In Humanism of the Other, Emmanuel Levinas argues that it is not only possible but of the highest exigency to understand one's humanity through the humanity of others. Based in a new appreciation for ethics, and taking new distances from the phenomenology of Hegel, Heidegger, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty, the idealism of Plato and Kant, and the skepticism of Nietzsche and Blanchot, Levinas rehabilitates humanism and restores its promises. He expresses disappointment with the revolutions that became bureaucracies and totalitarian governments, and the national liberation movements that eventually led to oppression and international wars. Defining the human as subject, ego, synthesis, identification, cognition, and mood all too easily lead to subjugation, persecution, and murder. Painfully aware of the long history of dehumanization which reached its apotheosis in Hitler and Nazism, Levinas does not underestimate the difficulty of reconciling oneself with another. The humanity of the human, Levinas argues, is not discoverable through mathematics, rational metaphysics or introspection. Rather, it is found in the recognition that the suffering and mortality of others are the obligations and morality of the self.

September 30, 2000, Netzarim Junction in the Gaza Strip. State-owned France 2 TV channel reports the shooting of a Palestinian youth, Mohamed Al Dura and the wounding of his father Jamal, "targets of gunfire from the Israeli position." Jerusalem bureau chief Charles Enderlin intones, "the child is dead, his father critically wounded." The accusation enflames the news stream, ignites a wave of Jew hatred unlike anything known since the Shoah. Blood libel. Israelis are branded as child-killers. A war of atrocities, the "Al Aqsa Intifada," is unleashed against Israeli civilians, Jews by the thousands are attacked in France and throughout Europe. Is the "death of Mohamed al Dura" a news broadcast? Or is it a staged scene, the creation of a myth, a lethal narrative launched in a war of conquest disguised as the pathetic cries of helpless victims. How did a crudely fabricated video leap into Western media from a Palestinian source and circulate without encountering a critical eye? Astute observers did in fact notice incongruities in the fleeting images of the alleged incident. They have investigated, analyzed, reported on their findings. But it takes something more than rational exposes to counter an explosive myth."