Episode 212: Gaza and the Political Utility of Selective Empathy
Citations Needed | November 20, 2024 | Transcript
[Music]
Intro: This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.
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Nima: “Salvadoran Ties Bloodshed To a ‘Culture of Violence,’” reported the New York Times in 1981. “The violence in Lebanon is casual, random, and probably addicting,” stated the Honolulu Star-Advertiser in 1985. “Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims” wrote long-time New Republic publisher and editor-in-chief Marty Peretz in 2010.
Adam: There’s a recurring theme within media coverage of subjugated people in the US and around the world. They’re mindlessly, inherently violent, and savage. Whether the subject is immigrants from Central or South America, Black populations in major US cities, or people in Lebanon or Palestine, we’re repeatedly told that any violence they may be subjected to or carry out themselves is inevitable, purposeless, and baked into their so-called culture.
Nima: The pathologizing of violence in certain racialized communities is one side of the coin. The other side, which reinforces this notion, is the equally sinister concept of selective empathy. It’s a conditional sense of compassion, reserved for victims who media deem deserving–say, Ukrainian victims of Russia’s invasion–and not for those who media deem undeserving, like Palestinians under siege by Israel in Gaza. What motivates this asymmetry, and how does it shape public understandings of suffering throughout the world? How is empathy as a form of media currency central to getting the public to care about victims of certain violence, while a lack of empathy — and even worse, pathologizing violence in certain communities — conditions the public to not care about those whose deaths those in power would rather not talk about, much less humanize?
Adam: On today’s show, we’ll look at the concept of selective empathy and media coverage. We’ll examine how we’ll continue centuries-long campaigns of dehumanization, particularly against Arab, Black and Latino people, bifurcates victims of global violence into deserving and undeserving, and influences contemporary opinion on everything from pain tolerance to criminal-legal policy.
Nima: Later on the show, we’ll be joined by Muhannad Ayyash, Professor of Sociology at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He is a policy analyst for Al-Shabaka and the author of many journal articles and the book A Hermeneutics of Violence, which was published in 2019.
[Begin clip]
Muhannad Ayyash: What anti-colonial, anti-racist scholars and activists have been pointing out for years and years and years and years about how colonialism and settler colonialism works, and one of the key features of that is dehumanization. And a critical part of dehumanization is to turn the colonized into an ahistorical, savage, sub-human, or non-human entity that does not belong in the realm of human life.
[End clip]
Adam: We’re discussing a classic trope of media criticism, which we’ve mentioned on the show before, but we’ve never done an episode on it, which is the idea of deserved and undeserved victims. Obviously, Noam Chomsky has written about this a lot. It’s sort of a pretty obvious idea, but one I think that’s worth drilling down on, which is that there are those that our media, specifically US media, deems worthy of our sympathy and those who are kind of maybe worthy of sympathy here and there once they’ve jumped through a bunch of hoops about not being terrorists and being women and children that maybe occasionally, they can be sympathetic, but mostly their violence is baked into their culture. Their suffering is part of some mystical oriental sectarian war that’s been going on for thousands of years.
Nima: They don’t love their families or babies or friends the way that we do.
Adam: And indeed, because of a mistranslation of a word like the word “martyr” where they’re going to say they actually want to die, they sort of seek out death. They actually like it. It’s fun for them. And so, they’re not really that sympathetic. And that bifurcation, that dissection is as we’ll argue in this episode and again, have argued elsewhere, is central to maintaining the machinations of industrial-scale violence. Specifically in Gaza but also US border policy sanctions, the subjugation and the intractable poverty and dispossession of Black people in poor communities. The way you make that okay is you have two sides of the coin. The one is you pathologize their violence. It’s baked into their DNA. The other side of the coin is you decide to humanize and empathize with people who don’t undermine the interests of those in power. And when they suit those in power, again, selective human rights being the obvious culprit here, then your heart bleeds, and they’re worthy of profiles and nonstop coverage. And so, that’s what we’re going to drill down on today.
This is kind of a spiritual successor of Episode 197: The “Human Shields” Canard as Catch-All Colonial Absolution, where we discuss the use of human shields as a variation on this theme, which is to say, those who seek out death, and it’s part of their culture of violence versus those you know who are not like you and me.
Nima: The United States did this explicitly during the Spanish-American War in the late 19th century and also during the Vietnam War, for example, as did fascist Italy when it invaded Ethiopia in the 1930s. This idea of the violence we visit on others is not felt the same way that we would feel, and therefore, it’s not really a big deal.
Orientalism accompanies Western colonialism and imperialism, especially in the media. The United States and other expansionist states have long relied on painting the Native populations they attack, slaughter and seek to conquer, as savages and barbarians in need of a civilizing machine-gun hand. This dehumanization justifies violence and oppression.
At the turn of the 20th century, during the Spanish-American War, American press, including newspapers like media mogul William Randolph Hearst’s Evening Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s The World, used yellow journalism, that is, sensationalism and exaggeration, to push US imperial interests and guide the public toward supporting American atrocities in the Philippines. Heart’s paper, as well as outlets like Harper’s Weekly, ran profiles on Filipino resistance fighters and leaders that compared their “savage” physical and psychological traits with more civilized American appearances, demeanors, and characteristics.
A February 6, 1899 article in Hearst’s New York Evening Journal featured a drawing of six scary-looking blades and swords, with the caption, “The Formidable Knives of Filipino Warriors,” frightening readers with notions that Filipinos are killing machines, that violence is merely a way of life for them — and therefore can only be subdued by visiting even greater violence on them.
Furthermore, American media routinely published articles about Filipinos’ supposedly “contaminated blood,” that brought infection, disease and madness to the invading American forces. David Brody, in his 2010 book Visualizing American Empire, recounts a 1902 article in McClure’s Magazine that included a “lengthy account of how an American soldier may become savage while serving in the Philippines.” The article, written by Dr. Henry Rowland, ends this way. This is from 1902:
They have seen savage sights; they have eaten the food of the savages; they have thought savage thoughts; the cries of the savage are ringing in their brains. In all their surroundings there is not one single object to remind them that they belong to an era of civilization. Their lust of slaughter is reflected from the faces of those around them. They crave slaughter more than food and sleep.
Homesickness and fever, sun and treachery, have broken down their few centuries of civilization.
Similar approaches to justifying imperial violence, by presenting adversaries as bloodthirsty savages who don’t value life the way white Westerns do, are present in media across the past century.
But let’s move ahead to a more modern but very related concept: the theory of the so-called culture of violence. The conceit, developed in part by right-leaning sociologists in the United States is that certain groups immediately turn to threats, intimidation, even murder in response to interpersonal or geopolitical conflicts because they simply don’t value life as we’ve been saying. This framing applies to subjugated people throughout the world all the time, particularly Black people in the United States and Arabs and Muslims worldwide.
So, let’s take a look at how this has developed over the last few decades. The 1960s and 1970s marked the start of a rise in violent crime in the United States that would last until the 1990s when crime rates began to plummet. At the time, news media advanced the theory of a “culture of violence” in urban cores, particularly among Black Americans.
