It is 1940 in Austria. A gentle, kindly woman who happens to live near the Nazi Mauthausen concentration camp is nearing her breaking point. Day after day, she sees the constant barrage of atrocities through her dining room window. Eventually she decides she has had enough and pens an angry letter to the Nazis. “One is often an unwilling witness to such outrages,” she writes seethingly. “I am anyway sickly and such a sight makes a demand on my nerves that in the long run I cannot bear.” Picking up steam, she makes her final demand: “I request that it be arranged that such inhuman deeds be discontinued, or else be done elsewhere where one does not see it.”1
Yes, you read that right. This sensitive and fragile woman did not simply demand that the murder and abuse of the Jewish prisoners be halted immediately, period. Rather, she proposed the viable alternative that it be continued out of sight. Because, as we all know: out of sight, out of mind.
So what does this unfortunate correspondence from Nazi Germany have to do with the present day? What does it have to do with empathy? Everything.
Empathy has become the great moral arbiter of the 21st century. Modern man divines whether something is right or wrong, moral or immoral, by applying the empathy test. Why do bad things happen? Why do some people live in poverty or oppression? The answer is plain as day: A lack of empathy. If we could only properly empathize with the suffering of these victims, all would be remedied. A long list of the big bad empathy offenders can then be reeled off; Faceless, rapacious corporations; Backstabbing, bullying politicians; War-mongering, colonialist countries. What isn’t to blame? Not bad incentives. Not mismanaged systems. And certainly not outdated or venomous cultures, ideologies, or religions.
And to a certain extent, these people are correct. In many situations, the empathy test is a good one. It is always wise to step into another’s shoes and see the world from their perspective. Especially in personal relationships. This is not controvertial.
However, the dangers of relying on empathy as your sole moral compass are titanic. In his 2016 book Against Empathy, Yale psychologist Paul Bloom argues that empathy is shortsighed, parochial, and innumerate. In other words, it is a fleeting feeling that is applied in the short-term, it tends to to be doled out selectively to those we are close to, and it can’t scale—we feel more empathy for the plight of one child that fell into a well than for the thousands of victims of an ethnic cleansing.
But there is one bug of empathy that Bloom only briefly touches on that I believe is its most catastrophic weakness: Evil people can exploit empathy and manipulate others to commit terrible atrocities in its name. In other words, empathy can be hacked.
Jews are painfully aware of this fact, because this barbaric phenomenon goes by a name that virtually every Jew grows up hearing: Blood libel.
Jewish history is littered with vicious massacres called pogroms that were committed in the name of empathy. Empathy for whom, you ask? Well, for the innocent Christian children that the bloodthirsty Jews were inexplicably periodically murdering. As if murder wasn’t bad enough, these savage Jews were charged with an additional accusation that was sure to elicit a deluge of empathy. They were purported to have siphoned the pure Christian blood from the cold, stiff juvenile bodies and then used it as the key ingredient in their delicious baked goods (despite the inconvenient fact that blood is not kosher by Jewish law). Anyone who had any empathy for innocent Christian children at the time could have only come to one chilling conclusion—the murderous Jewish vermin must be wiped from the earth.
Sadly, but unsurprisingly, blood libels are not simply a historical oddity. Plenty of present-day psychopaths have picked up the mantle. The current chief offender being Hamas.
Unfortunately, it seems that Jihadist terrorists have a better understanding of both history and human psychology than the average Westerner. In 2010, Salah Eldeen Sultan—who was described as “one of America’s most noted Muslim scholars”—eloquently and passionately stated her case on a Hamas-run TV station in Gaza. She proclaimed:
The Zionists kidnap several non-Muslims [sic] – Christians and others… this happened in a Jewish neighborhood in Damascus. They killed the French doctor, Toma, who used to treat the Jews and others for free, in order to spread Christianity. Even though he was their friend and they benefited from him the most, they took him on one of these holidays and slaughtered him, along with the nurse. Then they kneaded the matzos with the blood of Dr. Toma and his nurse. They do this every year. The world must know these facts about the Zionist entity and its terrible corrupt creed. The world should know this.”
Blood Libel on Hamas’ Al-Aqsa TV – American Center for Islamic Research President Dr. Sallah Sultan: Jews Murder Non-Jews and Use Their Blood for Passover Matzos, MEMRI, Special Dispatch No. 2907, 14 April 2010.
So yes, blood libels are still alive and kicking.
But they only set the stage for the most pernicious strategy that Hamas and other terrorist groups employ to weaponize empathy: the use of human shields.
Despite being in clear violation of the international laws of war, human shields successfully serve a double purpose. First, they deter the enemy (Israel) from swiftly striking its most effective blows—which inevitably increases the enemy’s (Israel’s) casualties. Second, they provide an endless stream of dead women and children as fodder to elicit further empathy from the West, a bottomless supply of ammo for the media crusade—which, again, results in more casualties for the enemy (Israel).
Hamas knows that we are all that kindly woman living near the Nazi death camp. We may not reside across the street from the Palestinians, but we are their virtual neighbors. We do not see their suffering through our windows, but on our screens. We cannot request that the suffering take place elsewhere, but we can retreat to our echo chambers and tear posters of kidnapped children from the walls.
For years, Hamas and their friends planted the blood libel seed, ensuring that much of the West would gloss over the October 7th pogrom, at best paying lip service to its condemnation. And then they delivered the main event: thousands of dead Palestinian women and children. As predicted, it was a rousing success.
So I have one question left for you—the Western champions of empathy, the most humane people on our planet. On the days following the October 7th pogrom, you heard the gut-wrenching testimonies and you saw the grisly images. The nightmare played in vivid, gory detail on your omnipresent screens. And you averted your eyes. You questioned its validity. You chose to lap up the Hamas blood libel instead of the Hamas GoPro massacre footage. The Jews were at fault. After all, they murder innocent Palestinians for fun. They are the Nazis.
You amplified Hamas’ message when they pinned the accidental Islamic Jihad hospital bombing on the Jews and inflated the death toll.
You remain silent when hundreds of men, women, and children are held hostage in an underground Gazan hell.
You call for an Israeli ceasefire rather than a Hamas surrender.
Hamas noticed your craving for righteous empathy and gladly catered to it. They disseminated photos of one martyr after another. They fueled your fury. They fomented your protests. They inflamed your moral sensibilities.
Did it feel good?
- Gordon J. Horwitz, In the Shadow of Death: Living Outside the Gates of Mauthausen (London, 1991) pp.60-1 ↩︎
Jeremy Koloski 