Dandandan

Genocide. Mass starvation. Israel bombed Al Ahli Hospital and killed 500 people. The list of ever-more-creative libels against Israel seems endless. Some have been decisively disproved. Others continue to be asserted despite a lack of credible supporting evidence. Yet they continue to spread. Why? Because many of the most egregious libels against Israel aren't spread because they're true. They're spread because repeating them is psychologically rewarding. It gives ordinary people an intoxicating sense of moral righteousness. In doing so, they become what I call moral superspreaders—one element of a broader psychological model I'll be presenting next month at the Contemporary Antisemitism Conference at the University of Haifa on how modern propaganda hijacks the human brain. Heretic Coffee's recent decision to publicly tear up a grant from the Jewish Federation illustrates this almost perfectly. They declared they would rather go out of business with a "clear conscience" than accept funding from a Jewish organization because of its support for Israel. Think about that for a moment. By their own account, they were willing to reduce the resources available for their humanitarian mission rather than be publicly associated with that donor. In other words, they chose moral identity over humanitarian impact. The feeling of moral righteousness became more important than feeding more hungry people. A fascinating recent study (linked below) helps explain why. Researchers found that people who are highly invested in seeing themselves as moral are also more likely to judge others by harsher standards than they judge themselves. This is exactly what Hamas's remarkably successful propaganda campaign exploits. One of the oldest propaganda tactics is simple: If you've committed atrocities, accuse your enemy of something even worse. The larger the accusation against Israel, the less mental space remains for Hamas's documented atrocities. Attention shifts away from the perpetrator and onto the accused. At the same time, the people repeating those accusations receive a psychological reward. They experience themselves as standing against history's greatest evil. That feeling is emotionally gratifying. It makes the accusation far more likely to be repeated. That's how ordinary people become moral superspreaders. They don't merely spread propaganda. They spread it because doing so reinforces who they believe themselves to be. Propaganda doesn't spread because it's persuasive. It spreads because it's psychologically rewarding. Its greatest success isn't convincing people to believe a lie. It's making them feel like better people for repeating it.