If there is one common factor that binds all the people who protest Israel’s war campaign it is compassion for the suffering of innocent Palestinian civilians who are caught in the middle of the Israeli war to destroy Hamas. And unquestionably, the Palestinians suffer, terribly. For Westerners, growing up in a positive-sum world that prizes empathy, it is hard not to feel compassion for those suffering like that. It’s enough to make anyone cry. As now Democratic Presidential candidate Kamala Harris said, distancing herself from the protests’ actual content: “They are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza.”  

What I find deeply unsettling, though, is the undertone of anger and moral indignation that underlies so much of this loud compassion for Palestinians suffering. It’s not hard to detect, just behind, at times in front, of this humane anguish, an accompanying tone of anger, a moral indignation: for them it’s not a tragedy, it’s a crime. For some it’s just indignation about Bibi – as if another Israeli leader could come to a lasting agreement with Hamas. For others, it’s the harshest of judgments. “Israel is the cause of this terrible death and destruction! This is genocide!”  

And then, all of a sudden, on the 7th of October, the extravagant empathy that progressives lavished on Palestinian victims was mysteriously not available to Jews when they were victims of Palestinian mass murder, replaced instead with classic honor-shame themes of deliberate contempt.  A young Biden administration National Security official warned Israel about a second term for Biden: “We can help you [Israel] in the way that we can, but you’re not going to continue to lie, and bomb, and kill all these kids without facing serious consequences.” In Biden’s administration, the Israel-aggressor/Palestine-victim narrative seems to be hegemonic. 

Now that Biden has withdrawn, and Kamala Harris is the candidate, things look more troubling. More than Biden, Harris is an avid consumer of deeply misleading figures about casualties coming from Gaza, Hamas propaganda swallowed whole. She is an active participant in what is inappropriately called the “liberal” (really radical) wing of the Democratic party (her record as “most liberal of all US Senators” was recently removed from GovTrack, presumably lest it alienate the crucial swing voters). Her daughter fund-raises for UNRWA at a time when the organization’s complete immersion in Hamas, the group that victimizes Palestinians the most, has become well-known. She was one of the earliest supporters of a ceasefire that would have left Hamas intact and the hostages in chains. She threatened arms embargo if Israel did not follow American directions on how to defend themselves. 

As someone who knows well Hamas’ use of the Western media to conduct the cognitive campaigns in their war of extermination with Israel, the situation that has emerged since the 7th of October, fills me with alarm. Hamas, in a series of deliberately terrifying maneuvers, savagely attacked an enemy’s civilians and then, hauling off hostages of all ages, took refuge embedded deep, like poisonous bobbit worms, within and under the families and clans of Gaza, guaranteeing their victimization… a new and more intense stage in the war to destroy Israel by getting Gazans killed in order to spread hatred of Jews and to protect Hamas from retaliation. 

And sure enough, the steady stream of images of those victims, pumped into the West, accompanied with unvetted, skewed figures taken seriously, with lengthy specials depicting the most desperate conditions, have rapidly turned Israel’s deeds of self-defense into aggressive war crimes. As one campus protester complained: “What do you want us to do? We wake up to images of Palestinian suffering.” Elizabeth Spiers unwittingly nailed it: they have Palestinian suffering “firehosed into their smartphones.” And they’re addicted to this Palestinian suffering porn. 

Among the lethal journalists like Chris McGreal, the slide from “killed” to “slaughtered” is predictably slippery, the accusation of massacres, and genocide, became for the activists, a matter of dogma, a litmus test of progressive credentials, even of dating eligibility. The Squad entered it into the congressional record, even as South Africa – with friends – brings it to the world court. Hence, the pitiable condition of the Gazans falls fully on the back of the aggressor with the massive war machine, Israel.  

