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Drawing
on the dynamics of apocalyptic movements, Landes looks at the turn of the millennium in
terms of a radical mismatch between two millennial styles, an Islamist pre-modern
(Caliphators) and a Western post-modern (Woke). Due to a striking cognitive
failure, Westerners could neither see nor discuss the foe they faced, and
repeatedly, convinced they were bending the arc of history towards justice,
took sharp wrong turns.
List of contents
Acknowledgements
Warning to the Reader: If I'm Right, We're in Deep Trouble
Introduction: Reflections of a Heretical Medievalist
Part One-Selective History of the Disastrous Early Aughts (2000-2003)
1. Al Durah: Spreading a Jihadi Blood Libel (2000)
2. 9-11: Taking the World by Storm (2001)
3. Jenin: Cheering on the Jihadi Suicide Terror (2002)
4. Danoongate: The Muslim Street Extends Dar al Islam (2005-6)
Part Two: Key Players
5. The Premodern Mindset-Zero-Sum Honor
6. Caliphators: A Fifteenth-Century Millennial Movement
7. Liberal Cognitive Egocentrics and Their Demopathic Kryptonite
8. The Global Progressive Left (GPL) in the Twenty-First Century
9. Compliant, Lethal, Own-Goal War Journalism: The Bane of the West in the Twenty-First Century
10. Anti-Zionist Jews: The Pathologies of Self-Criticism
Part Three: Are We Really Going to Let This Happen (Again)?
11. 2000: The Launch of Global Jihad
12. Y2KMind: Oxymoronic Progressives
13. Preemptive Dhimmitude: Unwitting Submission
14. Woke Jihad: Contact Apocalyptic Highs
15. To Sound Minds: On Our Watch?
Glossary for Understanding Caliphator Cogwar in the Twenty-First Century
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Professor Richard
Landes was trained as a medievalist and taught in the Boston University History Department. He is
now an independent historian living in Jerusalem. His
work focuses on apocalyptic beliefs at the the turn of the first millennium (the Peace of God) and the second millennium (Global Jihad, Woke).
Summary
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.