In one example from September 28, 1973, the Associated Press reported this from Atlanta, Georgia:
The South has always dominated murder statistics in the United States, much to the fascination of sociologists and other crime trend observers. Some call it a regional culture — a culture of violence, said Dr. William Bowers, a research sociologist at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.
The article would go on to state: “Bowers said the high homicide rate among blacks contributes to the consistently dominating position of the South.”
Adam: The article later cited Raymond Gastil, a sociologist who the AP credited with coining the term “culture of violence” in relation to the American South. Interestingly enough, Gastil still would later go on to develop surveys and reports for the deeply conservative Freedom House and American Enterprise Institute, which probably offers a bit of a glimpse into his politics. In the article, Gastil compared “Southerners” to Irish people, stating: “‘The Irish, for example, have long had a reputation for a great deal of scrapping,’ he said, ‘but this very seldom results in murder.”
I like the idea that a culture having a reputation for something is enough for him. He doesn’t need to investigate its validity. It’s just something I heard once.
Nima: The Irish are scrappers, but they’re not killers.
Adam: Yeah, the article noted that other contemporaneous sociologists cited far more compelling and material causes: “poverty, unemployment, and cultural deprivation” as a chief contributing factor in the rise in violent crime. But this was only to explain that Bowers disagreed with that analysis. Yet, we know now, as sociologists did then, that socially destabilizing economic factors like urban deindustrialization and the hollowing out of social services in cities were a major contribution to the rise of crime obviously.
The culture of violence narrative would appear internationally as well. In April of 1981, United Press International dispatch, republished in The New York Times, portrayed the country of El Salvador as internally and inevitably violent without mentioning the essential external factors such as the role in sponsoring US right-wing paramilitary death squads. The article would say: “Ernesto Rivas Gallont, El Salvador’s Ambassador-designate to Washington, said yesterday that the reason for the continuing bloodshed in the Central American nation was its ‘’culture of violence.’’ He told reporters at a reception that he expected the violence to go on for some time.”
Nima: And on December 2, 1985, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser published an editorial following the hijacking of EgyptAir flight 648. Here’s the short backstory: On Nov. 23, 1985, the plane, bound for Cairo to Athens, was taken over shortly after takeoff by members of the Palestinian militant group Abu Nidal. After landing in Malta, and the killing of five passengers by the hijackers, the plane was raided by Egyptian commandos who had trained by US Delta Force, who killed 56 of the remaining 86 passengers on board, as well as 2 members of the six-person crew and two of the three hijackers. A week later, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser editorial opened with this:
“The bloody and despicable hijacking of the Egypt airliner in Malta is the latest incident in the culture of violence that appears to be endemic in the Middle East now.”
The editorial continued to characterize violence as “endemic,” not to be bothered with pesky historical or political explanations for certain actions. The article said this:
Juxtapose this scene with one in Beirut. After five days of fierce — even for Lebanon — battles in the capital, the warlords made another one of their endless, and no doubt insincere truces. The violence in Lebanon is casual, random, and probably addicting. Many of the armed thugs in the Druze, Christian and other Moslem militias have done nothing but play with weapons for a decade or more. They know nothing but war. Peace only means unemployment and boredom for them. The violence in certain wings of the Palestinian movement is similar. A whole generation of Palestinians have called guerrilla bases home, and are only skilled in war.
Adam: Yeah, so, I mean, this was kind of typical for that time period. And again, it pervades today, which is that this idea that the Middle East is inherently violent. One hears it with this kind of pontificating, faux historical claim of well, they’ve been fighting for, you know, hundreds of years or thousands of years, right?
Nima: Oh, right. Millennia, right. It’s a rough neighborhood.
Adam: Rough neighborhood. Again, not true, totally empirically false. Not to say there haven’t been conflicts but compared to Europe, not even remotely close.
Nima: Right. And it’s also a consistently colonized and occupied place.
Adam: Right, especially since the early 20th century. And so, the idea that if the US just went away, they would all just kill each other. “They” is an axiom and was overtly an axiom of punditry up until maybe the mid-2010s, and now, it’s kind of shrouded in more euphemism. But for a while, I mean, again, that Marty Peretz quote, which we’ll discuss, that was 2010. And you could just say Muslims are just violent people by nature, and that was taken for granted. And this is how you kind of pathologize the victims of US imperial meddling and bombing. Because again, who was funding the death squads in Lebanon? Who was helping fuel sectarian violence in Lebanon? It’s not inherent in any culture.
Nima: Right. And so, you have that editorial in the Honolulu Star advertiser in 1985. And then we saw this continue, not only when it had to do with, say, the Middle East but also here at home in the United States. It wouldn’t take long for media to begin to actually conflate the groups that they’ve been working overtime to dehumanize.
So in May 1989 an editorial by Ken Auletta in the New York Daily News condemned the Central Park Five, now the Exonerated Five, a group of Black and Latino teenagers wrongfully convicted of attacking and raping a woman in Central Park. As I said, they have been exonerated since following years of an infamous hysteria-fueled media smear campaign alongside one led by Donald Trump, meant to justify tough-on-crime policymaking and broken-windows policing, even calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty in New York despite the fact that these five people were absolutely innocent.
Now, in Auletta’s piece in 1989 — Auletta now writes for the New Yorker but then for the Daily News — he quoted New York City Council President Andrew Stein who said this in the article: “‘Kids make their own rules and get away with things continuously. It leads to a feeling there are no moral judgments. The streets have a way of talking.’”
And Auletta goes on to say this: “And what they say is that New York, in too many ways, is like lawless Beirut, minus the cannon fire. Children rule the streets.”
Auletta added this in the piece:
The thugs who set upon the young woman in Central Park were ‘infected by a culture of violence,’ says Adam Walinsky, a former speechwriter for Robert F. Kennedy and a student of crime, a culture in which aberrant behavior becomes normal. He adds: ‘One out of every 20 black men in the U.S. will die of homicide. Those are wartime figures. Do people think it will improve if we pretend it’s not happening?’
Adam: Well, I don’t think they’re pretending it’s not happening. I think they’re pretending the causes aren’t some brain problem with the people involved. It’s also worth noting that the Central Park Five, the Exonerated Five, brought a new libel suit against Donald Trump because he once again asserted their guilt again despite the true killer confessing on the debate stage. So, hopefully they can rain a few million dollars, a few ten million out of him for just continuing to fucking lie. He lied about it as late as 2014 on Twitter. He said, what are they doing in Central Park? Playing checkers? And it’s like, the kids were just fucking running around. But also, they didn’t do it because the guy who did it confessed to it. So, he’s convinced they were guilty of something. He doesn’t know what, but he’s going to find out that’s right because they’re Black, and he’s a racist.