Hamas, ferocious promoters of genocidal hatreds, implacable exterminationist antisemites, part of a mad millenarian movement to conquer the world, who deal brutally with the lives of their own people, somehow, vanishes from the discussion. AOC, who had initially, despite harassment, resisted using the term, defended her belated accusation of genocide: 

When we are talking about famine, the actions of Hamas should not be tied to whether a three-year-old can eat. The actions of Hamas do not justify forcing thousands, hundreds of thousands of people to eat grass as their bodies consume themselves. We and the Israeli government have a right to go after Hamas. But we are talking about a population of millions of innocent Palestinians. 

When Human Rights Watch, the notoriously anti-Israel “human rights” NGO, belatedly (after a dozen reports condemning Israel) came out with a study of the horrors of the 7th of October, they not only did not say anything new, but left out of the study any mention of the 500 miles of tunnels that permitted the leaders to launch the attacks on Israel and hide behind their expendable populace when the retaliation inevitably came.  

When, after meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu, VP and Presidential candidate Kamala Harris says: “What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating. The images of dead children and desperate hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time,” she reveals herself a committed captive of the Hamas-driven, news media-diffused narrative, and though she soft-pedals the angry part of her compassion, it is clear whom she holds responsible. 

The role of Hamas in engineering the catastrophe, in gunning down those of their own people who flee a war zone, in attacking food deliveries, their profitable business controlling supplies even as they steal from hospitals… none of this AOC and other “progressives” find relevant. It’s a good possibility that those who feed her the news haven’t exposed her to any of that and she’s genuinely ignorant… but not self-aware enough to make her hesitate to angrily denounce Israel’s criminality. Angry Compassion. 

And so, the protesters gather, driven by the images, into a heartfelt outcry – ‘Stop the genocide!’  

Not only do the real and merciless genociders get to accuse their unfortunate targets of the crime they plan for them, they receive cheers from a group of “mostly peaceful” and “mostly idealistic,” young, useful infidels at elite Western universities: “Hamas we love you.” 

***

When you think of it, the strategy, however horrifying, is brilliant and wildly successful. An enemy – Caliphators who want the global Caliphate now – seeks to invade and dominate infidel lands – Dar al Harb, Realm of the Sword – but are far too weak to do so weapons in hand. As long as they are weak, they must conduct cognitive war. The treaty of Hudaybiyya. 

For Hamas, on one of the hotter jihadi fronts of this global asymmetrical war, the goal is to invade and destroy Israel. Currently Israel is too strong to be destroyed. But in the meantime, it turns out that the most successful cognitive-war maneuver, for the Palestinian jihadis (with immense gain for their global comrades as well), is to get Palestinians killed, and get the world to blame Israel and further their war of extermination. As Jeffrey Goldberg put it dryly: “While Hamas is expert at getting innocent Palestinians killed, it has made clear that it would rather kill Jews.” 

In Gaza, where this strategy is the most highly refined, Hamas has turned the narrow, densely populated strip into an underground fortress geared for offensive warfare, with a “protective” layer of two million human beings, Gazans, Muslims, above ground, who bear the brunt of the retaliation they provoke. In the last decade, Hamas has dug over 800 kms of tunnel (in an area 41 kms long and 5-13 wide, more than London Underground). Dug initially by lethal child labor, this massive investment of funds and resources follows a simple directive: maximum protection and mobility for the attackers and the weapons below ground, maximum exposure for the civilians above.  

When the jihadis (Hamas, Islamic Jihad) fire their rockets at Israel, they provoke a reaction that will kill the civilian population, whom they will even prevent from evacuating in response to Israeli warnings. In other words, Hamas has invested massively in a formal policy of deliberately harming its own civilians, a politics of human sacrifice. “So what if 15% of the rockets aimed at Israel fall short and kill Gazans. They’re martyrs for the cause and we’ll blame their deaths on Israel.” 

