Israel And Its Apologists Weaponize Sympathy In Order To Facilitate Genocide
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
Activist and author Yves Engler has been jailed by Montreal police for criticizing media figure Dahlia Kurtz and her support for Israeli atrocities in Gaza, after Kurtz said Engler’s comments made her feel “afraid for my safety”.
After Engler wrote about the charges against him, he reported that he was subsequently charged for “harassing the police” by drawing public attention to his case.
It’s fascinating how everyone who supports Israel always collapses into playing the victim at the earliest opportunity—even western police forces tasked with persecuting Israel’s critics. Israel models this victim-LARPing behavior, and its entire goon squad follows its example.
But what’s interesting is that being perceived as the victim has no value in and of itself — what has value is sympathy. It is sympathy that Israel’s supporters are after. Playing the victim is just a means toward that end.
If you’ve ever known anybody with a personality disorder that inclines them toward manipulative behavior, you may have noticed that one of the main things they manipulate in people is their sympathy. They do everything they can to draw as much sympathy toward themselves while working to kill off any sympathy that people might have toward their perceived enemies. They’ll sacrifice almost any piece on their psychosocial chessboard in order to control a bit more of the sympathy among the people in their life.
They do this because sympathy is a fundamental primer for narrative control. If you sympathize with someone, you are much more likely believe the things they say and trust their narratives about what’s going on. If you lack sympathy for someone, then anything they say is going to be viewed with much more skepticism.
This is just how humans are wired as a social animal. We’re evolutionarily conditioned to place more trust in people we perceive as belonging to our own tribe than we place in those outside it — those within our group are the ones with whom we sympathize. That’s why for example you’ll see Trump supporters start voicing opinions they’d never held before as soon as Trump and his MAGA pundits take a certain position on a given issue; they sympathize with the source, so they espouse its position on that issue.
A good manipulator understands this, so they do everything they can to make sure everyone is sympathetic toward them and unsympathetic toward anyone whose interests conflict with theirs. That’s why we’re still talking about October 7 even after 16 months of genocidal atrocities and ethnic cleansing plans. Israel and its apologists throughout western governments and media have been working diligently to draw sympathy toward Israel for those killed and abducted on October 7, and to stomp out all sympathy for the orders of magnitude more Palestinians who’ve been killed and abducted by Israel. This has allowed narratives which serve the interests of Israel to dominate the mainstream western consensus on this issue, thereby bringing in concrete material benefits like weapons, bulldozers, the weakening of Israel’s enemies, and the eventual replacement of Palestinians with Israeli Jews on what used to be Palestinian territory.
So you can see how victim-LARPing leads to sympathy, sympathy leads to believed narratives, and believed narratives lead to concrete material benefits. All skillful manipulators understand this dynamic and use it in their own lives; the only thing that differs is the specific narratives they use and the material benefits they’re trying to extract. One manipulator might use sympathy to extract sexual favors from women and deference from men. Another might use it to extract money or resources. Another might use it for status in their social circle. It’s on a different scale and has different objectives, but the dynamic is the same.
Normal people don’t typically understand this, so we’re highly susceptible to these kinds of manipulations because they tend to fly under our radar. Normal people place a lot more value on telling the truth and doing what’s right than highly manipulative people do, because normal people prioritize human connection much more highly than manipulators. Normal people use language to communicate and understand and connect with each other, while manipulators use it to extract material benefits. These are two drastically different ways of relating to one’s social environment, and normal people are often completely unaware that the other way of relating is even a feature for some of the people in their lives. This makes them ideal targets for manipulation.
That’s what you’re seeing when Israel cries victim about October 7 or Israeli hostages held by Hamas. It’s what you see when Israel supporters shriek about an entirely made-up crisis of “antisemitism” in our society. It’s what you see when the propaganda machine for the western empire frames its enemies as the evil perpetrators of “unprovoked” aggressions to which the empire is just an innocent passive witness, or when they try to generate sympathy for the poor oppressed people living under this or that evil dictatorship that happens to be sitting on top of a lot of oil. They’re manipulating public sympathy so they can control the narrative, so that by controlling the narrative they can advance their material agendas.
There’s a legendary video of Norman Finkelstein shouting down a sobbing young Israel apologist on a college campus for trying to play the Holocaust card to silence his criticisms of Israel. One of the reasons this video is so widely shared and resonates with so many people is because Finkelstein happens to be the Jewish son of Holocaust survivors and could therefore speak with great authority, but another reason is because it’s such a skillful shutting down of an attempt to manipulate sympathy for the benefit of the Israeli state. By taking sympathy off the table, he took away the Israel apologist’s primary weapon.
Israel and its supporters understand the power of narrative control better than most. That’s why they have a carefully cultivated discipline dedicated to narrative control with its own special name: hasbara. Hasbara is all about manipulating the narrative about Israel in mainstream public discourse.
The real currency of our world is not money or resources, nor gold, nor even weapons. The real currency of our world is narrative and the ability to control it, because if you can control the narrative, you can control everyone.
The average human life is dominated by mental stories, so if you can control the stories that humans are telling each other about their world, you can control the humans.
If you’ve ever tried to meditate, then you know how pervasively dominated human consciousness is by mental chatter. Our minds are constantly babbling about how things are, how we are, how the people around us are, and what’s going on. If you can exert control over how this powerful deluge of mental narrative is occurring for large numbers of people regarding an issue you’ve got a vested interest in, then you have a much better chance of advancing your interests than someone who does not. You have a lot of real power.
Mountains of abuses exist in our world because manipulators understand this dynamic while normal people do not. The strings of our sympathy are continually jerked around without our awareness, by which we are herded into belief systems which advance the interests of the powerful.
That’s why it’s very important to withhold sympathy wherever it’s being weaponized. If someone is using a weapon to hurt people, your first order of business is to take their weapon away from them. You really can’t cede any ground to Israel apologists when they try to tug at your heartstrings about the victims of October 7 or fake “antisemitism” emergencies in western society, because any sympathy you extend in that direction will be used as a weapon to murder and abuse people in the middle east who’ve never done anything to you.
This is something to keep in mind as Israel and its apologists work to whip up public sympathy using dead Israeli children in order to reignite the genocide in Gaza.
Whoever controls the narrative controls the world, and whoever controls sympathy controls the narrative. Never give manipulators that power over people.
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