So, we’re going to cut to current, contemporary narratives of this idea of the culture of violence as a way of dehumanizing those who aren’t worthy of empathy. Let’s look at a couple of media examples of coverage of Baltimore whose population is 58% Black as of 2020, which obviously codes as Black, similar to Chicago, Detroit. In 2015, during the uprisings in Baltimore over the police killing of Freddie Gray, The New York Times published a reheated culture of violence opinion piece headlined “The Real Problem With America’s Inner Cities.” Its author, Harvard sociology professor Orlando Patterson framed the “unrest,” not the killing as the central problem. Patterson attributed the uprisings to not just police violence and poverty, but also a “culture of violence among a small but destructive minority in the inner cities,” which he likened to the Wild West. Patterson also argued that this culture was bolstered by, among other things, single parenting, classic Republican scapegoat for violence.
Now, one might think that in the wake of yet another police killing, it would make sense to keep people’s focus on the police violence that was endemic in overpolicing of black communities, but Patterson and by extension, the Times couldn’t really help but wag their fingers at “the destructive minority” and basically every civilian in Baltimore who didn’t “advocate fundamental American values,” whatever that means, was seen as responsible for violent crime in Baltimore in the wake of the Freddie Gray killing.
Baltimore has continued to be subject to these framings. While the city places high among violent crime rankings, media present violent crimes as rampant and generalized, simply baked into the city, part of their culture with little or no mention or curiosity at all about what the underlying causes of that poverty and violence may be, let alone the role policing and dispossession may play in that. Again, sorry to keep sounding like a bunch of bleeding-heart liberals, but certainly, the material causes of things are probably more of a factor than simply some vague cultural shift untethered to material realities.
In September 2021, a segment from Fox 45 Baltimore exemplified this. So, we’re going to play a clip and listen to that.
[Begin clip]
Dan Lampariello: A summer of shootings creating crime scene after crime scene. So far in 2021, more than 230 people have been killed in Baltimore. Another 460 plus were shot and survived, a crisis that’s been blamed on a culture.
Police Commissioner Michael Harrison: This is about breaking the cycle and cultural violence in our city.
Mayor of Baltimore, Brandon Scott: This is a cultural thing that has to change too.
Police Commissioner Michael Harrison: Deep-rooted culture. And until we change that culture, you know, we’re gonna have problems. But we have to change that culture.
Dan Lampariello: The messaging from Baltimore’s mayor and police commissioner has been as constant as it’s been consistent.
Police Commissioner Michael Harrison: These individuals speak to the culture of violence that we have been talking about for so long.
Dan Lampariello: They believe the acceptance of illegally carrying weapons and using them to settle scores on the streets is deep rooted into the fabric of the city.
[End clip]
Adam: Well, yeah, I mean, that’s who rises to the ranks of these things. I mean, this is sort of typical, right? It’s cultural violence. Cultural violence because, again, this kind of gets everyone off the hook. How do you change a culture? Well, in theory, you change the material conditions. But that’s not going to happen. So, what they do is these kinds of neoliberal interventions, right? Gun buybacks and police riding around in cruisers, meeting people, some of which can be harmless, some of which are just counterinsurgency, none of which deal with the underlying causes. And these portrayals have had a deleterious effect. One 2004 study by Florida State University researchers showed that news media that associated Black populations with criminality led the viewing public to disproportionately favor punitive criminal-legal policies.
Nima: Similar narratives of nihilistic violence among Muslims have persisted as well. In 2010, Marty Peretz, publisher and editor-in-chief of The New Republic magazine, published a piece about a recent New York Times. Now, that New York Times article tried to describe certain misperceptions, and Peretz pushed back on that, wondering if really the misunderstanding of Muslims was sad or wary at all. In the piece, Peretz responded to a New York Times poll that found “considerable distrust of Muslim Americans” among New York City residents, which the Times called “a sadly wary misunderstanding of Muslim-Americans.”
Now, Peretz didn’t find this to be particularly much of a problem, going so far as to suggest that Muslims everywhere are prone to acts of terrorism and violence, and to argue that “Western society” must “defend its own and their future” from Muslim immigration. Later asking, “whether I need honor these people,” meaning all Muslims in New York City. The most infamous part of his screed read as follows:
Why do not Muslims raise their voices against [at once] planned and random killings all over the Islamic world? This world went into hysteria some months ago when the Mossad took out the Hamas head of its own Murder, Inc.
But, frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims.
Faced with some backlash for that last sentence, Peretz initially doubled down, calling his own comment, quote, “a statement of fact, not value.” But later wound up kind of, sort of apologizing but only for that very last sentence, the one about Muslim life being cheap, most notably to Muslims. But not for the chauvinism and anti-Muslim denigration of the piece as a whole.
Adam: Now this system of dehumanization, specifically around people coded as Muslim or Arab, is obviously the double standard of Gaza and Israel and how the media covered that “conflict” versus how it covered Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Recently, I published a long study in The Nation, along with my writing partner and data researcher, who chooses to remain anonymous, where we looked at the first 30 days and the first 100 days of CNN and MSNBC coverage of both Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s siege bombing of Gaza. And of course, we found some fairly stark double standards that we thought were worth noting in terms which really, I think, highlight selective empathy. So some key findings were mentions of child deaths, for example, and related terms were 33.4% more likely for Ukrainian victims during the first 100 days after Russia’s invasion, compared to Gaza. And given that the child deaths were 262 compared to over 10,000, this meant that for every Ukrainian child who died, they received 16.1 mentions on air, and every Palestinian child who died in Gaza received .36 mentions on air. Notably, MSNBC did not run a single segment in the first 100 days that focused specifically on the plight of children in Gaza whereas MSNBC ran over a dozen segments focusing specifically on the plight of children during that same time period in Ukraine.
The most notable double standard that we saw, which tracks with a similar analysis we did in January for The Intercept where we analyzed the Washington Post, LA Times, and New York Times was the total asymmetry and uses of what we call emotive words, which are kind of the inverse of empathy. Which is to say, when a Palestinian is killed, is it called brutal massacre, slaughter, barbaric, or savage? We compared Palestinians and Israelis, not Palestinians and Ukrainians in this one. And the numbers there were quite stark. So, for example, combining CNN and MSNBC, this is just a 30-day analysis, so this is just the first month, and I did this by hand. It took a very long time. The word “savage” was used 36 times for the killing of Israelis. It was used zero times for the killing of Palestinians. “Barbaric” was used 102 times. It was used zero times for Palestinians. The word “slaughter” was used 181 times to describe the killing of Israelis. It was used six times for Palestinians. The word “brutal” was used 332 times to describe the killing of Israelis and only 13 times for Palestinians. And the word “massacre” was used 402 times for the killing of Israelis and only 24 times for the killing of Palestinians. And what’s really notable too is how similar the totals were for the different networks. They were almost identical.
