No. 597 September 9, 2013 http://jcpa.org/article/manufacturing-exploiting-compassion-abuse-media-palestinian-propaganda/ Manufacturing and Exploiting Compassion: Abuse of the Media by Palestinian Propaganda Philippe Assouline 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 Since the First Intifada, Palestinians have deliberately used children as foot-soldiers in made-for-TV-riots, because images of vulnerable children most effectively and enduringly reframe the Palestinians as hapless Davids, regardless of whether the facts agree:12 [T]he emotions such pictures arouse are more likely to defeat than promote rational discussion. This tendency is so common that in the social psychology field it is titled the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE). The FAE is “The tendency to make internal attributions over external attributions in explaining the observed behavior of others.”…So when a television viewer sees the thirty-second image of an Israeli soldier using deadly force on a sixteen-year-old who is throwing rocks, the observer is likely to make the attributions that the Israelis are cold, bloodthirsty murderers while the Palestinians are simply an oppressed people wanting their freedom and land. Attributions are made nearly instantaneously.13 In order to replicate these damning shots, Palestinian leaders have systematically indoctrinated their own children to hatred of Jews and “martyrdom,” and then placed them on the front lines for the cameras.14 The effectiveness of dead Palestinian children as propaganda tools was underlined by Yasser Arafat in 2002: “The Palestinian child holding a stone, facing a tank,” the Palestinian leader asked, “is that not the greatest message to the world, when that hero becomes a ‘martyr’?”15 Weeks prior, an AP photo of 15-year-old Faris Ouda stoning a tank had become an iconic symbol of Palestinian “resistance,” and Arafat wanted more of the same.16 When Ouda was later killed while rioting, a beaming Arafat declared to his young classmates, “We salute the spirit of our hero, the martyr, Faris Ouda!” After repeatedly chanting Ouda’s name to enthralled cheers, Arafat then encouraged the children – some looking as young as 11 or 12 years old – to emulate Ouda’s “steadfastness and his sacrifice,” i.e., to also attack soldiers and die for the Western media’s cameras.17 This indoctrination of children – at times by their own families18 – has been pervasive in Palestinian society since the Oslo accords.19 Children are relentlessly brainwashed from the most tender age and in the crudest way to strive for “martyrdom” – in schools,20 sports,21 summer camps,22 music,23 mosques,24 social media,25 culture,26 television,27 and even public celebrations of murderous terror attacks.28 As a corollary to this indoctrination, Palestinian children are sent to the front lines for propaganda, and “have assumed an integral role” in televised confrontations, “burning tires and shooting slingshots to attract the television cameras.”29 Thousands of Palestinian children have been arrested for stone-throwing, and yet “the phenomenon of unsupervised minors under the age of 12 throwing stones at cars on West Bank roads, at civilians and soldiers, and during riots” is only growing.30 Palestinian groups have frequently used playgrounds as rocket-launching pads, in the hope that reprisals directed at those same playgrounds will trigger sensational headlines.31 Worse, dozens of minors have been sent to carry out acts of violence and terror against Israelis.32 Hamas, which in 2009 boasted that Palestinians use “human shields of the women, the children…to challenge the Zionist bombing machine,”33 now openly trains child-soldiers in its high schools,34 while Fatah affiliates force other children, often less than 10 years old, to theatrically defy Israeli soldiers for the cameras.35 In all of these cases, children are deliberately endangered by Palestinian leaders and propagandists in order to make them appear as pitiable victims of Israeli cruelty.36 Casualties and arrests generated by this cynical exercise are then used, effectively, to defame and slander Israel.37 Palestinian officials and allied NGOs regularly accuse Israel of rank child abuse while activists circulate damning pictures of child casualties in order to further demonize the Jewish state.38 The responsibility of Palestinian leaders for the promotion of attacks by children on Israeli soldiers and civilians is seldom even broached in their indictments. Armed minors who have died in combat with Israel are instead counted as noncombatant children, without further inquiry.39 Israel is frequently blamed for the death of Palestinian children accidentally killed by Palestinian terrorists and even images of Israeli children injured by Palestinian attacks have