Manufacturing and Exploiting Compassion:
No. 597 September-October 2013
- Israel, a liberal democracy caught between tyrannies and sectarian violence, is increasingly perceived as uniquely evil.
- In the struggle for hearts and minds, feelings trump facts. Imagery and accusations that automatically trigger public compassion are incomparably more compelling than dry, defensive argumentation. We are “wired” by evolution to support those we perceive as innocent victims in distress, even when the facts do not mandate such support.
- The portrayal of Palestinians as innocent victims in distress has been the key to Palestinian propaganda’s popular success. Through the mass-production of heartrending imagery centered on children, staged “news,” manipulative rhetoric, and rigid censorship, Palestinian propaganda has successfully used the media to recast Palestinians as entirely blameless victims.
- Moreover, a number of prominent journalists for international news agencies have concurrently been salaried employees of Palestinian administrations. Both Agence France Presse and the Associated Press have employed journalists with close ties to the Palestinian Authority.
- Israelis have long tried to win minds with a multitude of defensive arguments and legal justifications, and have lost. Israel will have to define itself to the world in a way that is at least as emotionally appealing as the Palestinians’ saga of victimhood.
- Rather than fighting spurious accusations with impersonal facts, Israel must fight Palestinian propaganda’s exploitation of public compassion with a touching but morally correct narrative of its own.
Blaise Pascal once observed that “people…arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof, but on the basis of what they find attractive.”1 Today this is confirmed by science, and it explains why Palestinians have won the media war.
In 2011 – an age of abundant and verifiable information – opinion polls found that as many as 40-60 percent of Europeans believed that “Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians.”2 That so many Westerners baselessly accuse Israel of genocide is all the more baffling when one considers that it is Israel that is regularly threatened with annihilation.3 Those poll results are not peculiar to Europe: similar worrying trends have been noted among American youth, liberals, and minorities.4 Israel, a liberal democracy caught between tyrannies and sectarian violence, is increasingly perceived as uniquely evil.5 Tired refrains can no longer obfuscate the truth: the success of the Palestinians in generating such widespread hostility towards Israel has been earned, and in fact can be scientifically explained.
In the struggle for hearts and minds, propagandists for the Palestinian cause intuited long ago that which science now proves: feelings trump facts. Imagery and accusations that automatically trigger public compassion are incomparably more compelling than dry, defensive argumentation. Indeed, compassion – a deeply rooted survival adaptation – has been shown to heavily skew our social attitudes in favor of those we perceive to be innocent victims in distress.6 Suffering children are the ideal triggers of this instinctive compassion.7 In fact, because our social judgment “may be influenced more by emotion than by reason,” we tend to favor those we see as victims in distress even to the detriment of more numerous, but faceless, other victims:8
A number of recent studies support the role of emotions in moral judgment….The researchers’ findings show there is a key relationship between moral judgment and empathic concern in particular, specifically feelings of warmth and compassion in response to someone in distress.9
Because “it makes us feel good when we can alleviate that suffering” (by siding with perceived victims), the repeated experience of compassion ingrains in our minds “self-other similarity to those who are vulnerable, who suffer, and who are in need.”10 This is a critically important fact: we are “wired” by evolution to support those we perceive as innocent victims in distress, even when the facts do not mandate such support.11
The portrayal of Palestinians as innocent victims in distress is the common thread running through all of Palestinian propaganda – and has been the key to its popular success. Through the mass-production of heartrending imagery centered on children, staged “news,” manipulative rhetoric, and rigid censorship, Palestinian propaganda has successfully used the media to recast Palestinians as entirely blameless victims of Israeli brutality. Having secured the public’s empathy and bypassed its critical reasoning by portraying Palestinians as helpless victims, Palestinian propaganda has created millions of Western allies for the Palestinians, and sheltered Palestinians from any accountability for their political choices.
1. Children as Weapons of Mass Deception
ppksky Said:
But you never hear Israel’s leaders stress this or point out the Jews have rights that trump those of the Arabs. One has the impression that Israel is an illegitimate entity that violates Arab rights of self-determination. If there is a case to be made for the Jewish right of self-determination, its nowhere to be seen.
As Yamit and Shy Guy can tell you – Israel’s idiotic leaders sound like your sleazy used car salesman or bad lawyer with a crooked toupee! The arguments they make insult the intelligence of a child. Israel’s hasbara is based on legal arguments and abstract history! No one cares and the real world isn’t an academic seminar.
That’s why Israel is losing ground. While the Arabs argue the justice of their cause, Israel by default is ensuring their case is the stronger one. There are ways to rebut the danger of establishing a Palestinian Arab state but not in the way Israel has been doing it to date.
Why would anyone go to such lengths as this to point out the corrupt character of the promotion of Palestinian Nationalism without pointing out the obvious? Palestinian Nationalism is a fake nationalism. The claims that there is any such thing as a Palestinian people is a lie. Palestinian Nationalism exists only as an antisemitic cult to wage war against Israel. The very term “Palestinian” was coined as propaganda against a Jewish Israel by the Roman Empire.
This whole exposition is a questionable effort.