Hvis du trodde at emosjoner er noe vi er ferdige med eller ikke kan gjøre noe med, tok du og tar du fremdeles feil, her er bare litt av hvorfor, jfr tidligere postering hvor jeg nevner Ute Frevert, ifbm bl a Hitler og Holocaust, se under:
How Hamas fooled the media: A neuroscientist’s view, Orli
Peter
When Syrian rebels captured Damascus earlier this month, CNN described their jihadi leader, Mohamed al-Jolani, as a “blazer-wearing revolutionary”. Other journalists praised his “rebranding” with values of “tolerance” and “pluralism”, while the Council on American-Islamic Relations cast his win as a victory for “justice and freedom”.
… What is going on? Can’t the media see what is in front of their faces? …
… “The international media differs from the Arab ones. They
focus on humanitarian issues. We don’t speak to them in the language of
violence, destruction and revenge,” he said.
The effects are clear. Across the Middle East, militant groups from Hamas to the Syrian rebels orchestrate calculated psychological operations. Seen from a clinical point of view, they demonstrate exceptional skills in cognitive empathy, which they use to manipulate our emotions.
Cognitive empathy is the ability to accurately understand and model the
thoughts, feelings and values of others. … On the other hand, emotional empathy –
what the West excessively values – is the ability to feel what you believe the
other person is experiencing.
Cognitive empathy takes effort to construct, whereas
emotional empathy is involuntary. Anti-Israel militants have been able to
turbo-charge their propaganda by using their cognitive empathy to manipulate
Westerner’s emotional empathy.
Using cognitive empathy, militants have learnt to present
their cause as aligned with Western humanitarian values, carefully curating
their image as champions of freedom and justice.
This dynamic is rooted in asymmetrical power relationships,
where weaker groups often develop a detailed understanding of powerful parties,
using cognitive empathy to identify and press the psychological buttons that
influence those in power. These terrorists often possess a stronger cognitive
grasp of Western psychology than Westerners understand jihadi psychology.
This imbalance often creates a vague, incomplete and
distorted understanding of militants by Westerners, functioning like a
political inkblot on the Rorschach test, where individuals with a weaker
understanding project their values and experiences onto the “underdogs”, rather
than forming an accurate cognitive model of their motivations.
Many Westerners … attribute benevolence to militants, sympathising with them as “victims”.
… The BBC duly described it as part of a wider “humanitarian crisis” fomented by Israeli “strikes on Gaza”.
… After October 7, I saw this jihadi psychological warfare have an impact on recovery from trauma.
… She noted that the constant propaganda is internalised by Jews, who feel “shame” for being “occupiers” instead of the indigenous people that they are in Israel.
Young adults are susceptible. In March, a Pew survey revealed that respondents 29 and under are more likely to sympathise with Hamas. … Research shows older adults are more resistant.
The terrorists exploit Western values by weaponising our
emotional empathy.
Through graphic imagery and tales of victimhood, they
provoke “pain empathy”, the visceral emotional reaction to witnessing
suffering. Our brains are wired to respond more deeply to the image of a single
suffering child than to statistics about millions of people, a phenomenon known
as the “identifiable victim effect”.
Studies reveal that small charities can raise more money than bigger ones simply by showcasing such poignant imagery. These images involuntarily affect our brain functioning. With exposure to these images, we respond with emotional empathy. The more emotionally empathic we already are, the more vulnerable we are to its weaponisation.
Hamas and its sympathisers skilfully exploit pain-empathy circuits in the brain, flooding the media with real or manipulated images of dead children, even misrepresenting gruesome scenes from other wars – including the Shoah in cases of “Holocaust inversion” – as Palestinian casualties of Israel. Terror leaders have openly stated that higher death tolls benefit their cause. They work to increase civilian casualties by broadcasting messages in mosques and on social media, instructing Gazans to ignore Israeli evacuation warnings, and by physically blocking evacuations through roadblocks or even shooting those attempting to flee. In a blatant display of its anti-humanitarian values, Hamas increases civilian casualties in order to weaponise Western pain-empathy to gain support for their agenda.
But while the militants centre their narrative around victimhood to promote pain-empathy in Western audiences, they simultaneously promote a narrative as victor to excite their base. For example, militant propagandists sent the Western media images of Gazan suffering, while Hamas broadcast GoPro videos of torture and murder to their supporters to invigorate them. They highlighted their victimhood and suffering under the “occupation” of the “colonisers”. They played it brilliantly.
During the 2008 war in Gaza, the international media focused on gruesome and graphic coverage of casualties, sometimes called “war porn”, and transformed a complex conflict into a global emotional spectacle. CNN and the BBC amplified sympathy for Hamas, illustrating the devastating effectiveness of such psychological strategies.
While emotional empathy fosters connectedness, it can also have negative consequences, such as lying to benefit our group, prioritising our group’s interests over principles of justice and connecting so much to another group’s priorities that our empathy is self-destructive.
The ability to truly empathise – combining emotional resonance with cognitive understanding – requires a nuanced, fact-based model of others’ motivations. Without this balance, our empathy becomes a tool for manipulation. What can we do? We must refine our cognitive frameworks to resist propaganda, anchoring our emotional responses in accurate understanding. While individual stories of suffering evoke deep empathy, they must be rescaled to reflect the true scope of the issue. Similarly, the compelling imagery of “blazer-wearing” revolutionaries for peace must be critically examined within the broader context of extremist violence and manipulation.
Dr Orli Peter is a neuropsychologist who established the Israel Healing Initiative, a nonprofit dedicated to “healing trauma at the speed of science”
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Ute Frevet:
frevet Emotions in History – Lost and Found - Central European University Press
https://books.openedition.org/ceup/1504
https://books.openedition.org/ceup/1505
https://books.openedition.org/ceup/1506
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