Dr. Richard Landes is a Historian and author, as well as the Chair, Council of Scholars, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.
Dr. Landes taught at Boston University for over two decades. His BA is from Harvard, MA and Ph. D. are from Princeton University and he did additional studies at Ecole Normale Superieure. He founded the Center for Millennial Studies; has written many publications, and done much post doc work on Peace and Conflict. He is now retired, writing history of both the 11th and 21st centuries in Jerusalem.
Landes coined the term “Pallywood” referring to “productions staged by the Palestinian Arabs, in front of (and often with cooperation from) Western camera crews, for the purpose of promoting anti-Israel propaganda by disguising it as news.”
In November 2022, Landes published his latest book which “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 and produced the “new antisemitism.” These misinterpretations in 2000 (Al Durah and Intifada), 2001 (9-11), 2002 (Jenin “Massacre”), and 2005 (Danish Cartoon Affair), 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, metastasizing antisemitism, politicization of academia, 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.”