Thus, any Israeli response to this cannibalistic war strategy was a win-win for Hamas: if they did nothing, the jihadis would grow more aggressive until they did. When the Israelis fought back, it produced a flood of images of Palestinian suffering, guaranteed to: 

  • fill the West with images that arouse deep compassion for the victims, and corresponding anger at those who victimize them, namely Israel. 
  • and sooner or later, this Western outrage forces a cease-fire, ensuring Israel never gets to win, and Hamas gets to go to the next round, thus prolonging the agony of the sacrificial Gazans.  

And in the bigger picture, Hamas thereby mobilizes Jihadis around the Ummah (including the West) and fans the flames of Jew-hatred everywhere, even among infidels in Dar al Harb. The actual conflict with Israel aside, these are all major Caliphator goals and victories. Indeed, the strategy now defines the latest incarnation of Caliphator cognitive warfare in Europe: 

Muslim Interaktiv, along with its close cousins, Generation Islam and Realität Islam, is the vanguard of a new generation of German Islamists who have replaced old-school jihadist propaganda with the fresh battle cry of grievance peddling. While the overall goal — to Islamize Western society — remains the same, the new method of adopting the role of an aggrieved minority is more effective because, rather than being overtly illegal, such speech is constitutionally protected. 

The Grievance Jihad. 

***

The presenting problem here is the role of the Western public sphere, and the kind of conversations it holds. Hamas’ terrible sacrificial ploy, designed to trick Western progressives into joining with Caliphator Jihadis, the most brutal supremacists on the planet, could only succeed if Western participants in that public sphere, especially the information professionals, played their Hamas-assigned roles: to present the conflict in terms of Israeli aggression and Palestinian victimization; to inflate the figures of civilian (and especially “children’s” deaths; to give prizes to the most impressive icons of Palestinian suffering; to lead a conversation of “the whole world” in which Israel is the clear villain and must be punished.  

Were our news media not to play their Hamas-assigned role, emphasizing Palestinian civilians suffering and Israeli aggression… were they to seek out reliable numbers of dead rather than rapidly repeat the claims of proven, serial, liars… were they to report Hamas forcing civilians not to evacuate… were they to ask Gazans about resistance to Hamas… were they to report when Jihadi rockets hit Gazans and how Hamas tried, grotesquely, to blame Israel… were they to document the links between Hamas and UNRWA and Hamas and the Nazis… were they to expose their Western audiences to Hamas’ genocidal ideology… were they to interview historians who could point out how reluctant the world was to acknowledge a real genocidal attempt in Rwanda that killed almost a million Tutsis, and yet all of a sudden, eagerly call tens of thousands dead in an urban warzone in Gaza a “genocide”… were they to hold their Arab and Muslim journalists to professional standards… were they to have given the “picture of the year” award to some haunting photo of the terrible catastrophe that Hamas inflicted on Jews who thought they were making peace with their neighbors… then maybe Westerners might hope to keep a moral keel in the face of this onslaught of genocidal war propaganda manipulating their compassion to prepare their destruction. 

But when the public is virtually force-fed Palestinian suffering around the clock, when social media swarm with images, some real some not, when NPR has to warn readers that spending too much time looking at this flood of suffering can be bad to your health… when the news anchors give ample time to people accusing Israel of racism, apartheid, and genocide, but never see fit to discuss these same characteristics, so pervasive in the Palestinian public sphere… when news agencies raise the work of open allies of Hamas “to picture of the year”… then how can Westerners hope to see lines of responsibility and judge both Israelis and Palestinians fairly, i.e., according to their merit, without prejudgment based on framed pictures and procrustean ideologies like intersectionality? 

Seriously, I ask those who feel, angrily, that “although Israel has a right to defend itself, it has not done enough to protect enemy civilians from harm, and this is unacceptable…” – what do you think of a strategy that maximizes one’s own civilians’ deaths even as it seeks the to kill all your neighbors? How can you let such merciless people manipulate your compassion for their people, a compassion they do not share, and manipulate you to side with them, to affirm their terrible projection of genocide? When other hate speech is everywhere condemned down to the last microaggression, why are people shouting “Hamas we love you,” when Hamas is one of the most hate-riddled and violent movements on the planet?  

