{"id":811,"date":"2016-02-02T12:22:08","date_gmt":"2016-02-02T12:22:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/?p=811"},"modified":"2016-02-02T12:22:08","modified_gmt":"2016-02-02T12:22:08","slug":"the-age-of-the-terror-selfie-tablet-jan-5-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/2016\/02\/02\/the-age-of-the-terror-selfie-tablet-jan-5-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"The Age of the Terror Selfie (Tablet, Jan. 5, 2016)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>At\u00a0a lonely army\u00a0outpost in 1994, Israel was shown the difference between radicals and fanatics\u2014and between soldiers and storytellers. But the West didn\u2019t learn.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>This fall and winter have seen many of us here in Israel consuming a miserable kind of reality TV: blurry clips of young Palestinian Muslims with knives seeking release in murder and martyrdom, lunging, stabbing, falling stricken to the ground, the action captured by cellphones or security cameras; an imam in Gaza waving a knife and calling on the faithful to render us into \u201cbody parts\u201d; a fighter from the Islamic State, our new neighbor, warning us of the violence he and his comrades will inflict when they arrive. The effect was so disturbing that it triggered psychological stress akin to that of a real war, though the fatalities barely added up to a skirmish. No land was conquered or lost, no concessions demanded. With our computers and cellphones, as the director of military intelligence put it, \u201cWe\u2019re all brainwashing ourselves.\u201d The battlefield had moved almost entirely inside our own minds.<\/p>\n<p>In the past month or two it has been more apparent than ever that the confluence of unfiltered information, dramatic images of bloodshed, and fanatical interpretations of Islam have converged to become one of the key forces shaping our lives. That makes it worth looking for the moment this force began to make itself felt in earnest. My selection, a subjective one based on my personal experience, can be found on the front page of the Israeli daily <em>Maariv <\/em>of Oct. 31, 1994.<\/p>\n<p>Read <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/jewish-news-and-politics\/196313\/the-age-of-the-terror-selfie\" target=\"_blank\">more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At\u00a0a lonely army\u00a0outpost in 1994, Israel was shown the difference between radicals and fanatics\u2014and between soldiers and storytellers. But the West didn\u2019t learn. This fall and winter have seen many of us here in Israel consuming a miserable kind of reality TV: blurry clips of young Palestinian Muslims with knives seeking release in murder and martyrdom, lunging, stabbing, falling stricken &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=811"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":812,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811\/revisions\/812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}