And other findings in our survey noted that CNN and MSNBC covered the impact of Russia’s invasions on civilians more generally twice as often as they did on civilians in Gaza, despite the fact that the death toll at the time of our analysis was five times greater. On CNN, MSNBC — again, this includes anchors, guests, hosts but it shows editorial priorities, because it matters who you bring on. On MSNBC and CNN, the word “genocide” was used to describe what was happening to Ukrainians 275 times and only 12 times for Palestinians. And the word “war crime” was used to describe what was happening to Ukrainian victims 1,515 times and for Palestinian victims only 92 times. So, the discrepancy is pretty stark. And again, when you look at the actual number of people who died, the number of war crimes live streamed, at the very least, it’s comparable. I think it’s probably fair to say that Gaza had far more war crimes and far more uses of “barbaric” and “savagery.” And we’ve stated in the study that, you know, one wants to be careful not to compare tragedies. This is true also for our Intercept piece back in January because I think it can seem like we’re saying you shouldn’t care about Ukraine. What we’re arguing is that you should care at the very least the same about Palestine. And MSNBC and CNN, supposedly kind of center, center-left networks obviously didn’t, manifestly didn’t. They had a very asymmetrical view of sympathy for these victims.
Nima: Despite the fact that also the level of slaughter and destruction is exponential.
Adam: It’s not even close. And this obviously correlates with both the racial composition of the victims but also their geopolitical position as unfortunately being on the other end of US-made bombs, rather than, say, Russian bombs. So, they have a sort of double whammy. They’re both not white, and they’re also being killed by US/Israeli war. So obviously, the extent to which they’re going to get any sympathy at all, it’s just when they randomly have a decent Palestinian guest who mentions it, and that’s pretty much it.
Nima: Exactly. Now, over the years, additional studies have given scientific heft to what’s known as the “racial empathy gap.” For a study published in 2011, researchers at the University of Milano-Bicocca in Italy showed white participants video clips of a needle or an eraser touching a person’s skin. They essentially gauge their reactions by how much sweat their hands secreted while watching this video. The researchers found that white participants reacted to pain suffered by Black people significantly less than to pain of white people. A study published the next year 2012 found that “White and Black Americans — including registered nurses and nursing students — assume that Black people feel less pain than do White people” in part because participants assumed Black people experienced less privilege and more hardship which participants associated with “physical toughness.” The authors of the study added that archival data from the NFL showed that injured Black football players were deemed more likely to play in a subsequent game than injured white players “possibly because people assume they feel less pain.”
Now, it’s well documented that these perceptions have translated to substandard health care for Black and Latino people across the United States, particularly regarding pain relief. For example, a 1994 study revealed that Black and Latino people with recurrent and metastatic cancer were less likely to receive adequate analgesia. Writing for Slate Magazine in 2013, Jason Silverstein added that:
Racial disparities in pain management have been recorded in the treatment of migraines and back pain, cancer care in the elderly, and children with orthopedic fractures. A 2008 review of 13 years of national survey data on emergency room visits found that for a pain-related visit, an opioid prescription was more likely for white patients (31 percent) than black patients (23 percent).
And studies have shown that the effects of the dehumanization of Arab people and Muslims within the United States showcases this as well.
In 2015, researchers Nour Kteily and Emile Bruneau published findings in a piece for the Washington Post, noting this:
Most importantly, dehumanization is associated with less empathy and more aggression. For example, in one study, we gave participants a story about two children (one Arab, one white)caught shoplifting in a store. The police detained the Arab child but sent the white child home. Those who dehumanized Arabs and Muslims were less likely to feel sympathy toward the Arab child. Even more troublingly, we observe that dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims was associated with supporting highly aggressive policies such as drone strikes in the Middle East and torture of Arabs and Muslims. Across our work, dehumanization tends to be associated with aggressive responses, even when we statistically account for individuals’ dislike of Arabs and Muslims, suggesting that dehumanization has a unique influence.
Adam: The dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims is reflected in the most absurd ways. There was a 2015 poll that found that 30% of Republican voters and 19% of Democratic voters wanted to bomb Agrabah, the fake city from Aladdin, the 1993 Disney film just because it sounded Muslimy.
Nima: It sounds vaguely Arab. And so therefore, sure, I support the bombing of the Sultan and Jafar.
Adam: Yeah.
Nima: So, similar to this idea of, you know, certain communities inherently having a culture of violence. When coupled with the assumption that there is a deficit of pain felt by the physical bodies of those same people, you get this kind of creepy perfect equation of making it okay to then exert violence upon those communities, upon those populations. So, this idea of the culture of violence, the lack of a pain threshold, right? That’s similar to what other people might experience, what white people might experience. This misunderstanding, this total bogus nonsense non-science, all works together to therefore have certain people be perennial targets of aggression and others, when victims of the identical kind of aggression, they get a certain kind of empathy. This is all actually a very close cousin to another phrase, this tough guy word salad of the “language of force,” Adam, you know, which we’ve also discussed as related to this idea of claiming that certain communities have a culture of violence. Similarly, we hear this from military officials, soldiers, political commentators in the media all the time, this idea that the only language that is understood by, fill in the inevitable target, is the language of force.
Adam: Because it’s considered beastly, right? You’re forcing me to go to your level is always the implication, right? It’s the old Golda Meir, ‘I don’t hate that you kill my children, I hate that you force me to kill yours.’
Nima: Exactly. If they weren’t such barbarians, we too wouldn’t have to resort to our own savagery.
Adam: Because, again, it’s the idea that there’s asymmetrical sympathy and empathy in the US media is maybe obvious to some people though it’s good to have the study. I mean, that’s why I’m glad we did the study that manifestly shows it. But there’s a way you sort of create the groundwork for that over many, many decades in the pro-Israel media, the War on Terror within the United States, the pathologizing of, you know, media depictions, right? Reel Bad Arabs, the 2006 documentary about how Arabs are demonized. This is part of a fucking machinery, and we obviously, for the purposes of this episode, don’t have time to get into all of it. But the way in which you create the groundwork for this level of dehumanization, which we’ve seen, again, on horrific and gross and manifest display over the past year, that doesn’t just happen overnight. That is something that is conditioned into people over many, many decades.
Now look, default position, do Americans need that big of excuse to be mindlessly racist? Not really. But there is a regime. There’s a media regime that does a lot of the heavy lifting. And we’ve seen it play out because people will say, I don’t understand how people can sit there and watch this many kids get shredded by bombs and not care. And there are many different ways they do it, you know, human shields, which offsets blame to quote-unquote “Hamas,” the fake ceasefire, you know, ‘They’ve been fighting for thousands of years.’ There’s always these things, but one of which is this idea that they just like violence, that it’s kind of their thing. It’s part of their culture. And this culture of violence is the logical outcome of a broader dehumanization and selective empathy regime, and it’s what makes this fucking manageable. Because again, I think that if people saw these people being bombed and starved and displaced as humans, this obviously would not be as politically palatable, but some meaningful percentage simply don’t.
Nima: To discuss this more, we’re now going to be joined by Muhannad Ayyash, Professor of Sociology at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He is a policy analyst for Al-Shabaka and the author of many journal articles and the book A Hermeneutics of Violence, which was published in 2019. Muhannad will join us in just a moment. Stay with us.