And yet, today, this strategy of sacrificing Palestinian lives has reached new heights: images of Gaza, taken by Hamas-allied “journalists,” curated, westsplained, and celebrated by an activist news media, incite furor in the Muslim world – Jihadi passions, genocidal antisemitism, throughout the Umma. And those sentiments, conveyed according to the proper narrative of Israeli guilt, inspires sympathetic outrage among many an infidel. It has led to major advances for Hamas and other Jihadis in invading Western universities with both propaganda and tactics to promote “global intifada” and, at the same time, driving Jews from academia. 

Why would the West play so key a role in the victimization of Gazans by their leaders, since without their angry “compassion” to turn the tide and spread the hatred, the sacrificial strategy could not work? 

Why doesn’t the West say to Hamas: 

No. We’re not going to chant your supremacist grotesque slogans. You accuse Israel of genocide and slaughtering children – but your words and actions show that you are projecting onto the Jews your fantasies and desires, which you put into bloody action whenever you can, and vow to repeat as often as possible. 

Why doesn’t the West, looking at the deeds of the 7th of October, considering the devastating horror, realizing how some might “long for Auschwitz” at the sight of the programmatic humiliating cruelty… why does the West not go on a “Palestinian suffering” fast, renouncing the poison, concocted by people who say they love death, dangled before them by the very perpetrators of the catastrophe they are supposed to deplore? It’s literally fatal to a compassionate and empathic world. 

Why don’t proud, free, Western infidels say to the Muslims: 

Freedom of religion is for those who mutually give up the triumphalist demand that “my” faith must dominate. It’s reciprocal. And given how much trouble the Muslims around the world have getting along with each other and neighboring infidels, it is a test of your readiness to benefit from the wondrous and rare rights of religious freedom, that you engage in reciprocal, friendly relations with the Jews rather than fan the forest-fire of your resentful hatreds. That would greatly reassure us about your intentions in these troubled times.’ 

Why, instead, have so many jumped both feet into the pro-Hamas camps? Why do police authorities deny the very evidence of genocidal Jew-hatred among Muslims in their midst? Why is the cry in the capitals of Europe, “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the Gas”? Why do so many old hippies feel such great sympathy for the pro-Hamas demonstrators? Why can people not see the difference between Woodstock Nation and encampments for Hamas? 

***

Here’s a troubling answer: some people (not everyone, but it seems way more than just a perverse few) take serious pleasure in hearing news of Jews behaving badly.  

On one level, you could call it man-bites-dog interest: “That’s funny, I thought Jews weren’t supposed to act like that. Killing babies! Jesus, what’s this world coming to?” 

But there’s something more, and more sinister at work: not only do people take pleasure at the shame it brings on the Jews when people think badly of their morality, but it can be, and has been, weaponized by precisely the forces most invested in total war and in getting Gazans killed.  

In 2023/4 we witness a high-point of this media-enabled weaponization. Hamas has an openly-stated genocidal manifesto, and yet, with the help of malicious allies and useful idiots they get the chance to play the victim of aggression and to accuse the very people they want to exterminate of their own criminal intention: “genocide.”  The Great Projection. “The whole world” – and by that I mean the orchestrators of the global public sphere, the broad consensus among journalists, NGOs, the UN, the universities – has inverted both the empirical and the moral tale. 

In the Caliphator playbook, this is huge victory: bind the beast we want to slaughter; and blind its allies. In the Western playbook, one would like to think it would stir somewhat less enthusiasm, given that, among other consequences of encouraging this Caliphator CogWar strategy, it will chase the Jews from Europe and other Western states, thereby setting those democracies up for conquest. Historically, warmongers and tyrants hate Jews and make them a priority target. 

