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? As a neuropsychologist, I was intrigued. The recent Henry Jackson Society report revealed the largescale embrace of anti-Israel bias across the media. It seems to me that this is part of a pattern.
In a recent video released by the IDF, a captured Palestinian Islamic Jihad spokesman called Tarek Abu Shaluf described how he was taught to create false narratives about the Gaza war to appeal to Western humanitarian values. “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. It’s like hacking into someone else’s algorithm for how they think and feel, enabling you to predict their reactions to your actions. 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, particularly those who live free from war or violence – like many of the students protesting on college campuses – attribute benevolence to militants, sympathising with them as “victims”.
Later in the interview, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad spokesman admitted that when a rocket struck the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza in October 2023, the terrorists knew it was one of their own. Yet, to “erase” this fact, he said, they portrayed the deaths as a humanitarian disaster perpetuated by “the occupation”. 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. I have been criss-crossing Israel to try to stop its negative effects. As a neuro and clinical psychologist with more than 30 years of treating trauma, I founded the Israeli Healing Initiative last year and have been bringing high-tech treatments to survivors of trauma from Druze community centres in the north to the Adi Negev Nahalat Eran Rehabilitation Hospital in the south, helping survivors smile again.
This week, I met Ateret Violet Shmuel, founder of the nonprofit Indigenous Bridges, which helps indigenous communities heal 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. One poll concluded that TikTok videos may be part of the problem among college students. 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”