[Music]
Nima: We are joined now by Dr. Muhannad Ayyash. Thank you so much for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Muhannad Ayyash: Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Adam: We were discussing in our opening about the two criteria for whether or not an impacted or victimized people gets empathy in US or Western media more generally. The first is, is there oppression being done by the US or its allies? The second being, are they perceived as being white? Palestinians obviously fail both of these tests so their dehumanization is pretty pervasive and manifest as we show at the top of the show, and we’ll discuss in this interview. But there’s one other element I wanted to talk to you specifically about, which is a little more subtle, but I think is one that’s worth talking in and of itself, which is, maybe this sounds a little pat, and it’s obscured by these kinds of cheesy War on Terror framings, which is the total distortion of history.
Now, people talk about this a lot in the context of policy, and it’s like, what about this history? And there’s kind of like a little McNugget pro-Israel talking point ready to go for everything. But the sheer ignorance of the most basic historical facts of Palestinian existence, not just ignorance, but also misinformation, I think, leads to the dehumanization. Because without understanding the history, if you assume this kind of false symmetry, this idea that Palestinians are kind of frustrated Jordanians, then the only thing that could sort of justify their desire to fight for lack of a better word or to liberate themselves or to throw rocks at tanks would be perceived by others as kind of a mindless anti-Semitism or a kind of mindless racism or religious fanaticism. Talk about how the pathologizing of Palestinians more broadly in our media is facilitated by erasing history and reducing Palestinians in general to either religious extremists, mindless anti-Semites, or Iranian marionettes, puppets of Iran?
Muhannad Ayyash: Absolutely. It’s an excellent question and points out one of the key features of what Edward Said called “Orientalism” decades ago and what other anti-colonial, anti-racist scholars and activists have been pointing out for years and years and years and years about how colonialism and settler colonialism works. And one of the key features of that is dehumanization. And a critical part of dehumanization is to turn the colonized into ahistorical, savage, sub-human, or non-human entity that does not belong in the realm of human life. And it shapes the entire discourse about the great violence committed against the colonized as a righteous violence that is tragic, perhaps, but is necessary and needed when confronted with these mindless savages, mindless killing machines that have no history, that have no social systems, political systems, legal systems, economic systems, that have no aspirations, that have no ability to represent themselves. This is Orientalism 101 that we see replicated throughout the long history of colonial modernity, and we still see today.
In the media, in public discourse, in political discourse, the war on terror is such a powerful tool of painting this entire “conflict” as if it is a Lord of the Rings type of movie or a Star Wars type of movie, right? There’s the good guys and then there’s the bad guys, and the bad guys are so evil, right? The orcs are so evil that there’s no story to them. There’s no background to them. They’re just killing machines. They just kill for the sake of killing, destroy for the sake of destruction, and what that enables then is the “good guys” to unleash unspeakable violence on those communities without feeling any moral inhibition. That’s the critical part. Human beings are not predisposed to commit genocide and mass acts of violence and extermination and so forth. I know that’s kind of hard to believe, given all the violence that we have witnessed throughout history and all the violence that we see today, but really the majority of people, that’s what scholarship on violence shows. The majority of people don’t want to do that, don’t support that. We’d prefer to live a life without these kinds of horrific violence happening around them or certainly for them to participate in them.
But what has happened throughout history is that all sorts of propaganda and discourse come in to conceal violence, justify it, and therefore, can ensure its continuation. And that is what is happening with the Palestinian people. The story of the Palestinian people is not only not known in places like the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, and elsewhere, it is actively concealed in those spaces. And anytime that it pops up, there’s an attack on it to marginalize it, to censor it because the Zionist project, the Israeli state project, the American imperial project, they cannot function if the truth and reality of the situation appear on a wide scale. Despite everything, I still believe in people, and I still believe that if people actually know the real story, they would not be okay with what is happening to the Palestinian people. And I do believe the reason I also say that is because look at how much power structures invest in concealing that story. They do fear that story coming out and being told in its full honesty and its full truth and its full reality because if people start to see it in an unhindered way, they would not be okay with sending all these weapons to Israel.
Nima: You know, you really hit on something that I want to dig into a little bit more here, which is this idea of the justification, right? It’s not just the dehumanization. It then makes the committers of mass violence against those who have been dehumanized the real victims. And I mean, you know, we see this across media and political speech and have for decades, even just the “Hasbara,” the kind of Israeli propaganda phrase of shooting and crying is one that makes this really manifest. But just recently, we saw a CNN piece with the headline, “‘He got out of Gaza, but Gaza did not get out of him’: Israeli soldiers returning from war struggle with trauma and suicide.” That was the headline, and it goes into the personal stories of Israeli soldiers who have been — obviously, this is not their take on it — committing mass war crimes in Gaza, slaughtering hundreds of people. Then we hear their personal stories and their challenges and what it means to their humanity. And yet, those that they have been killing are not part of this story. I would just love for you to comment on just maybe a little more on how it’s not just the dehumanization, it is then that mass justification and with the additional kind of hand wringing of, oh, we wish we didn’t have to kill at this rate, but, you know, we just have no choice.
Muhannad Ayyash: In 2004, there was an interview with an Israeli demographer. His name was Arnon Sofer. This was an interview with Jerusalem Post. This guy was a well-known demographer in Israel who was, at the time, very concerned about the demographic threat of the Palestinian people and held meetings with Ariel Sharon at the time, the Israeli Prime Minister. You know, was listened to and heard quite loudly in Israeli media and by Israeli officials. And he was a proponent of building the wall and the besiegement of the Gaza Strip at the time. And by the way, this interview was taken down even for the Jerusalem Post standard, a very right-wing publication. The blowback was too much, and they actually took it down but not before activists had been able to post it elsewhere so we can still have access to it today.
And he spoke very openly and said out loud what the liberals and the “centrists” and “leftists” in Israel were also already saying and still are saying to this day. And what he said is that there needs to be a wall built around Gaza and that the wall in the situation of closing off the Gaza Strip from the rest of the world will be a catastrophe for the people living there, but that’s okay because we need to do that. We need to do that to save our existence as a “Jewish state.” That means a Jewish majority inhabiting a Jewish state. And I quote directly from that interview, once they do that, and I quote: “Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today.” For Israelis to “remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.” And then he ends it by saying that the biggest concern he has, and I quote: “The only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings.” That was in 2004.
Things have just escalated into even more intense forms of dehumanization today. And what Sofer was saying back then out loud is the predominant understanding or worldview, I should say, of Israelis and their supporters in the US and Canada and elsewhere. And you see in that discourse exactly what you just described happened in that CNN interview. The people in the Gaza Strip are just animals. Killing them is something that you have to do because that’s the only way you can treat an animal who is such a savage that wants to kill you. And then the biggest concern you’ll have is, how do we save our humanity after we’ve done all that killing? Because we’re the only human beings in this story. The Palestinians are not real people. This kind of thinking is not new. This clip that you see on CNN is not new. It’s part of the continuation of this long history of dehumanization that maintains the killer as the only real human. And these stories just kind of reinforce that way of thinking. And it goes then to that whole justification piece.