But curiously, it does not have that salutary impact. The Great Projection goes on the Congressional Record, with nary a peep from a supine press corps. One would have expected that if principles and values were freely in play here, at least a vocal minority would point out how utterly self-destructive it is for “progressives” to support a movement that rejects all their principles, values and freedoms… and targets them in the longer run.   

To chant the irredentist, imperialist claim, From the River to the Sea Palestine will be Arab, with its religious variant: From the river to the sea, Palestine is Islamic, contradicts every progressive principle. One might have thought that the last thing a well-informed progressive would want to do is chant a statement that in Arabic says it quite eloquently: eliminate the self-determination, freedoms, and lives of all Israelis in a remorseless, non-negotiable, zero-sum fight that partakes in and greatly benefits the larger Jihadi movement to conquer the world.  

Does it soothe their conscience that in it is, according to Rashida Tlaib, “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction or hate.” Does she believe the berserkers of the 7th of October are ready to become champions of freedom, human rights, and peace when they finally reduce Israel to a minority under their sovereignty? 

Not to distract from the global warming apocalypse, but there’s something urgently suicidal about how the West is responding to the 7th of October.  

What players contribute to this dizzying cognitive and moral disorientation? The moral sleepwalkers who are in it for the feeling of virtuous solidarity, the savvy activist organizers with training, the ideologically aligned faculty (no herding cats here), the morally challenged administrators, the lethal media, continuing to ignore its professional responsibilities to report accurately, instead fully geared for feeding a Western addiction to Palestinian suffering. And one can fairly guess that these are precisely the people who have the privilege to embrace those deadly luxury beliefs that victimize everyone, but them, the virtue-signalers, last. 

What happened to the lessons of the 7th of October?  

  • Hamas is driven by a genocidal hatred so strong, that on the 7th of October, they engaged in unmatched levels of dehumanizing sadism.  
  • Virtually every branch of the Palestinian “resistance” movement – PA, BDS, SJP, CAIR – either welcomed even celebrated the action or denied it happened.  
  • The reaction of “progressives” in the West – cheering Hamas’ assault long before the images of Palestinian suffering appeared – indicate a fundamental alignment between “revolutionary” forces and Caliphators, both fighting the same war against the great Satans. 

One might have thought that, at least, people of moral and intellectual integrity might have questioned the sincerity of BDS’s “civil, non-violent” invocation of Palestinian “dignity,” and “freedom.” Or thought about the meaning of Chicago BLM making an icon celebrating the paragliders who turned tripping festival goers into the slaughtered, incinerated, ravaged victims of their jihad. 

But, apparently, no. 

Instead we see major parts of the influencers in the public sphere, allowing major advances in the Jihadi campaign to drive the Jews from the polities they plan to take over: prestigious and venerable universities are under heavy pressure to break ties with Israel; Israeli contributors to major new discoveries are erased from the record; authors are damaged for their Zionism, Israeli tourists are not welcome. Israel becomes more of a pariah with every passing year since 2000. And students from Harvard and Columbia, dutifully learning jihadi chants, display their ignorant folly before those whose applause they eagerly court. And under cover of this foolish solidarity, Caliphators spread their forbidding authority; and Jews, even those without self-respect, withdraw. 

So why would Westerners, especially the thought leaders, drink so unhealthy a cocktail? What makes it so sweet on the lips? How long can they ignore the bitterness inside the belly of their body politic? Whence comes this extravagant, urgent, exclusive, compassion for innocent Gazan civilians? How did this “people,” so recent an invention as a people compared with the Kurds, the Berbers, the Tibetans, the Yazidis, so complicit in their own misery, become the chosen victim people of the “Left”? Why do people conjure up panics of ever-imminent but never arriving famines and humanitarian crises even as real famines and far worse and much longer crises go unnoticed and untended elsewhere? 

And why the steadfast focus on the Jews? Ask a progressive if he feels morally superior to the Palestinians, and if he’s honest, he’ll snort his scorn. Of course he does. By progressive standards, Islam is a dismal belief system some of whose prominent adherents promise the delights of an orgiastic heaven to those who will go blow themselves up among the enemy’s people. (Although suicide terror began by attacking Jews (2000-2005), by now far more Muslims are killed in Jihadi suicide terror attacks than Jews or other infidels.)  

