Richard is, by “trade,” a major academic historian and author specializing in Millennialism; those who believe in this expect that, at some point in the future, this world riddled with injustice and evil will be transformed into heaven on earth. Trained as a medievalist, Richard’s early work focused on the period around 1000 CE, a moment, in his opinion, of both cultural mutation (origins of the modern West) and intense apocalyptic and millennial expectations.

He authored the Encyclopedia of Millennialism and Millennial Movements (Berkshire Reference Works; Routledge, NY, 2000); Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience (Oxford U. Press, 2011), and The Paranoid Apocalypse: A Hundred-Year Retrospective on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (NYU Press, 2011).

At the same time, he studied how communications technology shapes our culture. He also began analyzing the controversial issue of “honor-shame” cultures and their relationship to modernity.

In 2005, he launched a media-oversight project called The Second Draft in order to look at what the news media calls their “first draft of history.” There, he first published a series of documentaries, According to Palestinian Sources, about the Muhammad al Durah Affair, an episode of “fake news” that he considers the first post-modern blood libel, the first successful blood libel in the West since the Holocaust:

Pallywood

Al Durah: The Making of an Icon

Icon of Hatred.

Since January 2005 he has been blogging at The Augean Stables, a name chosen to describe the current condition of the Mainstream News Media (MSNM) in the West.

As a result of this work on the MSNM, he has come to understand the role of cognitive warfare in the campaign of apocalyptic Jihad against the West in the 21st century, and the abysmal record of the West in defending itself in this critical theater of War. He published this work: Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad.

At some point, he began to focus on Global Jihad and radical, political, and fundamentalist Islam. He’s produced films. He’s analyzed footage. His two blogsites, The Second Draft and The Augean Stables are an important knowledge-based addition to the internet.

Richard should be interviewed and recorded everywhere, again and again. I would send his work into space in a time capsule and/or bury it here somewhere safe until peace breaks out and evil takes a break. And after our universities, think tanks, political leaders, and world bodies regain some measure of sanity and balance.