So, scholars of mass violence, whether it’s genocide, murderous ethnic cleansing, whatever form of mass violence you’re talking about, especially in this era of colonial modernity, which is about 500 years old or so, they’ve made it clear that you need two elements for a genocide. There’s two critical elements. There are more but two very critical elements, they have to be present for genocide and mass violence to occur. One is you have to have the capacity for it, the military capacity, the economic capacity, and so on. Unfortunately, in this day and age, there’s no shortage of that capacity, especially in powerful states like Israel. The second element, though, that you need is the ability to conceal that violence. And without that, you can have all the capacity in the world, again, I go back to this original point that sounds weird to people these days, but it is true, you can’t get a lot of people to participate in genocide unless it is concealed from them that that is what they’re doing.
Nima: Right.
Muhannad Ayyash: They become convinced of the idea that their violence is righteous violence and a necessary violence for survival. So, that concealment which is enabled through the dehumanization of the Palestinians and directing attention to the humanity of the killers who are just, you know, we have to feel so sorry for them that they had had to do all this stuff that helps conceal the violence, conceals the reality on the ground, and that, in turns, justifies it. And when you have that justification, you ensure the continuation of the violence. That’s why you can have a genocide ongoing for over a year now with no end in sight. It’s because for many people, certainly for the majority of Israelis, but for many Americans as well, there’s a concealment that justifies it and therefore enables it to continue. That’s why it’s so critical to not just call out the repression of the Palestinian story in spaces like the US and Canada and elsewhere, but to give it room to be told.
Nima: Right.
Muhannad Ayyash: And to be told in its honest version so that people can no longer participate in the concealment and therefore the justification of these violences.
Nima: Well, and that’s why we’ve seen so many Palestinian and other journalists being explicitly targeted with slaughter in Gaza because they are the storytellers. And so, if Israel can control the story, then you know, it gets to that concealment that you’ve been saying.
Adam: I want to ask about the sort of hashtag liberal sympathy industry. You wrote back in October of 2023 that the double standard was obvious. After discussing the sort of empathetic outpouring for Israelis, you write:
The same is entirely absent for the Palestinians. For the Palestinians, there are no evacuations. Aircraft carriers are not sent to provide military support. Mainstream political and cultural discourse does not humanize Palestinian life and mourn Palestinian death. Aid relief is withheld and used as a bargaining counter. Economic support is not forthcoming. Institutions do not send Palestinian messages of support.
So, in our study from The Nation, we compared it both to Ukrainians and Israelis, and we showed a pretty stark and manifest difference, sometimes 17 times, sometimes 50 times, sometimes hundreds of times. To the extent that it can be quantified, it is pretty, I think, unequivocal. I don’t think anyone doubts that. And to be clear, one thing I think is worth noting is that Israelis, I think, were perversely expecting the Ukraine treatment themselves, but then, within a few days, it was clear that this was going to be the most asymmetrical revenge killing / pre-existing plans for genocide ever. And they didn’t really get that. They got that from elite State Department sectors of CNN, but the liberal bourgeois and the liberal lower classes didn’t really do the whole put an Israeli flag on your lawn type thing like they did for Ukraine. They were always shocked by that. They’re like, why are we not getting the same treatment? It’s like, I don’t know, man, maybe because it’s like a week in, and you’ve killed five times more people than they killed.
So, I think that was a shock to them, just to talk about the liberal empathy industrial complex. I think it mostly came top down. It wasn’t really something that within a few weeks, I think most people, especially those with social media, were like, wow, this isn’t so simple. But the inverse didn’t happen. There really wasn’t any kind of comparable outpouring for Palestinians even as their deaths began to skyrocket into the tens of thousands and possibly and almost certainly hundreds of thousands.
I want to talk a bit about this kind of equivocation, what we call in the show “nuance trolling,” and you saw this, obviously with the recent book tour of Ta-Nehisi Coates, where he’s saying, no, it’s actually pretty simple. There’s the apartheid, and it’s very similar to Jim Crow. And this isn’t some symmetrical war. This isn’t the war of Austrian succession where a bunch of people line up on a field and lob bullets. I mean, it is a guerrilla war by colonized people, blah, blah, blah. They can’t really counter it on the facts. The goal is to sort of nuance something to such an extent that you kind of forget what you’re talking about. I want you to talk about this liberal tendency, sometimes naive, I think, sometimes very deliberate and malicious, of trying to nuance troll everything to death to where the moral dimension is just removed entirely, and we’re kind of debating the best way to take the civilian death down from a ten to an eight-and-a-half.
Muhannad Ayyash: Right. So, there’s two things that I want to highlight from this. This is a very important question. One is whether it’s deliberate or naive, it doesn’t matter because the effect is the same. I always get asked this question, do they know that they’re doing this, or do they not? Some do and some don’t, but there’s no differentiation between the two. On the level of effects, the effects are the same.
Adam: Spoken like a true materialist, it doesn’t matter.
Muhannad Ayyash: [Laughs] Yes, yes, that’s right.
Adam: You are not an idealist.
Muhannad Ayyash: No, the effects are the same, and the effects of your discourse are much more important than what you intend it to be. The effects are concealment, justification, propagation of violence. So, that always remains the primary point of focus for me. Now, not only is this “nuance” and “complexity” thing concealing the moral dimension of the issue, it actually is concealing the power asymmetries of the issue, the reality of the issue. The settler colonial paradigm is critical to understanding what is actually happening in Israel and Palestine. None other than David Ben-Gurion, the most prominent Zionist leader prior to the establishment of the Israeli state and then the first prime minister of the Israeli state, none other than him said outrightly in private political meetings (those documents would later be declassified), he said, when we say we defend ourselves, that’s only half the truth. Sure, basically saying in a firefight or something like that, maybe they did fire the first shot, and we defended ourselves. But he said, you know, basically, let’s not be kidding ourselves. And this is a direct quote. “Politically, we are the aggressors, and they defend themselves.”
Why would Ben-Gurion say that? “Politically, they are the aggressors and they defend themselves.” “They” being the Palestinians, “we” being the Zionists. It’s because it is obvious that the Zionist movement was largely made up of European Jews who had moved to this land and are trying to expel the indigenous Palestinian people of that land and claim it as their own and claim exclusive Israeli-Jewish sovereignty on a land that had been inhabited by these Palestinians for generations upon generations where these Palestinians have clear connection to that land and claim a particular kind of sovereign relationship to it. That sovereign relationship is not going to look like the modern version of sovereignty. But that doesn’t mean that the modern version of sovereignty is the only version of sovereignty. In fact, not only is it not the only one, it’s probably one of the most destructive forms of sovereignty, but that’s another discussion.