No pro-Palestinian Western Christian, e.g., the Quakers, would approve of their own communities preaching such a mad and murderous supremacist vengeance. On the contrary, the pro-Palestinian Christians rebuke Jews for their mere “nationalism.” And yet, when it comes to Palestinians, the most savage and sadistic deeds are just resistance which, they will gladly support without getting their own hands dirty. 

The real moral prize for the progressive left, it seems, is an age-old desire among secondary monotheists (and apparently their post-religious successors), to displace the self-regarding moral eminence of the self-entitled previous chosen people. 

It’s time to see you Jews taken down a notch or two. Sure, we take a pleasure in your moral degradation in the public sphere – in seeing you accused of racism, war crimes, genocide. It does make us feel good to deplore your loss of the moral high ground as, with power, you do to others, what you have suffered for so long. We would never hurt Jews, but surely their humiliation is long overdue. And if some take our Schadenfreudefeste too literally, and actually strike out at you, well, that can’t be helped sometimes. 

It’s actually a Pattern.  

This and this alone, I submit, explains the popularity of angry compassion. It’s only partly (if at all) compassion for the victims; it’s much more the moral outrage aimed at Israel, not pro-Palestinian (au contraire), but anti-Israel. So, the useful idiots take pleasure in looking down on Jews and create a new and improved post-modern antisemitism of fools: Anti-Zionism. Apparently, the titillation experienced when accusing Israel of genocide, offers a high so heady that major players cannot resist raising their voices in song.  

Contrast this urgent compassion for Palestinians suffering at the hands of the Israelis, with the indifference of these same emoters, not just for other people’s suffering on much larger scales, but even for Palestinians when not the victims of the Israelis.  

In other words, suffering at the hands of Israelis is the decisive variable in predicting Western attention, compassion, and outrage. By focusing so intently on conveying this suffering, a compliant journalism directly channels Hamas’s propaganda into the Western (enemy) public sphere, the very definition of own-goal war journalism, in which one publishes enemy war propaganda as news.  

Ironically, were the media not to so behave, and the public not to snap at the dangled poison, the cannibal strategy could not work and perhaps the Palestinian people might be spared their predatory elites. 

For the Caliphators, for whom Israel and the USA are the great and little Satan, this pattern of enemy compliance with their war propaganda is great news. For progressives, targets of that same cognitive war campaign as Israel, this is a massive own goal, killing their own society with their extravagant kindness.  

What will it take for Western liberals to temper their compassion for a people whose misfortune is engineered by their own leaders? Can they give up their gratuitous anger at us? Can they judge fairly? Can they save themselves… and the world of freedom they were privileged enough to receive from their ancestors? Who imagined it would be so much harder to choose life than follow a death-cult? 

Scanning the horizon for signs of life. 

Headshot of Robert Landes

Richard Landes was trained as a medievalist at Princeton University (MA 1979, PhD 1984). His work focuses on apocalyptic and millennial beliefs at the turn of the first and second millennium (1000 and 2000 CE). Among Landes many books are The Apocalyptic Year 1000 (2003), Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience (2011), and the forthcoming Can the “Whole World” be Wrong? A Medievalist’s Guide to the 21st Century (Academic Studies Press, 2021). Landes coined the term “Pallywood” while investigating the Muhammad al Durah affair and maintains “The Augean Stables,” a blog critical of western journalism. He recently published two articles: “The Demopath’s Lexicon: A Guide to Western Journalism between the River and the Sea” in Israel Affairs (2020), and “Oslo’s Misreading of an Honor-Shame Culture” in Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs (2019). Since retiring from Boston University in 2015, where he was a Professor in the History Department, he lives happily with his wife in Jerusalem, where he can write free of politically correct pressures.