I've been studying related issues for the past 20-odd years. It's my impression that this anti-Palestinian trend in the Mainstream is very recent -- basically post-Oct. 7. For years, if not decades, before that, the Mainstream -- which includes not only news media, but also academe, politics, arts & entertainment, etc. -- tended to be pr…
I've been studying related issues for the past 20-odd years. It's my impression that this anti-Palestinian trend in the Mainstream is very recent -- basically post-Oct. 7. For years, if not decades, before that, the Mainstream -- which includes not only news media, but also academe, politics, arts & entertainment, etc. -- tended to be pro-Islam & pro-Palestinian. Writers like Andrew Bostom, Robert Spencer, Ibn Warraq, Hugh Fitzgerald, David Horowitz have documented and analyzed this for years -- and they are either ignored by the Mainstream, or they are demonized as "Islamophobes" and "racists". Ibn Warraq and Hugh Fitzgerald especially have concentrated on analyzing how academe has been doing this. Fitzgerald called Middle East studies throughout Western universities (abbreviated as MESA) as "MESA Nostra" (a pun on the Mafia's "Cosa Nostra"), documented a systemic pattern of handicapping any significant criticism of Islam.
According to French philosopher Jacques Ellul, this tendency goes back to the 1980s and 90s. Ellul was a European academic and knew that world.
Speaking of academe, he complained as long ago as the early 1980s about already then a climate of inhibition. In his preface to the 1985 edition of Bat Ye'or's book (The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam), Ellul wrote:
"In France, criticisms of Islam or Arab nations is no longer tolerated."
And in his preface he goes on to articulate many other interesting habits of this Western intolerance to open rational criticism of Islam, such as:
"Thus one 'demonstrates' that it is false that Arabs were cruel invaders, that they rampaged with terror and massacres against peoples who would not submit... that [it is false that] Islam was intolerant, on the contrary, it was Tolerance itself. [That] it is false that women are held in an inferior state and that she was excluded from the city. [That] it is false that jihad was a material war; etc. etc...."
Years later, in 1991, Ellul wrote in the foreword to Bay Ye'or's book (The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude):
"In the general current of favorable predispositions to Islam... there has been a reluctance to allude to the jihad. In Western eyes, it would be a sort of dark stain on the greatness and purity of Islam."
And he goes on to say about Bat Ye'or's book:
"This book neatly highlights what one is concealing -- I would say carefully concealing -- so widespread is the agreement on this silence that it can only be the result of a tacit agreement based on implicit presuppositions."
I've been studying related issues for the past 20-odd years. It's my impression that this anti-Palestinian trend in the Mainstream is very recent -- basically post-Oct. 7. For years, if not decades, before that, the Mainstream -- which includes not only news media, but also academe, politics, arts & entertainment, etc. -- tended to be pro-Islam & pro-Palestinian. Writers like Andrew Bostom, Robert Spencer, Ibn Warraq, Hugh Fitzgerald, David Horowitz have documented and analyzed this for years -- and they are either ignored by the Mainstream, or they are demonized as "Islamophobes" and "racists". Ibn Warraq and Hugh Fitzgerald especially have concentrated on analyzing how academe has been doing this. Fitzgerald called Middle East studies throughout Western universities (abbreviated as MESA) as "MESA Nostra" (a pun on the Mafia's "Cosa Nostra"), documented a systemic pattern of handicapping any significant criticism of Islam.
According to French philosopher Jacques Ellul, this tendency goes back to the 1980s and 90s. Ellul was a European academic and knew that world.
Speaking of academe, he complained as long ago as the early 1980s about already then a climate of inhibition. In his preface to the 1985 edition of Bat Ye'or's book (The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam), Ellul wrote:
"In France, criticisms of Islam or Arab nations is no longer tolerated."
And in his preface he goes on to articulate many other interesting habits of this Western intolerance to open rational criticism of Islam, such as:
"Thus one 'demonstrates' that it is false that Arabs were cruel invaders, that they rampaged with terror and massacres against peoples who would not submit... that [it is false that] Islam was intolerant, on the contrary, it was Tolerance itself. [That] it is false that women are held in an inferior state and that she was excluded from the city. [That] it is false that jihad was a material war; etc. etc...."
Years later, in 1991, Ellul wrote in the foreword to Bay Ye'or's book (The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude):
"In the general current of favorable predispositions to Islam... there has been a reluctance to allude to the jihad. In Western eyes, it would be a sort of dark stain on the greatness and purity of Islam."
And he goes on to say about Bat Ye'or's book:
"This book neatly highlights what one is concealing -- I would say carefully concealing -- so widespread is the agreement on this silence that it can only be the result of a tacit agreement based on implicit presuppositions."