So, this whole nuance and complexity discourse, you’re completely right that it takes the moral dimension out of it, but it takes away the reality that we are talking about here. The Israeli state project being the aggressor, and the Palestinians are in fact, defending themselves and defending their right to stay on their land. This is what I mean, that story never appears in American discourse and Canadian discourse, the mainstream anyway. But it doesn’t appear on purpose because if that starts to appear, then it will show the lie of the propaganda that Israel is just “defending itself.” It is not. It is clearly the aggressor. It is trying to change the demographic, social, cultural, political, and economic landscape of a region that had all those things, all those social and political and economic and cultural and religious systems for centuries and centuries and centuries. That’s why within the region, there is hostility towards Israel because Israel is the aggressor coming in here, trying to change the landscape of the region, not the other way around. If this story starts to become the prominent story, and that story is what gets us closest to the reality of what is happening, a reality that even the Zionists understood, and Israelis, many of them today understand, then it dissolves entirely the whole discourse of “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East,” “Israel has the right to defend itself,” “the Palestinians are mindless terrorists,” and so on.
And the liberal nuance and complexity issue, the reason why that is entirely unconvincing, and I don’t take it seriously, whether they’re naive or malicious, is because everything is complex. How the food ends up on your dinner table is complex, but we still talk about it. We talk about everything, and we simplify complex stories into manageable narratives and discourses that a lot of people can wrap their heads around so that we can make just and peaceful decisions and good policy decisions. But for this particular issue, which of course, has complexity and nuance and all the rest of it, there’s also a simplified version of it that explains the actual dynamics on the ground in a way that communicates reality and therefore, gives us a better chance to come up with policies that would direct towards actual peace and justice. But the liberal types don’t want that because it would get in the way of American interests in the region.
Adam: I want to go back to this idea of using McHistory as part of this dehumanization regime. So, there’s a corollary to selective sympathy, which is this idea of pathologizing violence, which we touched on earlier, but I want to really get into, which is that the first step is you eliminate history. Then by doing that, you eliminate motive. So, then you see all this violence or see this sort of anger, and then the only way you can explain that without history, which is to say without motive, is to have some kind of warped ideology.
This is why in the first days after October 7, there was such an obsession in Israeli media — never really caught on because, of course, it doesn’t make any sense — of Hamas is ISIS, which itself was a Saudi-backed mercenary death squad without any popular support. But there was this idea that they were just mindless, end times Jihadists. And again, didn’t really hold water. People didn’t really buy. It didn’t make any sense.
But I want to talk about this idea of — and you see this with human shields discourse, which we can get into — pathologizing of violence as being the necessary condition of selective sympathy. Ukrainians, they’re part of the civilized world. That Palestinians just aren’t part of the civilized world. They’re not part of the circle of solidarity of humanity. There’s kind of something sub that, something under that. And the way you do this is you historicize a “cycle of violence.” They’ve been fighting for “millennia,” right? Jon Stewart once said this 10 years ago, right? It’s this kind of mindless cliche to say, ah, well, it’s kind of just in their DNA. Talk if you could about this pathologizing, this ahistoricism, and how it creates the groundwork for this selective sympathy, which is obviously racial, but I think it’s more than that. It’s kind of something else beyond that too.
Muhannad Ayyash: Absolutely. One of the reasons why Edward Said’s book Orientalism became such a powerful book and so widely read to this day is not because he pointed out Orientalism in easy texts. Texts and novelists and knowledge that was outrightly in your face, racist and pro-colonial and all the rest of it. Those are easy to argue. Those are easy to make the case for. The reason it became very famous is because he found Orientalism in texts that present themselves as if they are anti-racist, as if they are anti colonial, the liberal type texts. And he showed that that is actually where the real power of colonialism lies is in its distortion of the reality of the colonized and its concealment of its own great violence against the colonized. And you see this exactly happening today in that discourse.
You might love Jon Stewart for all sorts of things, but saying something like that is entirely racist and colonial. It doesn’t make him a racist and colonial. I don’t get into these kinds of individual accusations and that kind of thing, but the discourses, this is why I go back. I don’t care what your intentions are. I go to the effects of your discourse. So, the discourse of saying that oh, it’s in their DNA to be violent towards one another. It’s entirely racist and colonial. It is a form of justification to do whatever you want to those people or ignore them or whatever.
But let’s be very clear, it’s entirely ahistorical. In addition to being morally wrong and colonial and racist, it is factually incorrect. So, if you care just about facts and you just want to remove morality out of all of these decisions, fine, even in that arena, you’re wrong. This is not a 5,000 year old conflict. This is not something that has been happening forever in the region. This is all nonsense. There’s definitely been at least as many, if not way more wars and violence in the US alone over its history than you’ll find in other regions of the world. It’s again a form of concealment. This is a modern conflict with settler colonial roots in a European ideology that emerged in the heart of Europe as part of the era of colonial modernity.
Just to go back to your earlier point, if people want to get more nuance and complexity, go read the journal Settler Colonial Studies where the academic experts on settler colonialism no longer debate Israeli settler colonialism. They’ve had those debates. They’ve done comparative works. And of course, there’s differences and similarities between all settler colonial projects. There’s differences between Canada and the US. There’s differences historically even within those spaces of how settler colonialism operated and so on and so forth. So, that’s all important work and good work. So, if people want to find the nuance, you can go find and go read those journals. But you know, some of us are trying to do the simplified version of it to communicate it to the public as all good social scientists should do and do do.
So, yes, you’re entirely correct. In that example, you brought up that this is another way to remove not just moral but rational explanations. And the second you do any kind of rational explanation of, why do you think Palestinians are resisting with armed resistance? By the way, Palestinians resist in armed and unarmed forms. Of course, all the attention is always given to the armed resistance, but most of the resistance is unarmed, I would argue. But at any rate, regardless of which one they do, by the way, they’re always attacked. BDS, for example, is entirely unarmed, and in the US, different states are busy trying to criminalize it, if not criminalize it already.
But what basically Israel and the US want is for the Palestinians to bow down and say, yes, sir, we will leave our land. You can take it all. And for those of us who remain, we’ll just thank you so much for allowing us to remain as second- or third-class citizens, and let’s all move on. Please normalize with the rest of the Arab world. We’ll tell them to like you and work with you, and we’ll move on, and everything will be hunky dory. This is a fantasy of the Americans and the Israelis that will never be realized on the ground because, guess what? There’s not one people throughout the history of humankind that acquiesces to its own subjugation. There’s always going to be resistance. So long as settler colonial occupation continues, there’s going to be resistance to it by the Palestinians and other people in the region so long as American imperialism continues in the region. And to simplify that, too, I know there’s complexities around that, and I appreciate all that, but to simplify that, what that means is securing American interests at the expense of the people of the region. This is what makes imperialism imperialism in a nutshell. It prioritized the interests of the imperial power over the well-being and health of the majority of the people.
Adam: Well, yeah, and that’s, of course, a condition of this “normalization.” They’re not normalizing with democracies, they’re normalizing with dictatorships.
Muhannad Ayyash: They don’t want democracies in the region because if there are democracies, then people will say, well, we’re not going to just give you our resources. We’re going to use the wealth of our nation to take care of our people first and foremost, and we can still make deals with you. That would be a win-win.
Adam: But think about the Saudi cocaine yacht parties. I mean, have some decency because without those, truly, normalization just wouldn’t work. And you can’t build large lines in the middle of the desert for some reason where you also displace people who live there.
Nima: Yeah, I think it’s so important as you bring up this idea of who has a monopoly on violence, right? And that violence not only is admitted to as acts willfully committed, but there’s this idea that it always has to be couched as reactive or responsive. And we get to these phrases as we’ve been saying, you know, they’ve been fighting for millennia or they use human shields or they have a cycle of violence as Adam said. But earlier on the show, we’ve also been talking about this idea of the culture of violence within certain societies that we hear about. And this is not only in the Palestinian context or you know, when we hear about other countries in the Middle East that the United States wants to bomb and invade, but also domestically, right? So, there’s this culture of violence or the only language that they understand is the language of force, right? And so, we get these creepy phrases “escalate to de-escalate” that always wind up absolving who is actually committing mass acts of violence for their own actions. And just gets to this idea that every accusation is actually a confession. Before we let you go, can you talk about the way that the language is operating to do all this work whether it’s politics or media?
Muhannad Ayyash: Yeah, I mean, you’re absolutely right. Let’s just think about it this way. You have now a situation where there is an ongoing genocide that has destroyed hospitals, clinics, schools, universities, agricultural fields, residential buildings, businesses, critical infrastructure. Disease is killing people, left and right. We have over 42,000 people already killed. The number is likely larger. Over 100,000 injured, many with life-altering injuries. Estimates suggest that about 25% of those injured are likely to die in the near future because of the destruction of the healthcare system. People are starving to death. The horrors are there for people to find, not through mainstream media, but they’re to be found. And in that context, the people committing those acts of violence are gleefully celebrating them. There’s lots of investigations that you can find in Al-Jazeera and others, and you can just go to the social media accounts of the Israeli soldiers to see how they’re gleefully celebrating that. And the American government is continuously sending all the bombs and weapons that are enabling this genocide, and people are concealing that reality. And then in that context, the victims of that are being accused of having a “culture of violence.”
Take yourself out of your national identity for a second. Try to think of yourself as an alien watching this situation, and you tell me what you think of that statement. And I’ll end it with this. Concealing reality will give you short-term and even intermediate-term achievements for your imperial and colonial goals. Sure, you can destroy Palestinian life in the Gaza Strip. You can colonize more Palestinian lands. US can strengthen its position in the Middle East for its upcoming geopolitical confrontation with China and so on and so forth. And you can use the concealment of that reality as a way to enable you to achieve those short and intermediate goals.
But reality always comes back to bite you in the butt. If you conceal from yourself your personal debt, sure, you can continue to rack up stuff on your credit card in the immediate term and buy new things that you can’t really afford, and so on. But eventually, reality will come knocking on your door, and reality will come knocking on the doors of the Israelis and the Americans at some point in the future. And it will not be pretty. There will be consequences for this. I don’t know when, I don’t know how, but there will be consequences, and they will be destructive for many Israelis and Americans. Therefore, this is not just a question of Palestinian life. It is in the interest of ordinary people everywhere, including Israelis and Americans, to unconceal that reality and start to have honest discussions that can lead us to real, peaceful, and decolonial solutions that will be for the benefit of us all because, literally, all of our lives are at stake. Palestinian lives are at stake right now. They have been at stake for decades, and especially in the last year, but it will be everybody’s lives at some point. I encourage people to continue to do their best to unconceal reality and direct the discourse towards a more just and peaceful solution.
Nima: Well, I think that’s a perfect place to leave it. We’ve been speaking with Dr. Muhannad Ayyash, Professor of Sociology at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He is a policy analyst for Al-Shabaka. He is the author of many journal articles and the book A Hermeneutics of Violence, which was published in 2019. Muhannad, thank you so much for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Muhannad Ayyash: My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
Adam: Yeah, I think, you know, again, the idea that there’s double standards for different groups of people is maybe self-evident to people. It’s good to have the data though that proves it and shows it. And again, it’s just not something that’s possible without the warping of history. Because enlightenment thought: what is a person? A person is their memories. I think the metaphor is they’re like a harpsichord that you pluck, and everything that resonates from that for the rest of your life is a memory. A memory is what makes you you. It’s why, in sci-fi, you have a concept that you can download a memory and transplant it to someone else, and it’s the same person, right?
Nima: Sure.
Adam: So, in that way, history is your humanity. History is what defines a group of people. And when you warp that history and you turn everyone into a sweaty bomb vest-wearing cartoon, then everything else flows from that. Everything else becomes easier after that because they’re not real people with real histories. They don’t have any relationship to the land. They don’t have any relationship to the soil. They don’t grow olive trees. They’re this abstraction that just is full of mindless hate. And again, you give history to one side which makes sense, right? European Jewry was almost eliminated from the earth, and that is a sympathetic narrative.
Nima: It also reminds me of something that Grace Lee Boggs has written about history not just being truth, but rather this:
History is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past. How we tell these stories — triumphantly or self-critically, metaphysically or dialectically — has a lot to do with whether we cut short or advance our evolution as human beings.
End quote. And so the idea that even the understanding of history is not just laying out a timeline of facts, but history itself is a collection of stories, and how we tell those stories has everything to do with whose humanity we choose to acknowledge, who is the hero of the story, who is the perennial victim of the story. And just like any story, I think our histories reflect that same kind of bias, those same kind of narratives, and we see this play out again and again and again not only in our pop culture and politics but of course, across our media when it comes to this selective empathy. This idea of who gets to be painted as a community that lives by a culture of violence, that doesn’t value human life, that don’t treat their children the way “we” or others treat their children, that they don’t feel pain the same way, that they can deal with loss and grief in different ways because that’s just how they’ve evolved or that’s what they’ve been subject to for so long that they don’t feel emotions the way we do or the way others do.
And I think this, coupled with that idea that we had spoken briefly about earlier, that some people whether it is painted as governments or painted as entire populations, entire ethnicities, only understand quote-unquote “language of force” is itself a justification of visiting extreme violence upon those communities. Saying they brought it upon themselves, it’s the only thing they understand, and so we have to act accordingly. Otherwise, we can’t communicate, and the only way we communicate is by not only threats but by actual violence visited upon their bodies and their families and their homes and their land. And I think that all of that gets us to this idea of something we talk about a lot on the show, Adam, which is the power of narrative, the power of storytelling, and how that plays out, and who is allowed to be human, and therefore, who is allowed to live.
So, that will do it for this episode of Citations Needed. Thank you all for listening. You can follow the show on Twitter @citationspod, Facebook at Citations Needed and become a supporter of the show through patreon.com/citationsneededpodcast. And as always, a very special shout out goes to our critic-level supporters on Patreon.
I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. Newsletter by Marco Cartolano. Transcriptions are by Mahnoor Imran. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
[Music]
This Citations Needed episode was released on Wednesday, November 20, 2024.
Transcription by Mahnoor Imran.
